Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

When the guests had gone, Peter said, quoting Goethe or someone, “They are pleasant enough people, but if they had been books, I wouldn’t have read them.”

—THE FORSAKEN MERMAN

HOPE GOT TO THE RESTAURANT MUCH TOO EARLY. She hid herself inside the Laura Ashley shop on the opposite side of the street. It was a principle of hers never to be early or on time for an engagement with a man (except Fabian, who didn’t count), but to be between two and five minutes late. This was difficult for her, as she was naturally a punctual person, but she persevered.

That morning, in the interval between an interview with a client who wanted her to extract substantial maintenance from the wife he was divorcing and a client who wanted to set up a charitable trust, largely, as far as she could gather, for the benefit of his personal friends, Hope had been making plans for her father’s memorial service. The trouble was that each time she thought of some particular poem or song or piece of prose that he had loved, she started crying. The man wanting the charitable trust stared at her tearstained face and asked her if she had a cold.

Hope wasn’t a literary person, but her father’s favorite pieces—at least their titles—were committed to her memory, or, as she put it, written on her heart, and would be there forever. Herbert’s “Jordan” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and a bit of Sartre, she thought as she wandered among the racks of floral dresses. “Is there in truth no beauty?” she asked herself. “Is all good structure in a winding stair?” But she had to stop that in case she began weeping again. Before leaving her office, she had made up her face with care and didn’t want it washing off before she met Robert Postle.

He would very likely be there by now. It was three minutes past one, and as far as she could remember from his visits to Lundy View House that coincided with hers, he was as punctual as she would never allow herself to be. In the restaurant, they told her he was already there, and she soon saw him, standing up by his table and waving to her.

Robert Postle had been her father’s editor at Carlyon-Brent since some time after Hamadryad was short-listed for the Booker Prize. The retirement of his former editor was the ostensible reason for this change, but the shortlisting was the real reason. That had been a long time ago and Robert was getting on a bit. To the teenage Candless girls, he had been a striking, even sexy, figure, and his marriage soon thereafter had brought Sarah half mock, half real distress. He had developed a paunch since then and a lot of his dark silky hair had fallen out, leaving strange springy tufts occurring above his ears and patches on the bald crown like wooded islands on a pale brown sea.

He was a Roman Catholic, a devout man, who had apparently adhered to the letter of the law, for he by now had many children. In order to attend Gerald Candless’s funeral, he had asked permission of his parish priest to enter an Anglican church, though this was no longer regarded by Rome as necessary, and the priest had privately thought him a bit of a stickler. Hope thought he looked even deeper into middle age than he had two weeks before.

Being kissed by him wasn’t the pleasure it had once been. It wasn’t a very graceful operation either, as she never went anywhere in London without a hat, and today she was wearing a cartwheel of coral-colored linen. She kept it on because she knew it brought a becoming rosy flush to her face.

“What did you think of that piece in the Mail ?” asked Robert.

“Not a lot.”

“I can’t imagine you talking about your ‘partner.’ ”

“No, well, my partners are three other people at Ruskin de Gruchy. What I said was my ‘feller,’ but they changed it. I really mind that stuff about my handkerchief. Of course I use handkerchiefs—tissues are so disgusting; they’re so wet —but I haven’t got an H on them. That was pure invention. Do you think I could have a drink? They do liter carafes of white wine here, and that’s what I need after the dreadful morning I’ve had.”

They also do half liters, Robert thought, which might be enough to be going on with, but he didn’t say so. He had a proposition to put to Hope and he knew precisely the words he intended to use, but he delayed while she swilled down Orvieto, studied the menu, and whined about newspapers, journalists, and the media in general. She looked uncannily like her father, and that pink hat colored her normally white skin to the plum shade his had become in recent years. It was still hard for him to accept that Gerald was dead, as it is always hard to come to terms with the death of someone in whom the vital force has been particularly present.

“I expect you’re aware,” he said when Hope’s risotto had arrived, “of the recent popularity of a certain kind of biography. I mean a child’s memoir of a parent, usually, although not invariably, a father.”

She looked up at him from under that hat brim. “A child?”

He didn’t know how she had managed to get to Cambridge, still less achieve a first. Of course, a lot of it was affectation. She was the kind of woman who thought it amusing to have people put her down as a fool and to then surprise them, either with some profound remark or a passing comment on her achievements.

“A child in the sense of offspring, progeny, issue, heir, scion,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, I see.”

“But have you come across that sort of book?”

“I don’t know,” Hope said.

“Usually, it’s the parent who’s famous, not the child, though both may be. I can think of one or two where neither was famous, but the parent’s life was so interesting and the writing style so absorbing that the memoir was still a success in spite of it.”

“I don’t have time to read,” said Hope, wiping her plate with a piece of bread, as if she hadn’t had a good meal for a week. Her eyes, bright now with repletion and alcohol, fixed on his face. They were Gerald’s eyes, the rich dark brown of polished leather, the eyelashes thick as brushes. “I haven’t read any books but Daddy’s for years.”

That might be no bad thing, he thought, a freshness of approach, a mind uncluttered by the magnificences of recent daddy biographies.

“All right, you don’t read,” he said as his fish and her veal came, “but would you write?”

She was staring at the carafe like a pet cat in front of an empty plate. He tapped it and said to the waiter that they’d better have another one of those.

“Would you write a memoir of your father?”

“Me?” said Hope.

No, the wine waiter, he thought. That chap with the glasses at the next table. “Your relationship with him, how it was when you were a small child, what it was like being his daughter. Oh, and his origins, his background, his family, what he came out of. The stories he told you, the games he played with you.” To his horror, tears welled up in those eyes that were Gerald’s eyes. She must be half-blinded, he thought. “Hope, my dear, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

A couple of tears escaped and trickled down. She dabbed at them with a handkerchief. So it was true—she really did use handkerchiefs. She crumpled it up in her hand before he could see if there was an H on it or not. Facilitating her recovery with a big slice of veal, she said with her mouth full, “I couldn’t write anything. I haven’t any imagination.”

This would be facts, not imagination. Well, some imagination, some emotion, surely. But he knew it was hopeless. The waiter refilled her glass. She swigged it as if parched, and Robert was incongruously reminded of that episode in King Solomon’s Mines when Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good crawl across the last lap of the desert sands to suck up muddy water out of an oasis pool.