Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

She surprised him by asking, “Is this something Carlyon-Brent want to commission?” But after all, she was a lawyer.

He said cautiously, “I don’t know about commission. If it was done the way we hope it would be, we’d want to publish it.”

“Not if I did it, you wouldn’t,” she said. “I’ll have the zabaglione—no, I won’t. I’ll have the tiramisù and some Strega, no coffee, and then I must fly; I’ve got a very full afternoon. Why don’t you ask my sister?”

“It did occur to me, but she’s always so busy.”

“Thanks very much,” said Hope. “I’m a lady of leisure, I suppose. I’ll ask her if you like; it’ll probably appeal to her.” He wondered how she kept so thin, how she did her work. Both Gerald’s girls drank so much. Hope must have consumed over a liter of wine. “She doesn’t get as upset about Daddy as I do,” she said.

Robert watched her go, straight as a reed and as unsteady. He thought of bereaved children’s memoirs and of titles. Mommie Dearest at one end of the quality scale and When Did You Last See Your Father? at the other. Classics like A Voyage Round My Father. Then there was that Germaine Greer book he had admired, with all the detective work in it. That brought him to the letter to the Times about Gerald never having worked for the Walthamstow Herald. Probably nonsense, but on the other hand, he, Robert, had never really believed Gerald had been at Trinity. Not that he would ever have said a word, to Gerald or anyone else, but he had had a feeling about it, a sense of something not being quite right.

He paid the bill and, a taxi-hater, he began to walk back to Bloomsbury.

5

Psycho may mean no more than pertaining to the soul, but words that have it as their prefix are frightening because of their associations with violence and madness: psychopath, psychotic. The Psychopomp who takes the soul to the underworld is easily imagined as gray and lumbering, but not thin, not wraithlike. The Psychopomp is fat.

—ORISONS

SARAH TOLD URSULA THAT SHE SHOULD HAVE HAD HER hair cut years ago, but better late than never. Looking over her shoulder into the mirror, she said that she could see what people meant when they remarked on her likeness to her mother, something she didn’t mind admitting now Ursula looked so much more attractive. It was the first time she had been in the house since the funeral, and she trod warily, casting uneasy glances.

Hope cried, but not for long, and she had the grace to say she knew she was stupid and that her father would have hated it.

“That was the only thing about you Dad didn’t like,” said Sarah, “the way you’re always crying.”

“I’m not always crying. I don’t cry when I’m happy.”

It would have been too much to expect them not to go out on Saturday evenings, and Ursula didn’t expect it. Hope went to a party in Ilfracombe and another one in Westward Ho! and Sarah went drinking in Barnstaple. The Saturday they both came and both went out by six, Ursula was baby-sitting anyway. She had to be at the hotel and inside room 214 by seven sharp. It was a suite really, consisting of the parents’ bedroom, the children’s bedroom, and a bathroom in between. The windows had no sea view but gave on to the formal gardens at the front and the Ilfracombe to Franaton Road.

The parents were a Mr. Hester and a Ms. Thompson. Ursula didn’t know if they were married or just living together. This was the third time she had sat for them since they had arrived ten days before, but they never said much to her, being anxious to escape downstairs to the bar and dinner and the postdinner country-and-western evening in the Lundy Lounge. The children were always in bed when she got there, with the television on in their room. There was a girl of six and a boy of four.

The first time she came, she offered to read to them, a suggestion greeted by Ms. Thompson with an incredulous stare. They had the telly. They had a stock of children’s videos from the hotel’s boundless store. And, of course, there was another telly in the main bedroom. Ursula sometimes wondered how many television sets there were in the Dunes. Hundreds. It was a daunting thought.

She had brought a book with her, but before settling down to read it, she went into the children’s bedroom to say hello. The little girl smiled, but the boy gave her an indifferent stare. On the dazzling screen, Power Rangers struck attitudes and flashed swords. The little boy clutched a small yellow model of a Power Ranger in his left hand. The second time she came, tiptoeing in to check on the children, Ursula had eased the little figure out of the sleeping boy’s grasp lest it dig into his soft cheek in the night. But he awoke screaming, fumbling and groping for it, so she was obliged to restore it to him.

For a while, she stood by the window in the main bedroom, watching the cars full of holidaymakers pass by. The evening was warm and sunny, but it had rained all afternoon and the hedgerows glittered with water drops. The grass was very green, the garden-center annuals in the flower beds bright as paint. She asked herself, not for the first time, why she was doing this, minding other people’s children for a pittance, and she didn’t really know the answer. It got her out of the house in the evenings—that was true. It removed her from those things that reminded her of him, so much of it everywhere, cluttering the place, his books, his manuscripts, his galley proofs and proof copies, his papers.

And to get out in the evenings, where else could she have gone? Perhaps to see the neighbors, all of whom had invited her, and who would have talked of him, questioned her, and required answers. There were cinemas still, a few, but she was wary of going to them alone. Obviously not to the pub or a bar. Baby-sitting gave her quiet evenings in neutral surroundings. She surveyed the room critically. There was nothing here to remind anyone of anything, unless some people’s memories could be stirred by wall-to-wall beige carpet, chintz-covered armchairs, a pink-and-beige-checked bedspread, and two pictures, both abstracts in pink, blue, and gold.

No books, no papers, not even a magazine. She tried to read her own book. That was all right; that was her choice, Trollope’s Is He Popenjoy? And she wanted to read it, but tonight, even the basic powers of concentration called for had deserted her. Would it be a melodramatic gesture to clear the house of everything that had been Gerald’s? She had to think of the girls and their feelings. And then what was she to do with all that stuff? Only that morning, she had received a letter from an American university asking almost reverentially to be the guardian of his manuscripts.

“Not Daddy’s manuscripts!” Hope had said, as if Ursula had proposed to desecrate his grave. “Oh, you can’t. You mustn’t.”

“At least make them pay for them,” said Sarah. “Though in my experience, that would be like trying to get blood out of a stone.”

The university’s keeper of collections boasted that they had the world’s finest accumulation of manuscripts by contemporary writers. Already they possessed three of Gerald Candless’s, three treasured manuscripts with the author’s corrections, and it was the keeper’s dream to acquire more. Ursula realized that she couldn’t keep on cutting foreign stamps off envelopes and throwing the contents away. Some would have to be read and answered. So she had crept—a Trollopian word for women’s gait, but true and appropriate here—into Gerald’s study and opened the cupboard where his manuscripts were kept.