Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

But first, she had paused just inside the door and looked almost fearfully about the room. It reeked of him. He was powerfully and dreadfully present still, a personality left behind when the body had been removed, a fetch, an earthbound spirit. What was that word he had once used in those scrawled, slowly to be deciphered pages she had carefully typed? She had had to look it up, first in Chambers , which didn’t have it, then in the Shorter Oxford , which did. Psychopomp. The messenger who escorts to the underworld the souls of the dead. Standing there in his study, she felt that the psychopomp hadn’t yet come for him, had been deterred, perhaps, by his restless energy, his hard, dark gaze, the ambience of him that remained oppressively sexual even in age, even in celibacy.

Ursula shivered. He used to say that novelists who wrote that were writing rubbish, because no one had ever shivered at some shock or unpleasant discovery. But she had and would, she thought, all the time she was in here. It was a place from which to remove certain essential artifacts, those manuscripts, some notebooks, all the first editions, and then lock the door and throw away the key. She imagined locking the door and then having a builder in to take away the door frame and then plaster over the door and paper over the plaster so that the study behind became a secret room, sealed up and perhaps one day forgotten. She could also imagine what the girls would say to that.

In a sense, one’s children never grow up. Their parents’ home is always their home, to keep as a sentimental sanctuary in the heart, to return to at will, their first refuge, no matter what homes of their own they may have. Sarah and Hope would consider it their primary business to tell her how to manage and arrange and decide the future of Lundy View House. The study to them was a sanctum, a place Hope could easily turn into a shrine.

Eventually, she had opened that cupboard door and looked inside. But there were more manuscripts than she remembered, Gerald’s own handwritten originals as well as copies of her copies, and there were attempts at novels that had never been finished, some of which contained only a chapter or two. He had tended to that—to start something and grow tired of it or be unable to make it work. And then he had been angry and bad-tempered until a better idea came. She hadn’t reproached him, not then, but still he had said to her, “It is my life. Can’t you understand that? All the life I have or ever will have. All the life I might have had has gone into it.”

She didn’t know what he meant. Hadn’t he had success and adulation, money enough, herself and his daughters, this house?

“I pour out my life into it,” he said. “I do it to save my life. And when it fails, it’s death. I die. And then I have to be resurrected. But how many times can you die before the last time? Can you tell me that?”

“It” was always how he referred to his writing. The primal, the sole “it.”

In there, in among the manuscripts that had become published books, would be a dozen of those “deaths.” She had turned her gaze on his desk then and noticed something. The page proofs that he had been correcting the day he died still lay there to the left of the typewriter, but the pile of manuscript on the right-hand side was gone. Hope knew nothing about it—she said she couldn’t bear to go in there—and Sarah didn’t seem to know what Ursula was talking about. Daphne Batty, usually so reasonable, would nevertheless have taken any inquiry as an accusation of stealing, as if she could have found a use for a hundred sheets of indecipherable typescript.

Ursula, in the hotel bedroom, put the manuscript out of her mind and read the first chapter of her Trollope. She had read it before, but she didn’t mind. At nine, she went softly into the children’s room. They were fast asleep, the Power Ranger in the little boy’s hand held up against his mouth. Ursula turned off the television set and went back into the main bedroom to pass the time in reading and pondering until Mr. Hester and Ms. Thompson returned at 10:30.

The idea was strangely unacceptable, one of those propositions that on the face of it cannot hurt or harm or even embarrass but yet are deeply unsettling.

“Robert Postle wants you to write a memoir of your father?”

“He asked Hope first,” said Sarah. “I can’t think why. It couldn’t be you, because it has to be a child writing about a famous parent.”

At least her daughters didn’t ask her if it upset her to talk about Gerald. Ursula felt glad Robert Postle’s invitation hadn’t been put to her, because she might have been rude or said something she later would have regretted.

“Are you going to do it?”

“I’ve said I would. It might be just the thing for me.”

Ursula thought she understood what that meant. Though almost thirty-two and teaching at the University of London for seven years, Sarah had published only one book, and that was her doctoral dissertation. A memoir of her father would hardly qualify as a learned work or enhance her academic reputation, but it might be better than that—it might bring her before the public; it might make her a name. It might, if well enough done, be a best-seller. Sarah began outlining the current fashion in biographies of parents and citing famous examples, but Ursula already knew what she meant. All she hoped was that it wouldn’t much involve her.

“I’m going to make a start next week, so that I’ll have nearly two months before term begins.”

“Start the writing, do you mean?”

“There’ll be some research to do first.”

Ursula wished her daughters would sometimes call her Mother or Mum, or even by her Christian name—she wouldn’t have minded that. Sarah occasionally did call her Ma, but Hope never called her anything and hadn’t since she was about twelve, when Gerald said “Mummy” was babyish and some other style should be found. None, of course, ever had been, though Sarah had found a compromise, if not one that was much to Ursula’s taste. Still, she was disproportionately and humiliatingly pleased to hear it, which she did perhaps once during each of Sarah’s visits.

“There’ll be research into Dad’s background and family, and I’ll have to see what ancestors I can trace. I don’t know much about his parents, our grandparents, only that he was called George and she was called Kathleen and they lived in Ipswich. And he was a printer and she was a nurse. That was in the Times obituary.”

“It’s also on his birth certificate,” said Ursula.

“Right. I’d better see that, then. They were dead long before we were born, of course.”

“Before we were married,” said Ursula.

“He used to talk about his childhood to us when we were children. Did you know that? Fantastic stories of when he was a little boy, but a lot of them were literally fantasies; I think we always knew that. I mean, the boy could fly or swim for miles underwater, and in one, his mother was a mermaid.”

“And the chimney sweep one,” said Ursula.

“Yes, of course. That was our favorite.” Sarah sighed. “He was an only child, so no nephews or nieces, but did he have any cousins? He must have done. George and Kathleen would have had brothers and sisters. Candless isn’t a common name. If there are any in the Ipswich phone book, they’re very likely to be relatives. But you’d know—did he talk about aunts or uncles?”

“Not that I remember.”

Sarah said earnestly, “Will you try to remember? Will you think about it? I’ll need all that, how you and Dad first met—didn’t he come and speak to some association you belonged to? I’ll have to talk to you, so will you think about it, Ma, before I come down next time?”