Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

As if she didn’t already think about it, dwell on it far more often than she really wanted to, recriminate, regret.

“Did you have a happy childhood?” she found herself asking Daphne Batty almost before she knew she was asking it.

“Of course I did. The best years of your life, they are.” Daphne burst into song. “ ‘Back home in Tennessee, just try and picture me, upon my mammy’s knee—’ ” She broke off, then sighed. “There’s a lot of truth in those old songs. Not that it was Tennessee, wherever that may be. It was Westonsuper-Mare.”

“I expect Weston sounds pretty exotic if you were born in Memphis,” said Ursula. “Or Purley, come to that.”

Purley. A nice place, comfortable, pretty, safe, with a view of green hills. Why did people always knock suburbs? Why had Gerald? She had been born there, the youngest child of her parents, her brother, Ian, was twelve years her senior and her sister, Helen, ten. Though an afterthought or perhaps an accident, she was loved and cherished by her parents, spoiled by them and protected. Herbert Wick was a builder who had made money in the postwar building boom and who, though not rich, was very comfortably off by the time Ursula was fifteen. It was then that Herbert and his wife moved from their semidetached house at the Croydon end of Purley to a big ranch-style chalet bungalow at the Coulsdon end.

Ursula went to Purley County High School, where she secured eight O levels and two years later three A levels of B, B, and C. The head teacher wanted her to apply to various universities, but Ursula herself wasn’t keen; she was apprehensive about going away from home, and, as her father pointed out, what good had two years at the polytechnic done Helen, who had married as soon as she finished her studies? A typing and shorthand course would be more valuable, and when she had completed it, she could go to work at H. P. Wick and Company, which operated from a pretty little custom-built cottage-type office in Purley High Street.

Ursula hadn’t much enjoyed the typing course, but it was soon over, and working for her father was about as pleasant as she imagined any job could be. He drove her to Wick’s in the mornings and back home for lunch, and twice a week she didn’t have to go back in the afternoons because there wasn’t enough to do to fill five full days. She and her mother went for long walks.

There was still plenty of beautiful open country around Purley, though Herbert Wick was doing his best to build on it, and sometimes they walked as far as Fairdean Downs or Kenley Common. Once a fortnight, Betty Wick liked to go shopping in “town”—that is, the West End of London—and in order that she might accompany her mother, Herbert would unfailingly give her the whole day off. They would take the train from Purley to London Bridge or Waterloo.

Both of them patronized the public library, and Betty was secretary of the Purley Library Users’ Association. Ursula had always been a great reader, and by then she was reading five or six books a week—all fiction. Looking back now, across nearly forty years, she realized that she hadn’t known there were any other kinds of books. Well, there were textbooks, of course, and scientific books, and the library had shelves marked BIOGRAPHY and POETRY and DRAMA, but she was blind to them; she walked past them without looking.

She read detective stories and romances and ripping yarns and a great many historical novels. That was how they came to invite Colin Wrightson to speak at the Library Users’ Association’s annual meeting, because she and her mother had such a passion for his books about Queen Victoria and Victorian London and the empress Eugénie and ladies and gentlemen falling in love in English country houses.

It was a very comfortable, very quiet, unadventurous life. Every other Saturday, Herbert and Betty Wick and Ursula drove over to Sydenham for tea with Ian and his new wife, Jean, in the little new house (built by Herbert, who also provided the deposit on it) that they were buying on a mortgage from the bank where Ian worked. After that, they often went to the cinema. Ursula and Betty went to the cinema without Herbert once a week as well, invariably to an afternoon performance so as to be home to cook Herbert’s dinner. Sometimes Ursula went to Wimbledon to see Helen, and occasionally she stayed the night. Helen had a little boy named Jeremy and was pregnant again. So sheltered a life had Ursula led that this staying overnight at Helen’s, traveling there on her own with her suitcase, walking up from the station and ringing Helen’s doorbell at the appointed time, was a daring activity that made her feel quite sophisticated.

Once a year, the Wicks and Ursula went away on holiday together. Almost always the Isle of Wight, though not invariably the same place on the Isle of Wight. Once they went to the south of France, but they didn’t much like it, and the following year they returned to Ventnor. At Christmas, Ian and Jean came and Helen and Peter with Jeremy and later on with the new baby, Pauline. Helen asked Ursula to be godmother to Pauline, and Ursula was very thrilled and flattered to say yes.

Few people, Ursula thought, could have changed as much in nearly four decades as she had. Their appearance, yes, that went without saying. Helen, for instance, though Ursula would never have said it aloud, looked so different at sixty-seven from what she had at thirty that the two versions of her, the young and the old, might be women quite unrelated to each other. They might almost be from different races—their weights, their heights, their coloring, the cast of their countenances, utterly disparate. No doubt—though not in respect to the weight and the height—the same was true of her. It wasn’t the physical aspect of the matter that she meant.

She had been quiet, gentle, profoundly ignorant, deeply innocent, self-satisfied, complacent, affectionate, easily amused, quickly delighted, and possessing a kind of shy exuberance. And she had been an ostrich with a buried head. She had been ambitious for nothing. She had known nothing. In fact, it had been dangerous to let her out alone. Now all her ignorance was gone, her innocence brutalized, her complacency dead, her affections crushed, her ability to be delighted vanished, and her exuberance replaced by a defensive, faintly ironical self-control. Yes, she had changed beyond all knowing.

She had been a pretty girl. That was the word. No one would have called her beautiful or handsome. She had a kitten face with small neat features, blue-gray eyes, fair hair, which she wore short and permed. Her figure was good and she had what her mother called a fine bust. Because her father paid her well—ridiculously well, she later discovered—and those shopping trips were so frequently made, she possessed a lot of clothes. Nothing fancy or daring or especially fashionable, but accordion-pleated skirts in pastel pink or lemon with matching sweaters, several tweed suits, a few tight-waisted full-skirted cocktail dresses for use at the Isle of Wight, and innumerable pairs of shoes. She had never had a boyfriend.

Once or twice, a man had taken her out. There was the one she had met at a dance in Ventnor. He took her to the cinema the next day, but they had no further contact after the Wicks went home. Someone who worked in Peter’s office had been invited to dinner by Helen specifically to meet Helen’s sister, and he had been keen enough. They, too, went to the cinema and for a drive in his car, but Ursula hadn’t liked it when he kissed her, and the next time he phoned, she told her mother to say she had gone away. She met so few men, and the ones she did meet failed to match up to her secret romantic ideal.

At school, for O-level English, she had read Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley , an experience that put her off Victorian fiction for years. She read Jane Eyre only because they had a copy in the house—she was in bed with a cold, and there was nothing else to read. Until she read it, her heroine, the woman she wanted to be like and whose husband she wanted to marry, had been the narrator in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. But Jane Eyre was to be preferred. She understood, as she finished the book, that she was on the lookout for a Mr. Rochester of her own.