Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Two evenings before the writer Colin Wrightson was due to come and give his talk at the library, his wife phoned Betty Wick and said he had broken his ankle. It was January and very cold and her husband had slipped on a patch of ice while walking down the garden path to replenish the nuts in a bird feeder. She went into considerable detail about how he never did this, because she always fed the birds, but for some reason, goodness knows what, he had gone out with his bag of nuts and slipped and broken his ankle in two places.

Over the years, when Ursula reflected on her life, she often thought about that icy patch on the garden path and the impulse to feed birds in a man who never fed birds. Suppose he had hesitated, then decided to wait till his wife came home, done something else, forgotten the bird feeder. Suppose the phone had rung just as he was going out there. Or suppose he had simply been a little more careful, avoided the ice, stepped onto the grass and walked around it. Her whole life would have been different. Her whole life had hung on whether or not a man walked down a garden path and slipped on ice. If he hadn’t slipped, she would have married someone else, lived in different places, had different children, perhaps even been happy. It was a dreadful thought.

Mrs. Wrightson—her name was Sally, but Ursula didn’t know that then—was deeply apologetic on the phone, contrite. Colin felt so guilty about the Purley Library Users’ Association, the last thing he wanted was to let them down, so he had asked a writer he knew, a friend, to go in his place—Gerald Candless. No doubt Mrs. Wick was as closely acquainted with the work of Gerald Candless as with that of her husband. Mrs. Wick was not. But her daughter, whose eye she caught, was nodding, so she said, “Oh yes, that would be marvelous. Thank you so much,” and she said she hoped Mr. Wrightson would soon be better.

“Have you ever read anything of his?” Betty Wick asked when she had put the phone down. “I’m sure I haven’t. I’ve just about heard of him.”

Ursula was already wondering why she had nodded, why she had urged her mother, by that nod, to accept the offer. “I’ve read The Centre of Attraction ,” she said.

It had shocked her, though she wasn’t going to tell her mother that. It had made her feel uncomfortable and somehow dissatisfied. The sexual content was not so much responsible for this, though it was partly responsible, as were certain assumptions the writer seemed to be making—that people were free, for instance, to make love with whom they chose and to stay up all night if they liked, that they wanted to lead full and adventurous lives, that young soldiers had animal passions, and that families were hotbeds of anguish. She had had to tell herself once or twice that life wasn’t like this; life was what she had. Real people didn’t speak in sexual innuendo, use bad language, or have conversations about passion and death. But the novel made her uneasy, and when she had finished it, she had taken no more Gerald Candless novels out of the library.

Now, though, she thought she had better. She borrowed two more—there were only three more—and sat up late reading them. The effect on her was much the same as The Centre of Attraction ’s had been. They left her uncomfortable, dissatisfied, and something else as well this time. Was it possible that she was passing her life foolishly, even wasting her life? Was it even possible that this fiction was reality ? It felt like it. It convinced her of a kind of truth more than the thrillers and the romances did. His books made her feel that she was outside somewhere, looking in at real people doing real things. What kind of a man could make a reader feel like that?

She and her parents and one of the Purley branch librarians had intended to take Colin Wrightson out to dinner after the event. A small French restaurant had been chosen and Herbert and Betty Wick had been there the previous week to try it out. Now their guest at L’Ecu Rouge would be Gerald Candless. Ursula had given careful thought to what she should wear. Not one of the taffeta dresses—that would be overdoing it—and a suit would look as if she meant to travel somewhere. She finally settled for a powder blue pleated skirt with a powder blue sweater worn over a blue-and-white-striped silk blouse. Heavy makeup was fashionable, but she had seldom worn as much as some girls, largely because her father made jocular remarks if she did, asking her if she had been at the raspberry jam again or kissing a fire engine.

There was a photograph of Gerald Candless on the flap of the back jacket. The face was half-turned and in partial shadow, the curly dark hair low over his forehead, but from what she could see of him, she thought he looked arrogant, clever, opinionated, frightening, and as if he had to shave a lot. She wouldn’t be able to talk to a man who looked like that, still less to a man who had written those things, because everything she said would sound silly. She would speak as little as possible and he would hardly notice she was there.

He was late. Not very late, no more than five minutes after the scheduled time for the start of his talk, but the librarian and the committee ladies were going mad. Ursula sat in the middle of the front row of seats, where they had told her she must sit, her hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles. She was wearing navy blue suede pumps. Calm, resigned, unmoving as she waited, she had begun to hope—wickedly, for what about the librarian and her mother and the committee?—that he wouldn’t come at all.

Then he came. He had come by car and gotten lost. She had expected him to be wearing a suit, but he sauntered up to the platform in an old pepper-colored sports jacket, a Fair Isle pullover, and ginger corduroy pants. His hair was long, and long hair for men hadn’t yet come into style, but his was as long as a woman’s, a thick bush of wiry dark curls.

She recognized her Mr. Rochester. Not Charlotte Brontë’s hero, but Orson Welles in the film. His face wasn’t as full as Welles’s and his mouth wasn’t budlike—it was wide and curving—but he was her Mr. Rochester, and it terrified her. Another girl, another sort of girl, might have set out from that moment to get him, to attract him, fascinate him, tempt him. Ursula wouldn’t have known how to begin. Besides, she was frightened. She would never dare speak a word to him.

He talked. About how he wrote and what impelled him to write and what he wanted to write one day. She didn’t take much of it in. Because it was the theme of one of his novels, he talked about Freud’s seduction theory and raised a gasp from his audience. But later on, she could remember hardly anything of what he had said. Afterward, at question time, the Purley librarian passed a note to her on which she had written that Ursula should ask a question. Ursula turned around and shook her head vehemently. She would rather die. One woman asked him if he wrote by hand or used a typewriter, and another woman—the audience was mostly women—asked him what advice he would give aspiring writers.

“Don’t,” he said.

More gasps and some laughter, but Ursula could tell they hadn’t liked that laconic answer. She looked up at him, expecting him to say more, and found that he was looking at her. His eyes met hers and something very strange happened. He winked. It was a tiny wink, more of a tic really. She knew she must have been mistaken, but still she blushed, a deep fiery blush that made her want to bury her face in her cold hands, but she couldn’t, not there. I will never dare say a word to him, she thought as the heat subsided from her cheeks. I wish I didn’t have to go to dinner. I wish I could go home and go to bed with a nice book, The Constant Nymph or Frenchman’s Creek.