Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

In the restaurant, she was seated as far from him as it is possible to be when six people are sitting at a round table. But she was still opposite him. He drank a lot; he didn’t eat much. The librarian looked dismayed when he asked if they could have another bottle of the red, but her father made reassuring faces, and Ursula knew that meant he would pay for it.

Her mother and the librarian persisted in talking to him about his work, though they should have been able to see, as she could, that he disliked discussing it. The less she said—and she uttered only essentials concerned with what she was going to eat and to pass the water, please—the more he began to pay attention to her. Mostly, at first, with smiles and requests as to what he could pass her, but then, when he had dismissed a particularly fatuous question (Ursula thought) about where he got his ideas, he asked her quite abruptly, turning his back on the librarian, where she came from and what she did.

Ursula would have been glad if the ceiling had fallen in at that moment, engulfing them all, or if the proprietor had come in to say there was a bomb in the building and they must evacuate it in five minutes. Only there were no bombs in those days and nothing to make the ceiling fall. She had decided desperately that it didn’t matter what he thought of her, because she would never see him again, so she said very quietly that she lived in Purley with her parents and worked in her father’s office.

“And you’re engaged to be married.”

She shook her head, the blush returning.

“I’m sorry. I thought you must be.”

She didn’t ask why he thought that. Her father supplied an answer.

“Too pretty to be unattached, eh?”

Gerald Candless said coolly, “Something like that.”

But then she thought he looked at her almost tenderly. It was hindsight that told her he was weighing her up, considering; she hadn’t thought it back then. She doubted if she had ever seen that tender look on his face again. Because there was no need for it once he had decided not to spare her? The slaughterer strokes the calf only while he fattens it. There is no honey for the bear once captured.

Normally a good sleeper, she hardly slept that night. She kept thinking of her father saying she was pretty. It made her squirm. In her narrow bed with the rose-sprigged white curtains draped from a gold coronet, she wriggled with embarrassment. The room seemed silly now, the white carpet, the Cicely Mary Barker pictures, the looped net curtains. Perhaps he would put her in one of his books, a silly girl, a contrast to the intrepid heroine.

Next day, he phoned. He had phoned her mother first and asked if it would be all right to speak to Ursula, and her mother had passed on the number of Wick and Co.

“I told your mother I wanted to thank you for last night.”

“It wasn’t me,” she whispered, almost voiceless. “It was them.”

“Oh, no, it was you.”

She had nothing to say. Her heart beat heavily.

“I’d like to … return the compliment. Isn’t that what people say?”

She said truthfully, “I don’t know.” She knew nothing.

“I’d like you to have dinner with me.”

Modern English is peculiar, though not unique, in that it has one form for both the singular and the plural of the second person. French or German would have been quite clear. The obsolete thou would have been clear. But this was 1962.

“Did you give my mother a date?” she asked. “I’m sure my parents would be free most evenings, and of course I am.”

He laughed. “I meant you. You alone. You and me.”

“Oh.”

“Will you have dinner with me, Ursula?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She was almost stammering. “I mean, yes, of course. Of course I will. Thank you.”

“Good. When would you like it to be? You say.”

All her evenings were free or else occupied by events, by movable feasts, that could without trouble be changed. “Friday,” she said. “Saturday. I don’t mind.”

“Your name means ‘little bear’—did you know that?”

She hadn’t then. She uttered a small, tremulous “No.”

“I will call for you at your parents’ house in my car at seven on Saturday evening, Ursula.”

She didn’t know what to say. Perhaps to thank him? Before she could say anything, he had rung off.

Honey for the Little Bear.

6

Our children when young are a part of ourselves, but when they grow up, they are just other people.

—A PAPER LANDSCAPE

ONLY ONE CANDLESS WAS TO BE FOUND. Sarah examined the Ipswich telephone directory in her local public library. J. G. Candless, in Christchurch Street. She noted down the address and the phone number. She was growing excited about her book, much more excited than she had expected to be. She had already written bits of it, although she had an idea that it ought not to be done this way, piecemeal, odd stories about her father and memories that she particularly liked jotted down, but methodically, research first, then time set aside for the serious writing. Now was the time to start the research. That was why she had been to the library and found a relative. A possible relative, she corrected herself. She was too much of an academic to make assumptions.

But she was excited. Enough to want to devote hours and hours to it. When a man named Adam Foley, whom she had met in the Barnstaple pub, phoned and asked her out, she said no, because she had to start on the research for the book. The sound of his voice excited her, but, perversely, she said no to him and said it absently. After that, his voice also turned cold and he was barely polite when he said good-bye. She had shrugged, had no regrets. She had to phone this man called J. G. Candless in Ipswich. On her way home, she bought a town map of Ipswich in a bookshop. She meant to be thorough about this. Anyway, she was bound to have to go there. She might even go this week.

Sarah’s flat was on the top floor of a Victorian house, a big attic with skylights, and to get to it you had to climb forty-eight stairs. Sarah didn’t mind this and usually ran up them, or ran up thirty of them. Her own front door was painted deep purple. The rooms were large, if few, a living room converted from three attics for the servants’ use, a slightly smaller bedroom, a kitchen, purple like the door, and a bathroom. From the big new windows (put in and paid for by darling Dad), you could see all the way across to Primrose Hill, a green hill and green trees and rows of gray-and-brown houses and white-and-yellow towers fingering the blue sky. At night, it was black and yellow and glittery.

Sarah had a look in the mirror, checking on whether she liked her new hair color, done in St. John’s Wood that morning. Perhaps it was rather too red. On the other hand, it made her look less like her mother. Like most people—not like Hope, though—she was dissatisfied with the way she looked and would have preferred to resemble some dark beauty such as Stella Tennant or Demi Moore. Small neat features looked prissy. Her mouth was too rosebudlike, her nose too short and straight, her eyes too gray. She was seriously considering going in for brown contacts.

Because she thought her small neat features dull and prissy, a milkmaid’s looks, Sarah sought to dress herself with contrasting wildness and drama. So she always wore high heels, sometimes thick high heels attached to clumping shoes or boots, and a lot of black, with fringes and red beads. Her hair was her crowning glory, so she never covered it with a hat as Hope did, though sometimes she wore a large tortoiseshell clip, whose teeth held up a spike of hair at right angles to the rest.