Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“Didn’t some of these people come to your wedding?”

“There were none of your father’s relations there, only friends.”

“Well, tell me about how you and Dad first met, will you?”

“I thought I was to do that when you came down for the weekend.”

“I can’t come down. I’ve got to go and see this Thague woman. So tell me now, will you, Ma?”

Some of it, only some of it. Ursula talked for ten minutes, censoring as she went. It was after Sarah rang off that she thought about it in detail, leaning her head back, closing her eyes, remembering.

The car was an MG, a two-seater. He called for her in it at precisely seven. She was ready; she had been ready for two hours—not a particularly good idea, as she had to keep running upstairs to comb her hair again and renew her lipstick (pale pink, so that Dad wouldn’t say she’d been kissing fire engines). A run appeared in one of her stockings and she had to change them, too. Those were still the days, though they were passing, when women were supposed to look perpetually fresh and newly painted, not a hair out of place, like so many life-size Barbie dolls or Stepford Wives. Bandbox was the word. It had taken her days to decide what to wear before settling on the new pink shift with pink jacket.

The whole thing made her parents uneasy. Why did this man want to take their daughter out? He was old enough to be her father—well, not quite, but she knew what they meant. Why not take them all out if he wanted to make some return for the dinner at which they had entertained him and at which he had drunk far too much?

“He isn’t courting you, is he?” said Herbert Wick.

“I’m just going to have dinner with him, Dad.”

“I do think it’s most peculiar,” said Betty. “Don’t you, Bert?”

“Writers are peculiar. Still, I suppose it’s all right. He’s a middle-aged man.”

As if that made him safe. You could leave your daughter alone with a middle-aged man, whereas a young one would be dangerous. Was it a matter of greater physical strength or stronger physical urges? She didn’t think of this at the time.

Her parents were pleasant enough to Gerald when he arrived. Her father offered him a drink. Gerald said, “Yes, please, how kind,” and accepted a large gin and tonic. No one worried about drinking and driving in 1962. He was wearing a suit, not very clean and not pressed at all, but still a suit. His tie, he said, was in his pocket; he didn’t like ties, but he would put it on when they got to the restaurant.

The restaurant was in Chelsea and quite a long way. Ursula dreaded to think how long it would take at this hour in a car. Well over an hour probably, toiling up through Streatham and Balham and Battersea, along one-way streets in heavy traffic—well, what they considered heavy then. It took Gerald about forty minutes. He talked to her all the way. He asked her questions. She had never been asked so many, never known anyone to take so much interest in her. Where had she lived as a child? Where had she been to school? Had she been good at school? Did she like working for her father? What were her interests? What did she read?

She plucked up her courage and said she had read three of his books.

“And did you like what you read?”

“I liked The Centre of Attraction best,” she said. She had really read it; the others she had dipped into and skimmed through.

“That’s not an entirely pleasing thing for a writer to hear, you know. That his first book is preferred. It implies he isn’t getting better.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean …”

“I’ll give you all my books and inscribe them to ‘Little Bear.’ ‘To Little Bear from Gerald Candless, with admiration.’ ”

She blushed. “There isn’t anything to admire about me,” she managed to say. “I’m very ordinary.”

“Perhaps it is your ordinariness I admire,” he said.

Sixties food was not inspired, even in a good restaurant like that one. She ate prawn cocktail and roast chicken and peach melba and he ate smoked mackerel and roast chicken and apple pie à la mode. She asked him why ice cream made it à la mode and he said he didn’t know, that it was American. Strange that she remembered the details of that meal but that she couldn’t remember what they had eaten at any other until after they were married.

He had put on his tie before they got out of the car—imagine being able to park a car right outside a restaurant in the King’s Road!—and it was a red tie, a bit greasy and frayed. When he smiled, she saw that one of his molars had been crowned with gold. It made her think Mr. Rochester must have had a gold tooth.

“Have you a boyfriend?” he asked her when their coffee came.

She was a little shocked, and she reddened again. He watched the color form and fade, his head a little on one side.

“I think that blush means yes, Little Bear.”

“No,” she said. “No, it doesn’t mean that. I haven’t got … anyone.”

He said nothing. They left. In the car, driving back, she saw his large, long hands tighten on the wheel, the knuckles polished white, as he said without looking at her, of course without looking, “May I apply for the post?”

She had no idea what he meant. “The post?”

“The vacant position of boyfriend—or, since I am too old for such a term, suitor, swain, lover—in the life of Little Bear.”

“You?” she said. She was horrified, aghast, amazed, delighted, incredulous.

He pulled the car to the side, then stopped it. “Do you doubt me?”

She found out later that this quotation from Jane Eyre was unintended. If he had ever read the novel, he had forgotten it. It was by the merest chance that he spoke Edward Rochester’s phrase when Jane is incredulous of his proposal, using a common-enough expression. And therefore he had no idea that she herself was quoting when she replied in Jane’s word, “Entirely.”

But they had sorted it out. She had explained and he had laughed. They hadn’t touched each other and it was to be a long time before he kissed her, but that evening they established that Gerald Candless was to be her accredited—well, boyfriend.

He took her out twice a week. He phoned her every day. Her parents thought it peculiar, but they came to accept him. He was comfortably off, if not rich, did fairly well from his books and very well from his journalism. He had a house in Hampstead, a small house, as he kept on saying. Everyone in the family, Herbert and Betty, Ian and Helen, expected him and Ursula to get engaged, but it was six months before he asked her to marry him.

She said yes at once because she was in love with him, though she could not have said, as Jane does, that no net ensnared her, that she was a free human being with an independent will. She could not have said that her spirit addressed his spirit, just as if both had passed through the grave, and they stood at God’s feet, equal—though she would have liked to.

The truth was that he had ensnared her, hypnotized her almost, had her in thrall. And she still disbelieved. She still felt she might wake up and find herself back in January, on the day before Colin Wrightson was due to come and speak to the Purley Library Users’ Association. It was only a dream that he had slipped on the ice on his way to feed the birds, for two days later, he came to Purley and talked about Queen Victoria’s daughters and she never met Gerald Candless at all.

Now that Sarah wasn’t coming and Hope wasn’t coming, Ursula told the Dunes that she could baby-sit on the Friday night if required, and the Saturday, too. They sounded pleased. A Mr. and Mrs. Fleming, who would be coming with two children, had attempted to book a baby-sitter in advance of their arrival, but they had been told it was unlikely anyone could be found.