Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

He was up there at the altar with his best man, whom Ursula had met once, which was how she knew this wasn’t a cousin but just another friend. She wasn’t nervous. She wanted to marry Gerald; she was in love with him, and she couldn’t wait to be married to him and living with him and sleeping with him every night. She made all her responses in a firm, clear voice. Then the vicar said to repeat the words about “With this ring I thee wed and with my body I thee worship”—they hadn’t gotten around to changing the prayer book by then—and Ursula held up her hand and saw the engagement ring on her finger.

Gerald had the wedding ring ready to slip on, so she quickly tugged at the engagement ring, and whatever she’d been before, she must have been nervous by then, because the ring fell out of her hand and onto the floor. It made quite a loud sound as it hit the floor of the nave, which was made of flagstones, with a bit of carpet runner up the aisle, but the ring hit the stones, not the carpet. Instinctively, she ducked down to retrieve it, and Pam ducked, too, and their heads collided, not painfully, but ridiculously. She felt about for the ring and Pam felt, but they couldn’t find it, and she heard the vicar or someone whisper, and whisper crossly, not pleasantly, “Leave it. Leave it.”

Gerald repeated those serious words, not at all crossly, but with an undercurrent of laughter in his voice, as if he was suppressing great amusement, and she loved him for that, as if she hadn’t loved him already. When he came to endowing her with all his worldly goods (for she had already thrown one of his worldly goods onto the floor), she thought he would burst out into a crow of laughter, but he didn’t; he controlled himself, and the vicar looked daggers.

Afterward, they had to go into the vestry while the congregation sang a hymn, and she was anxious all the time about her ring, but before they went back into the ceremony, little Pauline came up to her and gravely presented it to her. She had had it all the time. With great presence of mind in one so young, she had picked up the ring and slipped it on the stem of one of the flowers in her bridesmaid’s bouquet, where it had remained until that moment.

Later on, frequently, Ursula had thought what a strange business that affair of the ring had been. Like an omen, but an omen of what? In another way, it was like a dream, for such things happen more in dreams than in reality: the dropping of the ring, the fruitless hunt for it, the shame of hunting for it, its retrieval with such precocity by a child, the image of it encircling the stem of a white rosebud.

She had never told her daughters. Perhaps she would tell Sarah now or perhaps not. Once, when the girls were little, she had asked Gerald if he remembered, but he had looked at her as if she had invented the whole thing, as if it were a product of her imagination. She had begun to notice at that time that he disliked being reminded he was married. He avoided using the words my wife whenever he could. Once, she saw him looking at the bare third finger of her left hand and his face bore a satisfied expression.

Ursula went to look at the sleeping children. When she came back into the room, Sam Fleming was there. He had come up to check that everything was all right.

“I hope you won’t mind my asking, but have you any connection to Gerald Candless, the novelist who died this summer? I believe he lived near here.”

“I was his wife,” said Ursula.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I” was what she would have liked to say. Instead, she thanked him and said there was no need for him to stay, the children were fine, and there was something on the television she had been looking forward to watching. But instead of switching it on, she sat and thought and asked herself the questions she had asked so many times since his death. Had he been sorry for what he had done? And had he been trying to make amends by leaving her his house and his savings and his future royalties?

7

They make a mockery of those Greek and Turkish women they have seen on package holidays, but most London girls dress entirely in black, as if in mourning for the lost freedom of color.

—THE MEZZANINE SMILE

THE DEPARTURE OF YOUR CHILDREN IS NOT INVARIABLY A cause of unhappiness. If they are happy, even though distant, if they are prosperous and getting on with their lives and have children of their own, that should be enough for you. You didn’t, after all, have them to look after you in your old age. You never thought of such a thing. Come to that, to be strictly honest, you didn’t have them intentionally at all; they just came. But once there, you knew you had had them so that they might grow up straight and strong, be successful, be happy, earn their livings doing what they wanted to do, and take a fitting place in the world.

Thus the philosophy of Joan Thague. One of her sons was in Australia, another in Scotland, while her daughter lived in Berkshire. She saw them once a year, sometimes more. Her grandson at the Anglia Polytechnic University dropped in once a fortnight and she knew the reason he came. He got a good meal. Maureen, her cousin John’s son John George’s wife, came and had a cup of tea and took her shopping in her car to the Martlesham Tesco, which was the best supermarket for miles around. Joan Thague still had her health and strength at seventy-eight and thought herself a fortunate woman.

If she had been able to cope with the phone, she could have talked to her children and her grandchildren once a week. But her deafness made things difficult. The doctors said she was deaf because the noise in the silk mill where she had worked as a girl had damaged her ears. Joan didn’t argue. Doctors never listened if you did. She didn’t say there was very little noise in the silk mill or that her uncle Ernest had been stone-deaf and her dad deaf in his declining years. It was obviously hereditary, but doctors didn’t like it if you said an illness was obviously anything.

She had an attachment to put on the phone receiver and, of course, she had her deaf aid. With the deaf aid in place and with her sharp eyes on a person’s lips, she could hear anything; she could hear words uttered in a normal voice, but the thing on the phone didn’t really help her at all. She had described the noise that came out of the phone, the way it sounded to her, as like what a big dog’s barking would be if it was in the bottom of a well. The audiologist had laughed and said, very well put, but she hadn’t been able to do anything about improving the phone. Joan kept the phone in case she ever had to dial 999 for an ambulance, but she never used it. That was why the young lady whose dad had passed away was coming to the house and not phoning.

Saturday was the day, in the afternoon. Maureen had come around the day before and said this Miss Candless had phoned again and asked if Saturday afternoon at about three would be all right, and Maureen had said she was sure it would be, and she had come over to pass on the message. Then they had gone to Martlesham and Joan had bought chocolate-chip biscuits and Kunzle cakes (which had come back into the shops after an absence of forty years) for Miss Candless’s tea. Luckily, Frank had left her comfortably off and she had always been thrifty, so she didn’t have to worry about spending a little extra for special occasions.

While she busied herself dusting and vacuuming the already-immaculate bungalow, Joan speculated as to who the young lady could be. It was unthinkable that anyone called Candless and hailing from Ipswich shouldn’t be one of their family. Miss Candless was trying to trace her father’s roots, and Maureen had said this man’s Christian name and something else about him but had turned her face away at that moment to catch sight of someone out of the window and Joan hadn’t been able to read her lips. She put the vacuum cleaner away and laid on the newly dusted coffee table in the living room all the photograph albums she possessed, four of them.