Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“Yes.”

“Was that successful, Sarah?”

There was a pause, a silence; then Sarah’s voice came in a rush, impulsive and strangely high-pitched. “I’ve been wondering, Ma, if you—I mean, if you’ve any idea why Dad …”

“Idea of what?”

“Nothing,” said Sarah.

“Shall I write to you, then?” In the absence of any reply to this, Ursula said, “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

“No. No, nothing. I’ll call you in a day or two.”

She sounded just like Ursula’s mother had when some forbidden subject had been raised—cagey, slightly embarrassed, almost dismissive. In Betty Wick’s case, the subject had usually been sex, and for a moment Ursula wondered, as she replaced the receiver, if Sarah’s awkwardness could have been from the same cause, shyness in anticipation of what her mother might have to say about her married life. But no, it must be something else, something she couldn’t guess at, for both daughters seemed to her free from even mild inhibition. If Sarah wanted to know, she would come out with it, and if she was afraid of hearing, she would say that, too.

Her own mother had belonged to a time that must seem to Sarah and Hope a dark-age generation. The words she had used unconsciously on the phone came back to her. They were those her mother had spoken to her in a quite different context, words all mothers once perhaps used to their girls on the brink of marriage: “Is there anything you want to ask me?” One thing was for certain, she would never repeat them to Sarah or Hope in the sense they had been used to her.

The night before her wedding, her mother had said to her in a deceptively casual way, “Is there anything you want to ask me about, you know, tomorrow night?”

Ursula was terribly embarrassed and taken aback. “No, thanks,” she muttered, not looking at Betty.

“There’s not much in it, anyway,” said Betty. “I mean, if you’re expecting the sort of thing you read about in books, I can tell you you’ll be disappointed. Just don’t build your hopes up, that’s all I’m saying.”

Ursula had not built her hopes up. Indeed, having by then perused a number of sex books, which, by 1963, were becoming increasingly frank and explicit, she knew very well to expect no wonders the first time or even the second. Sexual fulfillment must be worked for, with mutual understanding and consideration. For this reason, she rather wished Gerald had not been so circumspect and had taken her away for a couple of weekends in advance of their marriage so that their wedding night might be more perfect than could reasonably be anticipated. But, in the event, the books, not to mention Betty Wick, could hardly have been more wrong, and Ursula loved their lovemaking from the start. She found within herself a fount of sexual desire and free, eager response.

On their honeymoon, they went to the newly attractive holiday place, Yugoslavia, the Dalmatian coast. It was warm and sunny, and while the hotel was strange and rather primitive, with one bathroom to a floor and the key to it always missing, and the food consisted mainly of pork and green peppers, they had a large airy bedroom with lace curtains at the window and a tentlike mosquito net over the big wooden bed. Ursula could have spent all day as well as all night inside that all-enveloping white net, stroking Gerald’s body, kissing Gerald, receiving him into herself with long sighs and delighted laughs of pleasure. It was he who laughingly resisted, made her get up, wrest that bathroom key out of the management, and, once they had showered in cold water, explore the town, walk the beach, swim.

She couldn’t keep herself from touching him. When they walked, she hung on to his arm or put her arm around his waist. He said it was too hot for that, and it was, but still she needed to touch him, just to feel his skin on her skin, his brown skin under her fingertips, and when they sat on the rocks, she pressed herself against him, turning his face to hers to kiss him. Now, when she looked back, she was ashamed. She was so ashamed that even the memory could make her redden and her cheeks feel hot when she pressed her cold fingers against them.

One evening, he had said to her, “You are the sort of woman most men would dream of being married to.”

She took it as a compliment and a warm tide of joy flowed through her body. She was especially delighted because that afternoon, when they had returned to their room for the siesta most people took, she had stripped off her clothes and pulled him down onto her, thrusting her full breasts into his hands, smiling and murmuring his name, parting her legs to receive him between them, shameless and wanton because she hadn’t known there was any reason for reticence. And he, though also smiling, had shaken his head and made a little pushing away gesture with his hands, had murmured, “No, no, not now,” and lain down under the net with his back to her.

So later, when he made that flattering remark, she was happy, and no less so at its corollary, though surprised. “I didn’t know you; I just thought I did. I didn’t expect ardor.”

“What did you expect?”

She knew now. Indifference. Perhaps Betty’s reaction. “I don’t know, Little Bear,” he said. “Ursa Minor, Constellation, I don’t know what I expected.”

Minor, yes. Acquiescence was what she got from him. That was something she also knew now. Well, she had known it for years. Not on their honeymoon, though; she hadn’t known it then. She had thought he was tired, reminded herself he was fourteen years older than she, when in those last days and nights there was no lovemaking and she was rejected, if with rueful smiles and amused protests. They went home, to Hampstead, to the house on Holly Mount, and she didn’t know how sharply the image of that room in Cavtat would be imprinted on her mind, so that she would always associate in the future white net, draped, streaming, gathered, enveloping, with sexual pleasure.

But did he? Or rather, with sexual excess, profligacy, dismay? And was that the explanation for his recoiling from the mist, that it reminded him? Folds of white net, eddying billows of white mist. She thought this theory of hers far-fetched, but not to be entirely discounted. It was a long time since confronting the suspicion—no, the certain knowledge—that he disliked making love to her, that he loathed it, could cause her pain. So perhaps when he had seen the white mist hang from the white sky, he, too, had remembered that gauzy bedroom, the smell of sex, her wetness and softness and openness, her uninhibited passion.

He was writing a book and she understood that it exhausted him; sometimes he worked throughout the evenings. She even told herself that she was excessively desirous and, although she was enough of a child of her time not to think there might be something wrong with her, she did tell herself that she had gotten into an absurd habit. There was more to life than sex. Such as learning to be a wife. To cook, to entertain his friends. She found herself able to decipher his curious handwriting, and this surprised him. He was pleasantly surprised that she could read what he had written, when so many typists in the past had given up in despair. Without telling him what she was doing, she abstracted his first chapter from the bottom of the pile of manuscript, took it away, and typed it up, producing fifteen perfect pages.

Presenting it to him later, she half-expected a cold incredulity, even reproaches. By that time, the early signs of his rejection of her had begun to show themselves. She hadn’t understood what they were, what she had done, but she was already wary; she was watchful for signs, on the verge of being afraid of him. The typing of the fifteen pages, she realized later, had been done to placate him, to make him pleased with her.