Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

They were almost at the top. At a place on the path where it was almost flat, just before the final steep ascent and the fork, she turned to look at him. They both stopped and looked at each other.

“If you are thinking that you would like Molly to be with us, I’m afraid she won’t. She’ll be upstairs with the children. She won’t leave them alone, and she doesn’t want any sitter but you. No, please don’t say what you’re going to and offer to sit instead of her.”

Ursula nodded again. She said, “Your branch of the path goes that way. I’ll come up on Thursday at about eight-thirty, if that’s all right.”

He smiled. “It will have to be.”

When she got into the house, she went straight to her desk and to the three manuscripts she had put there before she went out. This was to avoid thinking about what had happened. If she did that, she would feel a fool and she might also feel other unwelcome emotions. Over the years, she had become very practiced in controlling the contents of her mind; she knew how to quell certain thoughts and allow others to rise to the surface. Now, quickly, she turned her attention to the manuscripts.

They were to go to the university that had asked for them. Two she had typed herself; the third was Rosemary’s work. He had done the corrections and emendations himself, with a fountain pen, in black ink. Why was it that his handwriting was so nearly illegible but his corrections neat? She opened a drawer in her desk, looking for wrapping paper, padded bags, tape.

When the phone rang, she had begun thinking of Sam Fleming again. It was an altogether-welcome interruption. Or appeared so at first. She hardly recognized her daughter’s voice. It was even more hesitant than the last time, almost tremulous. Fleetingly, she thought that if she were the kind of mother in whom her children confided, she would be about to receive a confidence of a disturbing kind. But she wasn’t and they wouldn’t, any more than their relationship allowed for her to confess to a daughter, suavely or delightedly, that a man had just invited her out to dinner.

“What’s the matter, Sarah?”

The silence was so long and in a strange, indefinable way so profound that Ursula thought for a moment they had been cut off. She said, “Sarah?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Right. What?”

“I don’t quite know how to put this.” Ursula heard her daughter draw breath. Then, with a quaking of the heart, she heard her use a name she had never, so far as Ursula could remember, used before. “Mother,” she said. “Mother, was Dad, was he always called Candless?”

Weakened by Sarah’s form of address to her, Ursula said, “I don’t understand.”

“All right. Did he ever have another name? Did he change his name?”

“Not that I know of. No, he didn’t. Where did you get that idea?”

Sarah didn’t answer. “I thought of coming down for the weekend. I’d like to go through his study, go through all his papers. Would that be all right?”

Ursula was astonished even to be asked. She said too fulsomely, “Of course it would. Of course.”

“And maybe I could be a bit of help. Sort things out for you. Would that be useful?”

“What did you mean about another name?” said Ursula.

Another silence. Then she said, “It’s too difficult to explain on the phone. We’ll talk about it when I come down.”

Ursula sat in the living room, looking out to sea. The mist had gone and the sinking sun was a dark gold in the west. Lundy stood out against it, a dark rhombus. She reviewed what Sarah had said, making nothing of it. As the sun went and the shadows fell, she thought that if she turned around quickly, she might see him there in “Daddy’s chair.” His name was as much a part of him as that big frame, that shaggy hair, that deep, authoritative, laconic voice. Gerald Candless. Not a name everyone would recognize, nowhere near a household word, but not to be passed over, not to be heard without a pause for thought, an “Ah, yes, of course.”

She did turn then. If he were there, she’d be hallucinating. If he were there, she would be going mad. The chair, of course, was empty. The house was empty. She remembered then, weeks too late, that she had never told the hospital he wouldn’t be having a bypass. No doubt they knew by now.

Her marriage might have been like other people’s marriages. Perhaps this was what marriage was. How could you tell? She wasn’t very interested in clothes or hairdressers or what her mother called “aids to beauty,” but she went shopping in the mornings, window-shopping mostly, because there was nothing else to do. She went to St. John’s churchyard and had a look at Constable’s grave because Sally Wrightson told her she should. When it was fine, she walked on Hampstead Heath. A woman came in to clean the house. Gerald never ate lunch; he wouldn’t stop for that. She took him coffee and a piece of bread with a hunk of cheese and he smiled at her and thanked her. In the afternoons, she deciphered his handwriting and typed another chapter of the book that would be called The Forsaken Merman.

The protagonist—he had taught her this word when she called the leading character a “hero”—was a naval officer whose wife returned to live with her parents while he was away at sea and finally left him for the cousin she had been brought up with. There was very little in it about marriage and a lot about family relationships. If Ursula had hoped to find out his views on marriage from it, she was to be disappointed. She wondered how an only child, as he was, could know so much about what it meant to have brothers and sisters.

Gerald had thousands of books, so she no longer went to the library. It was at this time that she began reading something other than fiction. Not given to introspection then, she still saw them as Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre, and if she thought about her marriage, though she didn’t much, it was to conclude that life for Jane once she was a wife might have been similar to her own. Without the typewriter, of course. And without the memory of the madwoman in the distant wing. That Gerald might have had his own version of the madwoman never crossed her mind.

They had a drink together in the evening; they ate the dinner she cooked. Or they went out, or his friends came, or they went to them. The Wrightsons, the Arthurs, Adela Churchouse, Roger and Celia Pallinter. The conversation was of books, other people’s books, book gossip, anecdotes about other authors, scandals. And about important things, their feelings, their beliefs, their principles.

Jonathan Arthur and his wife, Syria, were active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Syria’s sister had actually refused to have children because of her dread of a nuclear disaster, of the world ending, and Syria said a day never went by without her worrying about a nuclear war coming. Ursula had never thought much about what her father still called “the atom bomb,” or if she had, she had trusted in deterrence, but she joined CND and went to meetings.

For the sake of having something to do really and of becoming more like the people he knew and talked to. If she knew more and was more involved, he might not just ask her how she was and how the typing was going and what was she going to do that day; he might talk to her. He might treat her as an equal. Adela Churchouse tried to interest her in the anti-apartheid movement and in the Homosexual Law Reform Society, so she stopped buying South African apples and tried to be enlightened about homosexuals. This wasn’t easy, because at home, her brother had made jokes about “poofters,” while her father had thrown a book called The Well of Loneliness in the fire.

Much of The Centre of Attraction concerned a young sailor’s guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but when she told Gerald about her new activities, he only seemed bored by CND. The anti-apartheid people he also seemed to find tedious, but he had put his foot down about HLRS. His reaction was almost as violent as her father’s. What did she know about law reform? She was to have nothing to do with it. Change in the law would come in its own good time, nothing she could do would help it along, and what on earth was she thinking of listening to that old sapphist, Adela Churchouse?