Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

He put out his hand and laid it over hers. Ten minutes before, this action would have been all she wanted. For the time, for a start. Now it had a deadening effect; it was hateful to her. She let her hand lie there, felt his above it, not as welcomed skin against receptive skin, but as an embarrassment, heavy, hot. The waiter came, called by him, and his arrival was an excuse for withdrawing her hand.

It was a relief to him as much as to her, she thought, when she rose to go at barely 9:30. He would walk her back to her house, he said. She argued a little, then gave in. The thought that he might want to come into the house on the chance of getting a look at Gerald’s first editions was bitter. But in the event, he didn’t even come to the front door, only to the garden gate. She realized that on leaving by that gate less than two hours before, she had imagined that on her return he might kiss her. Imagined it as fantasy, but still saw in her mind’s eye the scenario.

“Good night,” she said.

He had been going to say something—she had no idea what—but he didn’t. He checked himself and echoed her own good night.

It isn’t possible by looking at a woman to tell whether she will bear children easily. Ursula knew that even when she accused Gerald of choosing her for that reason. Anyway, it could be true that he thought he could tell, that he had thought that when he first saw her and noticed her generous hips, full breasts, youth, innocence, and ignorance. And he was right. She was in labor for only two hours before Sarah was delivered. In a later age, the hospital would have sent her home in the afternoon. As it was, they kept her in for three days.

Few women then were commenting on the injustice of a preference for baby boys over baby girls. Boys were best, and not only among Muslims. Because Ursula had begun to be frightened of Gerald, had been apprehensive and wary of him throughout her pregnancy, she thought he would mind having a girl. He would blame her, as men did blame women, for having a girl. But for once, he surprised her with a delight and an enthusiasm she had never suspected him capable of.

“I’d been worried,” she said into Sarah’s tape recorder, “that although he seemed to want a child very much, he wouldn’t be so overjoyed when that child was a reality. I didn’t think he knew what it meant to have a baby in the house. Well, I didn’t know myself. But I thought I knew better than he did.”

“And you were wrong,” said Sarah. She said it in a satisfied way Ursula chose to ignore.

“As you say,” Ursula said levelly, “I was wrong.” She reflected on how wrong she had been. “He adored you from the first. He called you his treasure. He used to complain, you know, that no one took a writer’s writing seriously. I mean that they think what a writer does is really a hobby, that it’s not a job, and that it can be dropped for something else at any time, can be interrupted at any time. So a writer, being at home, can undertake any home tasks, is always there to answer the door, or take phone calls, or talk to people who come. And I thought he’d make a point of that not in fact being the case with the baby, with you. I thought he’d insist on never being disturbed by your crying and absolutely never, never being expected to look after you. But he forgot all that with you, with his treasure.”

Sarah was smiling, so she smiled, too. She forced it, but she managed.

“He took you out for walks in your pram. Men didn’t do that then, but he did. He changed your diapers. He would have fed you—only in the nature of things, I had to do that. The doctor was always in the house. GPs would still make home visits in 1966. Every time you weren’t in the peak of perfect health, that poor GP was sent for.”

“You must have felt yourself very lucky,” Sarah said.

“To have that sort of man, you mean? That rare sort of man?” Ursula managed not to answer. “My mother didn’t think it was right. Your aunt Helen didn’t. They thought it must be some failure on my part. My father wanted to know why we didn’t have a nanny or at least an au pair. We could easily have afforded it. Your father wouldn’t. He said there was nothing she could do that he couldn’t, and he did it with a love no mere nanny could feel. Of course, we had a nanny for Hope; we had to.” Ursula paused. “Is this the sort of thing you want?”

“I’d like an anecdote. Something a bit more … well, individual?”

“I can’t think of anything.”

“Okay, then, that’ll do for now.”

Sarah switched off the machine. Just as well, Ursula thought, because I don’t know how long I could go on with this. Anecdotes, indeed. She didn’t know what she was asking. Of course she didn’t. They were approaching dangerous ground, and if they hadn’t stopped, she would have had to start lying.

“Dad changed his name when he was twenty-five,” Sarah said. “I don’t know why. Do you?”

Ursula didn’t believe it. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure he did, but I’m not sure of anything more. You never had the slightest suspicion?”

“Not about his name, no. Why should I?”

“Not about anything? About his not having any aunts or uncles or cousins? You said there was no one belonging to him at your wedding.”

“I suppose I did sometimes think it was rather strange his having no relations at all. No, I thought it strange he could write so much and so well about families when he hadn’t got one.”

“But you didn’t ask him?”

“No.”

“Shall we have a look at Dad’s room?”

Ursula was touched by that “we,” as she always was by anything either of her daughters said that might be construed as implying a bond or link between her and Sarah or Hope. She followed Sarah to the door of the room, and it was only then, when Sarah hesitated and turned her head, that she was aware of her daughter’s stricken face. How self-centered I am, she thought, how absorbed in my own troubles, how unnoticing. It would be an effort for Sarah to go in there—she saw that—it would cause her real pain. Neither she nor Hope had entered the room since Gerald had died.

“Would you like to leave it for another time?”

Sarah shook her head. “I’ll be fine.”

Never had Ursula done her daughters the injustice of believing their affection for their father was less than utterly genuine. There had been no pretense, no affectation. They adored him. As I might have, she thought, if he had been to me as he was to them, if I had been his treasure. There came into her mind, unexpectedly, unbidden, the twelve-year-old Hope saying to her with resentful abruptness, “Why can’t you be nicer to Daddy?”

She opened the door of Gerald’s study and stood back to let Sarah precede her. There was no mist today and the window revealed a bright sky, cold, with racing clouds, a choppy sea, Lundy standing out clear and dark. Sarah looked nervously about the room. She went to the desk, hesitated, and then sat down in her father’s chair. His handwriting was nowhere visible; Ursula had seen to that. She had taken away those selected manuscripts and sent them to Boston, to Bond Street, to the anthologist in Cumbria. Sarah touched the cover on his typewriter, opened a drawer and then closed it again.

“Are there any more certificates?” she said.

“You mean birth, marriage, death? All we have are upstairs. Do you want me to fetch them?”

“Tell me where they are and I’ll fetch them.”

You will only have to come back in here, thought Ursula. You had better stay and get accustomed to it. She went upstairs and found the file that contained all the family documents, her parents’ death certificates, her marriage certificate, those for her birth, the girls’ births, and now the one for Gerald’s death. Sarah was no longer at the desk, but standing in front of the cupboard with the door open, contemplating those stacked manuscripts. She had grown very pale.