Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“I’ll give you back his birth certificate,” she said tonelessly, then, vaguely indicating the manuscripts, added, “All these will have to be read, won’t they?”

“Will they? I don’t know.”

She seemed interested only in the marriage certificate and not very interested in that. “Did Dad keep a diary?”

“Not so far as I know. Well, no, I know he didn’t.”

“He put all his life into his books, didn’t he? Everything that happened to him, everything people said, the things he saw and heard.”

He had been famous for it. In lectures, interviews, on radio and television, he had vaunted his tendency to constant autobiography. “Did he tell you that?”

“Not all that long ago, as a matter of fact. Three or four years? Hope and I were both at home and he was reading over something he’d written and he started talking to us about how he had written down everything that had ever happened to him. Well, not everything, not by then, but he intended finally to have written everything.” Sarah paused, her voice not quite steady. “I don’t know if he did. I wonder if he did.”

Ursula said nothing.

“Of course, when it was made into fiction, it was sort of filtered through the author’s creative process, so it changed; he explained that. Anyway, I knew it; it’s something I explain to my students, who want everything Charlotte Brontë wrote, for instance, to be directly autobiographical. But he did use everything; his life was his material, to a degree that I think is unusual. So I suppose we can’t expect a diary, as well.”

Talking had helped Sarah. The academic in her was coming to her aid. Ursula saw the color beginning to return to her face.

“Are you interested in letters?” she asked.

“Not particularly.” An old sharpness was also returning. “This is going to be my memoir—in other words, my memories. I may want Dad’s background, but I don’t want what he said to other people, and still less what they said to him. I may take a look at his notebooks and the latest proofs.”

“Photographs?”

“We’ve got a boxful somewhere, haven’t we? For some reason, we never had albums.”

“No, we never had albums,” said Ursula. “I’ll leave you to it.”

He put all his life into his books.… For a long time, she hadn’t seen it. A Paper Landscape , published a year after Hope was born, had been another story of a family, poor Irish in Liverpool this time, and the eldest daughter’s struggles to become a painter. In the next one, A Messenger of the Gods , a father dies young and his widow is left with two small children and his old mother to support. The change came with Orisons , written after the move to Lundy View House. This was the first novel of his she hadn’t enjoyed, experiencing instead a sense of foreboding when she began to decipher a new chapter.

Yet for a long time, she had made herself resist. It was her imagination, she told herself. These characters couldn’t be based on her sister, Helen, and her husband. She was too introspective, too sensitive; perhaps she was paranoid. It was vanity that made one see oneself in fictional characters. Adela Churchouse, or it might have been Roger Pallinter, had told her that when they used a real person to create a character, he or she never suspected, while people constantly saw themselves as the originals of characters based on others.

But when she came to type Hand to Mouth in 1984, she was no longer able to deceive herself.

10

The seahorse is unique among species in that it is the male who becomes pregnant and bears the young.

—HAMADRYAD

A FAMOUS ACTRESS, WHO HAD ALSO BEEN AN ACQUAINTANCE of Gerald Candless, recited the second half of Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” A rather less famous actor, but one who had occasionally stayed at Lundy View House, read Herbert’s “Jordan.” Ursula, in the front pew, with a daughter on either side of her, the younger in a huge black hat and weeping copiously, thought “Jordan” inappropriate for an aggressive atheist like Gerald, of whom it couldn’t have been said that while he had his God, he envied no man’s nightingale or spring.

Ursula didn’t know, and had indeed never heard of, the soprano who sang a Hugo Wolf song. These were Hope’s choices, and she suspected Hope had chosen what she would like at her own memorial service, if she had been able to contemplate having one. Roger Pallinter, thin in old age, arthritic and on two sticks, recited one of his own poems. It was a surprise to Ursula that he had written any. Colin Wrightson, looking just as old and doddery, gave an address. Eulogy, thought Ursula. She also thought how very odd it was to listen to and look at a man who had once been one’s lover and feel nothing for him but impatience and a faint distaste.

She would have liked to hold poor Hope’s hand but could scarcely imagine what the reaction might be if she attempted to take it. Robert Postle, sitting behind her, had one of those noisy, spluttery colds that spray infection into a three-foot-long radius of atmosphere around their subject. She felt a spot of damp on the back of her neck and shuddered. While Wrightson droned on, his wife, on the other side of the church, put on her glasses and read the black-edged sheet Hope had had printed with the songs and poems on it and GERALD CANDLESS 1926–1997 in times roman at the top. Perhaps she was as taken aback as Ursula herself had been at the Latin epitaph: Vixit, scripsit, mortuus est.

“He lived, he wrote, he died,” Tessa Postle whispered throatily to her.

It made her shudder. She was going home on the 3:50, a train that would get her to Exeter by 7:00 P.M. From there, she would take another, reaching Barnstaple by some time just before nine. Both girls had asked her to stay the night, which amazed and touched her, though Hope’s invitation had been grudging. Her sister, Helen, had asked her to stay, and perhaps she would have done if the prospect of getting from Carshalton to Paddington in the morning hadn’t been so dire. Now it was all over and the organist was playing a voluntary, which Adela Churchouse was humming and to which she seemed to be executing a little dance in the aisle. London’s literati drifted out into the courtyard, into Piccadilly.

Ursula was kissed by people she couldn’t remember ever having seen before. Robert Postle, mopping his face with tissues from a box held by Tessa, said that they must meet; they must talk; there was the new book.… When would she come up again? When would she have lunch with him? “You don’t need me,” she said. A small crowd surrounded her by this time, but no one was shocked; no one was even surprised. It was her grief, her loss, the soul-rocking sorrow any woman would feel at the loss of such a man as Gerald Candless. To her surprise, Sarah came up to her, touched her arm, rescued her. She had a taxi waiting; she and Hope would accompany her to Paddington.

A red-letter day indeed, thought Ursula, who could hardly believe it. Once more, but this time in the taxi, they sat on either side of her, and she was moved by their presence, as nothing connected with Gerald could have moved her. He was gone, but she was still there; she was their surviving parent—Was that it? Was that what accounted for it? Something happened that hadn’t happened for years and years. The tears came into her eyes, and not tears that stopped there, were blinked back, and quelled, but real gushing, pouring tears that spilled over and flooded down her face.

“Oh, Ma,” said Sarah, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”