Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Ursula hadn’t felt so happy for ages. She hadn’t felt happy at all for years, but now she did, because Sarah and Hope were being nice to her, were actually both of them kissing her good-bye. She couldn’t remember Hope kissing her since she was a tiny girl. They were a threesome hugging, a great loving embrace; then the girls went, and happy Ursula, making sure they were gone, bought herself a poached salmon and watercress sandwich and a bottle of fresh orange juice in the sandwich shop for eating and drinking on the train, in the first-class compartment.

Sarah told herself that she had come to terms with her father’s behavior, his assumption, for some reason or other, of a new identity. At least she was used to it. She could accept it. The difficulty was that her discovery had stopped her in her tracks; she was stuck as badly as if she had writer’s block. Her father could have told her, though he never had, that if the first few chapters a writer has written are lifeless or have gaps in them, it will be very hard to proceed with any enthusiasm until that earlier part has been satisfactorily repaired. And if these repairs can’t be carried out, the whole work may have to be abandoned.

She couldn’t mend her chapter without the wherewithal for filling gaps. A great reluctance to go on had taken hold of her. How could she write about a man who seemed to have been born at the age of twenty-five? A man who had taken his first job at that age? The Western Morning News had replied to her letter. They had a record of Gerald Candless working for them in Plymouth as a general reporter from the summer of 1951 until late in 1957. She had even read a piece written by him on the Suez crisis of 1956 and soldiers leaving for Egypt on a boat out of Plymouth. But no records seemed to exist of his history before 1951.

The results of searching her father’s study had been disappointing. He had not been a specially orderly man, but on the other hand, he hadn’t been grossly untidy, either. There was no filing system, but neither were there drawers stuffed with rubbish. He had kept letters, still in their envelopes, but by no means all the letters he had received. In spite of what she had said to her mother, she read them and wondered at his choice of what to preserve, at last realizing—it was an unwelcome, even chilling, conclusion—that he had kept letters from the rich and famous, from celebrities and from distinguished writers. Friends’ letters had been discarded. It was impossible to escape the conclusion that he was looking to a posthumous future, when someone would write his biography and include those letters.

In that case, what had he expected a biographer to do about his banished childhood and youth? Not inquire perhaps. Assume, gloss over, pass on. Strange, then, that he had kept no sort of diary. Not entirely believing her mother, Sarah had searched for a diary, found only notebooks whose contents referred to the plots, themes, and characters of his novels.

All Saturday afternoon, she had worked in the study, but in the evening she had gone to the pub in Barnstaple and then on to a drinking club with a bunch of friends. Strangely enough, because there was no prearrangement, Adam Foley turned up among them once again. He was one of Alexander’s friends, or an ex-boyfriend of Rosie’s sister—Sarah wasn’t sure which. His family had a weekend cottage in a village not far away.

Nothing was said about the phone call, coldly received and coldly terminated, but she thought he resented what had happened. It must be so. He spoke to everyone but her. He must remember her “No, thanks, can’t, I’m busy.” Too bad. She wouldn’t talk to him, either. It was a shame he was so deeply, disturbingly attractive. His hair was black and his skin had a dark bloom. He was thin. She liked thinness and that peculiar grace with which he moved, very casual, laid-back, insouciant. But she had brushed him off.

After a time, she was aware, uncomfortably at first, then with mounting excitement, of his eyes on her. Not on her face, not meeting her eyes, but on her body. That wasn’t what having a roving eye meant, but his eyes roved. While they were still in the pub, he went to fetch a round of drinks, then came back with glasses for everyone but her.

“What’s poor Sarah done?” Rosie said.

He looked at her face then. “I didn’t see you there.”

It was uttered in an indifferent tone and as if she were too insignificant to be noticed. He must be paranoid if a woman’s refusal to go out with him made him so rude. She could be rude, too. It would give her pleasure.

“Staring at an empty chair, were you?”

She got up, went to the bar, and bought her own drink. The place was so crowded, she had to push past him to get back to her seat. As she did so, his arm touched her thigh, pressed against her thigh. For some reason, she didn’t walk out. She stayed and they went on to the club. It was in a cellar under a greengrocer’s and called, of course, Greens. He pushed ahead of her; he let the door swing into her face. There was dancing on a little floor the size of someone’s bathroom and he danced with Vicky and with Rosie. He danced with them and looked at her.

She was mesmerized by him. She began to feel a little sick. Of course, she had drunk too much. It must have been after one when they all left. Rosie asked him if he wanted a lift. He cocked a thumb in Sarah’s direction and said in exactly the tone he might use about a taxi driver, “She’s taking me.”

And she did take him. Or he took her. He took the keys from her in silence, found her car, opened the passenger door for her, and drove a couple of miles. She was very drunk, but not too drunk to be aware that he had parked the car on the grass verge and gotten out. He came around to her side, pulled her out, put her in the back, and made love to her on the backseat.

Somehow or other, he and she had gone back to the cottage together and Sarah had stayed the night. With Adam, in Adam’s bed, though members of his family were occupying the other bedrooms. And it had been exciting, like being a teenager again, creeping up the stairs, carrying her shoes, making no sound because Adam’s aunt or grandmother or someone was sleeping on the other side of the bedroom wall. They had scarcely spoken. Early in the morning, the moment the old woman had gone off to Holy Communion, she had gotten up and driven home with a monstrous hangover.

Her mother had made no comment on Sarah’s arriving back at ten in the morning, just asked if she’d had a nice evening. Sarah drank a lot of fizzy water and a fair amount of black coffee and took herself back into the study, where she expected to find nothing and where she made the only real discovery of the weekend.

It was in the last drawer she examined, lying on top of the sheets in an open pack of typing paper. She didn’t know what it was and didn’t know then that she had made a discovery, only that she was holding in her hand something peculiar that she couldn’t identify and which seemed to have no place in a novelist’s workroom. Not, that is, a novelist who was also an atheist. But she thought that later. After the memorial service, in fact, back in her own flat, where she showed her find to Hope and Fabian.

* * *

Their father had not only not believed in God but had been aggressively anti-God. (Their mother’s attitude toward religion they had never inquired about nor thought important.) He had brought them up godlessly, though without the ostentation of requesting they not attend school assembly. Religious ritual, he opined, would have no effect on them, and he had been right. Neither of them had ever read a line of the Bible, nor did they recognize quotations from it. They had been in church only to attend their cousin Pauline’s wedding and their father’s funeral.