Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Out for a walk with Sarah, the little girl fell over, and when Ursula picked her up, she fought her and cried, “I want my daddy!”

Ursula plucked up her courage and asked Gerald when he was coming back to their bedroom. It took courage, and she knew that was ridiculous in a marriage, to have to rehearse for days beforehand the form of words you would use to ask your husband to come back and sleep with you. Would her mother have behaved like that? Would Helen? Would Syria Arthur? Sometimes she had the lunatic thought that marriage with Gerald needed practice , even that she should have been married before, that she should have been someone else’s wife, to know how to manage this marriage.

The words she finally used were those words. Her tone was casual and friendly. She had wondered whether she could try a coyness, a flirtatious note, but in the end she had settled for this light, amiable inquiry: “Are you soon coming back to sleep in our bedroom?”

“I have to get up to tend Hope most nights,” he said.

“We could hear her from our room.”

He didn’t answer. She thought he might just arrive one night. Even knock at the door and walk in and come over to the bed where she was, the way men in books did, though not his books. Reading the sex scenes in his books, rereading them as she found herself secretly doing, made her feel faint and her heart beat heavily. She wondered if he had done those things he wrote about. She could never ask him; she could ask him so little.

For a long time after Hope’s birth, she felt no sexual desire. Perhaps it would never return. There was no one to ask. She imagined asking her doctor, Helen, Syria, but she never imagined asking her mother. When she was young—that was how she put it to herself, even though she was only twenty-seven—she hadn’t looked at her own motives, questioned her thought processes, fears, hopes, but now she had become introspective. She had so little to do but think.

Although she felt guilty about it, she had lost interest in CND and never went to another meeting after Hope was born. If the Americans dropped a bomb on the Russians and the Russians retaliated, nothing she could do would stop them. Three months before Hope’s birth, the bill making homosexual acts between consenting adults in private legal had become law. So Gerald had been right there, too, and change had come without any efforts on her part. She bought apples and oranges without noticing where they came from and never joined another campaign.

When the woman was gone, another one came to clean the house, and Gerald was always occupied, endlessly busy. Writing, though he never wrote more than three hours a day, looking after the children, taking them for walks, playing with them, reading to them, bathing them. Already marked by those in the know as a distinguished novelist, literary but increasingly popular, he was one of the sights of Hampstead, pushing a pram up Heath Street with a baby at one end and a toddler at the other. Such an unlikely -looking man to be doing that, tall, growing heavy by then, with that thick, curly, longish black hair, those big sensual features—the fleshy lips, the hooked nose, the intense but ponderously lidded eyes.

Sometimes, looking at him, and she was always looking at him, she thought it an un-English face for a man born in Ipswich. More Spanish or Portuguese, owing something to Moorish genes. Or Irish. He never cared what he wore, choosing only the comfortable. If men of his age had worn denim at that period, he would have worn it. So he took the children to Hampstead Heath or to Whitestone Pond in old flannel trousers and a sports jacket with a greasy scarf knotted around his neck instead of a tie.

Alone at home, she read and thought. One day, Hope smiled at her and put out her arms, and Ursula fell in love. One of the things she had thought would never happen had happened. Unrequited love, though, may be worse than no love at all. Hope didn’t dislike her, would allow herself to be hugged, fondled, kissed, but she infinitely preferred her father. As did Sarah. And Sarah, being older, vociferous, quite articulate for someone of two and a half, expressed her feelings whenever she was put out, especially when she was reproved.

“I don’t want you. I want my daddy!”

They were beautiful children, with large, long-lashed eyes and flawless flower-petal skin. Hope had long dark curls that twisted naturally, as vines do, into ringlets, Gerald’s full, curved lips and high forehead. Both girls had her short, straight nose, and Sarah had her coloring, too, the freckled sandiness, the tawny hair. They would cling to Gerald, the pair of them, like kittens to a mother cat, nuzzling him, an arm thrown around his neck, a cheek pressed to a cheek. But he, with his curly mane and smiling muzzle, was a father cat.

Ursula was prey to strange suspicions. She had a dream in which Gerald figured, surrounded by children; he had been married before and had some unspecified number of children from this first marriage. The dream persisted as if it were fact, and later she brought herself to ask him, again rehearsing the question carefully, how he came to be so good with children.

“I like their company,” he said.

“Yet you didn’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“I was not so fortunate,” he said, using the cold and formal tone that was becoming habitual with him when he spoke to her. He no longer called her Little Bear.

And he didn’t come back to sleep with her. Everyone said that a man’s sexual desires were far stronger than a woman’s; even people who never expressed opinions on this subject more or less said that, even her mother. What had happened to his desire? Or did his preoccupation with his children sublimate it? She started reading books on sex and popular psychology. Her own desire had returned and now began to torment her.

She was typing A Messenger of the Gods. The main character, the widow Annie Raleigh, had a voracious sexual appetite, which for a long time, given the time and the society in which she lived, she wasn’t able to gratify. It surprised Ursula, and distressed her, to discover how much he knew about female desire and women’s sexual needs. There was something uncanny about it, for it so closely paralleled her own feelings and situation. She asked herself why, if he understood, he didn’t respond to her. It took years and two rereadings for her to understand that Annie Raleigh was herself.

An illustrated children’s encyclopedia of the time showed Sarah photographs and drawings of thirties boys. The Wonderland of Knowledge , in twelve volumes, had been given to Fabian Lerner’s grandmother on her tenth birthday. The boys wore short flannel trousers that reached to their knees, striped blazers, and striped ties. Unlike Richmal Crompton’s William Brown (of whom Hope showed a surprising knowledge), none of them wore striped caps indoors.

The Applestone boys would have looked like that. Her father would have looked like that. She imagined the boys named Don and Ken going to tea in the house in Waterloo Road, a house in which there was no central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher, television (though possibly a radio); no carpets, only rugs on linoleum; open fires and perhaps a gas fire; draft stoppers around the window frames; and once-weekly baths. Sarah had done her research, assisted by Fabian’s grandmother. She had also looked for, and failed to find, a K. Applestone in the telephone directory for the Chelmsford area.

There were no Applestones at all. Applestone turned out to be a very uncommon name, while Appletons and Applebys abounded. But Kenneth Applestone existed in the records. Paying another visit to St. Catherine’s House, Sarah found him born in 1925: Kenneth George Applestone, second son of Charles and Dorothy Applestone, née Mitchell. She started looking for a record of his marriage from 1943 onward, but there was nothing. Then she looked for a death certificate. No record of that, either. Joan Thague had no photographs of the Applestone boys, so it was solely Sarah’s imagination that made her see Ken as a tall, dark boy with brown eyes and curly black hair.