Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“If you put it like that—well, no, I suppose there hasn’t been.”

Finding herself quite unaware of how to draw up a contract for Jason Thague that would be binding, she phoned Hope for advice.

“I’ll do it for you,” Hope said.

“Will you really? Thanks. I know you don’t approve.”

“Maybe not, but if it’s got to be done, I’d like it done properly.”

“Hopie, can you remember Dad ever saying he based a book on some actual event? I mean, I know he said everything he wrote had its source in his experience or his observation, but did he ever use a real event? Like people write novels about battles in the Crimean War or the sinking of the Titanic. ”

“ The Centre of Attraction ’s got the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in it. You remember what’s his name—Richard—he feels guilty because the bombs probably saved his life; they stopped him from having to take part in an invasion of Japan. And then there’s A White Webfoot. The critics said it was based on fact, although Daddy didn’t.”

“I was away when that was published. I was in America. Of course I’ve read it.”

“The reviewers called it a thriller and said it was based on the Highbury murder case of—let’s see—1960 or 1961, I think.”

“That would be too late. Ten years too late. And it hasn’t anything in it about someone changing his identity, has it?”

“Nothing at all,” said Hope.

12

Jacob Manley was not a forbearing man, yet when someone died, he always said of him that he had gone to his reward, never to his punishment.

—EYE IN THE ECLIPSE

THIRTY YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE URSULA HAD SEEN her brother’s first wife, Jean. She never thought of her, except in one connection, and had almost forgotten her. Jean had faded out of her life as in-laws do in the event of death or divorce. In this case, it had been divorce. And now she was dead.

Perhaps not too untimely a death. She had been, after all, a few years older than Ian, which would have made her over seventy. A letter coming from him had surprised Ursula, the handwriting on the envelope, which at first she didn’t recognize. They spoke occasionally on the phone; they sent each other Christmas cards, his second wife, the mother of his children, writing them. He had phoned when Gerald died but hadn’t come to either funeral or memorial service. But now a letter had arrived. It had to be a serious matter to warrant a letter.

Ian wrote as if he cared, though not as if he regretted. Jean had never remarried, had shared a house for years with her widowed sister. Death had come three weeks before; the funeral was long over. Ian hadn’t attended it and he was sure neither Ursula nor Helen would have wanted to be there. Ursula, sitting at her kitchen table with the letter in her hand, tried to remember Jean, to see her face, to conjure up precisely her features and coloring, but that, she failed to do. She could manage only a pale blur that was somehow intense and strained, a tortured face, dark hair threaded all over with gray, hands that fluttered, then clutched each other. But she remembered with perfect clarity why Jean, who was seldom in touch with her, whom she could say she hardly knew, came to Holly Mount that day in 1968 and poured out the anguish in her heart.

Three years later, Jean and Ian were divorced and Ian married the woman on whose account Jean had come to confide in Ursula. Why Ursula? It was never made clear why she had been chosen. Perhaps because Jean’s own family and friends were too close. Or perhaps it was that Jean, like Helen and even to some extent Betty Wick, looked upon Ursula, by virtue of her marriage to a novelist (a writer, an artist, a person from a different world), her entrée to elite and sophisticated circles, her home in that most elegant and least suburban of suburbs, as a woman of the world who would know answers and remedies in unfamiliar and indeed undreamed-of situations.

For infidelity was undreamed of among the Wicks and their connections. The sexual revolution that began in the sixties hadn’t touched them, even supposing they knew that it was taking place. But it had touched Ian Wick, or something had, and led him into adultery. This was the news Jean brought to Ursula and adultery was her word. Ian had fallen in love with a young cashier at the bank, had spent nights with her, been away for weekends with her, and now wanted to marry her.

Ursula, of course, had no answers. And Jean’s story of Ian’s withdrawal from sex struck painful chords in her own recent experience. Jean came out with it all, no holds barred—Ian’s refusal to share a bed with her, his unexplained absences, his apparent contentment, as if he had some other distant source of happiness. As he had, as he had. And as Ursula listened, helpless to console, she could think only of these parallels. When Jean had gone home (determined to take a taxi all the way to Sydenham at Ian’s expense), she wondered she hadn’t seen it before.

Gerald didn’t want her because he had someone else. “Someone else” was Jean’s expression until, her story progressing, she began using a name, and Ursula, with her newfound habit of questioning the words and expressions she used, found it absurd, almost comical, as if this combination of words could only properly apply to an illicit paramour. “Another woman” was almost as silly. Yet a woman there must be, a girl, a lover, a mistress, out there, a “someone else” intervening in her marriage. All the conditions of Ian’s defection fit Gerald, except that of frequent absence.

When he was away from the house, Sarah and Hope were almost always with him. He had never, so far as she knew, taken them on visits to his publishers, but he seldom went to his publishers. Would he take her children to visit his mistress?

A Paper Landscape was published in 1968, and he had already begun writing his next novel. In that year, he also became deputy literary editor of a Sunday newspaper. The position brought books for review every week, and Ursula had plenty to read. She read so much fiction that she suggested to Gerald—jokingly, of course, but attempting to talk to him of things he knew about and liked—that they ought to make her a judge in the newly instituted Booker Prize.

“The other judges might have something to say about that,” he said.

She hadn’t understood. She hadn’t wanted to. “Because I’m your wife, you mean?”

“Because you’re hardly competent, are you?”

Another time, when he saw her reading a novel, his review of which had appeared in the paper the previous Sunday, he asked her if she really understood what she was reading.

“I think so,” she said, tense already, expecting the insult.

He looked her up and down, the way he had recently acquired, the way a designer might view a model newly dressed in his latest creation. But he had no longer any interest in her appearance. He looked for something else, though she didn’t know what.

“Should I,” she tried, “should I try reading your critique?”

His face went dark with anger. “Critique,” he said. “Are you French? Are you trying to impress me? It is a notice. A notice or a review. Can you remember that?”

Before he began his new novel, he had a title for it. When he had written two chapters, he asked her if she would type it for him. No taking it for granted this time, and she wondered why not. Was he for some reason placating her?

She had no room of her own in the house in Holly Mount. The house was really too small for them and he, of course, had the room intended as a dining room as his study. She was sitting in the living room, reading, and the children were asleep. He had given them their tea and bathed them and put them to bed. Often she had thought of asserting herself here, but to take these offices upon herself would have meant physically tearing the little girls from him.