Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Her heart quailed at the thought; she recoiled from it. He fed them, bathed them, told them their bedtime story, and began writing at 7:30. Just before ten, he walked in with his hands full of sheets of paper, paper whose edges weren’t even aligned, but clutched in a bundle, held it out to her and asked her to “do what you have so kindly done before.” She could hardly believe her ears.

“It’s to be called A Messenger of the Gods ,” he said. “Would you get it into some sort of order for me, Ursula? Decode my scrawl?”

For the first time for months, he had used her Christian name. She stared at him, unsmiling, but put out her hand for the paper. There was an eagerness in his face that made him look younger, an enthusiasm. And she understood. He was pleased; he was happy. He had his title, and he had completed two chapters with which he was satisfied. This was his life; this was everything, this and his children. He told her because he had to tell someone. No doubt, he would prefer to tell that woman, the “someone else,” his mistress, but she wasn’t there.

“I’ll start on it tomorrow,” she said.

As the chapters came to her, she looked in the text, the story, for evidence of adultery. Already, at that time, she had heard him say—or, rather, seen him say, for she had read it in a magazine interview—that everything that happened to him went into his fiction. She found nothing. And then she realized something. He never wrote about marital infidelity. He seldom wrote about marriage, except peripherally, and although she had no means of knowing it then, this rule or inhibition was to prevail. He was never to write much about marriage or married life until the fateful Hand to Mouth in 1984, and even in that novel, though there was unhappiness and strife and incompatibility, though sex was important and sexual acts occurring, there was no unfaithfulness.

But then, when those chapters came to her in the early spring of 1969, this was still far in the future. This time, she encountered Annie Raleigh, shivered and trembled at his descriptions of her desires, looked in vain for adultery. But its absence might only mean that he was deferring the use of this particular experience, this perhaps new experience, until a later date, a later book. She typed his novel, she watched him, and she thought it coincidence that while she was tormented by sexual hunger, he had happened to write about a woman with a similar need.

She nevertheless repelled the advances of a young poet he invited to dinner and who followed her out to the kitchen while Gerald and Colin Wrightson and Beattie Paris discussed who would be candidates for the Booker. She kissed the poet back but stopped there and told him no, no, she wouldn’t go out for a drink with him, see him again, no, no, definitely not. That night, though she had never before done such a thing nor knew how it was done, she masturbated. Otherwise, she would never have slept.

She watched him. She listened. It was the beginning of that fascination with him that was to replace love. She thought about him constantly. If the girls were taken to see “a lady,” wouldn’t they betray him? She even asked Sarah, though she hated herself for asking.

“Daddy takes us to see Miss Churchouse, silly,” said Sarah.

Not Adela, who everyone said preferred women. Not Adela, who had threatened to chain herself to the Home Office railings over homosexual law reform. Jealous as she was, and made unreasonable by jealousy, as she knew, she still couldn’t believe Gerald would sleep with that scatty fifty-year-old, she of the diaphanous garments and bead strings, who took out her “partial” in other people’s bathrooms and left it grinning on the basin.

It wasn’t Adela. She watched him and listened to him. She had taken to being present in the girls’ bedroom while he told them their bedtime story, hoping to pick up some clue. If Sarah and Hope didn’t want her there, they didn’t say, only bade her keep quiet and not make a disturbance by moving about the room, picking up toys.

The stories he told them were serials. She couldn’t remember now, twenty-eight years later, which ones he had told them that spring when Sarah was three and a half and Hope was nearly two, only that though Hope was really too young to understand, she seemed to follow it. That story quarter hour was the only time boisterous Hope was silent. What happened in those stories had disappeared almost entirely from Ursula’s mind. She could just about remember that one involved an old man who sent messages by carrier pigeon to a little girl at the other end of the country and the other concerned a child who was sent up chimneys by a harsh master. This last owed a lot to Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies , not to mention Blake’s verses in Songs of Innocence , but she hadn’t read those then.

There was nothing in the stories about a “someone else.” How could there be? How had she ever imagined there could be?

Gerald gave her plenty of money. They had a joint account, and he never questioned what she spent. If he noticed what she spent, he didn’t say, but she didn’t think he was much interested in money. He wanted, he had sometimes said, a nice house to live in, a good house in a beautiful place. That was all he wanted to do with money. Foreign travel held no attractions for him. He disliked the theater and loathed opera. He bought books, but most of the books he wanted were gifts. One publisher had given him the Encyclopedia Britannica , and another one gave him the complete unabridged Oxford Dictionary. Their car was a Morris station wagon, because that was more convenient for transporting children and their paraphernalia. Clothes were to keep him warm and keep him decent, and the watch he wore he had had for twenty years.

But she could have what money she wanted and do as she pleased with it. What she pleased to spend money on in the April of that year was a private detective.

Until the night he had died, she had never been in there. Sometimes she had thought it strange to have a room in one’s house, a house one had lived in for twenty-seven years, that one never entered, whose shape one hardly knew, whose furniture one couldn’t have described. Like a Bluebeard’s chamber, which might contain nothing or might be full of bloody evidence. The difference was that she hadn’t been curious. Once only, coming into the garden from the cliff path, she had walked across to that part of the house where his bedroom was and looked up at its windows, becoming aware for the first time—or else she had forgotten—that it was a corner room with one window facing north and the other west.

Daphne kept it clean. Daphne had changed his bed linen. A single woman, living with her sister, another single woman, and their mother, who had been widowed for fifty years, Daphne had never once commented on the fact that Gerald and Ursula slept in separate rooms. Perhaps it didn’t strike her as remarkable. Perhaps she had no experience of how most married couples lived. She cleaned the room, sang “Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron,” changed the sheets, referred to it as “Mr. Candless’s room,” for though Ursula had become Ursula to her long ago, he had never become Gerald.

She suspected old Mrs. Batty of adhering to the Victorian principle of keeping out the night air, or, come to that, any air, for Daphne never opened windows, and she closed them if she found them open. Ursula opened all the casements in the room and leaned out of the one that faced west. The dark gray sea, an unrolled bolt of wrinkled silk, lay immobile, scarcely seeming to lap the pale, flat sand. It was misty, but the mist hung thin and distant, obscuring only the island and the far point.