Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Blinds at the windows. A bed with a quilt on it and a blue-and-white-striped cover on the quilt, two pillows in white cases, several hundred paperback books in a plain bookcase, a chest of drawers, an upright chair. The built-in cupboard she thought she remembered from coming in here nearly three decades before, but every bedroom had such a cupboard, so perhaps she didn’t remember.

The two pictures, one facing the northerly window, the other opposite it, affected her unpleasantly. She had come a long way from that wide-eyed and optimistic girlhood when she would have said, had anyone asked her, that one should have pretty pictures on bedroom walls, if not puppies and kittens, certainly sunlit landscapes and Monet water lilies. But still she wondered at the taste and the mental processes of her late husband, who could have Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons on one wall and a painting of a lighthouse, a wild sea, and a sky of tumbling clouds on the other.

It was then that she remembered his clothes. He had been dead for three months, but it had never occurred to her to do anything about his clothes. She had forgotten their existence. She opened the cupboard and looked at them, the baggy trousers, shapeless jackets, two aged tweed suits, a heavy dark gray sheepskin coat. They smelled musty, of old wool. When someone died, you used to take their clothes to a rummage sale. Now you gave them to a charity shop.

She began taking them out of the cupboard. She laid them on the bed. When the cupboard was empty, she dusted the inside of it and closed the doors. She took the pictures downstairs, thinking them unsuitable for a guest bedroom, and read printed on the back of the lighthouse painting “ Korsö fyr by August Strindberg.” She was trained as an art historian, but she hadn’t known Strindberg had painted anything. She carried the paintings—the reproductions—downstairs and laid them against one of the walls of the study, replacing them with a still life from her own room and Evening Light , an innocuous and rather charming picture by Robert Duncan of a girl in white and geese in a rose bed, a picture that someone had given Hope when she was twelve.

The clothes were heavy and she had to make three trips. First to the kitchen. Later, she would put them in the boot of the car, then drop them off at Oxfam when next she went to the shops. Before you disposed of clothes, you had to go through the pockets. The idea brought her a wry amusement, because this was exactly the situation where the wife or widow finds the letter that reveals an unsuspected love passage. The mistress’s assignation note from years before. Ursula smiled at the thought, because she knew she would find no letter, or anything else of that kind.

She postponed the search, put the clothes into a plastic bag and the bag into the broom cupboard, where there was no chance of the girls finding it.

Pauline immediately wanted to know why she couldn’t have Sarah’s room, where she had slept before, and seemed none too pleased when told both her cousins were coming.

“I didn’t know you had a spare room up here,” she said, no doubt recalling all those occasions on which she had either slept downstairs in the little room Ursula later took for her study or had shared with Sarah or Hope.

Ursula smiled but said nothing. It shocked her a little to realize, now, after all this time, that Pauline must always have believed Gerald and she shared a room, even shared a bed. Pauline stood inside and looked about her, approving, it was evident, of the view and Evening Light , but not especially of anything else.

“Those books will take a lot of dusting, Ursula.”

She spoke the name with emphasis, preceding it with a small pause, no doubt to show that she had remembered the caution not to say “Auntie.” Then she looked at her aunt, looked at her as if she hadn’t seen her for a long time, as if they hadn’t met outside Barnstaple station, traveled home side by side, and entered the house together.

“You’ve had your hair cut!”

“Nearly three months ago,” said Ursula.

In the evening, after supper, Pauline reverted to her previous visit and to Ursula’s proposal with regard to baby-sitting at the hotel. Ursula had forgotten whether she had told Pauline only that Gerald had stopped her babysitting or that she intended to do some baby-sitting now he was dead, and she realized too late that Pauline had known nothing about this activity of hers until she herself mentioned it.

“You actually did it!”

Pauline’s tone couldn’t have sounded more shocked and repelled, Ursula thought, than if she had confided her experiences as a prostitute in Ilfracombe town center.

“I’ve thought a lot about it,” Pauline said. “Brian often says I would have made a good psychologist. You weren’t close to your own children really, were you? I suppose baby-sitting was a kind of compensating for that. What do you think?”

Ursula thought it surprisingly near the bone. They went to bed soon after that. Remarks of that kind, made late in the evening, were particularly unwelcome because they kept her from sleeping. She hadn’t been back to the Dunes since the encounter with Sam Fleming, and she knew she would never go back. In spite of everything, in spite of her positive rejection of Sam, she had expected him to phone her. She had thought he would phone, if only to repeat his apology and explanation, but he hadn’t. Though his grandchildren wouldn’t be there, though they might never be there again, she would have gone back to baby-sit for others if he had phoned. It was an irrational, even absurd, way of going on, but it was the way her mind worked in this matter. And now the season was over, the hotel half-closed, to be shut up altogether for three months after the Christmas influx.

Ursula knew very well how a penetrating comment on the incongruities of one’s behavior, a remark that brings home an unacceptable truth, arouses dislike for the one who utters it. She was filled at that moment with dislike for her niece, an antipathy that of course would pass but which she was aware of having sometimes felt on previous occasions. Pauline had seldom been as perspicacious as that, usually only liable to make personal remarks about people’s appearance or habits, but even these, Ursula now recalled, had had a way of drilling into one’s soft and sensitive parts. Ridiculous, because she had been a child then, and one should make abundant allowance for what a child says. According to Gerald, anyway.

Pauline had first come to stay with them in that fateful year, 1969. Ursula called it fateful because that was their last year in Hampstead, the year of her brother’s separation from his wife, of A Messenger of the Gods , hailed by his publishers as the breakthrough for Gerald Candless from good to great fiction, the year of the private detective. Pauline came to stay because it was August, her school was on holiday, and Helen had to go into the hospital for a hysterectomy. Jeremy could stay with his paternal grandmother, whose favorite he was.

That year, Pauline was ten. She was coming up to the age when girls love looking after, playing with, and taking out small children. And she was a big, tall girl who looked at least two years older than her age, who perhaps felt older in some ways. Her mother was making her into a woman too early, letting her wear an unnecessary bra, cut off her plaits, and have her ears pierced. Helen believed that girls couldn’t begin being feminine too soon.

Ursula hadn’t seen a great deal of her since the incident of the engagement ring, when the small Pauline had brought the ring to her on the stem of a flower, and would hardly have known her. Gerald had no recollection of her at all. He put his foot down at once when Pauline wanted to take Sarah and Hope out. That was not to be; that was never to be. The danger, of course, involved the roads and the Hampstead traffic. No one thought about child molesters and rapists in those days. But he seemed pleased to have someone in the house to entertain the children, the possibility of their mother’s doing this having been dismissed by him long before.