Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Ursula washed her hands at the sink. She started to feel nervous because both girls stared at her in silence and in a ponderous way. With her hair pulled back and screwed into a knot and wearing an old denim jacket and gray trousers, Hope looked a lot like Gerald sitting there. If Ursula had screwed up her eyes, it would have been Gerald she saw, Gerald about to say something cruel and devastating.

But what she and Sarah said, finally, wasn’t exactly unpleasant, only unbelievable. Ursula found herself shaking her head.

“You didn’t know anything about it?” said Hope.

“You told me he’d changed his name, but this …” What kind of a woman was it who could live with a man for thirty-four years and not know who he was? “Are you absolutely sure?”

“Afraid so.”

And then, suddenly, Ursula found she could believe it. She could believe it all too easily. It accounted for so much. For the family life in his books and the unfamiliar people, the naval themes and the recurrent theme of poverty. The long procession of loving, self-denying mothers. The world of children, siblings big and small. In that kitchen, for a moment, she didn’t see her daughters, both of them strangely solicitous, anxiously eyeing her. She saw the church where she and Gerald were married, the dearth of his relations, heard his incongruous laughter when she dropped the ring, and she saw Mrs. Eady, her gaunt, wasted body, her tragic face, and she recoiled from it. She got up and stepped back, holding her hands in front of her, pushing something away.

“Ma, are you all right?”

She felt very cold then, and she sat down heavily. Hope, who had never in her life done such a thing, reached across the table and took Ursula’s hand in hers.

13

When he saw that the egress had been closed off, Mark turned and retraced his steps back to where he had entered. There, during the time he had been in the passage, someone had blocked that end, too, had sealed it with stone blocks set in mortar, and the mortar was hard, as if it had been there for a hundred years. He was enclosed inside a tube of stone, and he knew that whatever the passage might once have been, it was now deep in the earth, a worm-cast tomb.

—A WHITE WEBFOOT

URSULA WENT FOR HER WALK AS USUAL, taking her niece with her, though it was blowing a gale and the sea was a leaping mass of what Pauline called “white horses.” When it was calm, she compared it to a millpond, or had done so until Gerald asked her if she had ever seen a millpond. While they were out, Sarah phoned Jason Thague and told him about Hope’s doctor theory. He said he would be going to his grandmother’s for supper and that he would ask her.

“Thanks for the check,” he said.

“I’ve had this letter,” she said. “May I read it to you?”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s from the widow of the former editor of the Western Morning News. Someone passed on my inquiry to her. She must be very old—the writing’s a bit shaky. She says, ‘Dear Miss Candless …’ and then there’s a lot of explanation, and then she says, ‘I probably remember your father because he became famous later on. My late husband engaged him as a general reporter after interviewing him sometime in the summer of 1951 or 1952, early fifties anyway.’ The writing’s pretty illegible here but—wait, yes—‘My husband told me that on the day he started work, the new reporter asked to speak to him in private. He said he was writing a book, which he hoped to publish under another name. If my husband had no objection, he wished to call himself by this name from that time forward. I cannot remember what his name was, if indeed I was ever told it, but he wanted to change it to Gerald Candless.’ ”

“She can’t remember what it was? That’s great. That’s all we need.”

“She says she wouldn’t remember any of this if the reporter hadn’t become famous later on. Her husband told her about it at the time because he thought it strange. She goes on: ‘But he didn’t object to it. He said what he called himself was the young man’s business. I never knew the young man as anyone but Gerald Candless. You probably know all this, but if not, I thought it might be of interest. Yours sincerely, Diana Birchfield.’ ”

“But his first book wasn’t published for another four years,” Jason said. “Not till 1955.”

She was surprised and gratified that he knew. “No, but maybe he’d already started writing it. Besides, we think that stuff about the pseudonym was just an excuse, don’t we? He wanted to change his name for some other reason; he’d probably already changed it.”

She said good-bye to Jason as Hope came into the room and then she showed Hope the letter. She had no secrets from her sister, or not many, but she didn’t tell her she would be meeting Adam Foley that evening in the pub. It was a strange business, this carrying-on (as she called it to herself) with Adam Foley; she had experienced nothing like it before. Whether he had set it up or she had was hard to say. Both of them, probably, unanimously, coin-cidentally, but without words.

Words were minimal between them. Strange for two highly educated, highly literate people. Once they were alone together, they spoke only about each other’s appearance and what they wanted to do to each other. In the morning, either she got up and left first or he did, again without words, the other left sleeping. They both lived in London, both in Kentish Town, yet they never met there. He never phoned her, nor she him. She knew he would be in the pub with the others that night because Rosie had told her so. Rosie had asked her if she minded.

Hope was going to a school reunion. Six of them, while in the sixth form, had made a plan to do this every four years on the third Saturday in October. Hope couldn’t remember why October or why the third Saturday or even why every four years, but she was going. Drinks, then dinner, then more drinks. Sarah had agreed to drive her to Barnstaple and she was going to take a taxi home.

The surface of the sand was ribbed by the action of a rough sea, the rippling and corrugating of a choppy receding tide. In the shallow wells lay white razor shells, upturned, their hollows full of saltwater. Buffeted by the wind, Ursula pressed on, determined to reach Franaton Burrows before turning back. Pauline had given up after a hundred yards.

“The woman who lives next door to Mother got Bell’s palsy walking in a wind like this,” she said at the foot of the cliff path.

“Why don’t you go back, Pauline?”

“Her face never righted itself. It’s permanently pulled down on the left side.”

Ursula said nothing. At the next sharp gust, Pauline said she would go back, adding with a laugh that it seemed a shame to walk all that way down only to have to go up again. Ursula turned once to watch her climb the path, and when Pauline looked in her direction, she waved, not wishing to seem unkind. The beach was deserted. At the hotel, the shutters were closed on the upper windows and in its grounds the wind tore yellow leaves from the maple trees and the false acacias.

So Gerald was not Gerald and she might not, strictly speaking, even be called Candless. In that moment, she decided to revert from henceforward to her maiden name. Down there on the beach, in the sharp salty wind, she decided. She would be Ursula Wick and would immediately set about putting everything in that name. If he could change his, she could change hers, hers that wasn’t hers and never had been.

What dreadful thing had he done? What offense or, more likely, crime had he committed that made him take a new identity? She told herself, angrily and aloud to the wind, that she could have believed anything of him. He was capable of anything. She wished now that she had never forgiven him, never overlooked so much for the sake of—what? She no longer knew.