Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

It might be better to write to Robert Postle, and perhaps go to Ipswich at the weekend. Not down to Devon. Adam Foley had revealed, while seeming not to be giving direct information, that he went to his family’s weekend cottage only on particular Saturdays. Apparently, they had an arrangement, a rota, from which no family member might deviate. There would be no point in her going down to Devon.

The woman might be younger than she, although surely not much younger, more beautiful, better educated, more clever, wittier, more charming. There was nothing Ursula could do about any of that, but she would make herself look as good as possible. She dressed with care, in a pale green coat over a matching dress, made by Cardin, rather stiff, structured and with a lot of topstitching. Her mother would have asked where on earth she was going, got up like that, would have commented on her painted nails, her jade earrings, but she took care not to let her mother see her go. So far as her mother knew, she had gone out in a dirndl skirt and cotton blouse.

In the train, she felt overdressed, more as if it was a wedding she was going to; she fancied that people were staring at her, but by then it was too late. If she had gone back to change, she knew she would never have set out again. It was three in the afternoon and she had eaten nothing all day, fearing that if she ate, she might be sick. She felt sick even without having eaten.

Never once had she considered that the woman might not be in. She had assumed she didn’t go out to work, because Dickie Parfitt had seen Gerald enter the house in the late morning. But that might be wrong; there might be no one in. She began thinking like this in the Central line train after she had changed at Tottenham Court Road. If there was no one in, would she be disappointed, or would she be relieved?

She had worked out her route from Gerald’s London road plan. Fairlop Road, Hainault Road, Leigh Road. She had written these names down because she couldn’t squeeze the heavy map book into her small bronze-colored handbag. Her bronze-colored stiletto-heeled shoes were not the most comfortable for walking in and she had about half a mile to go. The district reminded her of the hinterland of Streatham, of Crystal Palace, yet there was some indefinable stamp of north-of-the-river London on it. It was gray and Victorian, with patches of fifties architecture filling in where bombs had fallen during the war, and green with privet hedges. But as Leyton was reached, the neighborhood rapidly became run-down. Here, near the Midland railway arches, it was poor and mean, and it had always been so; you could see that the low red-brown houses had been frugally built when these streets came into being eighty years before.

Of all the journeys she had ever made, this was the one from which she most often thought of turning back. First, of getting out of the train at Camden Town because her clothes were too grand, then of crossing the bridge at Leytonstone and getting into the first train that came, then in Fairlop Road, in Leigh Road. But always she had gone on, pressed on, with the half-formed prevision that if she gave up, she would hate herself tonight, tomorrow, even more than she did now. And that, she couldn’t bear. She already approached losing that sense of herself as a person worthy to be liked and admired; she was already developing what now, nearly thirty years later, was called “a low self-image,” but which then was known as an inferiority complex. Once, though proud and flattered that Gerald Candless had wanted her, she would not have thought so poorly of herself as to assume that any other woman in his life must be better-looking and nicer and cleverer than she.

Goodwin Road was a double row of little red-brown houses, linked together into terraces. A train went by over the bridge as she turned into the street and its noisy passage shook the ground like an earthquake. The sunshine, which was strong, seemed full of hot dust. She stood on the corner for a little while, trying to calculate where the house with the number Dickie Parfitt had given her might be. There was shadow on one side of the street, unbroken sunshine on the other. It was her longest hesitation but her final one. She walked on and up to the gate in the wall that separated the mean little patch of a front garden from the pavement.

The front door and the window frames were painted green. Net curtains hung across the windows halfway up from the central bar. There was no doorbell, only a knocker that was all in one with the mailbox and made of a cheap chrome. Another train went by and the street felt the rattle of it, but more remotely. She lifted the knocker and let it fall, lifted it and let it fall again. Her throat had closed and her chest felt tight.

Footsteps sounded inside, as if from far away. Yet that could hardly be in this small house where the passage would stretch for no more than ten feet. She thought these things as she stood, listening. The sun had gone in and she was immediately cold. A feeling came upon her that some terrible thing was approaching the door, some monster that trailed and lumbered. She fancied she heard a choking sound from in there, a throatiness, and in that moment she knew she had been wrong, but not in what way or in what respect.

A bolt was slid back and something lifted and allowed to fall, a chain perhaps. Then the door was slowly opened. Not a monster, not a slouching grotesque, and not a pretty young girl, either, but a tall, gaunt old woman, the woman of the photograph, who stood before her with the door pulled wide, not an inch or two, but as far as it would go, her expression patient, gentle, and tragically calm.

Ursula met Mrs. Eady again in the novel Gerald published thirteen years later. That was Purple of Cassius , which she typed before the last one she ever typed for him. Mrs. Eady was in it as Chloe Rule, the protagonist’s aunt, who brought him up when his parents were killed by a flying bomb. Deciphering his spidery zigzag handwriting, penetrating the web of deletions and corrections, Ursula brought Chloe Rule to light and recognized her for who she was.

Here she was in his pages and soon, more clearly and positively, on her pages, the living woman as real as the real Mrs. Eady had been, standing in that passage in the wide doorway. His description was accurate, down to the curiously luminous gray eyes and the big hands with a wedding ring on each of the third fingers.

By that time, she had grown a long way away from Gerald, almost as far as she was ever to be, but they still met at mealtimes, still made small talk across the table about the girls or the weather or something that needed doing to the house, and that evening, the first evening after her discovery, she had been many times on the point of asking him, of saying, “I recognize her. Who was she? Why did you go there? Oh, yes, I know you went there. Whom did you go to see and why did you? Why did you? Why did you go there and see Mrs. Eady and then, as if something was over or something resolved, uproot yourself and leave London forever?”

His silence silenced her. That evening at the table, she remembered, he had sat opposite her, reading a book, without speaking at all. She even remembered what the book was: The Paston Letters , in a new edition some publisher had sent him. He wouldn’t have told her if she had asked—she was sure of that—and the next day, she went back to his scrawled and crisscrossed pages to meet in them a man not in the least like Gerald, a young, sweet-natured man named Paul.

Paul was sent by his friend to the friend’s aunt, Chloe Rule, who kept a lodging house, and there he had his digs for years to come, becoming like a son to Chloe and watching her decline. It was a tribute to Gerald’s powers, Ursula thought, and she had thought it reluctantly, that he could draw this woman as comparatively young, as no more than forty when Paul meets her, yet she, Ursula, the knowing reader, could recognize in the character the old woman she had met and met only once. For Mrs. Eady had been old, had been deep into her seventies. Chloe Rule’s black hair had turned white, her strong face had fallen, and the cancer that was soon to kill her had devoured the plumpness that Paul observed the first time he saw her. But she was the same woman, and Ursula thought with a shiver that she was someone Gerald had loved.