Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Not Leyton, but Hounslow; not a little red-brown terraced house, but a tall gray one; not six children, but just two; not the murdered son, the lost sons, the daughter consecrated to religion, but one son and one daughter, unimportant, distant characters, not figuring much in the narrative. Were those other children the family that appeared in A Paper Landscape , in A Messenger of the Gods ? Perhaps. You could find out his whole life from his novels, yet not find it out at all, find out nothing.

The more she had known of these things, the less she had known him. That day, when she came home from Goodwin Road, it was to be weighed down with guilt. For she had misjudged him, falsely accused him. There was no one who could have entered that house but a woman from the next street, who had been given a key to the house to come in and keep an eye on things while Mrs. Eady was in the hospital having her operation. The woman had a station wagon and a husband, a tall, dark man, who might well one day have gone to the house in his wife’s place.

Ursula understood that Dickie Parfitt had gotten it wrong. She had never had a high opinion of his intelligence. Guilty and ashamed of herself, she sat down and wrote to the detective agency, ridding herself of its services and asking for its account. It was not until some time afterward that she understood her discovery really changed nothing. It didn’t negate Gerald’s visits to Goodwin Road; it provided no answer as to why he rejected her.

The following day, he returned from Devon and asked her a question. He was kind, almost jovial, somewhat paternalistic, faintly teasing, the way he had been in the days when he called her Little Bear. How would she feel about moving?

“Leave London,” he said. “Go and live in the country. Or at the seaside.”

“Don’t you have to live in London?” she said.

“Why? I don’t exactly work in an office.”

“Is that where you’ve been?” she said. “Have you been looking at houses?”

Once she would never have— dared was too strong a word—never have quite brought herself to ask him anything so baldly. She was no longer afraid of him, no longer in awe.

“Is that where you’ve been when you were doing research?”

“In Devon, yes,” he said. “North Devon. The most beautiful beach in England. A house on the cliff and a view of Lundy Island.” He looked at her; his eyes flicked over her. “Should I have told you before? Are you going to be unreasonable?”

She said, like a woman twice her age, not like the Wicks’ spoiled daughter, “I am never unreasonable.”

“No, you’re not, are you? I suppose that’s something to be thankful for. Come on, Ursula, Little Bear, Constellation, be nice, be pleased. ” She had stared at him in astonishment and he had reddened. She had never seen that before, a blush on his face. “Come on,” he said, “you come with me to Gaunton next week. We’ll all go, and we’ll go over the house. Won’t you like that?”

She thought she might. She was flattered that he had asked. It would have been much more like him to have bought a house and then moved her into it. He disappeared one day before they left for Devon, but she didn’t ask where he went; she didn’t even care. Dickie Parfitt had been paid, had been a touch aggrieved, but had departed without a struggle. Then the tunnel dream came. It might even have been the night before they went to Devon, the very small hours of that day. And she went to him and comforted him and got into his bed.

Going over Lundy View House that first time with Gerald and the girls and the estate agent had made her feel like an ordinary, normal wife and mother. Like the beloved wife of a suburban man, the mother of loving children, whose husband has been given a promotion and can now afford their dream house. It was a fine sunny day at the end of August. On the previous occasion that he had been to the house, it had been fine and sunny. The couple who owned the house, who were reluctantly moving to a smaller place near their daughter in the Midlands, showed them the large airy bedrooms, all with views of the green wooded countryside and three overlooking the sea.

The garden then was full of the kind of flowers that last in bloom for months, hydrangea and helichrysum and statice, though Ursula didn’t know their names then. They looked fresh and beautiful from a distance, a little worn close to. The lawn was yellowing in the heat, but the sea was blue as sea can ever be and the air so clear that you could pick out individual trees on the island and the striations on its cliffs.

Gerald said, out of earshot of the owners, “I could work in this room.”

It was on the ground floor, protruding from the main body of the house like a small wing. Bookshelves already lined two of its walls. She could see him calculating where more should go. He had Hope in his arms, had carried her up and down the stairs, whispered to her which should be her room and which Sarah’s.

Ursula’s resentment at his high-handedness, his choosing a place, if not quite a house, without consulting her, was fading. The house itself helped dispel it. Besides, she had come to expect so little from him that she was flattered he had eventually asked for her approval. And she was even more astonished when, that evening in the Barnstaple hotel where they were staying the night, where they had been given a double room, he asked her if they should make an offer on the house.

“Shall we buy it?”

“Yes, let’s.” Her reply was spontaneous, eager. “I love it.”

“My girls will have seaside every day,” he said.

Three weeks later, she thought she might be pregnant. She didn’t know whether she hoped it or feared it. Both, possibly. Another child for him to take away from her? Or a child for her to fight for and keep. In the end, she wasn’t pregnant, so it didn’t matter. And there wouldn’t be any more chances; he had made that clear by locking his bedroom door in Holly Mount, so that Sarah, coming in as usual in the morning, had to rattle the doorknob and shout, “Daddy, Daddy, let me in!”

The Hampstead house was sold and they moved in December, the day after Sarah’s fourth birthday. It was raining and the steely gray sea looked as if punctured all over by a million shining needles. Gerald’s books filled twelve tea chests and he set about getting them up on the shelves as soon as they arrived. Next day, the fog came. The house, the garden, the dunes were swathed in it, muffled by it, and the sea was invisible. He reacted violently, saying he would never have bought the house if he’d known.

She had no idea what he meant. To her, it was just low clouds, a white wetness that left dew on the leaves and water drops on the windows. A neighbor, to whom she had already talked, told her the sea mists seldom lasted more than a day, and Ursula repeated this to Gerald. He said nothing, just retreated into his study, pulled the curtains, and put the lights on.

She was in the next room, the room Pauline was later to sleep in, getting it ready, making up the bed for the guest he had invited for the weekend, Robert Postle’s predecessor at Carlyon-Brent, Frederic Cyprian, the editor who had “discovered” Gerald, who had been the first to read The Centre of Attraction. She would have preferred Gerald to have waited a week or two, but she had learned and was still learning that what Gerald wanted he got.

He came into the room where she was, holding a child by each hand, and said, “I want blinds put up in my room. Dark blinds. Can we get that done? How soon do you think it could be done?”

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