Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

He was far too discreet to have mentioned Sarah’s memoir or her letter. Discretion apart, he had always had the impression that those two girls didn’t get on too well with their mother. Spoiled to pieces by Gerald, they had been, both of them. Robert had his own beliefs about those who were excessively indulged in childhood, people who were extravagantly made much of. They started off as high achievers but never fulfilled their early promise. They weren’t stayers. Besides that, they had no time for people who didn’t think they were wonderful.

You had only to look at this letter to see it all there. And what did she mean by asking him why her father would have had a palm cross in his study? In the letter, she described him, Robert, as a Christian, which he hated. It made him feel as if he were about to be thrown to the lions. He was a Catholic, or a Roman Catholic, if you insisted. In his view, everyone in the Western world was a Christian, though many were lapsed or apostate. She had added a postscript, which seemed to him affected: “Have you any idea why Dad had that black moth emblem on his book covers?”

He didn’t know. He had only become Gerald Candless’s editor in 1979, when Freddie Cyprian retired. The fact was, she was chickening out of this memoir. And he had been fool enough to think he might see a first draft by Christmas and actually be publishing to coincide with the paperback of Less Is More. He thought of all the poor hopefuls out there who would give years of their lives just for a chance to get a book published! He put the letter on the pile and went downstairs to say good-bye to Ursula, who had said she wanted to catch the 3:30 from Paddington.

Ursula had never had much to do with the promotional aspects of Gerald’s books. She had never before been in these offices, to which Carlyon-Brent had moved from Fitzrovia thirteen years earlier. He had changed his agent at about the same time, but she had met his agent only once and that was at a literary dinner. Carlyon-Brent’s then publicity director, one of Elaine Kirkman’s predecessors, had told Gerald that if he was never accompanied anywhere by his wife, gossip columnists would begin speculating that his marriage was unsound.

That, of course, was when it had reached its most unsound point, a position from which it was never again to waver. She went to the dinner and found herself not even sitting at the same table as he. She went to another dinner party, this time given by the American ambassador and very grand. The risk of gossip was presumably allayed, because Gerald didn’t suggest taking her with him on an American tour or to an arts festival in Australia. When a new novel was published, he toured the country, going mostly to big cities, read from the new book, and signed copies of it for fans in bookshops, and he went without her.

Once, soon after they had moved into Lundy View House, he had done book-signing sessions in Devon and she had accompanied him. The whole publicity scene was quieter in those days, not looked upon as essential, particularly for a literary novelist. The booksellers gave them champagne and took them out to dinner afterward, even though Gerald sold no more than twenty copies of the highly acclaimed A Messenger of the Gods in Plymouth and seventeen in Exeter. He had taken her with him, she thought, though she hadn’t thought this at the time, to make it up to her for not sleeping with her. There was a lot of compensating going on at the time, mostly of a monetary nature.

Within reason, she could have any money she liked for the embellishment of Lundy View House, spend anything she wanted on help in the house and garden. She should invite her parents to stay, her sister, and Pam, her bridesmaid, now married and with children herself. Pauline must come during her school holidays. After the visit of Frederic Cyprian, Roger Pallinter came, and the Arthurs and Beattie Paris and Maggie. Gerald always spoke of these visits as supplying company for her. It didn’t strike her; it was her sister, Helen, who remarked on the anomaly.

“Mostly when people get married, their friends are those who were the wife’s friends. But the reverse is true of you and Gerald.”

At that time, she still cared what other people thought, and she was afraid of Helen or the Pallinters or the Arthurs finding out that she and Gerald didn’t share a bedroom. That was why she was so glad of that guest room on the ground floor. In the summer, their first summer, Colin and Sally Wrightson came.

When she was first married, Ursula had looked upon Colin Wrightson as having had a favorable and indeed almost-magical influence on her life. Without especially liking him, she saw him as her good angel. Had it not been for his slipping on the ice and breaking his leg, she wouldn’t have met Gerald. But now, nearly eight years later, she was beginning to see him as having done her an injury. She couldn’t be in his company without thinking of that day when Sally had phoned to tell Betty Wick of Colin’s mishap or without remembering her own dismayed excitement at the idea of Gerald’s coming in Colin’s stead.

Colin Wrightson was well known for his affairs. More so than for his historical novels, some said unkindly. Ursula said she didn’t know why Sally stayed with him.

“Bread and butter,” Gerald said.

“You mean she really stays on account of money?”

“Most marriages continue for economic reasons. Or, in other words, because women can’t support themselves. That may change in the future, but it hasn’t yet.”

He talked to her—when he actually did talk to her—not as if they themselves were partners in a marriage but, rather, as if she were a casual acquaintance he had met in a pub. What she didn’t tell him was that Colin Wrightson had once made a pass at her. She hadn’t found it gratifying or amusing or frightening, and she certainly hadn’t been affronted. But as well as not liking Colin very much, she didn’t find him attractive. He was a few years older than Gerald and only a few years younger than her own father, red-faced, overweight, a lumbering, myopic man whose clothes smelled of cigarette smoke.

The Wrightsons had come, and on that Saturday afternoon, Sally and Colin and Gerald had gone out with the children, leaving her at home alone. Why had she been alone? On account, perhaps, of a migraine. About that time, the migraines had started, though the one she had had that afternoon must have gotten better very fast or never have been that bad, because she wasn’t too ill to do what Colin wanted when he came back unexpectedly.

To make an essential phone call to London, he said. Well, he had said it to Sally and Gerald. He didn’t repeat it to her. He said a lot of other things that she would have been ashamed to say to anyone, that she would have been ashamed to say even then: that he couldn’t get her out of his mind, that he wasn’t made of stone, that he had only one reason for coming to Lundy View House. He sat on the sofa beside her, saying all these things, and after a while she got up and went into the guest room with him.

It was awful, electric, unexpectedly what she had longed for. With anyone, it appeared. Until she looked at his face, the texture and color of blackberry mousse and glistening with sweat.

“Go easy,” he kept saying. “Go easy.”

But she couldn’t go easy—it had been so long.

“Hey, you’re quite a girl,” he puffed. “Go easy now. If you do that, I can’t hold out. For God’s sake …”

Probably he liked smiling, passive women. At any rate, he hadn’t come back for more. She thought, madly, that she’d have killed him if he had, taken the kitchen knife with her and stuck it into his big belly.

She considered telling Gerald—just to see what he would say, what he would do. Instead, she asked him what it was she had done. It made her angry in later years to remember that she had put it that way Not “What’s the matter with you?” or “Why don’t you want me anymore?” But “What have I done?” When the women’s movement really got under way and she was reading about it and even excited by these new ideas, she understood she had been brought up like that, that her mother was like that and her sister, Helen, for they, too, had been conditioned to think that when things went wrong, the woman must be to blame.