Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

He said, “Nothing.”

Just like that, a bald nothing.

“We aren’t having a real married life,” she said, because she couldn’t bring herself to use such expressions as “making love,” or worse. “We don’t share a room. Why don’t we? That’s why I asked what I’d done. Maybe I’d better say, where have I gone wrong?”

Then he told her. And she wished she hadn’t asked.

“You were simply the wrong person. That’s not as harsh as it sounds, because there is no right person and never can be.”

She almost whispered it. “Was there ever?”

“No.”

“Gerald, what do you want of me?”

“Nothing,” he said again.

She had grown up a lot. She wasn’t nearly so afraid of him. “That’s not good enough. I need more than that. I’ve a right to a better answer than that.”

He sighed. She remembered—oddly then for her—a line from Shakespeare: “The heart is sorely charged.” He sounded as if his heart were sorely charged.

“When we got married, I thought it would work. I thought I could manage.” He didn’t mention the children. This was fourteen years before Hand to Mouth. “It isn’t my fault and it isn’t yours.”

“Why can’t you tell me why?”

“I can. Up to a point.” His sorely charged heart turned his face gray. “Long before I met you, I did something. Just a chance, rather daring something. Not wicked, not vicious. It destroyed my whole life. Later on, I tried to mend it, but it was too late. I’m sorry, but it makes me sick to talk of it. One day, maybe, I’ll write it down. When I’m old. Perhaps.”

“And that keeps you … away from me?”

He ignored that. “We dislike those we’ve injured. I know I’ve injured you—so there it is. If it’s any consolation to you, I’ve been celibate. Entirely celibate.”

She believed him. It wasn’t a consolation. It just made her detective activities seem foolish. Her brother, Ian, had recently gotten his divorce, just in time to marry Judy and ensure the legitimacy of the child she was expecting. It had shown Ursula’s family that divorce was possible without the world ending, that remarriage could happen. At the same time, Roger Pallinter’s wife had left him.

“Are you asking me to stay?” she said, and it took a lot of courage to say it.

“No,” he said. “No, I’m not asking you. I’m not even expecting it.”

She waited for him to add that he would like it, though, that it was what he wanted. Instead, he added, “This is straight talking, so I may as well say I’m indifferent as to whether you stay or not. That’s as you please. You have never shown a great deal of interest in the children, and they, of course, would stay with their father.”

She was so shocked that she couldn’t speak. It was easily the most brutal thing anyone had ever said to her. She seldom cried, but that night she cried bitterly. Next day, a Sunday, the first reviews of Orisons had appeared in the papers. They were the best he had ever had. The critics spoke of his compassion, his warm humanity, and of his ability to re-create on the page the magic that can exist between a man and a woman.

He had driven into Gaunton and bought all the papers. That was the only time he was really happy, when he got good notices, and they had never been as good as this. He pushed the papers across the table to her, read bits out of other reviews while she was reading, laughed with delight, once actually brought his hands together in a resounding clap of triumph. She was sure he had forgotten everything they had said the night before, or thought it of no particular account.

Now they wanted her to step into his shoes, so to speak, and publicize his new one. Walking across Russell Square toward the tube station, she thought of the things that woman Elaine Kirkman had said, the possibility of her going on the radio, on Kaleidoscope to talk about his writing, of a television program called Bookworm , of being interviewed by the Guardian and the Times. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell Elaine Kirkman or Robert Postle that the last book of Gerald’s she had read or even looked at had been published twelve years before.

And now there was this business of his not being who he said he was. It had been clear that neither Robert nor Elaine knew anything about that. They couldn’t, therefore, know how profoundly it had affected her, making the house and everything in it that was his horrible to her. Impulsively, she had decided she must sell it and move, and she hadn’t changed her mind after letting the sun set on her panic. The sun had set and risen again and she was more than ever resolved on getting out.

When she got home, she would return to clearing out all those papers, continue the task she had begun and flinched from. The house should be made tidy and sterile, cleaned of him, and then she would put it on the market. She was thinking like this when she looked up and saw Sam Fleming walking toward her.

Her immediate instinct was a childish one, her reflex to the sight of him something she hadn’t had since she was a child. She wanted to hide. Not be seen. Or pretend not to see him, slip past, eyes down. But he had seen her. He put out both hands.

“Ursula!”

She knew she had gone red. “Hello.”

“Let me guess. You’ve been to your husband’s publishers.”

It wasn’t so very clever of him. Where else would she have been but to Carlyon-Brent, unless it was to the British Museum? “I’m in rather a hurry,” she said. “I’ve a train to catch.”

“What time’s your train?”

She told him, wishing immediately that she’d lied and made it half an hour sooner.

“Then you’ve plenty of time,” he said. “Time to come and have a cup of tea with me.”

Sitting opposite him in the café near the tube station, she thought she might as well say it. What had she to lose? In that moment, stirring her tea, she thought suddenly that she had nothing left to lose, for she had already lost everything.

“Why do you want to be here with me?” she said, and she looked him straight in the eye. “If you’d wanted it, you’d have phoned me. This chance meeting—are you just being polite? You don’t have to be polite with me.”

“I did phone you,” he said. “I phoned you twice. The first time, I was told I had a wrong number, which I didn’t really believe, and the second time, I left a message and my phone number.”

“Oh. I see.” One of those weekends, it would have been, when the girls were home or one of them was home. “My daughters, I expect. I didn’t get the message.”

“I’d hoped to make you understand that I didn’t want to know you because of your husband’s books. Getting my hands on some first editions. That’s laughable. I wanted to know you—I want to know you—because I like you. I find you attractive. I think we’d get on together.”

“That’s frank,” she said.

“I still feel like that. I feel like it more. I see it as a tremendous piece of luck, a very happy coincidence, meeting you like this.”

“Not such a coincidence,” she said. “I expect your business is around here, isn’t it? You walk across the square every day at this time. And one day, I was bound to walk across it, too.” She felt a flicker then of that powerful desire that had afflicted her—oh, yes, it was an affliction—in the hotel that summer evening. His face, the sound of his voice, his enthusiasm, his eagerness to please her, so different from what she had been used to. “I must go and catch my train,” she said.

“I’ll come with you. I’ll put you into your train. Isn’t that what they used to say?”

She told him it wasn’t necessary. She had only to go one stop to King’s Cross and change to the Circle. He thanked her for telling him but said he was familiar with the configuration of the London underground and that he was going with her.