Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

The train stopped in the tunnel between King’s Cross and Euston Square and sat there for ten minutes. She had asked him how Molly was, and he was talking about Molly and the children and telling her how he thought Molly might marry again, when Ursula realized she had missed the intercity train. It wouldn’t now be possible to get to Paddington in time, and the next train was very late, too late to get a connection to Barnstaple. The tube train started with a shudder, but it was too late. She thought of asking Sarah or Hope if she could stay the night. One of them would say it just wasn’t convenient, sorry, Ma, and the other would say yes, all right, but in a forlorn voice, and she thought she couldn’t bear that.

The tears came into her eyes. He was looking at her, aghast. I know what this is, she thought. This is the start of some sort of breakdown. That is what will happen to me next. I shall break down, and that really means go mad, so to pieces.

“What is it?” he said.

“I’ve missed my train!”

“I know. Let’s get out at the next stop.” It was Baker Street, and on the escalator, he said, “We’ll find you a hotel for the night. Then I shall take you out to dinner and you can tell me why you’re so unhappy, because I don’t believe it’s missing your train or losing your husband.”

“No,” she said in a small voice. “No, it’s not.”

She thought he said that he would like to make her happy, but she couldn’t be sure, because it was noisy in the tube station and he might have said something quite different.

16

When you think someone is listening to you he is probably only considering what to say next.

—A MAN OF THESSALY

JASON THAGUE HAD FOUND ROBERT NUTTALL’S WIDOW, Anne, living in the Cotswolds. Her husband had been a dentist in Oxford and they had retired to Chipping Campden.

“That makes me wonder about dentists,” Sarah said. “I mean the Candlesses’ dentist. They’d have had one.”

“I don’t think so. Most people didn’t have dentists in the thirties, not a dentist you go to for regular checkups. You went to a dentist to have a tooth out when you had a toothache. Anyway, I asked my nan, and she said her father had had all his teeth out and false ones for a twenty-first birthday present.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“That’s what I said. My nan’s got dentures now, has had all my lifetime. She never went near a dentist till she was seventeen and living in Sudbury, and that was, like I said, to have a tooth out.”

What would her father have thought of Jason’s pitted face and his voice and his accent? She said coldly, “So we’ve reached a dead end.”

“Don’t say that. There’s still the knife grinder and the chair mender. Is my check in the post?”

Sarah had been fourteen when Hamadryad was short-listed for the Booker Prize, old enough to have some understanding of what that meant and young enough to be bitterly hurt and convinced of injustice when it didn’t win. She had read the novel and believed that the young girl, Delphine, the protagonist, was herself. She asked her father and he said, “There’s something of you in Delphine and something of Hope.”

She had asked which “somethings,” and he said, their beauty and their intelligence. What about the rest of her, then? What about Delphine’s shyness, her goodness, her reclusiveness? No one, even then, could have pretended she and Hope were shy or retiring or even particularly good.

“That was someone I knew long ago,” he said. “No, not a girlfriend.” He had hesitated. “A relative.”

She remembered that now. She was thinking of Hamadryad because Frederic Cyprian had still been her father’s editor when it was published. After that, and before the next book, he had retired. Some said his retirement was directly due to Hamadryad ’s failure to win. At the dinner, when the winning novel was announced, he had done something authors had been known to do but not publishers. He had gotten up from the table and walked out.

Sarah had met him a few times in the seventies when he came with or without his wife to stay at Lundy View House. He was old then and his wife was older, and she had since died. Sarah had known, since moving into this flat, that he and she lived very near each other. For some reason, now forgotten, she had once looked him up in the phone book. It must have been simple curiosity, since she had never intended to phone him or visit him.

Now she had. If he was still alive, and Robert Postle had indicated he thought so, he was still there, around the corner, two hundred yards away. She walked down and looked at the house. Victorian, red brick, a steep flight of steps up to the front door. It looked empty, closed up. She hesitated only for a moment, then walked up the steps and rang the bell.

No one came. She rang again. The door was opened by a woman some ten years older than herself, but very different from herself. She looked worn and harassed and irritable and she was dressed in a dark purple shell suit.

“Yes?” she said.

“My name is Sarah Candless. Gerald Candless was my father. I wonder if I might see Mr. Cyprian?”

“Well …”

“He was my father’s editor at Carlyon-Brent.”

“I know that, Miss Candless.”

The woman looked at her doubtfully. Sarah thought she recognized her from years ago as Frederic Cyprian’s daughter. Jane? Jean? Or perhaps it was just that she saw something of him in this strained, intense face.

“I met your father,” she said. “When I was young.”

“That can’t have been very long ago,” the woman said dryly. “Won’t you come in? I am Jane Cyprian. My father is very old and not well. More than that, but you’ll see, you’ll see.” She added, “He may be quite lucid. He sometimes is.”

Sarah felt the apprehensiveness that is almost fear and that comes at the threat of being confronted by someone whose control has slipped or been fragmented. She followed Jane Cyprian down the passage. It wasn’t dark or in any way sinister, unless a profusion of pictures, ornaments, and clutter is sinister.

Outside the closed door, Jane Cyprian turned to Sarah and said, “I wish you’d phoned first.”

“I was passing. I live very near.”

A shrug, a glance of impatience, and the door was opened. The room on the other side of it held nothing to surprise a visitor of a hundred years before. It was perfectly but not self-consciously Victorian, even to the braided pelmet along the mantelpiece and the row of framed sepia photographs above it. The old man sat in front of the cold grate in an antimacassared armchair. In the years since she had last seen him, time had bleached and shriveled and drained him, had dried him up, like a fallen leaf.

“Dad,” Jane Cyprian said, “there’s someone to see you.”

He turned his head, reached for the handles of the two sticks that rested against the arms of his chair, thought better of it, and extended one wavering hand.

“Ursula!”

Sarah shook her head. Jane Cyprian said, “That’s not your name, is it?”

“My mother.”

“Ah. He makes these mistakes. This is Miss Candless, Dad.”

“Ursula,” he said again.

Sarah made herself walk over to him and extend her hand. He looked at it as if it were some unfamiliar object, the likes of which he had perhaps never seen before, attached to her sleeve. His voice was thin and high, as if the vocal cords had shortened.

“That husband of yours never comes to see me anymore.”