Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“And you were expendable?”

“I was expendable, but I couldn’t be spent, so to speak. I think he’d have liked me to go and leave the children, only I wouldn’t go. Perhaps I stayed because he wanted me to go.”

She said she would like to visit the British Museum. He looked incredulous when she said she had never been there, but he took her, and he took her out to lunch. She wouldn’t have said another word about Gerald if he hadn’t asked. Asked and pressed her and shown an interest that wasn’t feigned.

“He hadn’t anything else, you see. He only had the children.”

“He had his work,” Sam said.

“Yes. He had his work. I don’t know which was more important to him, his writing or his children. About equal, I expect. I thought he had other women; for a long time I was sure of it, and then, quite a bit later, I thought there might be … men. But I don’t think so now. He said he had no sex life, and I believe that. I think he was always perfectly faithful to me—for what that’s worth.”

“Often not as much as many people think.”

She had never before talked like this to anyone, but now she was telling it all, or much of it, to Sam Fleming, knowing by some instinct she must recently have developed that it would be quite safe with him. He listened, but he said very little. Sometimes he smiled or raised his eyebrows. He made no final comment. She thought she had never known a man, in conversation with herself, look less bored.

He took her to Paddington in a taxi. He talked about their next meeting as if it was something previously firmly decided on. There would be a next meeting. The question was only of when and where.

“Come back up here. You say your daughter’s going down for the weekend. Get a lift with her and come back on Sunday night.”

“I wonder if I could,” Ursula said. “Why not? I don’t suppose she could exactly say no.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Sam.

He got out of the taxi with her, lifted her hand and kissed it, then drove away again quite quickly. In the train, instead of reading her book, she thought of all the things she had said to him, relived what she had said and felt comfortable about it. He hadn’t been impatient and he hadn’t swamped her with sympathy. She reflected on the last thing she had said to him, before they left the restaurant where they had lunched.

“It’s very hard to come to terms with the fact of someone simply not liking you.”

Gerald had written that, in one of his books. She hadn’t fully realized the truth of it until she had spoken it aloud. From soon after Hope was born, she had known Gerald didn’t love her. The effect of this realization was a profound sense of loneliness and a sinking of her self-esteem. He didn’t love her; he had no desire for her. Yet somehow, for years, she clung to the statement she had made to Roger Pallinter, that she and Gerald were friends. They were companions on an equal footing. She transcribed his handwriting and typed his manuscripts. With her, he shared his income entirely. She knew precisely what he received in royalties and, indeed, it was she who corresponded with his accountant and from 1973, when value-added tax was introduced, kept the VAT book.

In this way, she deceived herself. They might no longer share a bed, but they shared what was more important—the maintenance of a family, the running of a household, the entertaining of friends, decisions as to the children’s welfare. And then one evening, after he had been more than usually silent all day, she asked him if he had another chapter completed for her to deal with the next morning. He was reading, not a book, but some journal, the Spectator perhaps—she couldn’t remember—and he looked up, barely looked up, and, frowning, waved one hand in a dismissive gesture. Don’t bother me, it said; leave me in peace. Can’t you? Why do I have to put up with this?

And in that moment, she knew as plainly as if she had read it on the page that he didn’t even like her. It wasn’t a positive hatred; it was worse than that: a mild dislike, composed of utter indifference combined with resentment. Don’t bother me; leave me in peace. Why can’t you just do my typing and cook my food and manage my money?

That was when she began walking every day on the beach. A mile one way and a mile back, rain or shine, mist or clear. Out of his house, away from his children—though they were at school by this time—along the pale black-streaked sand, watching the flat sheet of lapping water or looking inland at the hummocky moon-landscape dunes. At first, on these walks, she dwelled on whether she should go or stay. Divorce, with the new law, would soon be easier, geared in women’s favor. She would get custody of the children. He would have to keep them all financially.

It was that very day, or perhaps the day after, that he had taught Sarah and Hope the Game—I Pass the Scissors. It was more a test or an ordeal than a game. She had looked up ordeal in the dictionary and found it defined as “any severe trial or distressing or trying experience.” At first, seeing the three heads bent over a table, she supposed them to be playing cards. Then she saw the kitchen scissors going from hand to hand. They wanted her to join in, a rare event.

But by that time, the girls had caught on, or Gerald had whispered the answer to them. Was it possible those two little girls of nine and seven had solved the Game in ten minutes? She was never to know and never to learn how herself. In the meantime, they wanted her as their stooge.

“I pass the scissors uncrossed.”

“No, you don’t , Mummy.”

“You don’t see, do you, Mummy?”

“All right. Try again. I pass the scissors crossed.”

“Wrong again,” said Gerald. “That’s enough for today. Come along, my little lambs, we’re going on the beach.”

Could she take his children away from him?

He wasn’t like an ordinary father. Not only did he worship the girls, but he had done everything for them. She had been like an upper-class woman whose children are cared for by nannies. If she took them away, it would ruin his life; it might kill him. Did she care? Strangely, after everything, she found that she did, still did.

Also, she would have to earn her own living. She would be morally bound to do so, if not actually. If I could have foreseen such feelings ten years ago, she thought, if I could have imagined at my wedding the person I’d become in this short time … She could type. She had no other skills. Even if she stayed with Gerald, she ought to do something more with her life.

The first thing that came out of those beach walks was a decision to educate herself, and the next day she signed up for an art history evening class. She told Gerald, but she didn’t think he heard, and if he noticed she was out on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, he certainly didn’t miss her. Later, of course, she knew he had heard, had been busily making notes.

At art history class, she met new people and made some friends. Until then their friends had been Gerald’s, but now she saw the possibility of having her own. But at the same time, she withdrew even more from her children. It seemed the natural result of their indifference to her, their overwhelming preference for their father and their tendency, Hope’s especially, to ignore her. Perhaps she should have persevered, treated these clever, bright girls as if they were handicapped children who needed constant stimulus and the knowledge of unquenchable love. But they got that from their father, and she couldn’t compete, scarcely knew how to, lacked the heart. Instead, she turned to her new friends, and to one man in particular.

It was at about that time, a few days before Easter, that she found the newspaper cutting in Gerald’s study. He had gone to Exeter to give a lecture at the University of the Southwest. She went into the study to find the chapter he had written the day before, part of Time Too Swift , with the character spitefully based on Betty Wick. It was lying on his desk, the usual higgledy-piggledy pages of scrawled, crossed-out, margin-scribbled prose, indecipherable to all but her.