Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Four years passed before she came back, and that was for her wedding in 1938. She opened the last album, the one she hadn’t looked at because she looked at it so often. Those photographers always began with a picture of the church, and St. Stephen’s was pretty enough, if not on par with the one she had wanted in Sudbury. Then came the shot of herself on her father’s arm, walking up the path to the door. She was holding up her white taffeta train with one hand and clutching her bouquet with the other. Her father looked happy enough, and in the later pictures, her mother looked happy. They were back to normal; they were over it. They had recovered, or recovered as much as they ever would.

What was she looking for? She had half-forgotten. The photographer’s series that she had looked at so often before passed gently before her eyes, the wedding, the bridesmaids, the group on the steps, the departure for the reception. The month of May and a glorious day. Happy is the bride that the sun shines on.…

Happiness, yes, but surely she had wanted luck, as well? Joan felt a constriction in her throat. What had she done for luck? Worn something old, yes, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.… She was nearly there; she sensed it. She turned to the last photograph in the album.

It hadn’t been taken by the professional, but by Frank’s best man. Joan couldn’t remember his name now, but he hadn’t been a very good photographer. Why had they stuck this picture in with the good ones? Because Frank had wanted it, because Frank for some reason had liked it. Usually, when she looked at her wedding album, she stopped before this page or else allowed her eyes to flicker swiftly over it.

Now they rested on it. And she saw herself and Frank arm in arm and the man who stood smiling at the front of the little crowd with his brushes in his hand and, behind him, leaning against a tree trunk, his bicycle, with his name clearly written in white on black on the metal sheet triangle attached to the crossbar.

J. W. RYAN, CHIMNEY SWEEP.

Ursula’s lover was named Edward Akenham and, in a way, he was the only lover she had ever had, for Colin Wrightson didn’t count, and though some husbands can also be lovers, Gerald had not been one of them. Edward was a painter with a cottage in Clovelly, but in order to live, he taught art history at an evening course in Ilfracombe.

From the first, she had known the kind of man Edward was. She had no illusions, perhaps because she had had so many about Gerald and all had been rudely smashed. Chronically poor, permanently unsuccessful, splendid to look at, if a little worn, Edward made a point of having an affair with one of his art history students each term. Occasionally, such a relationship lasted two terms, and Ursula was one of the two-term women.

He was honest. He told his girlfriends he had no money to spend on them, that he had never been married and didn’t wish to be. On the other hand, he was free. He had a place to take them, a cottage of exquisitely picturesque appearance, with the advantage of being next door to a pub. And he would make love to them nicely, with care, perhaps with passion. For a while, he would give them his devotion. What love he had to give, and within limits, he would give them. He was an honest man.

For nearly a year, he made Ursula feel desired, beautiful, sexy, and needed. In all that time, she never had a migraine. And Edward paid her a compliment very close to what Gerald had said to her on their honeymoon.

“You are the kind of woman most men dream of making love to.”

But June came and the end of the art history course for that year. Edward went off to Spain to stay with an equally impoverished friend, first saying an unequivocal good-bye to her, coupled with another compliment, of a sort. “It” was among the best he’d ever had. She minded, as she had known she would, because she was more than a little in love. But that, she had also known to be inevitable, for how could you live the life she lived and not fall in love with the first kind, clever, handsome man who paid attention to you?

She had read somewhere, perhaps among the pieces of advice given by an agony aunt, that if you have a love affair your husband hasn’t found out about, it is wiser and kinder not to tell him. But that, she felt, didn’t apply to husbands like Gerald, who wasn’t really a husband anymore, but someone she shared the house with, a not very congenial kind of landlord. So one Saturday morning, when her Thursday migraine was over, when Sarah was out riding and Hope was at her dancing class, she told him about Edward Akenham.

He looked up from the Times. “What do you expect me to say?”

It was terrible how she had learned to talk the way he did; she had learned his kind of repartee. “What you’ve just said.” It was true. “No other comment?”

“Not so long as you don’t get yourself in the newspapers,” he said. “I refer to your association with me, of course.”

She pondered his words: “your association with me” not “my wife.”

“And I don’t want my children witnessing any primal scenes.”

“There is nothing to witness. It’s over,” she had said.

“No doubt there will be others.”

There never had been. Until now.

“Why did you tell him?” Sam Fleming asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. She had told him all of it, that and much more. “I mean, I didn’t know at the time. It wasn’t revenge or some sort of wish to hurt him; I knew it wouldn’t hurt him. Afterward, I thought about why, and I think I told him in the hope he’d throw me out. I hadn’t the strength to leave, you see, and I couldn’t bring myself to take the children away from him and go, but I think somewhere in my unconscious was the wish that he’d leave me or force me to leave. He’d do it for me.”

“He didn’t, though.”

“He didn’t care enough. It looks as if he must have needed me in some way, and he did, but not in the way any woman would want to be needed. And by then he was beginning to be very well known. He was giving interviews to newspapers and getting pieces about him in the Sunday supplements. It suited the persona he’d created to have an apparently stable marriage, a serene family life. And his children had to have a mother—I don’t think he ever considered the possibility that they might not have a father—even if they didn’t care much for her. She had to be there so that they had a mummy and a daddy, like the other girls at school. It’s different now, but most children did live with both natural parents then.”

“It was a few years later that he wrote Hamadryad. ”

“The young girl was a kind of amalgam of Sarah and Hope, older than they, of course, and idealized—at least the dryad girl seemed idealized to me. Perhaps he saw his daughters like that.”

“The hamadryad,” Sam said, “dies when the tree she inhabits dies. Did he mean his daughters couldn’t exist without him, without his support?”

“God knows what he meant. It was sometimes hard to know with him where reality stopped and symbolism began. Maybe we have to remember that a hamadryad is also a kind of snake. But I’m talking too much. I haven’t talked so much for years.”

“You can talk as much as you like with me,” Sam said. “I like to be talked to. I’m a good listener.”

She smiled at him. They had been together almost continuously since the Sunday night when she arrived at the hotel where she had stayed before and booked into again and where he was waiting for her in the lobby. The drive from Devon in Sarah’s car had been uneventful and their conversation of the bland small-talk kind, broken by long silences, until the western outskirts of London were reached and Sarah asked her where her friend lived.