Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Pauline’s children were now adolescents and could be left at home with their father and their grandmother, who would come in to do the cooking. Pauline had worked for her living for just three years before she was married, and never afterward. This gave her a lot in common with Ursula, or she thought it did, for Ursula, too, had not worked, in the sense of being a wage earner, since some months before Gerald married her in Purley in 1963.

“You typed all Uncle Gerald’s manuscripts, though, didn’t you?” Pauline said one lunchtime after she had been at Lundy View House for nearly a week. “He wrote them and you made sense of his terrible handwriting and copied them on that old Olivetti you had.”

“That’s right,” said Ursula. “Like Sonia Tolstoy.”

“Who?” said Pauline.

“Tolstoy’s wife. She made copies of all his books, seven copies of each one, and they were all very long, and she had to do it by hand because typewriters hadn’t been invented. Or they didn’t have one, anyway. So it wasn’t as bad for me as it was for her.”

“But you didn’t get paid for it?” asked Pauline hopefully. If Ursula had been paid, even by her husband, this would partly have excluded her from the sisterhood of unemployed married women. “Uncle Gerald didn’t pay you?”

“He kept me,” said Ursula.

“Well, of course, that goes without saying. Brian keeps me, if you like to put it that way.”

“I didn’t always do it. Hand to Mouth was the last one I did, and that was 1984. After that, he typed them himself.”

“But why did you stop?” said Pauline.

Ursula didn’t answer. She was wondering how many minutes after they got up from the table she could go out for her walk. Twenty, probably. Pauline began to clear the table. She hadn’t yet asked Ursula if Uncle Gerald had left her well-off or comfortably off or just able to manage. She hadn’t asked if Ursula would have to sell the house or take in lodgers or do B and B, though Ursula knew she was dying to know the answers to all these questions. Everyone assumed that Gerald had left everything to Sarah and Hope, and Ursula, though she had gotten over the shock of his death, if shock it had been, hadn’t yet adjusted to his surprising bequests.

“I shall go out for my walk in ten minutes,” she said when they had loaded the dishwasher.

“In this fog?” said Pauline with an artificial shudder.

“It isn’t fog; it’s just sea mist.”

“Oh, I know that’s what you call it. You always did call it sea mist. It was the only thing I didn’t like about coming to stay here, that white sea fog. And Uncle Gerald hated it, didn’t he? I remember he would never go out in it; he used to shut himself up in his study. Why was that?”

“I don’t know,” said Ursula.

“Does it upset you when I talk about him, Auntie Ursula?”

“I think you could drop the ‘Auntie,’ don’t you?” said Ursula, not for the first time.

“I’ll try,” said Pauline, “but it will be very hard to get out of the habit.”

Hardly anyone came down to the beach when the mist rolled in from the sea. The car park emptied, the surfers retreated into their caravans, and the hotel guests went back to the indoor swimming pool. The beach, which was seven miles long and, when the tide was out, a half of a mile wide, was overhung by a white curtain, so that when you were on it, in the sand, the dunes and the sea became invisible. Ursula could see her own feet, and the beach stretching away in front of her and on either side of her for some yards, but she couldn’t see the hummocky wrinkled green dunes to the left of her or the water, to the right of her, creeping silently across the sand.

The mist would wet her hair and settle on her clothes in fine droplets, but she didn’t mind this. It wasn’t cold. Sometimes she thought she preferred misty days to clear ones, when you could see the headland and the estuary and Westward Ho! and, looming on the clifftop, the hotel and its garden and all those flowers in primary colors. She walked southward halfway between the edge of the dunes and the edge of the incoming tide, sometimes looking up to see a distant dazzlement of sun through the thickness of white gauze, but more often down at the sand.

The sand was sometimes quite flat and packed hard, but on other days, by some strange action of the tide’s passage, it was pulled into wrinkles like the skin that forms on boiled milk. Today, though, it was smooth, a dark ocher color, but streaked here and there in a chevron pattern with a fine glittery black dust. Visitors to Gaunton thought the black streaks, which looked as if a magnet had drawn them into that shape as it might draw iron filings across a sheet of paper, were from tar or some other pollutant, but Ursula knew that this powder was ground-up mussel shells, pulverized by the pounding and the kneading of the sea.

Shells were everywhere on the beach, white scallop shells and ivory-colored limpets, chalky whelks and blue-black mussel shells with a sheen of pearl or a crust of barnacles, razor shells that looked like a cutthroat razor in an agate case. When the girls first came here as small children, they collected shells every day, until they grew tired of it. Ursula found all the dull, dusty, smelly shells in a cupboard years later. She put them in a carrier bag and took them back to the beach, scattering them onto the sand as she walked along. The next day, when she walked the same way, the shells had been washed clean and shining by the sea and those she had restored to the beach were indistinguishable from those that had always been there.

Today, there was no one else on the beach. And the mist remained static, hanging, quite still. The solitude pleased her, the chance to think. No thinking could be done at Lundy View House while Pauline was there, and at night, when she was alone in her room, she took one of the sleeping pills the doctor had insisted she have. She asked herself why she liked the mist so much. Could it be because Gerald had disliked it? The possibility that this was true had to be admitted. She liked it because he didn’t, and in a way, that made it hers, a secret, inviolable possession.

Perhaps, too, she liked it because it obscured so much. Lundy View House, the other houses on the cliff, people, Gerald. It hid everything but the clean flat sand and the pure white or blue-black glittering shells. Now, of course, she no longer needed this obfuscation. Savoring it, she repeated the word to herself. Obfuscation. Once, long ago, she had set herself the daily task of learning long, difficult words to impress and please him. What a fool, she thought, but she thought it calmly and in a measured, considered way.

As she turned back, or rather, wheeled round, to retrace her steps nearer to the incoming sea, she wondered not for the first time why she had reacted as she had to Gerald’s death. At least she would have expected to feel shock. But there had been very little shock, only surprise and, very quickly, relief. No guilt, either. She had read somewhere—ah, what a lot of books and magazines and periodicals and journals and newspapers she had read over the years!—that bereavement brings with it a sad and bitter longing to have the dead back, if only for a few hours, to ask those questions that were always there but were never asked in life. And she thought, Yes, I would like to ask why. Why did you do this to me and take so much away from me? Why did you make me second-best—oh, much further down the scale than that—with my children? Why did you marry me? No, why did you want to marry me? It would have to be a different person, though, whom she brought back to life. The Gerald she knew wouldn’t answer.

That brought Mrs. Eady into her head. She hadn’t thought of Mrs. Eady for years. A big, sad old woman with a daughter in a nunnery and a murdered son, his photograph in a silver frame beside a small green-speckled vase. She could see it still as clearly as she could see the sand and shells. And less than a year later, they had moved away from Hampstead and come here to the clifftop and a house with a view of the Bristol Channel and Lundy Island.