Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Jason gave up for the time being, saw to his surprise that he had been reading for three hours. Two evenings before, he had gotten out of the cab just around the corner from Sarah’s place and, ignoring the expostulations of the driver, taken the tube to Liverpool Street station, thus keeping for himself most of the twenty pounds. Just enough now remained to buy half a bottle of gin or some food. He went downstairs and around to the corner shop, where he thought of Sarah, rejected the gin, and bought a pint of milk, a pizza, a bumper packet of minitortillas, and a pound of cheddar cheese.

21

“Remember that if you tell a man you love him,” said Mrs. Rule, “you may forget it, but he never will, and he will cast it up at you for the rest of his life.”

—PURPLE OF CASSIUS

THE LAST TIME PAULINE EVER CAME TO STAY DURING GERALD’s lifetime was in the long, hot summer of 1976. Gerald was writing Half an Hour in the Street , the least successful and certainly the least acclaimed of all his books. Perhaps he was affected by the heat or just didn’t apply himself. They spent most of the time on the beach, not the great stretch of sand that spanned the seven miles to Franaton Burrows—it was too crowded there—but in the little cove around the north headland, where there was no one but themselves. It was so quiet there and so isolated that quite often the tide came in, went out again, and returned once more over virgin sand no foot had trodden in the meantime.

Pauline was seventeen and had a boyfriend. He was the only boyfriend she had ever had and later on she would marry him. Brian was his name. Sarah wanted to know about him and got Pauline to talk about him all the time, which wasn’t hard to do. Hope wasn’t interested. She was still at the sand-castle stage. Gerald built the most beautiful sand castles on the beach, fortresses with moats and crenellated walls and keeps and towers. When Hope was younger, all she had wanted to do was knock them down, but Gerald hadn’t minded; he had only laughed.

Ursula swam every day, but Pauline couldn’t swim and didn’t want to learn. She talked to Sarah about Brian and about the possibility of getting engaged to Brian and her mother saying she was too young, but it was Gerald she looked at and Gerald’s sand castles that she admired. Her future might be with Brian; it was Gerald she was in love with, however. Ursula didn’t know how Hope, aged eight, could know this, but she did know it and she sat even more frequently than usual on her father’s lap, twining her arms around his neck and casting at Pauline sly, challenging glances.

The fine weather came to an end before the school holidays did. One morning, there was no beach to be seen and no blue sky, only the all-enveloping mist, a white fallen cloud. Gerald shut himself up in the study with the blinds down and the lights on and got back to work on his novel. After that, the mist came down every morning, sometimes staying all day, and at the end of the week, Pauline went home because school was starting the next day. But before that, the day before she left, something happened between her and Gerald, though Ursula never knew exactly what it was.

In any other marriage, she thought, a husband who wasn’t unfaithful and didn’t want to be—she was quite sure of this; she knew this—would have told his wife when a woman made an advance to him and he rejected it. Ursula had an idea that a man would want to tell, would be proud of telling, because it would be a kind of insurance for him. Whatever he had done before or since, that time he had resisted. He had been good; he was good. And he would want to tell his wife because it would make him seem strong-minded, impervious, and therefore attractive.

Gerald said nothing to her. Of course, it was inconceivable that he ever would talk to her about anything verging on human relations or sex or his personal feelings. But she knew Pauline and Gerald had had some sort of confrontation. Pauline’s face, which had no mark on it, no tearstain, nevertheless looked bruised. She was silent and her eyes, which had rested so constantly on Gerald, now wandered everywhere, while he seemed relaxed. It was impossible for him to be more attentive to his daughters, but perhaps he was more than usually demonstrative.

What had Pauline done? Gone to him in the study, Ursula thought, where the blinds were down and the mist pressed against the windows outside, and in some childish, clumsy way offered herself to him? His reaction was beyond her imaginings. She hoped only that he hadn’t been too unkind. When the time came for leave-taking, he had kissed Pauline, as he always did, and Ursula, who was used to seeing her rapturous response, noticed how she seemed to shrink into herself like someone out in the cold wind and inadequately dressed for it.

The customary thank-you note arrived (“Dear Auntie Ursula”) but the last line, which had become requisite, was missing. This time Pauline hadn’t ended her letter with a “Hope to come back next summer holidays” and an exclamation mark. As she always did, Ursula passed the letter to Gerald across the breakfast table and he read it, as he always did, in silence. The only comment came from Sarah.

“Is there anything in it about Brian?”

Both Ursula’s parents died the following year, her father in the spring, her mother at the end of the summer. Their house and their savings went to Ian and Helen and Ursula, to be divided equally. Apart from what she had got from the sale of her engagement ring, it was the first money of her own Ursula had ever had, and though it didn’t amount to a great deal, it was enough to escape on. It would buy a flat and supply the means of living for a little while. The guilt she might feel if she left Gerald and lived on his money would be assuaged. Even before she got the money, knowing she would get it and having a fair idea of what it would be, she thought about this prospect. She thought of it at her mother’s funeral, her eye on Ian and his not-so-new wife, Judy, the woman Herbert Wick had wanted to horsewhip. They had two children now and Ian had never looked so well and happy. A man must be doing well for himself if he looks happy at his mother’s funeral.

Pauline came up to them afterward with a tall redheaded boy in tow. “This is Brian, Auntie Ursula. We’re getting engaged at Christmas.”

She bestowed a big smile on Gerald. You see, somebody likes me; somebody wants me, desires me. Gerald didn’t say a word, but he, too, smiled. Shaking hands with the boy, he smiled his Mephistophelian dead-eyed smile.

Walking on the beach every afternoon, Ursula thought of taking the girls out of the good schools they loved, away from this house and this seaside, away from their father. The nearest she came to going was when she broke off from typing Hamadryad and wrote him a long letter of explanation for her departure. Later, she tore up the letter and put the money she had inherited into their joint account. Instead of going, she thought of going in the future, and to that end or partly to that end, she applied herself to the Open University’s art history course.

Hamadryad got rapturous reviews and was named by various celebrities as their book of the year. It was one of the six short-listed for the Booker Prize and Ursula went with Gerald to the Booker dinner. If he was disappointed at not winning, he didn’t show it. Frederic Cyprian had pushed back his chair with a flourish and a clatter, stood for a moment, and marched noisily out, but Gerald had only lifted his shoulders and slowly dropped them. A journalist asked him how he felt. Wasn’t it true that he had been asked to change the end but had refused?