Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Gerald could be pompous. “Like Pontius Pilate and Strindberg,” he said, “I told them that what I have written I have written.”

“Maybe you should have done what they suggested,” said the journalist.

“And maybe you should get back to subjects you know about. Like rock and cannabis.”

There was a scene in the novel that Ursula took particular note of while she was typing it. A young girl, friend of the Sarah-Hope heroine, makes an advance to an older man, who turns her down. In the man’s words and the girl’s turns of phrase, she heard Gerald and Pauline. His economical wit was there and her naive platitudes. It was a cruel piece of work. Her fear was that Pauline might read it and recognize herself or someone else might recognize her in it and tell her.

She was nearly certain this never happened. In those days, Pauline never read anything. Her father died the following spring, her wedding was postponed, and when a date for it was finally fixed, she wrote asking Gerald if he would give her away. Sarah, aged sixteen, said it was disgusting, a woman being given away like a cow or a bushel of wheat, but Gerald only laughed and said he would.

“Why not? I may as well. I’ll never get the chance with you two liberated souls. You’re more likely to give me away.”

Which only led, of course, to hugs and passionate denials. But Sarah and Hope were happy enough to be bridesmaids, in pink-and-purple tulle, while Ian’s little girl wore pale lilac. Helen called them sweet pea colors. A picture of the wedding got into a Sunday paper because of Gerald, whose Hamadryad , adapted by himself, had just been shown on television under the title A Young Girl , and Pauline was enraptured. At the wedding reception, after quite a lot of champagne, she threw her arms around his neck and told him he was the best uncle in the world. All, apparently, was forgotten, or at least forgiven.

Ursula worked hard at her art history. She went on a trip to Florence to see the Uffizi and another to Madrid to visit the Prado. Since her honeymoon, she had rarely been abroad, been anywhere really. Gerald didn’t like holidays, unfamiliar places, upheavals. If you lived by the sea, he said, you didn’t need holidays. Besides, around that time, he was doing author tours, one in the United States and one in Canada, and a four-day promotion in what was then West Germany. She went to Berlin with him, chiefly because she wanted to look at the Wall, but when Robert Postle suggested she accompany Gerald to New York, Washington, and Chicago, and then to Canada, she said no. Gerald just turned his head and glanced at her.

“Don’t you like flying, Ursula?” Robert Postle asked.

“That depends on whom you’re flying with,” she said.

He thought she meant the airline. Gerald knew. She could see it in his eyes and see something else, too, something that brought her a chill. He liked it when she spoke like that; he enjoyed her dislike, a bit of spirit. It relieved the boredom. She turned her back on him and told Robert she couldn’t leave the children. Sarah wasn’t old enough to be left in charge of her younger sister.

No one argued with her about her European trips. No one cared. Daphne Batty, recently engaged by Gerald on account of her name, would look after them. Ursula didn’t know, wouldn’t have guessed, though she knew him so well, what mental notes (and actual notes, probably) he was making for future use of the things she said about the hotels she would be staying in, the pictures she would look at, the sight-seeing she would do. It was to the girls that she said these things, but he listened.

And he listened when she came back and told them what she had seen and where she had been. One day, she found an essay she had written on Vasari and left beside her typewriter now slightly out of alignment, crooked, instead of lined up against the desk edge. But then she had no idea why he should be interested in what she studied or wrote. He concerned himself with her minimally, so why this?

But before she typed the next chapter of Purple of Cassius , she put her essay away in a drawer and locked it.

She told Sam none of these details, only that she had been to Florence.

“Let’s go there,” he said.

“You and I?”

“I love the way you say ‘you and I,’ whereas everyone else says ‘you and me.’ I bet when someone rings up and says, ‘Ursula,’ you say, ‘This is she.’ ”

“Gerald made me,” she said. “That was one good thing he did for me, taught me grammar. Did you really mean we could go to Florence?”

“We could go anywhere,” he said. “Within reason.”

He was staying with her at Lundy View House. When told he was coming, Daphne Batty had asked if she should make up a bed in “Mr. Candless’s room,” and Ursula, who doubted if she would have been as bold if the girls had asked, said, “No, thanks. He’ll be sleeping with me.”

Daphne said, “Why not,” then started singing something about two sleepy people in dawn’s early light and too much in love to say good night. She had simpered at Sam and winked when she thought Ursula wasn’t looking.

“I’d like to go to Rome,” Ursula said. “But I don’t suppose we could.”

“We’ll go tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll fix it. I’ll go into Barnstaple and fix it.”

“Can you do that?”

“Of course I can. Anyone can. We’ll go for a long weekend.”

Fleetingly, she thought of the girls. It wasn’t Sarah’s weekend. Hope hardly ever came. “I feel happy,” she said, “the way a child does. Simple, innocent happiness.”

Hope and Fabian were coming over for a drink, and when the doorbell rang, Sarah thought that was who it was. She didn’t know why they were going to the Odeon at Swiss Cottage, since one of them lived in Crouch End and the other, when they weren’t under the same roof, in Docklands. But they had said they would drop in after the film, and she had told herself that her reclusiveness shouldn’t apply to her sister.

The doorbell rang at 9:30, which was a bit early for the last showing to be over, but Sarah thought only that perhaps they hadn’t liked the film. But when she picked up the intercom, the voice of the speaker on the doorstep was Jason Thague’s.

She felt a surge of impatience, of almost-wild protest. Didn’t he appreciate the sanctity of one’s home? Just because he hadn’t one of his own … She wanted very much to tell him to go away and not bother her, but he was her researcher, her detective; she had to be pleasant. Still, when he appeared, she did tell him that she was expecting her sister and she didn’t say it in an inviting way.

“It’ll be nice to meet her,” he said, his eye on the bottles and glasses Sarah had set out on the table.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Not just yet,” he said. “Maybe just some water for now.”

That alarmed her. How long did he mean to stay? Spots had erupted around the cleft in his chin. It occurred to her, for no reason that she could think of, that Americans called them “zits.” The idea of it made her shudder. Zits. As she poured gin into her glass, she was aware that he smelled better; he smelled quite nice and he had washed his hair.

“I wish you’d phoned first,” she said.

“It’s not easy phoning, you know. I expect it’s another thing if you’ve got a mobile phone. I have to find a call box and then find change. I’d probably have to wait in a queue. It just seemed better to come here.”

Not for me, she thought. “Have you got something to tell me?”

“Yep. And it’s quite exciting.”

She settled down, resigned herself to it. If it really was exciting, it would be better to get it over before Hope came.