Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

She was working hard for her own degree from the Open University. Gerald and the girls knew about it and Sarah and Hope had at first shown some curiosity. What did she want it for? Was she going to get a job? Why art history? Gerald, on the other hand, appeared entirely uninterested. He seldom watched television, making an exception only when the adaptations of Hamadryad and later of A Paper Landscape were broadcast on BBC2, and when Ursula took over the downstairs spare room for herself and moved the set in there, he said merely, but in a tone that was more gratified than disapproving, “That will mean we can’t have anyone to stay.”

On the return journey to Devon, though Gerald and Hope talked exhaustively about academic matters concerning her future and the glowing A levels she would get, with occasional reference to Sarah’s prospects, Pauline’s dismal abandonment of education, and Robert Postle’s double first, no comment at all was made on her, Ursula’s, art history endeavors. Still, nothing was said about Gerald’s own academic achievements at Trinity, either. And Ursula didn’t mind. She would rather have nothing said than the casual contempt that was the probable alternative.

Gerald had been occupied in writing a script based on one of his earlier novels for a feature film. Ursula had no typing to do for him and was left free to get on with her own work. But in the early spring of the following year, he began writing a new novel. Sometimes he found his title before he had written more than a few pages, and it was so in this case. He called it Hand to Mouth.

Since Sarah’s departure, things had been rather better between them. Hope, too, was much occupied with school, seemed always to be out pursuing after-school activities, and their rapprochement, if it could be so called, might have been due to their being much alone together. Ursula supposed it was because she was his only companion that he was obliged to talk to her, but whatever it was, there was no longer any evidence of the dislike he had once more or less expressed for her.

On one occasion, very early in the morning, when she was watching a filmed lecture on the Italian Renaissance, he came into the room and sat down beside her on the settee. At the film’s close, he asked her questions, seeming genuinely interested. Another time, he asked her about the class she had attended in Ilfracombe. She expected mockery and jibes, but none came, nor did a suggestion that she had only chosen art history as her discipline because Edward Akenham taught it.

Trying to account for his approaches to her—conversation at mealtimes, signs of consideration, even an inquiry after her health—she wondered if it might be his age, if he was settling down, resigning himself to her and his fate. In May of that year, he would be fifty-eight. Inevitably, he would soon be alone with her, both his children departed.

* * *

Gerald handed her the first chapter of Hand to Mouth one wet day in March. It was raining too hard for her to go for her beach walk and so she settled down at once at the typewriter. It wasn’t until she was given the next two chapters that she began to see what was being done to her. She still remembered thirteen years later, with almost the same physical sensation, her increasing sickness, her actual nausea, as she deciphered this narrative of a man choosing a young naive girl from a suburb to be the mother of the children he so much wanted.

By the time the novel began, she had become a silly woman in early middle age. Her name was Una. She was married to a distinguished musician with a full and productive life, and because she had no talents herself and no inclination for good works, she spent her time in acquiring an education. The early chapters were about the turn academe had taken in the late seventies and early eighties, about cranky degree subjects, low standards in polytechnics, evening classes in obscure crafts and Oriental martial arts, education by mail and education by television.

Flashback chapters told of Una’s youth in Golders Green. The only daughter of the prosperous owner of a department store and his wife, she grew up ignorant, spoiled, and sheltered. It was at the only concert she had ever attended that she met her future husband, a composer on the lookout for a healthy, undemanding bride.

Two sons were born to them. They lived in North London, in Highgate. Una was never able to hold her own in the conversations her husband had with his intellectual friends and she turned out not to be as good a cook and housekeeper as he had hoped for and a less than adequate mother. At the same time, her pretensions grew, and when the family moved to Somerset, Una began investigating the possibilities of further education in order to keep up with her husband.

When she got to this point, Ursula walked into the study and asked for an explanation.

“You can do the explaining,” he said. “I don’t understand what this is about.”

She told him and he denied it. Una had dark hair, she was forty-six to Ursula’s forty-four, she lived in Somerset, her husband was a composer younger than she, and she had sons, not daughters.

“It’s still based on me,” Ursula said.

“Nonsense.”

“Why did you do it?” She corrected herself. “Why are you doing it?”

“It is you who are doing it, Ursula. Still, it’s a recognized phenomenon. People wish to identify themselves with characters in fiction, still more to find characters they can allege are based on themselves. I don’t know why, but it’s probably vanity. Vanity and a desire to be the center of attention.”

She asked him not to publish it. He laughed and told her she was imagining things. But he did change Una’s name to Imogen, Ursula and Una strictly being the only two English Christian names for women beginning with a U. He also made Imogen childless and her studies in social sciences rather than fine arts.

Ursula had typed six chapters but broke off in the middle of the seventh. She told him she would do no more. She would never type another line for him, and she waited for him to ask how, then, she justified her existence as sharer in his income. But he never did. That wasn’t his way; that was the last thing he cared about.

No one else could have read his handwriting, so he went into Barnstaple and bought himself a typewriter. As a journalist all those years before, he had been a two-finger typist and he managed. The result wasn’t fit for his agent’s eyes or Robert Postle’s, and Rosemary, who typed for a living, was found to take on Ursula’s job.

Hand to Mouth was published in the autumn of 1984. The reviews were disappointing. Ursula waited for some friend or acquaintance or even gossip columnist to point out the similarities of character and way of life between Imogen and herself. But no one did.

“I’ve read Hand to Mouth ,” Sam said, “and I wouldn’t have said Imogen was a portrait of you. She’s not in the least like you.”

“Her life was like mine was then. You didn’t know me then. She used my turns of phrase. She dressed as I dressed.”

“There’s a story about Somerset Maugham and Hugh Walpole,” he said. “Maugham based a character directly on Walpole. The self-opinionated critic Alroy Kear was Walpole to the teeth, barely a feature or a character trait altered. When Cakes and Ale was already in print, at proof stage, Maugham gave him a proof, and as Walpole sat down to read it that same night, he recognized himself in every cruel detail. There was nothing to be done except sue, but he didn’t sue. It was said to have ruined his life; he was never the same again, never got his confidence back. And he had thought Maugham his friend.”

“Well, I’d thought Gerald was my husband. I never really spoke to him much after that. That was the end.”