Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

The mist was lifting. Ursula knew the mist on this coast and the way it behaved and she understood from experience that it wouldn’t lift fully all day, but come and go, rise and fall. The white curtain had rolled up a little ways and thinned a little to let in pale, steamy shafts of sunshine. She could see the hotel now, its angry red, the gables too shallow and the roof tiles matching the geraniums that hung all over it in innumerable hanging baskets. The fog curtain disclosed it almost coyly, as if there were an audience on the beach longing for a glimpse of its beauties.

Her own house was briefly revealed. It was her own now. Not held in trust for her to live in, not merely affording her a life interest, but hers. And his future royalties were hers, and, apart from generous legacies to Sarah and Hope, all he possessed. The will had been much more of a shock than his death. She had thought about it on these beach walks of hers and now she believed he had made this will to make up to her for what he had done. He wasn’t showing her that he had loved her after all, but that he was in her debt. He owed her for taking her life and misusing it.

On the clifftop, Pauline had come out into the garden and was standing by the gate, waving. Ursula waved back, but less enthusiastically. Later on, she thought, she would do something seemingly out of character and take her niece to the hotel bar for a drink.

The mist descended again quite suddenly, as she had known it would, and hid the figure of Pauline, still waving.

3

A man believes everything he reads in the newspaper until he finds an item about himself that is a web of lies. This makes him doubt, but not for long, and he soons reverts to his old faith in the printed word.

—THE CENTRE OF ATTRACTION

THREE NEWSPAPERS WERE DELIVERED TO LUNDY VIEW HOUSE every morning. Ursula had kept the paperboy on for Pauline to have something to read at breakfast, but once her niece was gone, she intended to cancel the delivery. It was something to look forward to, not seeing newspapers. She liked to look at the view of the beach while she was eating her grapefruit and her toast.

The sea was calm this morning and a deep clear blue, not streaked with emerald as it sometimes was, and the sky was a pale, luminous, unclouded blue. The tide was out, was still going out, and where the sand was still wet, a boy of about twelve was building an elaborate sand castle with a keep and turrets and a moat. A man with his two small children was trying to fly a large red-and-white kite, but there wasn’t enough wind to lift it off the beach. He reminded her of Gerald, who had also flown kites, who had built innumerable sand castles.

“Have you noticed,” said Pauline, looking up from the paper, “that no one ever points out a simple truth about unemployment. The fact is that half the unemployment is due to women working. If women didn’t work, men wouldn’t be out of work, but no one ever dares say this.”

“It wouldn’t be politically correct,” said Ursula.

“Did you ever want to have a job? Apart from working for Uncle Gerald, of course.”

“I once thought of taking on some baby-sitting at the hotel. They always want child-sitters.”

Pauline looked at her to see if she was serious. Ursula’s face was quite blank.

“But you didn’t?”

“Gerald didn’t care for the idea.”

“I’m not surprised. The wife of a famous writer looking after other people’s kids for a couple of pounds an hour!”

“It was three pounds,” said Ursula. “If you’ve finished, I’ll clear the table, because I like to do that before Daphne comes. No, sit there. I’ll do it. Read your paper.”

When she came back into the room to fetch the coffeepot, Pauline said, “There’s a letter in here about Uncle Gerald. Would you like to see it?”

“Not particularly.” Ursula had already suffered from her niece’s propensity for reading aloud, so she sighed a little before saying, “You read it to me.”

“It’s rather peculiar, quite a mystery. It says: ‘From the editor of Modern Philately. ’ ”

“The Times always does that.”

“Peculiar. Well, here goes. Listen. ‘Sir, I refer to your obituary of Gerald Candless, the novelist (Obituaries, July 10). The writer states that the late Mr. Candless was employed as a journalist on the Walthamstow Herald in the postwar years. I was chief subeditor of that newspaper from 1946 until 1953 and can assure you that if that humble organ had been so fortunate as to number a graduate of Trinity and future world-famous novelist among its staff, this is not a distinction I would have forgotten. I am afraid you are in error when you name Gerald Candless as a Walthamstow Herald “alumnus.” I am, sir, your obedient servant, James Droridge.’ What’s an alumnus?”

“Someone who is a former student at a university.”

“Oh. Why did they say Uncle Gerald worked for that newspaper if he didn’t?”

“I don’t know, Pauline. It’s just a mistake.”

A burst of song from the kitchen heralded Daphne Batty’s arrival. Ursula carried out the coffeepot to the strains of Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again.” Daphne had brought the Daily Mail with her, and while anxious for Ursula to read Mary Gunthorpe’s interview with Hope, she had no aspirations to read it to her. It was titled “Oh, My Beloved Father! The Loss of Hope.”

Ursula thought she might as well bow to the inevitable now. She remembered how Gerald had sometimes resolved not to read the reviews of his books in newspapers, but they had been impossible to avoid. Sooner or later, someone would ring up and tell him what was in them, or send them to him with passages underlined in red, or quote from them in letters. Daphne would leave the paper behind and Pauline would find it, and then she would be in for a worse ordeal. She began to read, with Daphne looking over her shoulder.

He was a tall, burly man with big features and a wide, ironic smile. She is slender and rose petal–skinned, her dark hair long and softly waved, her eyes almost too large for that heart-shaped face. Yet Hope Candless is the spitting image of her father, the celebrated novelist who died two weeks ago. There is the same intelligence in those same brown eyes, the same penetrating glance, and the same musical voice.

That voice has a catch in it now and those eyes are bright with tears. To her embarrassment, they spilled over as soon as she began to talk about him. Wearing a pink-and-white shirtwaister dress and white high-heeled sandals—impossible to imagine her in jeans and T-shirt—Hope, thirty, dabbed at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief. It was the first handkerchief I had seen since my grandmother died ten years ago. Hope’s had a pink H embroidered on it.

“I miss him so much,” she said. “He wasn’t just my father; he was my best friend. I really think that if I could have chosen just one person in all the world that I’d spend my life with, it would have been him. I suppose you think that’s totally mad?

“When my sister and I wrote that death notice that we put in the paper, we had to find an adjective that expressed what we felt. Beloved wasn’t strong enough, so we used adored, because we did adore him. And we had the lines from that Victorian poem because we really did tire the sun with talking.

“Isn’t it funny? Each one of us firmly believes she was his favorite. But I think he really loved us equally and he had so much love for us. I’m sorry, you must excuse me, the way I keep crying. He bought me this place, you know, and he bought a flat for my sister, too.”