Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

An angioplasty was proposed. It was a method for unblocking an artery by inflating a kind of balloon device that had been passed into it by means of a catheter. Gerald liked the idea because the process could be carried out without surgery. It failed. The artery was impenetrable.

Ursula drove him home and he said nothing about her driving. He was deeply depressed. For most of his life, he had enjoyed robust good health and now his strength had been taken away, like Samson’s. For most of his working life his books had been received first with enthusiasm, later with rapture. But the critics had disliked Half an Hour in the Street , sneered at A White Webfoot , and damned The Mezzanine Smile with faint praise. Worse, they had given it short paragraphs at the foot of pages.

Back at home, he did no work. The strong medication he had been put on had a side effect of bringing him dreadful dreams. He said only they were dreadful, not what their content was. She wondered if he still had that recurring dream in which he was in the stone tunnel and first one end, then the other, was blocked, but she didn’t ask.

She felt nothing for him. No pity, no interest, of course no love. One good thing was that, mysteriously, she never felt him to be an encumbrance or a nuisance. He was her fate. She looked after him with great care, keeping him warm, comfortable, and suitably fed, as she might an aging once-loved pet animal. While in her company, he was dull, spiritless. He had done that himself. By a long process of attrition and occasional bouts of violence, he had worn away her love and even her liking for him, had silenced her, made her wary of speaking to him, and the result was that he had nothing to say to her. Symptoms of illness were occasionally discussed, the weather, the state of the tides.

Of those writer friends of his, Roger Pallinter was dead, Jonathan Arthur’s wife had died and he had married again and gone to live in France, and Adela Churchouse was too mad to go out alone. Frederic Cyprian was reported as being in an advanced state of Alzheimer’s; Beattie Paris had written his autobiography and died the day it was published. Only the Wrightsons still came. Gerald saw few people but his faithful daughters. They came every weekend, and Robert Postle occasionally came, talked publishing gossip to Gerald, and walked with her on the beach.

Sometimes she felt she must escape, get out, but she had never in all her life been to a cinema on her own and she wasn’t going to start now. She had had her fill of evening classes. Gerald hadn’t been precisely rude to the neighbors (one family at the top of the cliff road, two others in houses below the hotel), but he had left them in no doubt that he was humoring them, was bored, and they were afraid of him. They wouldn’t come again and they wouldn’t ask her without him.

Well before the height of the season, the hotel advertised for baby-sitters. When she told Gerald she had thought of doing a baby-sitting stint once or twice a week—to get out of the house, to escape—he flew into a rage. That was a job for peasants, for the likes of Daphne Batty. It was scarcely a step up from being a charwoman. She had never heard him use the word peasant before. His heavy, dark face was suffused with blood. The veins stood out on his forehead and temples like purple roots. She said if he felt like that, of course she wouldn’t do it. But she wondered later what that “peasant” and “charwoman” talk had meant.

She knew very little about his parents; he never talked about them. He had told her their names, that they were dead, that his father had been a master printer and he was their only child. Now she wondered if his mother had gone out cleaning—or was she being too “psychological”? But she didn’t wonder much; she didn’t really care.

Then he started his next novel, the one that was to be his last, Less Is More. The difference in him was startling. He was happy, looked younger, regained some energy. He wrote every day, completed the manuscript in six months. When his publishers wanted him to accept the invitation to attend the literary festival at Hay-on-Wye, he agreed happily, looking forward to meeting acquaintances there and to reading aloud, something he enjoyed and did well.

The days when she might have gone with him, when he might even have asked her, were long gone. He never rang while he was away, though the girls sometimes had long telephone conversations with him. On his return, he said nothing about the festival, how it had been, whom he had met there, and, contrary to his usual practice of taking a rest, then devoting time to research, he immediately began a new book.

Or so she supposed. He didn’t tell her what he was doing. And this in itself was strange, for, no matter how bad their relationship had been in the past, even after the fracas of Hand to Mouth , he had always announced to her his commencement of a new novel. He hadn’t been able to help himself, she had often thought, he was so happy on that day, those days, that first week. His energy overflowed. If there had been anyone else there to tell, he would have, but there was only herself, so it was she he told.

“I started the new one today.”

And she had never quite been able to find it in her heart to say, “Who cares?” Or “So what?” His enthusiasm touched her, in spite of everything.

“It’s going well. I’ve made a good start. I’m pretty pleased with it.”

Of course, as time went on, the anxieties began and the doubts, the self-torment. She could see it in his face, though he seldom expressed it. Since she had stopped typing for him, he never spoke further about what he was writing, only occasionally of the practicalities. He was running out of paper. He was going out to take his manuscript to the typist.

But this time, after his return from Hay, though she could tell he was working frenetically, he said nothing about starting a new novel. She wondered if it wasn’t a novel, if it was his autobiography, though he had once said he would never write one. About the same time, he told her he had invited a man called Titus Romney and his wife for a weekend. Romney was a writer he had met at Hay.

“A fan,” he said.

“Of yours, you mean?”

“Of course I mean that. I’m not likely to be a fan of his, am I? I’d never heard of him till a month ago.”

She shrugged. Then she remembered who Romney was. Robert Postle had mentioned him. Wasn’t he one of Postle’s authors?

“You needn’t worry—they won’t stay here. They can go to the hotel. I suppose we can give them lunch? My girls can come down and have a bit of fun tormenting him.”

“How very pleasant.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gerald said. “He’s a wimp.”

At his next checkup, the cardiologist recommended a coronary bypass. It was possible that two arteries would need to be bypassed. If Gerald didn’t want that, they could put him on stronger medication and his life would be indefinitely prolonged. But it was unlikely in that case that much exertion would ever be possible for him, and there might be unpleasant side effects—bad dreams, sleeplessness. While, with the bypass …

“I’ll have it,” Gerald said. No doubt he remembered the bad dreams he already had. “When can you do it?”

She had been there with him. They must have presented to this heart doctor the picture of the long-married, devoted couple. The wife much younger, anxious but practical, a capable nurse.

“I’d like to tell you,” said the surgeon, “how much I admire your books.”

Gerald hadn’t known the man knew who he was. “Thanks very much,” he said.

The health insurance would pay. He could have the operation the following week. A nurse told him the healing of his leg, from which the veins would be taken, would be more troublesome than the site of the main surgery.