Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“I’m sure,” Gerald said. “It’ll be a real breeze. I can’t wait.” In the car, on the way home, he said to her, “Not a word to my girls.”

“I’m not hearing this.”

“Yes, you are. You heard.”

He worked on whatever it was he was working on. Every morning and half the afternoon. She waited for him to say he was taking the manuscript to Rosemary, but he didn’t; he seldom went out, apart from taking a walk around the garden and to the cliff edge. He was typing it himself, of course, as he had typed all his work since she had refused to do it, but his typing was inadequate to pass muster. She heard from outside the study door the clatter of keys, and heard his muttered swearing when he made mistakes and had to do a line of x ’s.

It must be that he didn’t want Rosemary to see it. Would he want her to see it? She asked herself why she cared. Until recently, she had been quite indifferent about what he did, how he was, even if he lived or died. But then, at that point, she had almost offered to type his manuscript for him, to forget the pain and humiliation and perform this service for him as if Hand to Mouth had never happened. She hadn’t done that, but she had watched him and, to some extent, waited on him in a way she hadn’t for years.

His operation was to be on the Thursday. He accepted, knowing, without asking and without her telling him so, that she would accompany him to the hospital on Wednesday afternoon. And then she would go through all the motions of the anxious, loving wife, make the requisite phone call on the Thursday evening, be told he was “comfortable,” phone again the next morning, visit as soon as they said she could.

She had forgotten the Romneys were coming. He hadn’t. But such visitors were no trouble. She always cooked a roast for him and the girls, and it would only mean a larger joint of meat. He sat with the proofs of Less Is More on his knees and the Encyclopedia Britannica on the table beside him, a man with a bad heart, a man who, given what he was and the mind he had, must dwell sometimes on the journey his blood made throughout his body, squeezing its way through constricted passageways, on each rotation still reaching its destination, escaping again, once more penetrating the infinitesimally narrower passages.

Until the thick-walled tunnel closed at both ends.

“Do you think pity is akin to love?” she said to Sam when he was back with her at Lundy View House. “It’s what they say.”

“It’s what they used to say,” he corrected her. “All those eighteenth-century heroines pitying their lovers. That was just a way of saying they loved them but not using a word that betrayed their own weakness.”

“You mean, if you pity someone, that means you’re stronger? I think I was stronger than Gerald in his last days. I did pity him, and that’s what it was, pity; it wasn’t love.”

“What was it he was writing? This Less Is More ?”

“No, it can’t have been,” she said. “He’d already gotten the proofs of that by the middle of June. He was correcting them when he died. I don’t know what it was. I looked for it after he was dead and I looked some more when I was sorting out all those manuscripts.” His puzzled look made her smile. “You’ll want to know how I could tell it wasn’t there. His typing. It was so bad. There wasn’t a messy manuscript among them; they’d all been typed by Rosemary or me.”

He had destroyed it himself, she decided. Whatever it was, autobiography, new novel, amalgam of both, he had gotten rid of it. With no means of burning anything that size in summer, he could simply have dumped it in his wastepaper basket for Daphne to empty.

“I’m glad I felt something for him at the end,” she said. “It wasn’t love; it was just a little warmth, a little pity.”

“Did you hope he wouldn’t die?” Sam asked.

“I didn’t think that far.” She was suddenly visited with courage, the nerve to ask him. It was all this talk of love and pity. And he was looking at her with such tenderness, from which all sentimentality, it seemed to her, was absent. “Sam,” she said, “you said to me when we first met that you wanted to be in love. Do you remember?”

He nodded.

“So I’m asking you … well, I’m asking if it’s happened. With me, I mean.”

She held her breath. She needed to because of his hesitation. If he hesitated, wasn’t it all up with her? Wasn’t this an indication that everything was at an end?

“I’m not in love,” he said at last. “And you’re not, are you?”

“I don’t know,” she said very quietly.

“I think I’m too old. Or I’ve had it before and can’t have it again. Something like that. It was absurd to expect it. I do love you; I do want you to live with me. I want to live with you, I think spend the rest of our lives together. Is that good enough?”

“Yes,” she said.

26

It is easier to excise letters cut in stone than to unsay what has been said.

—A PAPER LANDSCAPE

“YOU HAVEN’T READ A White Webfoot ?”

“No,” Stefan said, “I don’t know why. When was it published?”

“Nineteen ninety-two.”

“Ah, then I do know. That was the year my wife was so ill. I didn’t read much. I certainly didn’t read reviews, so I wouldn’t have known about it. And when the paperback came out—would that have been the following year?”

Sarah had checked that morning, before leaving for Plymouth. “Hardback publication was in October 1992, paperback in October 1993.”

“That was the month she died.” He was silent, then smiled at her. “You said he lived at Gaunton, didn’t you?”

“A house on the cliff, yes.”

“My sister Margaret went to stay at Gaunton in the summer with her daughter and her husband. At the Dunes Hotel. Is that anywhere near?”

“Next door,” she said. “A hundred yards away.”

“It was July. They might have seen each other and not have known.”

“Or have known,” said Sarah. “You wouldn’t know exactly when, would you?”

“I know they left the hotel on July the sixth, because they all came to see me here before going home.”

He had had a shock. She remembered the look on his face, the dazed look. The sleepwalking look. Before he went across to the hotel with those Romneys, he had been his normal self, and when he came back, the shock was there. A sight had stunned him. He had seen his sister and recognized her after forty-six years. She hadn’t known him, though. She would have come back with him if she had. The shock had gone to his heart. Had broken his heart?

“Tell me about your brother Desmond,” she said.

“All right. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“I don’t want anything,” she said.

Her father looked at her out of Stefan’s eyes. Their voices, that at first she had thought alike, really weren’t at all similar. Her father’s had been very deep, rich, with that underlying faint burr. Stefan, of course, had left Suffolk when he was only a little over two, when he must barely have been able to speak, and his voice was educated London. He watched her, looked away, then turned to her again as if making calculations.

“Desmond,” she said gently.

“Well, Desmond,” he said, “I think you know he was murdered.”

“Yes.”

“When John disappeared,” Stefan went on, “Desmond was twenty and living at home, as all the rest of us were. That is, James and his wife and baby, Margaret and Mary and I, and, of course, Mother and Joseph. Desmond and I shared a room. We Ryans were a very good-looking lot, tall, dark, regular features—not me, I was the ugly one—but Desmond was the best of us. People used to say all the girls would be after him, and maybe they were, but it wouldn’t have been of much interest to him.”