Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“This place” is the large, airy ground-floor flat of a house in Crouch End with a big patio and a garden full of fruit trees. The author of Hamadryad and Purple of Cassius bought it for Hope when she qualified as a solicitor seven years ago. She had come second in her year in the Law Society’s exams and before that had come down from Cambridge with a first-class honors degree. Her sister is Sarah, two years her senior, and a lecturer in women’s studies at the University of London.

“Sarah has a flat in Kentish Town. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘I wish I was a rich man and could buy you homes in Mayfair or Belgravia.’ He was always thinking of us. When we were children, he was with us all the time. If we cried in the night, it was he who got up to comfort us. He played with us and read to us and talked to us all the time. I’ve wondered since when he got time to write his books. When we were asleep, I suppose.

“He never punished us. I mean, it’s laughable even to think of such a thing. And he used to get so angry when he heard of people who smacked their kids. I don’t mean seriously abused them, I mean a little smack. That was the only time we saw him angry.”

Talking to Hope Candless, you might be forgiven for concluding she and her sister had no mother. Or had a mother who left this paragon, ran off with the milkman, and abandoned them when they were little. But Ursula Candless is alive and well and living in the north Devon house her husband left her.

“A lot of people would say she was lucky,” says Hope. “After all, women are always complaining their husbands won’t look after the kids or even help. One hears about all these fathers who never see their children from Sunday evening till Friday evening, not to mention the ones the Child Support Agency has to chase after. No, I think my mother was a fortunate woman.”

Ursula threw the paper down in disgust. She would have read no more if Pauline hadn’t come into the kitchen at this point. Pauline greeted Daphne with a brisk “Good morning,” seized the paper, and, as Ursula had feared, read the rest of it aloud.

“Where did you get to, Auntie—I mean, Ursula? ‘A fortunate woman,’ right. It goes on: ‘Has this happy childhood and devoted father made Hope want children of her own? And does a life partner have to be another Gerald Candless?

“ ‘ “I’m very monogamous,” she says. “I suppose you could say I haven’t had a problem forming a stable relationship, and that’s said to be the result of my sort of childhood and home life. As for children of my own, we shall have to see.” She laughs and then, remembering she shouldn’t be laughing, brings out the handkerchief again. “My partner and I haven’t actually discussed children.”

“ ‘Her partner is fellow lawyer Fabian Lerner. They met at Cambridge and have been together ever since.’

“ ‘ “Twelve years now,” says Hope. Is her smile a shade rueful? She adds, surprisingly, “We spend most weekends together and go away on holiday together, but we’ve never actually lived under the same roof. I expect you think that’s peculiar.”

“ ‘Perhaps. Or is it only that Hope’s significant other can’t match up to her all-too-significant father?’ Well, that’s a bit snide, isn’t it?”

“To say the least,” said Ursula.

“I expect you’re glad Hope and Fabian don’t live together, aren’t you? It wouldn’t be very nice to have that in the papers.”

Daphne Batty took the vacuum cleaner into the dining room, humming a song Ursula had never heard before called “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”

The day Pauline went home was bright and sunny and there were already a lot of people on the beach by nine in the morning. They came down the private cliff path from the hotel and out of the public car park behind the icecream kiosk and the beach-supplies shop. Some came from the village across the dunes and some from the caravan site at Franaton. The surfers, in their wet suits, had been out since before Ursula and Pauline got up. Pauline, looking up from her breakfast, wanted to know why Gerald had chosen to live here, since his roots weren’t in Devon. She had never asked that before. Ursula shook her head and said she supposed he liked it. Most people did.

“I’m sorry, Auntie Ursula, I keep forgetting it upsets you to talk about him. I know I’m always putting my foot in it. I shouldn’t have said that about women working, either, not with Sarah and Hope having such good jobs. You’ll be glad to see the back of me, I’m so tactless.”

“No, I won’t, my dear,” said Ursula untruthfully. “You’ve been very kind to me. I shall miss you.”

She gave Pauline a signed first edition of Orisons as a parting gift. The jacket with the drawing on it of a young woman on the steps of a Palladian temple was pristine. The book was probably worth three hundred pounds, and she hoped Pauline would realize this and not lend it to people or give it away, as she couldn’t exactly tell her its value.

“Will I understand it?” Pauline asked doubtfully. “Uncle Gerald was so clever.”

There was nowhere to park the car at the station in Barnstaple, so she got out for only a moment and kissed Pauline, and Pauline said anxiously that she hoped Ursula would be all right on her own. Ursula drove off quickly.

After driving around and around for about fifteen minutes, looking for a parking space, she finally found one. She walked into the town center and into the first hairdresser’s she saw. It was twenty years since she had been to a hairdresser. In the late seventies, she had started to grow her hair, for what reason, she could scarcely remember. It had been a low point in her life, one of the lowest. They had been at Lundy View House for seven or eight years and the girls were thirteen and eleven, something like that. She had wanted to become a different person, so she had set about losing the weight she had put on after Hope was born and began to grow her hair. Those were two ways in which you could change yourself without it costing you anything.

She lost fifteen pounds and her hair grew to the middle of her back, but she was still the same person, just thinner and with a plait that she twisted up on the back of her head. If Gerald or the children noticed, they never remarked on it. Her hair was mostly gray now. Salt-and-pepper, they called it. Silver threads among the gold, according to Daphne, who sang the appropriate song. It was wispy, with split ends, and rather alarming amounts came out when she brushed it. She asked the hairdresser to cut it all off, to cut it short, with a fringe.

When it was done, she had to agree with the hairdresser that it looked nice and that she looked a lot younger. At last, she looked different, having succeeded at what she had been unable to attain twenty years before. The hairdresser wanted to give her an ash-blond tint, but Ursula wouldn’t have that.

She did her shopping and drove home with the car windows wide-open. Now her hair was short, she wouldn’t have to worry about wind and rain and the plait falling down and pins scattering. Two or three hundred people must have been on the beach by two o’clock. It was warm but not hot, the sun by now being covered by a thin wrack of cloud. Even when the tide was as high as it could go, there was always enough beach, more than enough, for sun-bathers and castle makers and shell collectors and ballplayers.

Ursula, out for her walk, threaded her way among the recumbent bodies and the picnickers and the children and the dogs and headed south. For some reason, nearly all the people stayed up at the north end of the beach, and after walking for two hundred yards, she was alone. She repeated to herself, as she had often done, the last line of Shelley’s best-known, even hackneyed, verse.