Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

She knew it would be no more than five minutes before he opened the passenger door and got in beside her. He would be there in five minutes. It was, in fact, three minutes. The interior light came on and she saw her face in the rearview mirror, ravaged, aged, the mouth blue, as from hypothermia.

He got into the car, closed the door, put his hand on her knee. The light went out and deep darkness came. He took her hand and touched the palm with his tongue.

As if she was very tired, as if she was ill, she said in a weary voice, “It’s no use.” She took her hand away and pushed his hand away. “I can’t. Not tonight. Not ever.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.”

“I do not.”

“The things you said.”

She could see his face only as a vague blur, but she caught the gleam of an eye.

“That was a game,” he said. “You know that. That was the game we play. You like it; I like it. It turns us on.”

“No.”

“You liked it before. It’s happened before.” He was urgent. He was panicking. “For God’s sake. I didn’t mean any of it. I love his writing. I loved that book. You must know I didn’t mean those things.”

She tried to be calm, articulate, partly succeeded. “You said them. I don’t suppose you did mean them. But that doesn’t matter. They were said and they can’t be unsaid. I would never forget them. I will never forget. I can’t help it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I apologize. I’m deeply, truly sorry.” He sounded it. He sounded how she would have hated him to sound at the beginning of it, humble, penitent, afraid. “Please let me unsay them. Come back all I said, can’t we say that?”

“I would if I could.” What’s done cannot be undone, she thought.

“Then say it. You can.”

“I can’t. It was the one place you shouldn’t have stabbed, that’s all.”

“Sarah, I don’t understand you.”

“I’m going home now. Good-bye.”

He began to protest. She got out of the car, went around the front, opened the passenger door, and stood there, waiting. It took him a moment, but he got out. She didn’t look at him, though he was quite clearly visible out here in the lamplight. Back in the car, she started the engine, pressed the switch to demist the windows. By the time she had driven out into the street, he was gone; he was nowhere.

Her head hurt behind her eyes. She needed some relief for pain, but she didn’t know what. Rain began when she was halfway home. The rhythmic swish of the wipers passing to and fro, to and fro, signified a dreadful meaninglessness. She carried the book into the house. It was only a few yards, but she and the book were soaked. She hadn’t cried for years, but she cried when the front door was closed. She dropped onto the floor in the hall, weeping in the dark, her father’s book, a wet, soggy pulp, pressed against her face.

27

What did Scheherezade do after she had told the thousand and first story? Did safety kill the creative impulse in her? Of course not. She began to write. One day the stories she wrote down will come to light and they will be a great improvement on the first thousand because security nourishes talent better than peril.

—HAMADRYAD

THICK FOG PERVADED SARAH’S DREAM, BUT SHE WAS SOMEWHERE IN the country, not on the beach, and there was no color. It was like a black-and-white film, or gray and dark gray. They walked toward each other, she and Adam Foley, emerging out of the fog, met, stood apart. He said, “I never said those things. That was my double saying them.” “You haven’t got a double,” she said, and she felt nothing for him, no desire, no challenge. The fog had condensed and clustered on her arms and hands. She looked down and saw that her whole body glittered with waterdrops like glass from a shattered windscreen.

“He hasn’t a double. There’s no one like him,” her father’s voice said. Then she saw her father where Adam had been. She knew it was her father, but he was young; he looked like Stefan and perhaps also like someone she had never known, someone who died horribly before she was born. “I put it behind me, or I tried,” her Stefan-Desmond-father said. “But it was always in the mist that I saw him.”

She was lonely, with no remedy. She asked herself if she wanted Adam and had to answer honestly that she didn’t; she never wanted to see him again. The house would be sold and she would never go back; she would never see Rosie and Alexander and Vicky again. Or the white mist that came in from the sea. Or the rhododendrons and the white razor shells, the black mussel-shell sand and the island lying becalmed on the flat gray water.

Did she have any friends? Masses of acquaintances, yes. Other lecturers. A sister and a sister’s partner. An uncle, who had his own life, his own children. An aunt she would never meet and cousins she had no wish to know. As usual—and she acknowledged this—she left her mother till last, had almost forgotten her mother.

The file on Gerald Candless was complete. Or as complete as she could manage. She leafed through the material, newspaper photocopies, her notes, photographs she had brought from Lundy View House, synopses she had made of her father’s books and her own attempts at beginning her book, Jason Thague’s reports, the Candless family tree, the Ryan family tree. She knew everything about him except why. She knew of his childhood, his parents, his stepfather and his brothers and sisters, his school days, his first job and his war service, his job after the war, his moving out of his family’s home, and his disappearance.

What she didn’t know was why he had disappeared and why he had taken on that new identity.

Her memoir would have to be written without that knowledge. With a week to go before her new term started, she sat down at the word processor early in the morning and began. When she had produced two thousand words, she broke off and wrote a letter to Robert Postle. She told him she was sorry about the long delay, that she had had to do research, but now she had made a serious beginning and had set herself a deadline of May. The end of May, she added.

While she was writing Carlyon-Brent’s address on the envelope, her mother phoned. Sarah thought she must be at Lundy View House and asked if it was snowing. Somewhere or other, she had seen snow forecast for the West Country. Ursula said no, not unless it also was in Kentish Town. They sorted it out and Sarah was more interested by the coincidence of her mother’s being in Bloomsbury while she was addressing a letter to the same place than by her reason for the call.

But then it occurred to her that Ursula ought to know what she had discovered, should have information about all these new relations. To be fair, she should have advance warning of what she would read in the memoir.

“Look, if you’re in London for a bit why don’t you come over here tomorrow evening? I’ll get Hope, too. I’ve got something to tell you.”

It came to her that mothers always took that to mean a forthcoming engagement or even a marriage. Something sexual, anyway. Sarah was so preoccupied with thinking she would never be sexual again that she didn’t take much notice of Ursula’s saying she had something to tell her, too.

“You haven’t sold the house?”

“Hardly. It’s only been on the market two weeks.”

Hope arrived with her head tied up in a scarf because Fabian had said her fur hat made her look like Boris Yeltsin.

“I’m sure Ma will think I’m going to announce my engagement.”

“You’re not, are you?”