Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“As you say, Hope, your father is dead,” Ursula said.

Hope pulled on her coat, stumbling, scrubbing the hair out of her eyes, wiping at her eyes with her fists. Sarah did nothing. She didn’t speak. Ursula lay back against the cushions, white-faced. Hope got the door open and pulled it shut behind her, crashed down the stairs. The front door slamming rocked the house.

Sarah rubbed her arm where Hope had punched her. She looked at her mother, wanting her to sit up and smile and say something about how childish Hope could be and she didn’t know what had got into her and it would all soon blow over. But Ursula said none of those things. She looked deathly ill. The brightness of her appearance when she had first arrived, the gloss of new clothes and freshly done hair and, yes, of happiness surely, all that had faded and she looked stricken. It was as if lightning had passed through her, felled her, deprived her of some vital force.

“Ma,” Sarah said, and then said, “Mother.”

Ursula moved. She raised her shoulders, dropped them, made a wincing face. Then she shook herself, or perhaps she shuddered. “I must go.”

“Look, she didn’t—” Sarah had been going to say that Hope didn’t mean it, but she remembered that was what Adam had said, and his saying it had made no difference. “I mean, she did mean it at the time, but she’ll get over it. Are you okay?”

“No. But I will be. One day. I, too, will get over it. I must go.”

“Would you like me to call you a taxi?”

All at once, Ursula became articulate, calm. “I can get a taxi in the street, Sarah. I don’t think that’s difficult, though I hardly know, I’ve been here so seldom. But I can get a taxi or I can walk to the tube station because I don’t want to stay here any longer. I don’t want to talk anymore, not now. There’s just one thing I want to say to you. I’ve never said it and perhaps I shouldn’t now, but I’m going to. I was deeply unhappy with your father—it was no marriage; it was nothing. He rejected me in every way after Hope was born, and if he never abused me physically, he—he struck me daily with his tongue. I’ll go now.”

Sarah stared at her. She got up mechanically and helped her mother into her coat. Ursula turned, her face close to Sarah’s, her eyes tired and sad. Sarah put her lips up to a cheek that was cold and rigid. The kiss wasn’t returned. Nothing more was said until they were downstairs, Sarah realizing too late that she had offered her mother no congratulations, no good wishes for her happiness. It was too late now.

“Look, Ma, I’ll be in touch. I don’t even know where you’re living. I haven’t got a phone number.”

“I was going to give you that, both of you,” said Ursula. “It can wait awhile, don’t you think? Good night.”

Upstairs in the flat, Sarah looked down into the street from the window. It was early yet, only nine. She saw Ursula walking along under the bare tree branches and then the rear lights of a taxi as it came out of a side turning. Her mother was out of sight by then, too far away for Sarah to see if she got into the taxi or not, and when the doorbell rang five minutes later, it seemed as if she must have come back. She had forgotten something or regretted her parting words. Sarah picked up the intercom, said, “I’ll open the door for you, Mother.”

There was silence, then a crackle, then a voice said, “It’s not your mother; it’s Jason.”

“I thought maybe you wouldn’t let me in,” he said.

Like her mother, he had had his hair cut. He looked healthier, as if he had been eating. The spots had gone. He handed her an envelope.

“It’s your check. I’m giving it back. I didn’t do the work, so you shouldn’t be paying me.”

“Do you want a drink?” she said.

“I brought a bottle of wine. It’s what’s in my pocket—I haven’t suddenly gotten fat. I’ve got a job—well, it’s part-time, on account of I’ve gone back to school.”

“You’ve gone back to college?”

“I will have. When term starts. Not in Ipswich, here in London. Have some wine?”

She had had too much already. She shook her head and he smiled, his eyebrows up. “You keep it for tomorrow then. Did you find out why your dad changed his name?”

She told him about Stefan, showed him the file, then the two thousand words she had written. He said, “There isn’t going to be any more to discover, is there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re never going to know why. D’you want to know what my nan said when I told her? She said that he must have done something terrible to a member of his family. Or one of them had done something terrible to him.”

Sarah nodded. She said in a stifled tone, “If anyone had ever told me I’d be pleased to see someone who called his grandmother ‘my nan,’ I’d never have believed them.”

“You’re a snob, Sarah.”

“I know.”

He laughed. “I’d better go. I’m still living in Ipswich for another week, and my last train’s at eleven.”

She hesitated, thought of them all suddenly, her dead father, her mother, Hope, Adam Foley’s hurtful insults, and she said in a small voice, not looking at him, “Would you like to stay the night?”

28

Plagiarism is more often the outcome of desperation than of villainy.

—THE BRIDEGROOM’S DOORS

MANUSCRIPTS FROM TWO OF HIS AUTHORS ARRIVED ON ROBERT POSTLE’S desk on the same day in the first week of August. The one that came through an agent, he hadn’t expected for a month or more; the other, which was sent to him directly, he had almost given up hope of ever seeing.

Thankful Child: A Memoir of My Father seemed about twice as long as The Spoiled Forest , which would suit Robert’s requirements very well. Titus Romney’s manuscript was the novel expected as the second under the terms of a two-book contract. At first glance, it looked as if it wouldn’t make two hundred pages, but Robert was gratified to note its early arrival just the same. When last he had spoken to Romney on the subject, the author had told him he was bereft of ideas and suffering from writer’s block. But that, Robert reflected, not altogether happily, had been nearly a year ago. Time flew.

He didn’t much care for Sarah’s title. She was playing with that line from Lear , of course. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” A couple of months ago, she had hinted to him that the memoir would make a sensational impact. Her father hadn’t really been called Gerald Candless; he had changed his name and identity at the age of twenty-five. There had been a lot more in the same vein, but Robert wondered, as he had wondered at the time, if Gerald Candless had been sufficiently a celebrity for the tabloids to get excited about it. Perhaps. It would depend on what she had found out and had written. Anyway, that would be a problem for Carlyon-Brent’s publicity department, not him.

Ursula had sold Lundy View House and was living with a bookseller in London. Robert had expected to meet the man at Hope’s wedding, but he wasn’t there. More to the point, Ursula wasn’t there. If some people asked why not, Robert hadn’t been among them, but a woman called Pauline told him Hope had fallen out with her mother and the breach wasn’t mended yet.

“Personally, I’d have expected Auntie Ursula to show more respect for my uncle’s memory.”

Then Sarah had introduced him to a man she called Stefan, who seemed rather too old for her, but that was all right, because, later, while she was explaining to him yet again that the book wouldn’t be done by May, after all, a much younger chap turned up who was obviously her boyfriend. One of those awful names, Gareth or Darren—no, Jason.