Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“ ‘The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ ”

She had learned it at school, along with the other poems children did learn then (though not later, and certainly not now): Masefield’s “Dirty British coaster” and that “Heraclitus” thing Hope had put in Gerald’s death announcement and “The Lady of Shalott” and Horatius saying, “Draw down the bridge, Sir Consul, with all the speed ye may.” “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings” was something else to remind her of Gerald, especially “the wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.”

“ ‘Round the decay,’ ” she said aloud in the empty silence, “ ‘Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ ”

This afternoon, she walked rather farther than usual. It was good weather for walking. Her mother had been a great walker in those pretty Surrey hills, though not her father, that stout, breathless man who used a car like the disabled use a wheelchair. Her mother said that if he could have gotten a car inside the house, he would have driven from room to room in it. They were both long dead, had been oldish when she was born, their youngest child, their afterthought. It would be easy to blame them now, but it hadn’t been their fault; it had been hers, all her own work. Looking back, she could barely understand that youthful folly.

To have been so unadventurous, so idle and accepting of idleness as a way of life, accepting of ignorance, blinkered, an ostrich girl, with her head not in sand but in trash. Ripe for Gerald Candless. Flattered, honored, surprised at such amazing good fortune. A lamb to the abattoir. Waiting for him like prey waits for the lion, watching it come closer, circle, and approach, but not escaping, not knowing escape was possible, still less desirable.

Ursula wheeled around on the beach, but counterclockwise this time, so that her return journey would be made close up against the dunes, the sandy valleys and the green rounded hassocks, the deep shadowy wells and the grassy hillocks.

There were always couples in those dunes, making love, at all hours of the day. If not exactly making love, doing all but. Locked in each other’s arms, kissing, rolling this way and that. Not for the first time, Ursula wondered what it would be like, to be in love with someone who was in love with you and go into the dunes with him and lie kissing him and holding him for hours and hours. Not get bored or tired of it, but want it more than anything in the world.

She began to climb the path that led up to the hotel. It was shallower and longer than the path that went up to her house and the other houses on the cliff. In place of the ragwort and the mesembryanthemum that grew alongside her path, there were fuchsia hedges here and morning glory climbing the low stone walls. Ursula was very hot when she reached the top and she expected her face must be pink and shiny, but at least her hair was tidy. It was very comforting to think that she never again had to worry about her hair.

She would call herself Ursula Wick today, she decided. “My name is Ursula Wick,” she would say. And perhaps she would revert to this maiden name of hers for the future and drop the Candless, which immediately stamped her as the famous writer’s widow. She opened the gate and entered the hotel garden. The borders around the lawns were filled with hydrangea, bright blue alternating with bright pink. Ugly, Ursula thought, even worse up here than they look from the beach. Hydrangea worked like litmus paper, she had read somewhere. You could put alkaline stuff on them and the pink ones turned blue, or else it was the other way around and the blue ones turned pink. In chemistry at school, they had used litmus paper, but she couldn’t remember which color was alkaline and which acid. It probably wasn’t true about the hydrangea, anyway.

She walked around to the front of the hotel and a man in a brown uniform opened the doors for her. It was rather dark inside and very cool. Arrows up on the walls pointed to the indoor swimming pool, the table tennis, the shop, the hairdresser’s, the bar. She and Pauline had had a drink in that bar, but they hadn’t stayed for dinner. She wasn’t sure where the dining room was. There were glass cases on the walls full of jewelry and ceramics and beachwear.

A young woman with long red hair stood behind the reception desk, checking something in a ledger against a computer screen. She looked up as Ursula approached, and she said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Candless.”

So much for introducing herself as Ursula Wick.

“We were all so sorry to hear about Mr. Candless,” said the redheaded girl, then added very conventionally, “You have our deepest sympathy in your very sad loss. I believe Mr. Schofield did write to you to express the sympathy of the staff?”

Ursula nodded, though she couldn’t remember. Hundreds of letters had come.

“Now, how may I help you, Mrs. Candless?” said the girl in a very caring, earnest way.

“I want to know if you still need baby-sitters.”

The girl pursed her lips. They were juicy red lips, like the inside of a cut strawberry. “We always need them, Mrs. Candless, and especially at this time of the year. Did you wish to recommend someone?”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “Me.”

It took some sorting out, as Ursula had known it would if they knew who she was. She had to explain that, yes, she was serious, that she really would like to baby-sit for the children of hotel guests, say twice a week. She was fond of children. It would be a change; it would—and here, somewhat to her shame, she found herself obliged to use an excuse, the widow’s excuse of wanting to get out of the former marital home in the evenings. This the redheaded girl understood. The manager, Mr. Schofield, arriving opportunely, also understood.

“Anything we can do to help you in your bereavement, Mrs. Candless,” he said, as if he was doing her a favor instead of she him.

“Thank you for your letter, by the way,” she said.

“My pleasure,” said the manager, going rather red as he perhaps realized this wasn’t quite the thing to say.

“Start on Thursday, then,” the redheaded girl said, evidently adhering to the principle that the sooner therapy begins, the better. She put something down in her ledger. Ursula thanked them and wondered, as she made her way out to the road, what exchanges about her strange behavior had taken place between them as soon as she was out of earshot. Once back at Lundy View House, she went straight into the little room they called the morning room, where she had piled all the letters of condolence on the small round table.

The stamps on the envelopes told her that they had come from all over the world. It was a pity she didn’t know some boy or girl who collected stamps, but perhaps she would meet one when she started her baby-sitting. After all, it wouldn’t be babies, but children up to ten. Ursula fetched a large black plastic bag from a roll in the cupboard under the sink and a pair of scissors from the workbox, which had been her mother’s, in the living room.

She cut all the stamps off the envelopes, finding it a soothing and indeed enjoyable task. There were stamps from the United States and Australia, Sweden and Poland, Malaysia and Gambia. Some of them were very beautiful, with birds or butterflies on them. When she had finished, she had accumulated sixty-seven foreign stamps. She put them into a new envelope and then she dropped all the letters, all of them unopened, into the black plastic bag. It was a relief to have decided not to answer any of them.

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