The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (21 page)

For infidelity was undreamed of among the Wicks and their connections. The sexual revolution that began in the sixties hadn't touched them, even supposing they knew that it was taking place. But it had touched Ian Wick, or something had, and led him into adultery. This was the news Jean brought to Ursula and
adultery
was her word. Ian had fallen in love with a young cashier at the bank, had spent nights with her, been away for weekends with her, and now wanted to marry her.

Ursula, of course, had no answers. And Jean's story of Ian's withdrawal from sex struck painful chords in her own recent experience. Jean came out with it all, no holds barred—Ian's refusal to share a bed with her, his unexplained absences, his apparent contentment, as if he had some other distant source of happiness. As he had, as he had. And as Ursula listened, helpless to console, she could think only of these parallels. When Jean had gone home (determined to take a taxi all the way to Sydenham at Ian's expense), she wondered she hadn't seen it before.

Gerald didn't want her because he had someone else. “Someone else” was Jean's expression until, her story progressing, she began using a name, and Ursula, with her newfound habit of questioning the words and expressions she used, found it absurd, almost comical, as if this combination of words could only properly apply to an illicit paramour. “Another woman” was almost as silly. Yet a woman there must be, a girl, a lover, a mistress, out there, a “someone else” intervening in her marriage. All the conditions of Ian's defection fit Gerald, except that of frequent absence.

When he was away from the house, Sarah and Hope were almost always
with him. He had never, so far as she knew, taken them on visits to his publishers, but he seldom went to his publishers. Would he take her children to visit his mistress?

A Paper Landscape
was published in 1968, and he had already begun writing his next novel. In that year, he also became deputy literary editor of a Sunday newspaper. The position brought books for review every week, and Ursula had plenty to read. She read so much fiction that she suggested to Gerald—jokingly, of course, but attempting to talk to him of things he knew about and liked—that they ought to make her a judge in the newly instituted Booker Prize.

“The other judges might have something to say about that,” he said.

She hadn't understood. She hadn't wanted to. “Because I'm your wife, you mean?”

“Because you're hardly competent, are you?”

Another time, when he saw her reading a novel, his review of which had appeared in the paper the previous Sunday, he asked her if she really understood what she was reading.

“I think so,” she said, tense already, expecting the insult.

He looked her up and down, the way he had recently acquired, the way a designer might view a model newly dressed in his latest creation. But he had no longer any interest in her appearance. He looked for something else, though she didn't know what.

“Should I,” she tried, “should I try reading your critique?”

His face went dark with anger. “Critique,” he said. “Are you French? Are you trying to impress me? It is a notice. A notice or a review. Can you remember that?”

Before he began his new novel, he had a title for it. When he had written two chapters, he asked her if she would type it for him. No taking it for granted this time, and she wondered why not. Was he for some reason placating her?

She had no room of her own in the house in Holly Mount. The house was really too small for them and he, of course, had the room intended as a dining room as his study. She was sitting in the living room, reading, and the children were asleep. He had given them their tea and bathed them and put them to bed. Often she had thought of asserting herself here, but to take
these offices upon herself would have meant physically tearing the little girls from him.

Her heart quailed at the thought; she recoiled from it. He fed them, bathed them, told them their bedtime story, and began writing at 7:30. Just before ten, he walked in with his hands full of sheets of paper, paper whose edges weren't even aligned, but clutched in a bundle, held it out to her and asked her to “do what you have so kindly done before.” She could hardly believe her ears.

“It's to be called
A Messenger of the Gods
,” he said. “Would you get it into some sort of order for me, Ursula? Decode my scrawl?”

For the first time for months, he had used her Christian name. She stared at him, unsmiling, but put out her hand for the paper. There was an eagerness in his face that made him look younger, an enthusiasm. And she understood. He was pleased; he was happy. He had his title, and he had completed two chapters with which he was satisfied. This was his life; this was everything, this and his children. He told her because he had to tell someone. No doubt, he would prefer to tell that woman, the “someone else,” his mistress, but she wasn't there.

“I'll start on it tomorrow,” she said.

As the chapters came to her, she looked in the text, the story, for evidence of adultery. Already, at that time, she had heard him say—or, rather,
seen
him say, for she had read it in a magazine interview—that everything that happened to him went into his fiction. She found nothing. And then she realized something. He
never
wrote about marital infidelity. He seldom wrote about marriage, except peripherally, and although she had no means of knowing it then, this rule or inhibition was to prevail. He was never to write much about marriage or married life until the fateful
Hand to Mouth
in 1984, and even in that novel, though there was unhappiness and strife and incompatibility, though sex was important and sexual acts occurring, there was no unfaithfulness.

But then, when those chapters came to her in the early spring of 1969, this was still far in the future. This time, she encountered Annie Raleigh, shivered and trembled at his descriptions of her desires, looked in vain for adultery. But its absence might only mean that he was deferring the use of this particular experience, this perhaps
new
experience, until a later date, a
later book. She typed his novel, she watched him, and she thought it coincidence that while she was tormented by sexual hunger, he had happened to write about a woman with a similar need.

She nevertheless repelled the advances of a young poet he invited to dinner and who followed her out to the kitchen while Gerald and Colin Wrightson and Beattie Paris discussed who would be candidates for the Booker. She kissed the poet back but stopped there and told him no, no, she wouldn't go out for a drink with him, see him again, no, no, definitely not. That night, though she had never before done such a thing nor knew how it was done, she masturbated. Otherwise, she would never have slept.

She watched him. She listened. It was the beginning of that fascination with him that was to replace love. She thought about him constantly. If the girls were taken to see “a lady,” wouldn't they betray him? She even asked Sarah, though she hated herself for asking.

“Daddy takes us to see Miss Churchouse, silly,” said Sarah.

Not Adela, who everyone said preferred women. Not Adela, who had threatened to chain herself to the Home Office railings over homosexual law reform. Jealous as she was, and made unreasonable by jealousy, as she knew, she still couldn't believe Gerald would sleep with that scatty fifty-year-old, she of the diaphanous garments and bead strings, who took out her “partial” in other people's bathrooms and left it grinning on the basin.

It wasn't Adela. She watched him and listened to him. She had taken to being present in the girls' bedroom while he told them their bedtime story, hoping to pick up some clue. If Sarah and Hope didn't want her there, they didn't say, only bade her keep quiet and not make a disturbance by moving about the room, picking up toys.

The stories he told them were serials. She couldn't remember now, twenty-eight years later, which ones he had told them that spring when Sarah was three and a half and Hope was nearly two, only that though Hope was really too young to understand, she seemed to follow it. That story quarter hour was the only time boisterous Hope was silent. What happened in those stories had disappeared almost entirely from Ursula's mind. She could just about remember that one involved an old man who sent messages by carrier pigeon to a little girl at the other end of the country and the other concerned a child who was sent up chimneys by a harsh master. This last
owed a lot to Charles Kingsley's
The Water Babies
, not to mention Blake's verses in
Songs of Innocence
, but she hadn't read those then.

There was nothing in the stories about a “someone else.” How could there be? How had she ever imagined there could be?

Gerald gave her plenty of money. They had a joint account, and he never questioned what she spent. If he noticed what she spent, he didn't say, but she didn't think he was much interested in money. He wanted, he had sometimes said, a nice house to live in, a good house in a beautiful place. That was all he wanted to do with money. Foreign travel held no attractions for him. He disliked the theater and loathed opera. He bought books, but most of the books he wanted were gifts. One publisher had given him the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, and another one gave him the complete unabridged
Oxford Dictionary.
Their car was a Morris station wagon, because that was more convenient for transporting children and their paraphernalia. Clothes were to keep him warm and keep him decent, and the watch he wore he had had for twenty years.

But she could have what money she wanted and do as she pleased with it. What she pleased to spend money on in the April of that year was a private detective.

Until the night he had died, she had never been in there. Sometimes she had thought it strange to have a room in one's house, a house one had lived in for twenty-seven years, that one never entered, whose shape one hardly knew, whose furniture one couldn't have described. Like a Bluebeard's chamber, which might contain nothing or might be full of bloody evidence. The difference was that she hadn't been curious. Once only, coming into the garden from the cliff path, she had walked across to that part of the house where his bedroom was and looked up at its windows, becoming aware for the first time—or else she had forgotten—that it was a corner room with one window facing north and the other west.

Daphne kept it clean. Daphne had changed his bed linen. A single woman, living with her sister, another single woman, and their mother, who had been widowed for fifty years, Daphne had never once commented on the fact that Gerald and Ursula slept in separate rooms. Perhaps it didn't strike her as remarkable. Perhaps she had no experience of how most married
couples lived. She cleaned the room, sang “Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron,” changed the sheets, referred to it as “Mr. Candless's room,” for though Ursula had become Ursula to her long ago, he had never become Gerald.

She suspected old Mrs. Batty of adhering to the Victorian principle of keeping out the night air, or, come to that, any air, for Daphne never opened windows, and she closed them if she found them open. Ursula opened all the casements in the room and leaned out of the one that faced west. The dark gray sea, an unrolled bolt of wrinkled silk, lay immobile, scarcely seeming to lap the pale, flat sand. It was misty, but the mist hung thin and distant, obscuring only the island and the far point.

Blinds at the windows. A bed with a quilt on it and a blue-and-white-striped cover on the quilt, two pillows in white cases, several hundred paperback books in a plain bookcase, a chest of drawers, an upright chair. The built-in cupboard she thought she remembered from coming in here nearly three decades before, but every bedroom had such a cupboard, so perhaps she didn't remember.

The two pictures, one facing the northerly window, the other opposite it, affected her unpleasantly. She had come a long way from that wide-eyed and optimistic girlhood when she would have said, had anyone asked her, that one should have pretty pictures on bedroom walls, if not puppies and kittens, certainly sunlit landscapes and Monet water lilies. But still she wondered at the taste and the mental processes of her late husband, who could have Piranesi's
Imaginary Prisons
on one wall and a painting of a lighthouse, a wild sea, and a sky of tumbling clouds on the other.

It was then that she remembered his clothes. He had been dead for three months, but it had never occurred to her to do anything about his clothes. She had forgotten their existence. She opened the cupboard and looked at them, the baggy trousers, shapeless jackets, two aged tweed suits, a heavy dark gray sheepskin coat. They smelled musty, of old wool. When someone died, you used to take their clothes to a rummage sale. Now you gave them to a charity shop.

She began taking them out of the cupboard. She laid them on the bed. When the cupboard was empty, she dusted the inside of it and closed the doors. She took the pictures downstairs, thinking them unsuitable for a
guest bedroom, and read printed on the back of the lighthouse painting “
Korsö fyr
by August Strindberg.” She was trained as an art historian, but she hadn't known Strindberg had painted anything. She carried the paintings—the reproductions—downstairs and laid them against one of the walls of the study, replacing them with a still life from her own room and
Evening Light
, an innocuous and rather charming picture by Robert Duncan of a girl in white and geese in a rose bed, a picture that someone had given Hope when she was twelve.

The clothes were heavy and she had to make three trips. First to the kitchen. Later, she would put them in the boot of the car, then drop them off at Oxfam when next she went to the shops. Before you disposed of clothes, you had to go through the pockets. The idea brought her a wry amusement, because this was exactly the situation where the wife or widow finds the letter that reveals an unsuspected love passage. The mistress's assignation note from years before. Ursula smiled at the thought, because she knew she would find no letter, or anything else of that kind.