The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (5 page)
Read The Chimney Sweeper's Boy Online
Authors: Barbara Vine
T
HREE NEWSPAPERS WERE DELIVERED TO
L
UNDY
V
IEW
H
OUSE
every morning. Ursula had kept the paperboy on for Pauline to have something to read at breakfast, but once her niece was gone, she intended to cancel the delivery. It was something to look forward to, not seeing newspapers. She liked to look at the view of the beach while she was eating her grapefruit and her toast.
The sea was calm this morning and a deep clear blue, not streaked with emerald as it sometimes was, and the sky was a pale, luminous, unclouded blue. The tide was out, was still going out, and where the sand was still wet, a boy of about twelve was building an elaborate sand castle with a keep and turrets and a moat. A man with his two small children was trying to fly a large red-and-white kite, but there wasn't enough wind to lift it off the beach. He reminded her of Gerald, who had also flown kites, who had built innumerable sand castles.
“Have you noticed,” said Pauline, looking up from the paper, “that no one ever points out a simple truth about unemployment. The fact is that half the unemployment is due to women working. If women didn't work, men wouldn't be out of work, but no one ever dares say this.”
“It wouldn't be politically correct,” said Ursula.
“Did you ever want to have a job? Apart from working for Uncle Gerald, of course.”
“I once thought of taking on some baby-sitting at the hotel. They always want child-sitters.”
Pauline looked at her to see if she was serious. Ursula's face was quite blank.
“But you didn't?”
“Gerald didn't care for the idea.”
“I'm not surprised. The wife of a famous writer looking after other people's kids for a couple of pounds an hour!”
“It was three pounds,” said Ursula. “If you've finished, I'll clear the table, because I like to do that before Daphne comes. No, sit there. I'll do it. Read your paper.”
When she came back into the room to fetch the coffeepot, Pauline said, “There's a letter in here about Uncle Gerald. Would you like to see it?”
“Not particularly.” Ursula had already suffered from her niece's propensity for reading aloud, so she sighed a little before saying, “You read it to me.”
“It's rather peculiar, quite a mystery. It says: âFrom the editor of
Modern Philately.
'Â ”
“The
Times
always does that.”
“Peculiar. Well, here goes. Listen. âSir, I refer to your obituary of Gerald Candless, the novelist (Obituaries, July 10). The writer states that the late Mr. Candless was employed as a journalist on the
Walthamstow Herald
in the postwar years. I was chief subeditor of that newspaper from 1946 until 1953 and can assure you that if that humble organ had been so fortunate as to number a graduate of Trinity and future world-famous novelist among its staff, this is not a distinction I would have forgotten. I am afraid you are in error when you name Gerald Candless as a
Walthamstow Herald
“alumnus.” I am, sir, your obedient servant, James Droridge.' What's an alumnus?”
“Someone who is a former student at a university.”
“Oh. Why did they say Uncle Gerald worked for that newspaper if he didn't?”
“I don't know, Pauline. It's just a mistake.”
A burst of song from the kitchen heralded Daphne Batty's arrival. Ursula carried out the coffeepot to the strains of Merle Haggard's “Today I Started Loving You Again.” Daphne had brought the
Daily Mail
with her, and while anxious for Ursula to read Mary Gunthorpe's interview with Hope, she had
no aspirations to read it to her. It was titled “Oh, My Beloved Father! The Loss of Hope.”
Ursula thought she might as well bow to the inevitable now. She remembered how Gerald had sometimes resolved not to read the reviews of his books in newspapers, but they had been impossible to avoid. Sooner or later, someone would ring up and tell him what was in them, or send them to him with passages underlined in red, or quote from them in letters. Daphne would leave the paper behind and Pauline would find it, and then she would be in for a worse ordeal. She began to read, with Daphne looking over her shoulder.
He was a tall, burly man with big features and a wide, ironic smile. She is slender and rose petalâskinned, her dark hair long and softly waved, her eyes almost too large for that heart-shaped face. Yet Hope Candless is the spitting image of her father, the celebrated novelist who died two weeks ago. There is the same intelligence in those same brown eyes, the same penetrating glance, and the same musical voice.
That voice has a catch in it now and those eyes are bright with tears. To her embarrassment, they spilled over as soon as she began to talk about him. Wearing a pink-and-white shirtwaister dress and white high-heeled sandalsâimpossible to imagine her in jeans and T-shirtâHope, thirty, dabbed at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief. It was the first handkerchief I had seen since my grandmother died ten years ago. Hope's had a pink
H
embroidered on it.
“I miss him so much,” she said. “He wasn't just my father; he was my best friend. I really think that if I could have chosen just one person in all the world that I'd spend my life with, it would have been him. I suppose you think that's totally mad?
“When my sister and I wrote that death notice that we put in the paper, we had to find an adjective that expressed what we felt.
Beloved
wasn't strong enough, so we used
adored,
because we did adore him. And we had the lines from that Victorian poem because we really did tire the sun with talking.
“Isn't it funny? Each one of us firmly believes she was his favorite. But I think he really loved us equally and he had so much love for us.
I'm sorry, you must excuse me, the way I keep crying. He bought me this place, you know, and he bought a flat for my sister, too.”
“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, âI 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, AuntieâI mean, Ursula? âA fortunate woman,' right. It goes on: âHas this happy childhood and devoted father made Hope want children of her own? And does a life partner have to be another Gerald Candless?
“ â “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.”
“Â âHer partner is fellow lawyer Fabian Lerner. They met at Cambridge and have been together ever since.'
“ â “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.”
“Â âPerhaps. 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.
“Â âThe lone and level sands stretch far away.'Â ”
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.”