The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (8 page)

The idea was strangely unacceptable, one of those propositions that on the face of it cannot hurt or harm or even embarrass but yet are deeply unsettling.

“Robert Postle wants you to write a memoir of your father?”

“He asked Hope first,” said Sarah. “I can't think why. It couldn't be you, because it has to be a child writing about a famous parent.”

At least her daughters didn't ask her if it upset her to talk about Gerald. Ursula felt glad Robert Postle's invitation hadn't been put to her, because she might have been rude or said something she later would have regretted.

“Are you going to do it?”

“I've said I would. It might be just the thing for me.”

Ursula thought she understood what that meant. Though almost thirty-two and teaching at the University of London for seven years, Sarah had published only one book, and that was her doctoral dissertation. A memoir of her father would hardly qualify as a learned work or enhance her academic reputation, but it might be better than that—it might bring her before the public; it might make her a name. It might, if well enough done, be a best-seller. Sarah began outlining the current fashion in biographies of parents and citing famous examples, but Ursula already knew what she meant. All she hoped was that it wouldn't much involve her.

“I'm going to make a start next week, so that I'll have nearly two months before term begins.”

“Start the writing, do you mean?”

“There'll be some research to do first.”

Ursula wished her daughters would sometimes call her Mother or Mum, or even by her Christian name—she wouldn't have minded that. Sarah occasionally did call her Ma, but Hope never called her anything and hadn't since she was about twelve, when Gerald said “Mummy” was babyish and some other style should be found. None, of course, ever had been, though Sarah had found a compromise, if not one that was much to Ursula's taste. Still, she was disproportionately and humiliatingly pleased to hear it, which she did perhaps once during each of Sarah's visits.

“There'll be research into Dad's background and family, and I'll have to see what ancestors I can trace. I don't know much about his parents, our grandparents, only that he was called George and she was called Kathleen and they lived in Ipswich. And he was a printer and she was a nurse. That was in the
Times
obituary.”

“It's also on his birth certificate,” said Ursula.

“Right. I'd better see that, then. They were dead long before we were born, of course.”

“Before we were married,” said Ursula.

“He used to talk about his childhood to us when we were children. Did you know that? Fantastic stories of when he was a little boy, but a lot of them were literally fantasies; I think we always knew that. I mean, the boy could fly or swim for miles underwater, and in one, his mother was a mermaid.”

“And the chimney sweep one,” said Ursula.

“Yes, of course. That was our favorite.” Sarah sighed. “He was an only child, so no nephews or nieces, but did he have any cousins? He must have done. George and Kathleen would have had brothers and sisters. Candless isn't a common name. If there are any in the Ipswich phone book, they're very likely to be relatives. But you'd know—did he talk about aunts or uncles?”

“Not that I remember.”

Sarah said earnestly, “Will you try to remember? Will you think about it? I'll need all that, how you and Dad first met—didn't he come and speak to
some association you belonged to? I'll have to talk to you, so will you think about it, Ma, before I come down next time?”

As if she didn't already think about it, dwell on it far more often than she really wanted to, recriminate, regret.

“Did you have a happy childhood?” she found herself asking Daphne Batty almost before she knew she was asking it.

“Of course I did. The best years of your life, they are.” Daphne burst into song. “ ‘Back home in Tennessee, just try and picture me, upon my mammy's knee—' ” She broke off, then sighed. “There's a lot of truth in those old songs. Not that it was Tennessee, wherever that may be. It was Westonsuper-Mare.”

“I expect Weston sounds pretty exotic if you were born in Memphis,” said Ursula. “Or Purley, come to that.”

Purley. A nice place, comfortable, pretty, safe, with a view of green hills. Why did people always knock suburbs? Why had Gerald? She had been born there, the youngest child of her parents, her brother, Ian, was twelve years her senior and her sister, Helen, ten. Though an afterthought or perhaps an accident, she was loved and cherished by her parents, spoiled by them and protected. Herbert Wick was a builder who had made money in the postwar building boom and who, though not rich, was very comfortably off by the time Ursula was fifteen. It was then that Herbert and his wife moved from their semidetached house at the Croydon end of Purley to a big ranch-style chalet bungalow at the Coulsdon end.

Ursula went to Purley County High School, where she secured eight O levels and two years later three A levels of B, B, and C. The head teacher wanted her to apply to various universities, but Ursula herself wasn't keen; she was apprehensive about going away from home, and, as her father pointed out, what good had two years at the polytechnic done Helen, who had married as soon as she finished her studies? A typing and shorthand course would be more valuable, and when she had completed it, she could go to work at H. P. Wick and Company, which operated from a pretty little custom-built cottage-type office in Purley High Street.

Ursula hadn't much enjoyed the typing course, but it was soon over, and working for her father was about as pleasant as she imagined any
job could be. He drove her to Wick's in the mornings and back home for lunch, and twice a week she didn't have to go back in the afternoons because there wasn't enough to do to fill five full days. She and her mother went for long walks.

There was still plenty of beautiful open country around Purley, though Herbert Wick was doing his best to build on it, and sometimes they walked as far as Fairdean Downs or Kenley Common. Once a fortnight, Betty Wick liked to go shopping in “town”—that is, the West End of London—and in order that she might accompany her mother, Herbert would unfailingly give her the whole day off. They would take the train from Purley to London Bridge or Waterloo.

Both of them patronized the public library, and Betty was secretary of the Purley Library Users' Association. Ursula had always been a great reader, and by then she was reading five or six books a week—all fiction. Looking back now, across nearly forty years, she realized that she hadn't known there were any other kinds of books. Well, there were textbooks, of course, and scientific books, and the library had shelves marked
BIOGRAPHY
and
POETRY
and
DRAMA
, but she was blind to them; she walked past them without looking.

She read detective stories and romances and ripping yarns and a great many historical novels. That was how they came to invite Colin Wrightson to speak at the Library Users' Association's annual meeting, because she and her mother had such a passion for his books about Queen Victoria and Victorian London and the empress Eugénie and ladies and gentlemen falling in love in English country houses.

It was a very comfortable, very quiet, unadventurous life. Every other Saturday, Herbert and Betty Wick and Ursula drove over to Sydenham for tea with Ian and his new wife, Jean, in the little new house (built by Herbert, who also provided the deposit on it) that they were buying on a mortgage from the bank where Ian worked. After that, they often went to the cinema. Ursula and Betty went to the cinema without Herbert once a week as well, invariably to an afternoon performance so as to be home to cook Herbert's dinner. Sometimes Ursula went to Wimbledon to see Helen, and occasionally she stayed the night. Helen had a little boy named Jeremy and was pregnant again. So sheltered a life had Ursula led that this staying overnight at Helen's, traveling there on her own with her suitcase, walking up from the
station and ringing Helen's doorbell at the appointed time, was a daring activity that made her feel quite sophisticated.

Once a year, the Wicks and Ursula went away on holiday together. Almost always the Isle of Wight, though not invariably the same place on the Isle of Wight. Once they went to the south of France, but they didn't much like it, and the following year they returned to Ventnor. At Christmas, Ian and Jean came and Helen and Peter with Jeremy and later on with the new baby, Pauline. Helen asked Ursula to be godmother to Pauline, and Ursula was very thrilled and flattered to say yes.

Few people, Ursula thought, could have changed as much in nearly four decades as she had. Their appearance, yes, that went without saying. Helen, for instance, though Ursula would never have said it aloud, looked so different at sixty-seven from what she had at thirty that the two versions of her, the young and the old, might be women quite unrelated to each other. They might almost be from different races—their weights, their heights, their coloring, the cast of their countenances, utterly disparate. No doubt—though not in respect to the weight and the height—the same was true of her. It wasn't the physical aspect of the matter that she meant.

She had been quiet, gentle, profoundly ignorant, deeply innocent, self-satisfied, complacent, affectionate, easily amused, quickly delighted, and possessing a kind of shy exuberance. And she had been an ostrich with a buried head. She had been ambitious for nothing. She had known nothing. In fact, it had been dangerous to let her out alone. Now all her ignorance was gone, her innocence brutalized, her complacency dead, her affections crushed, her ability to be delighted vanished, and her exuberance replaced by a defensive, faintly ironical self-control. Yes, she had changed beyond all knowing.

She had been a pretty girl. That was the word. No one would have called her beautiful or handsome. She had a kitten face with small neat features, blue-gray eyes, fair hair, which she wore short and permed. Her figure was good and she had what her mother called a fine bust. Because her father paid her well—ridiculously well, she later discovered—and those shopping trips were so frequently made, she possessed a lot of clothes. Nothing fancy or daring or especially fashionable, but accordion-pleated skirts in pastel pink or lemon with matching sweaters, several tweed suits, a few tight-waisted
full-skirted cocktail dresses for use at the Isle of Wight, and innumerable pairs of shoes. She had never had a boyfriend.

Once or twice, a man had taken her out. There was the one she had met at a dance in Ventnor. He took her to the cinema the next day, but they had no further contact after the Wicks went home. Someone who worked in Peter's office had been invited to dinner by Helen specifically to meet Helen's sister, and he had been keen enough. They, too, went to the cinema and for a drive in his car, but Ursula hadn't liked it when he kissed her, and the next time he phoned, she told her mother to say she had gone away. She met so few men, and the ones she did meet failed to match up to her secret romantic ideal.

At school, for O-level English, she had read Charlotte Brontë's
Shirley
, an experience that put her off Victorian fiction for years. She read
Jane Eyre
only because they had a copy in the house—she was in bed with a cold, and there was nothing else to read. Until she read it, her heroine, the woman she wanted to be like and whose husband she wanted to marry, had been the narrator in Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca.
But
Jane Eyre
was to be preferred. She understood, as she finished the book, that she was on the lookout for a Mr. Rochester of her own.

Two evenings before the writer Colin Wrightson was due to come and give his talk at the library, his wife phoned Betty Wick and said he had broken his ankle. It was January and very cold and her husband had slipped on a patch of ice while walking down the garden path to replenish the nuts in a bird feeder. She went into considerable detail about how he never did this, because she always fed the birds, but for some reason, goodness knows what, he had gone out with his bag of nuts and slipped and broken his ankle in two places.

Over the years, when Ursula reflected on her life, she often thought about that icy patch on the garden path and the impulse to feed birds in a man who never fed birds. Suppose he had hesitated, then decided to wait till his wife came home, done something else, forgotten the bird feeder. Suppose the phone had rung just as he was going out there. Or suppose he had simply been a little more careful, avoided the ice, stepped onto the grass and walked around it. Her whole life would have been different. Her whole life had hung on whether or not a man walked down a garden path and slipped on ice. If he hadn't slipped, she would have married someone else, lived in
different places, had different children, perhaps even been happy. It was a dreadful thought.

Mrs. Wrightson—her name was Sally, but Ursula didn't know that then—was deeply apologetic on the phone, contrite. Colin felt so guilty about the Purley Library Users' Association, the last thing he wanted was to let them down, so he had asked a writer he knew, a friend, to go in his place—Gerald Candless. No doubt Mrs. Wick was as closely acquainted with the work of Gerald Candless as with that of her husband. Mrs. Wick was not. But her daughter, whose eye she caught, was nodding, so she said, “Oh yes, that would be marvelous. Thank you so much,” and she said she hoped Mr. Wrightson would soon be better.

“Have you ever read anything of his?” Betty Wick asked when she had put the phone down. “I'm sure I haven't. I've just about heard of him.”

Ursula was already wondering why she had nodded, why she had urged her mother, by that nod, to accept the offer. “I've read
The Centre of Attraction
,” she said.

It had shocked her, though she wasn't going to tell her mother that. It had made her feel uncomfortable and somehow dissatisfied. The sexual content was not so much responsible for this, though it was partly responsible, as were certain assumptions the writer seemed to be making—that people were free, for instance, to make love with whom they chose and to stay up all night if they liked, that they wanted to lead full and adventurous lives, that young soldiers had animal passions, and that families were hotbeds of anguish. She had had to tell herself once or twice that life wasn't like this; life was what she had. Real people didn't speak in sexual innuendo, use bad language, or have conversations about passion and death. But the novel made her uneasy, and when she had finished it, she had taken no more Gerald Candless novels out of the library.