The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (11 page)

Now that Sarah wasn't coming and Hope wasn't coming, Ursula told the Dunes that she could baby-sit on the Friday night if required, and the Saturday, too. They sounded pleased. A Mr. and Mrs. Fleming, who would be coming with two children, had attempted to book a baby-sitter in advance of their arrival, but they had been told it was unlikely anyone could be found.

As she walked down to the hotel, Ursula remembered that it was her wedding anniversary. Had Gerald lived, they would have been married thirty-four years. Not that any celebration would have marked the day. Only she herself would have remembered it, for the girls had never shown the slightest interest in that sort of thing, though indignant enough if their own birthdays weren't appropriately honored, and Gerald always appeared to have forgotten. Gerald, she thought, had forgotten he was married at all, had forgotten it for years, thirty years, and behaved—to put it bluntly but accurately—as if he were a widower with a housekeeper.

Still, she hadn't been very nice to him, either, in later years. She had tried, but it had been impossible. And then she had stopped trying. For the sake of peace, she had simply given in to some of his whims. As in the matter of forbidding the baby-sitting. Well, she could do it now he was gone. She went into the foyer of the hotel, checked on the name and room number at reception, and went up in the lift to the third floor.

The couple in the room were further apart in age than even she and Gerald had been. There must have been nearly thirty years between them. He looked about her own age, a tall, very thin man with a lantern face and grayish fair hair, much the same color as her own. The mother of this boy of six and girl of three looked no more than Hope's age. She was very pretty, with long fair hair piled up above a high white forehead and eyes of a turquoise blue, which her sleeveless dress matched.

“Molly Fleming,” she said, holding out her hand as he said, “Sam Fleming.”

Ursula shook hands with them. The fair-haired children stood staring at her, the little girl with her thumb in her mouth.

“I am going to put them to bed, Mrs. Candless, but they won't sleep at once. Would it be too much to ask you to sit in there with them and maybe read or just chat to them?”

“Of course I will.”

Ursula squatted down on their level, asked them what they were called, said that once they were in bed, she would come in and they must get to know one another. If they liked, she would tell them a story or read from the book she had brought, which was
The Tale of Samuel Whiskers.

When they had been taken away, she crossed to the window and looked across the bay. This was one of the sea-facing suites, and this evening, Lundy was clearly visible, as a blue shape on paler blue glass-calm water. Though it was not yet dusk, the light on the point flashed and danced like a firefly.

She said to Sam Fleming, “Are you enjoying your view?”

“Not mine,” he said. “My room's on the other side of the corridor.”

She looked at him.

“You didn't think I was those children's father, did you?”

Naturally she had. “Of course,” she said crisply.

“They are my son's children. My son is dead. He died last year.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yes. It was very bad, very painful. Well, it is. It still is. Molly, of course, is his widow. I have tried to help her with the children all I can—Edith wasn't quite two when her father died—but I don't suppose I've been much use. More in the way, no doubt. But I like to be with the children.”

Ursula said again, “I am truly sorry about your son. It's the worst thing in the world to lose a child, an unnatural thing.”

Molly Fleming came back. “You won't be reading for long, Mrs. Candless. James is already crossing the frontier into the Land of Nod.” She laughed. “If you're ready, Sam, we can go down.” She said to Ursula, “I promise I will be back in here on the dot of ten.”

Ursula went quietly into the children's bedroom. James was asleep. Edith said, “Story,” or that was what Ursula thought she had said. It was hard to tell on account of the comfort blanket, one corner of which was stuffed into the little girl's mouth. Ursula said she would read to her and told her what she would read, and Edith said Samuel Whiskers was like her grandfather's name, which was Samuel Wiston Fleming. So Ursula read about Tom Kitten and his sisters and Tom going up the chimney, but by the time she got to Anna-Maria stealing the dough, Edith was asleep.

Leaving the door propped open, she went back into the main bedroom. Why had she used those particular words to Sam Fleming? “It's the worst thing in the world to lose a child, an unnatural thing.” They were a direct quotation from Mrs. Eady and they had sprung into her mind and found their way to her tongue almost without her volition. Ursula felt a coldness along her shoulders and down her spine, what was called “a goose walking over one's grave.” The worst thing in the world, the unnatural thing …

Presumably, Sam Fleming's son had not been murdered, as Mrs. Eady's had, nor was it likely he had a daughter who was a nun. No, James and Edith's father would have died in a road accident or of some young man's swiftly progressing cancer. He wouldn't have been beaten to death, his body discovered lying in his own blood. She didn't want to think of it, wished she hadn't summoned up those words, for they were like seeds that sprang up and grew and flowered, bearing poisonous fruits. They always were.

She sat down by the window, gazing outside to calm herself and drive away the image of the young man in Mrs. Eady's photograph, not smiling cockily and cheekily as he was in the photograph, but with his skull smashed in and blood on the walls. No, she told herself, no! Out there, the sea had turned to a dull, smooth pewter. The island had disappeared. The dark furry headlands lay as sleeping animals lie, relaxed, heavy, calm, but on the tip of Hartland, the firefly still winked.

The dark sea washed away the bloody image. Ursula thought of her daughters. What could she tell Sarah about her wedding? She would have to tell her something, and it must be something true, though edited, though expurgated. Much bowdlerization must be done. Sarah would take it for granted that she and Gerald had been lovers before they were married. Anything else was unthinkable these days. It had been very nearly unthinkable in 1963, but still, they hadn't been lovers. He hadn't asked and naturally she hadn't, because she'd thought that was for the man to do. She did wonder, but she thought it was something to do with his being fourteen years older than she.

None of that need be mentioned. Ursula had been married in white satin, low-cut, to show off some of the bosom she was proud of, and with a full skirt and detachable train. She carried white roses and white freesias. Her bridesmaids were her schoolfriend Pam and Helen's little Pauline, by that time three and a half. Ursula had a sapphire and diamond engagement ring and a gold wedding ring with a pattern of leaves chased around the band. She had stopped wearing the engagement ring in the mid-seventies and taken off her wedding ring for good in 1988. By that time, the leaf-pattern chasing had worn down and it had become a plain gold band like anyone else's.

In a gesture of defiance or anger or dislike (or something), Ursula had sold her engagement ring. She knew no one would know, just as no one had noticed when she ceased to wear it. She took the ring to a jeweler in Exeter and he gave her two thousand pounds for it. That meant it was worth much more, but she didn't care. She rather liked the idea of Gerald's expensive ring fetching much less than its true value. She didn't need the money; he had always given her what money she wanted, within reason, and all she did with it was put it into their joint bank account.

That engagement ring had made a nuisance of itself at her wedding. That was one way of putting it. She had forgotten to do as instructed by her mother and Helen and put the ring on her right hand so that the third finger of her left would be vacant, so to speak, and ready to receive Gerald's wedding ring. Helen noticed as Ursula was walking up the aisle on Herbert Wick's arm, and she made faces at her and pointed, but Ursula hadn't known what she was on about. She was observing, with a slight chill on this happy
day, what huge crowds of her own relations there were on the bride's side and what a mere smattering of friends (including Colin Wrightson and his wife) and no relatives at all on the bridegroom's.

He was up there at the altar with his best man, whom Ursula had met once, which was how she knew this wasn't a cousin but just another friend. She wasn't nervous. She wanted to marry Gerald; she was in love with him, and she couldn't wait to be married to him and living with him and sleeping with him every night. She made all her responses in a firm, clear voice. Then the vicar said to repeat the words about “With this ring I thee wed and with my body I thee worship”—they hadn't gotten around to changing the prayer book by then—and Ursula held up her hand and saw the engagement ring on her finger.

Gerald had the wedding ring ready to slip on, so she quickly tugged at the engagement ring, and whatever she'd been before, she must have been nervous by then, because the ring fell out of her hand and onto the floor. It made quite a loud sound as it hit the floor of the nave, which was made of flagstones, with a bit of carpet runner up the aisle, but the ring hit the stones, not the carpet. Instinctively, she ducked down to retrieve it, and Pam ducked, too, and their heads collided, not painfully, but ridiculously. She felt about for the ring and Pam felt, but they couldn't find it, and she heard the vicar or someone whisper, and whisper crossly, not pleasantly, “Leave it. Leave it.”

Gerald repeated those serious words, not at all crossly, but with an undercurrent of laughter in his voice, as if he was suppressing great amusement, and she loved him for that, as if she hadn't loved him already. When he came to endowing her with all his worldly goods (for she had already thrown one of his worldly goods onto the floor), she thought he would burst out into a crow of laughter, but he didn't; he controlled himself, and the vicar looked daggers.

Afterward, they had to go into the vestry while the congregation sang a hymn, and she was anxious all the time about her ring, but before they went back into the ceremony, little Pauline came up to her and gravely presented it to her. She had had it all the time. With great presence of mind in one so young, she had picked up the ring and slipped it on the stem of one of the flowers in her bridesmaid's bouquet, where it had remained until that moment.

Later on, frequently, Ursula had thought what a strange business that affair of the ring had been. Like an omen, but an omen of what? In another way, it was like a dream, for such things happen more in dreams than in reality: the dropping of the ring, the fruitless hunt for it, the shame of hunting for it, its retrieval with such precocity by a child, the image of it encircling the stem of a white rosebud.

She had never told her daughters. Perhaps she would tell Sarah now or perhaps not. Once, when the girls were little, she had asked Gerald if he remembered, but he had looked at her as if she had invented the whole thing, as if it were a product of her imagination. She had begun to notice at that time that he disliked being reminded he was married. He avoided using the words
my wife
whenever he could. Once, she saw him looking at the bare third finger of her left hand and his face bore a satisfied expression.

Ursula went to look at the sleeping children. When she came back into the room, Sam Fleming was there. He had come up to check that everything was all right.

“I hope you won't mind my asking, but have you any connection to Gerald Candless, the novelist who died this summer? I believe he lived near here.”

“I was his wife,” said Ursula.

“I'm sorry.”

“So am I” was what she would have liked to say. Instead, she thanked him and said there was no need for him to stay, the children were fine, and there was something on the television she had been looking forward to watching. But instead of switching it on, she sat and thought and asked herself the questions she had asked so many times since his death. Had he been
sorry
for what he had done? And had he been trying to make amends by leaving her his house and his savings and his future royalties?

T
HE DEPARTURE OF YOUR CHILDREN IS NOT INVARIABLY A
cause of unhappiness. If they are happy, even though distant, if they are prosperous and getting on with their lives and have children of their own, that should be enough for you. You didn't, after all, have them to look after you in your old age. You never thought of such a thing. Come to that, to be strictly honest, you didn't have them intentionally at all; they just came. But once there, you knew you had had them so that they might grow up straight and strong, be successful, be happy, earn their livings doing what they wanted to do, and take a fitting place in the world.