by Barbara Vine
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 sandals—impossible to imagine her in jeans and T-shirt—Hope, 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, ‘I 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, Auntie—I mean, Ursula? ‘A fortunate woman,’ right. It goes on: ‘Has this happy childhood and devoted father made Hope want children of her own? And does a life partner have to be another Gerald Candless?
“ ‘ “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.”
“ ‘Her partner is fellow lawyer Fabian Lerner. They met at Cambridge and have been together ever since.’
“ ‘ “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.”
“ ‘Perhaps. 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.
“ ‘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.
4
When the guests had gone, Peter said, quoting Goethe or someone
, “They are pleasant enough people, but if they had been books, I wouldn’t have read them.”
—THE FORSAKEN MERMAN
HOPE GOT TO THE RESTAURANT MUCH TOO EARLY. She hid herself inside the Laura Ashley shop on the opposite side of the street. It was a principle of hers never to be early or on time for an engagement with a man (except Fabian, who didn’t count), but to be between two and five minutes late. This was difficult for her, as she was naturally a punctual person, but she persevered.
That morning, in the interval between an interview with a client who wanted her to extract substantial maintenance from the wife he was divorcing and a client who wanted to set up a charitable trust, largely, as far as she could gather, for the benefit of his personal friends, Hope had been making plans for her father’s memorial service. The trouble was that each time she thought of some particular poem or song or piece of prose that he had loved, she started crying. The man wanting the charitable trust stared at her tearstained face and asked her if she had a cold.
Hope wasn’t a literary person, but her father’s favorite pieces—at least their titles—were committed to her memory, or, as she put it, written on her heart, and would be there forever. Herbert’s “Jordan” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and a bit of Sartre, she thought as she wandered among the racks of floral dresses. “Is there in truth no beauty?” she asked herself. “Is all good structure in a winding stair?” But she had to stop that in case she began weeping again. Before leaving her office, she had made up her face with care and didn’t want it washing off before she met Robert Postle.
