The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine Read Free Book Online

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.”
    â€œÂ â€˜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 beentheir 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