The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine

Author:Barbara Vine [Vine, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80115-9
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

16

When you think someone is listening to you he is probably only considering what to say next.

—A MAN OF THESSALY

JASON THAGUE HAD FOUND ROBERT NUTTALL’S WIDOW, Anne, living in the Cotswolds. Her husband had been a dentist in Oxford and they had retired to Chipping Campden.

“That makes me wonder about dentists,” Sarah said. “I mean the Candlesses’ dentist. They’d have had one.”

“I don’t think so. Most people didn’t have dentists in the thirties, not a dentist you go to for regular checkups. You went to a dentist to have a tooth out when you had a toothache. Anyway, I asked my nan, and she said her father had had all his teeth out and false ones for a twenty-first birthday present.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“That’s what I said. My nan’s got dentures now, has had all my lifetime. She never went near a dentist till she was seventeen and living in Sudbury, and that was, like I said, to have a tooth out.”

What would her father have thought of Jason’s pitted face and his voice and his accent? She said coldly, “So we’ve reached a dead end.”

“Don’t say that. There’s still the knife grinder and the chair mender. Is my check in the post?”

Sarah had been fourteen when Hamadryad was short-listed for the Booker Prize, old enough to have some understanding of what that meant and young enough to be bitterly hurt and convinced of injustice when it didn’t win. She had read the novel and believed that the young girl, Delphine, the protagonist, was herself. She asked her father and he said, “There’s something of you in Delphine and something of Hope.”

She had asked which “somethings,” and he said, their beauty and their intelligence. What about the rest of her, then? What about Delphine’s shyness, her goodness, her reclusiveness? No one, even then, could have pretended she and Hope were shy or retiring or even particularly good.

“That was someone I knew long ago,” he said. “No, not a girlfriend.” He had hesitated. “A relative.”

She remembered that now. She was thinking of Hamadryad because Frederic Cyprian had still been her father’s editor when it was published. After that, and before the next book, he had retired. Some said his retirement was directly due to Hamadryad’s failure to win. At the dinner, when the winning novel was announced, he had done something authors had been known to do but not publishers. He had gotten up from the table and walked out.

Sarah had met him a few times in the seventies when he came with or without his wife to stay at Lundy View House. He was old then and his wife was older, and she had since died. Sarah had known, since moving into this flat, that he and she lived very near each other. For some reason, now forgotten, she had once looked him up in the phone book. It must have been simple curiosity, since she had never intended to phone him or visit him.

Now she had. If he was

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