The Chimney Sweeper's Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

his books, seven copies of each one, and they were all very long, and she had to do it by hand because typewriters hadn’t been invented. Or they didn’t have one, anyway. So it wasn’t as bad for me as it was for her.”
    â€œBut you didn’t get paid for it?” asked Pauline hopefully. If Ursula had been paid, even by her husband, this would partly have excluded her from the sisterhood of unemployed married women. “Uncle Gerald didn’t pay you?”
    â€œHe kept me,” said Ursula.
    â€œWell, of course, that goes without saying. Brian keeps me, if you like to put it that way.”
    â€œI didn’t always do it.
Hand to Mouth
was the last one I did, and that was 1984. After that, he typed them himself.”
    â€œBut why did you stop?” said Pauline.
    Ursula didn’t answer. She was wondering how many minutes after they got up from the table she could go out for her walk. Twenty, probably. Pauline began to clear the table. She hadn’t yet asked Ursula if Uncle Gerald had left her well-off or comfortably off or just able to manage. She hadn’t asked if Ursula would have to sell the house or take in lodgers or do B and B, though Ursula knew she was dying to know the answers to all these questions. Everyone assumed that Gerald had left everything to Sarah and Hope, and Ursula, though she had gotten over the shock of his death, if shock it had been, hadn’t yet adjusted to his surprising bequests.
    â€œI shall go out for my walk in ten minutes,” she said when they had loaded the dishwasher.
    â€œIn this fog?” said Pauline with an artificial shudder.
    â€œIt isn’t fog; it’s just sea mist.”
    â€œOh, I know that’s what you call it. You always did call it sea mist. It was the only thing I didn’t like about coming to stay here, that white sea fog. And Uncle Gerald hated it, didn’t he? I remember he would never go out in it; he used to shut himself up in his study. Why was that?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Ursula.
    â€œDoes it upset you when I talk about him, Auntie Ursula?”
    â€œI think you could drop the ‘Auntie,’ don’t you?” said Ursula, not for the first time.
    â€œI’ll try,” said Pauline, “but it will be very hard to get out of the habit.”
    Hardly anyone came down to the beach when the mist rolled in from the sea. The car park emptied, the surfers retreated into their caravans, and the hotel guests went back to the indoor swimming pool. The beach, which was seven miles long and, when the tide was out, a half of a mile wide, was overhung by a white curtain, so that when you were on it, in the sand, the dunes and the sea became invisible. Ursula could see her own feet, and the beachstretching away in front of her and on either side of her for some yards, but she couldn’t see the hummocky wrinkled green dunes to the left of her or the water, to the right of her, creeping silently across the sand.
    The mist would wet her hair and settle on her clothes in fine droplets, but she didn’t mind this. It wasn’t cold. Sometimes she thought she preferred misty days to clear ones, when you could see the headland and the estuary and Westward Ho! and, looming on the clifftop, the hotel and its garden and all those flowers in primary colors. She walked southward halfway between the edge of the dunes and the edge of the incoming tide, sometimes looking up to see a distant dazzlement of sun through the thickness of white gauze, but more often down at the sand.
    The sand was sometimes quite flat and packed hard, but on other days, by some strange action of the tide’s passage, it was pulled into wrinkles like the skin that forms on boiled milk. Today, though, it was smooth, a dark ocher color, but streaked here and there in a chevron pattern with a fine glittery black dust. Visitors to Gaunton thought the black streaks, which looked as if a magnet had