The Chimney Sweeper's Boy Read Online Free PDF

drawn them into that shape as it might draw iron filings across a sheet of paper, were from tar or some other pollutant, but Ursula knew that this powder was ground-up mussel shells, pulverized by the pounding and the kneading of the sea.
    Shells were everywhere on the beach, white scallop shells and ivory-colored limpets, chalky whelks and blue-black mussel shells with a sheen of pearl or a crust of barnacles, razor shells that looked like a cutthroat razor in an agate case. When the girls first came here as small children, they collected shells every day, until they grew tired of it. Ursula found all the dull, dusty, smelly shells in a cupboard years later. She put them in a carrier bag and took them back to the beach, scattering them onto the sand as she walked along. The next day, when she walked the same way, the shells had been washed clean and shining by the sea and those she had restored to the beach were indistinguishable from those that had always been there.
    Today, there was no one else on the beach. And the mist remained static, hanging, quite still. The solitude pleased her, the chance to think. No thinking could be done at Lundy View House while Pauline was there, and at night, when she was alone in her room, she took one of the sleeping pills the doctor had insisted she have. She asked herself why she liked the mist somuch. Could it be because Gerald had disliked it? The possibility that this was true had to be admitted. She liked it because he didn’t, and in a way, that made it hers, a secret, inviolable possession.
    Perhaps, too, she liked it because it obscured so much. Lundy View House, the other houses on the cliff, people, Gerald. It hid everything but the clean flat sand and the pure white or blue-black glittering shells. Now, of course, she no longer needed this obfuscation. Savoring it, she repeated the word to herself. Obfuscation. Once, long ago, she had set herself the daily task of learning long, difficult words to impress and please him. What a fool, she thought, but she thought it calmly and in a measured, considered way.
    As she turned back, or rather, wheeled round, to retrace her steps nearer to the incoming sea, she wondered not for the first time why she had reacted as she had to Gerald’s death. At least she would have expected to feel shock. But there had been very little shock, only surprise and, very quickly, relief. No guilt, either. She had read somewhere—ah, what a lot of books and magazines and periodicals and journals and newspapers she had read over the years!—that bereavement brings with it a sad and bitter longing to have the dead back, if only for a few hours, to ask those questions that were always there but were never asked in life. And she thought, Yes, I would like to ask why. Why did you do this to me and take so much away from me? Why did you make me second-best—oh, much further down the scale than that—with my children? Why did you marry me? No, why did you
want
to marry me? It would have to be a different person, though, whom she brought back to life. The Gerald she knew wouldn’t answer.
    That brought Mrs. Eady into her head. She hadn’t thought of Mrs. Eady for years. A big, sad old woman with a daughter in a nunnery and a murdered son, his photograph in a silver frame beside a small green-speckled vase. She could see it still as clearly as she could see the sand and shells. And less than a year later, they had moved away from Hampstead and come here to the clifftop and a house with a view of the Bristol Channel and Lundy Island.
    The mist was lifting. Ursula knew the mist on this coast and the way it behaved and she understood from experience that it wouldn’t lift fully all day, but come and go, rise and fall. The white curtain had rolled up a little ways and thinned a little to let in pale, steamy shafts of sunshine. She couldsee the hotel now, its angry red, the gables too shallow and the roof tiles matching the geraniums