Passing On

by Penelope Lively

  Helen supposed that she would live at Greystones for the rest of her life. She supposed that Edward would also. Edward’s attempts to live elsewhere had never come to much. There had been the time when he worked in London with maladjusted children and shared a flat with a man he had been at college with.

  The children were uncontrollable and scared the wits out of Edward; also, he couldn’t stand the traffic noise. After eighteen months he packed it in and returned to Greystones, where he was perfectly happy doing a bit of private coaching and spending the rest of his time on volunteer stuff for the Nature Conservancy people until a casual criticism by some relative sent him into a crisis of conscience. Edward announced that he was thirty-four, had no purpose in life, and ought to be serious about his career.

  He applied for a job at a minor public school and got it. When, after eight months, he resigned and returned to Greystones, Dorothy was put out. ‘What on earth does he want to give up so easily for?’ she demanded. ‘It’s not as though they’d be impossible boys, like that lot in London.’ Helen, who knew why, said nothing. Edward got the job at Croxford House and lost that hunted look.

  And Helen? Helen, too, had left Greystones. More than once.

  She had left to go to college, and had returned of course in the vacations. She had taken that first job in the county town fifty miles away, lived in a bedsitter and drifted back to Greystones at weekends. There seemed no reason not to do so, and anyway It

  Edward was usually there. ‘Helen’s looking for something to do locally,’ stated her mother, to those who displayed any interest.

  ‘It’s ridiculous her trailing off like this every Monday morning.’

  And so inevitably the local opportunities had arisen — the part time work at a school, then at a technical college, and eventually at Spaxton library. Helen herself saw, now, with crystal clarity, the slide from indecision to an inevitable self-perpetuating arrangement; she saw how what might have been an undistinguished but useful career, dignified by such a title, had turned into a series of jobs. At the time, fatal steps are set:loin recognised as such. There had been, for so long, the presumption that at any moment something would crop up to provoke change. There had been Dorothy, making assumptions. There had been Edward.

  And in any case she quite liked Greystones, and was, it would seem, pathologically short of territorial instincts of her own.

  So, technically, Greystones now belonged to Phil. Technically, it had belonged before to her mother. Did that matter?

  Well, of course it matters, thought Helen, but does it matter in any significant way? And, walking back across the lawn with sodden feet, her arms full of lilac with which to cheer up the house, she decided that it did not.

  What was significant, of course, what did matter, was their mother’s continuing effect; absent, she still prescribed.

  ‘Ludicrous!’ stormed Louise.

  Not necessarily. There seems to have been a tax incentive.’

  Tim, in the big armchair, was the still calm centre. Louise eddied around him. Phil and Suzanne perched on chair arms. Helen and Edward stood at either side of the mantelpiece.

  ‘Mother didn’t care tuppence about that sort of thing. Anyway, why didn’t she tell us?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tim. Now there you have a point.’

  I don’ wan’ it anyway,’ said Phil comfortably.

  ‘You haven’t got it,’ stormed Louise. ‘It’s Helen and Edward’s home, just like it always has been. It makes no difference.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Helen. ‘So there’s no need for any of us to get in a fuss about it. It’s a technicality.’

  ‘S’right,’ Phil agreed.

  Louise, glaring out of the window, swung round. ‘It’s the principle of the thing. In the first place she should have discussed it with us and in the second it’s insulting to Helen and Edward technicality or not and frankly how far tax was a consideration I doubt. Mother never had a clue about finance and she wasn’t interested so . .

  ‘One assumes that this lawyer …’ Tim began.

  ‘Oh, sod the lawyer. Mother would have done what she’d decided to do. She always did. I daresay he put the idea into her head — that’s quite possible — but from there on it would have been her. She should have told us, it’s insulting to Helen and Edward and it’s discriminating between Phil and Suzanne.

  Suzanne is left her jewellery. Her jewellery! Her jewellery! Her jewellery is that brown bead necklace and her wedding and engagement rings and the regimental brooch with half the stones missing and the copper bracelet for preventing rheumatism.

  That’s what her jewellery is.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Mum,’ said Suzanne. ‘I mean, I don’t mind. It’s silly, all of this.’

  ‘That’s not the point. The point is that it’s everything for Phil and nothing for Suzanne. The point is also that Phil is a boy and Suzanne is a girl. That’s what the point is. Mother is making what might be called a political point.’

  ‘Was,’ murmured Tim, his hands folded behind his head, his gaze trained upon the ceiling. ‘Was making, darling. Sad to say.’

  Louise ignored him. ‘It’s a blatant piece of anti-feminism.

  Quite deliberate. Calculated to annoy. She wasn’t particularly fond of Phil. She criticised him every time she saw him.’

  ‘She got at me just as much,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘Oh, do let’s stop talking like this!’ cried Edward.

  ‘S’right,’ agreed Phil. ‘S’all stupid, anyway. Anyone min’ if I go for a walk?’

  Louise looked for a moment as though she might strike him, then subsided on to the sofa with a groan.

  ‘Think I’ll go too,’ said Suzanne, following Phil out of the room.

  There was a silence. Edward took off his glasses and began to clean them meticulously, a thing he only did when emotionally disturbed; most of the time they were opaque with dust. Helen heard a creak from somewhere upstairs and reminded herself that no, that was not mother. Mother was not heaving herself out of the bed in search of something; there was no need to go up, no need to feel restive. Tim cleared his throat and glanced at his watch.

  Louise sneezed violently. ‘Oh, Christ … I don’t care what they say, it’s psychosomatic too. I always get it worse here.’ She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. ‘Apart from anything else, you realise it makes it difficult if not impossible for you ever to leave Greystones?’

  ‘We don’t want to,’ said Edward. ‘At least I don’t.’ He looked at Helen.

  ‘How can you know?’ Louise bounced to the other end of the sofa. She stuffed a cushion behind her head and lay back.

  Tim was restive. ‘Darling, I’ve got a thousand things to see to before . .

  ‘All right, all right. Anyway the kids have pushed off somewhere.

  How can you know what you might want? Or Helen. I mean, it’s perfectly possible that . .

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Helen. ‘My market value has declined with the years. Come to think of it, I suppose it’s even lower now.’

  She laughed. Tim looked embarrassed.

  ‘That’s not what I mean. You know perfectly well that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that you don’t know what might turn up. Specially now that you’re not going to be dancing attendance on mother. Both of you.’

  ‘We never did so very much dancing,’ said Edward. ‘Not till lately. Mother was always self-sufficient, that you must admit.’

  Tim rose. ‘Think I’ll go and round up the children.’ He left.

  ‘Anyone can get married,’ said Louise. ‘I’m not interested in you getting married. I’m interested in you being able to …

  to . .

  ‘Go where the wind blows?’ suggested Edward. He put his glasses on again, looking unusually clear-eyed. He seemed rather cheerful now.

  Louise scowled at him. ‘You simply are not taking this seriously.’

  ‘It isn’t worth taking seriously.’

  Louise swung towards Helen. ‘Surely you can
see?’

  ‘I stand somewhere in the middle. I think Edward may well be ignoring possible future problems. But I don’t think it’s something we should get steamed up about. It is, in the last resort, a technical point. It’s not going to make any practical difference to any of us.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s the effect.’

  ‘There’s nothing that can be done about an effect,’ said Helen.

  Her own words came back to her that night, standing in front of her bedroom mirror. The new sweater was a mistake, it made her face look not more appealing but disturbingly furtive. It stared out over the unaccustomed colour and pattern with, it seemed to Helen, sly defiance. It was not at home. She took off the sweater, folded it and put it on a shelf of the wardrobe. It would do nicely as a piece de resistance at the village fete jumble stall.

  She got into bed. It was late. Edward had come up some time ago, while she was still pottering in the kitchen. Now, she heard his door open, quietly. The stairs let out a furtive creak. She knew exactly what he was doing. Assuming that she was asleep, he was going down to see if she had set a mousetrap in the larder.

  If she had, he would spring it with a pencil, guiltily, and not mention the matter. Helen, one step ahead in the mouse battle, now put traps under the sink; Edward — unlike the mice — had so far failed to discover them.

  Helen had a clear memory of Edward as a toddler sitting in long grass contemplating with rapturous absorption a butterfly on some clover. She could see it now: the waving grasses, the crunchy head of the clover, the butterfly opening and closing its wings, Edward’s baby face. Was that when it had all begun? Or later? For alongside that — the next slide in the box, as it were — was another scene featuring an upright, articulate Edward, aged three or four: a man shooting pigeons over a stubble field, the mound of pearly corpses at his side, Edward flinging himself at his mother screaming ‘Tell him he mustn’t shoot they! Tell him he mustn’t kill they because they nice!’ Dorothy pushing him impatiently aside: ‘Don’t be silly, Edward. Birds have to be shot.’

  Nowadays the possibilities for distress were limitless, and had been for many a year. Edward’s outrage had run from the abuse of donkeys and circus animals and battery hens to vivisection and otter-hunting. There were whales to worry about and ospreys and gorillas and the greater horseshoe bat, orchids and lichens, butterflies and toads. There was no end to it. And it got progressively worse, as far as Helen could see. Fuelled by the glowing testimony of television, in full colour, the scale of man’s insensitivity was seen to be as never before. The destruction of South American rain forests, the draining of the Somerset levels, the pollution of Finnish lakes — it was all brought to your hearth now, to furnish sleepless nights for such as Edward. In the village, small boys no longer collected birds’ eggs; propaganda in the primary school had seen to that, but five thousand miles away people were exterminating entire ecological systems.

  Edward’s interest in protective organisations had extended from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and local naturalists’ groups to Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. Greystones had a television for one reason only — that Edward might indulge his passion for wildlife films, though these as often as not brought to his attention some new aspect of the endangered environment and gave him yet another thing to worry about. His rare holidays were spent with like-minded souls, camping on bird-infested islands and living off wild spinach and tins of baked beans. He always came back wonderfully exhilarated, which puzzled Helen. Surely the contemplation of vanishing riches should be dampening rather than uplifting? ‘It’s knowing that it’s still there somewhere,’ said Edward.

  Helen, getting down before him in the morning, hurried out into the garden with the mousetrap, from which projected a stiffened corpse. Tam followed her, gazing hopefully upwards.

  When they returned Edward was in the kitchen, making tea.

  Helen said, ‘I forgot to tell you — Mr Carnaby rang. The lawyer.

  He’s going to look in this afternoon.’

  ‘I shan’t be here,’ said Edward at once. ‘Why?’ he added.

  ‘That’s not clear. He just said he’d like a word.’

  ‘Well, he’ll have a much more satisfactory one with you than with me. You can tell me all about it afterwards.’ He gave her a propitiating smile and left for work. Habitually, Edward sidestepped all confrontations with the world of affairs; he would have avoided having a bank account if he could, and had great difficulties with the income tax people. He never answered letters that came in typed envelopes, and often did not open them.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me inviting myself here,’ said Giles Carnaby. ‘I felt that my office would be inappropriate. People can feel at a disadvantage.’

  ‘Supplicants. And all those filing cabinets. Of course,’ Helen added hastily, ‘you have to have the filing cabinets, I realise that.’

  ‘Quite. And in any case I think it is I who am the supplicant.

  I’ll come straight to the point. I’m feeling somewhat concerned — and embarrassed — about your mother’s Will. We wee not aware, in our office, that you and your brother had never been informed of the terms of the Will — that this house was to be left to your nephew, with the proviso about your continued occupancy.

  The fact of the matter is that when my predecessor advised your mother, and the Will was drawn up, he appears from the correspondence to have suggested to her that she should consult all of you — all three of you. It now seems that … urn, well, that she didn’t.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Helen.

  ‘Which is a bit unfortunate. So my predecessor seems to have been under the impression that she had, and proceeded accordingly, and of course it wasn’t up to him to inform you, and indeed he would have been acting unprofessionally had he done so on his own initiative.’

  ‘Oh goodness,’ said Helen. ‘No one’s blaming him.’ She shifted slightly; the sun was in her eyes, obscuring her view of the visitor. Thick silvery hair and a face beneath that looked younger than the hair. Actually, she thought, my age — give or take a year or two. Nice voice.

  ‘All the same. We feel … concerned. I feel concerned. Not of course that it makes the slightest difference to … to your living arrangements. But obviously there is … there is . .

  ‘An effect,’ suggested Helen.

  ‘Precisely. Which could have been avoided.’

  ‘I don’t think my mother wanted to avoid it,’ said Helen. He looks like a film star, she thought, the one in that film about a man being chased across enormous fields by a plane. What’s he called, for heaven’s sake? Man with a nice face and thick hair. Bit younger.

  ‘Oh,’ said Giles Carnaby. ‘I see.’

  There was a silence. Got it, thought Helen. Cary Grant. Why on earth should I think of that? I haven’t seen a film in years.

  Giles Carnaby coughed. He ran a hand through the thick hair.

  The hand wore a heavy gold ring. Married? wondered Helen.

  Wedding ring? Some men wear them. Oh, married, presumably.

  Everyone’s married.

  ‘The other rather unfortunate thing is that — and I feel I really have to mention this — the tax advantage is not, to be frank, all that great. My predecessor was — well, his initial enthusiasm for the scheme turned out to be somewhat misplaced though, to be fair to him, he did put this to your mother. But by that time she appears to have got up a certain enthusiasm of her own. At least this is my impression, from the correspondence.’ Giles Carnaby looked at the floor, uncomfortable; he stirred the carpet with his foot, ran a hand through the hair again. Don’t take on so, thought Helen, please, it’s not your fault. It’s perfectly all right, honestly.

  Would you like a glass of sherry? No — heavens, it’s only half past four. Tea. Would you like a cup of tea?

  ‘Yes, mother would have,’ she said. ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘I hope it’s not causing family problems, anyway.’

  ‘My sist
er’s rather put out. She’ll calm down.’

  ‘The boy himself. .

  ‘He’s got green stripes in his hair,’ said Helen. ‘I don’t imagine they mean anything serious. He was always a perfectly nice child.’

  Giles Carnaby laughed.

  Helen sprang to her feet. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’d love a cup of tea.’

  He followed her into the kitchen, a move she immediately regretted. From time to time she saw Greystones as others must see it; this was one of those occasions. The cracks in the flagged floor. The green mould creeping up the wall by the back door that one just ignored because if you redecorated it simply crept up again within a month or two. The rusting cake tins. The crockery. That sink.

  ‘What a marvellous kitchen,’ said Giles Carnaby.

  Helen threw him a quick look of suspicion. No, perfectly sincere.

  He wandered around. ‘I say! Country Life calendar for 1962!’

  ‘It’s got some photos of bats that my brother is rather fond of.’

  ‘Doesn’t he get confused over dates?’

  ‘He’s never very bothered about that sort of thing,’ said Helen.

  She put the kettle on. Biscuits? She opened the Coronation tin and closed it again quickly. You cannot offer slightly mouldy Tea-Time Fancies (Dorothy’s favourites) to a visitor. Cake? No cake available.

  ‘Earl Grey!’ said Giles Carnaby. ‘I haven’t had Earl Grey since my wife died. I never know where to get it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Helen. ‘Have this one.’ She thrust the packet at him, an extraordinary, unaccustomed sunny smile on her face. ‘I can get another.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘Please . .

  ‘All right,’ said Giles Carnaby. ‘But only on condition you come and drink a cup of it with me sometime.’

  The kettle boiled. Violently, as always, spewing water all over the stove. Helen leapt for it, this absurd smile still pasted to her face. How tragic. When did she die? Come and drink a cup of it with me sometime.

  ‘You would probably have to make it also,’ said Giles Carnaby.

  ‘I’m hopelessly inefficient. Not professionally, of course — I mustn’t let you think you’ve got a dud lawyer. Professionally I am a whizz.’