Passing On

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Do they? Good.’

  ‘We could always have moved out, both of us, but we didn’t.

  Why not?’

  ‘Inertia,’ suggested Edward.

  ‘Do you honestly think so?’

  Edward avoided her eye.

  ‘In your case, possibly,’ she went on. ‘Or at least inertia certainly comes into it. In mine, I think the whole situation is more dubious.’

  ‘Helen…’ Edward began, warningly,

  ‘I can see, with detachment, a certain lack of enterprise, to put it mildly. Perversity, even. Masochism.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ said Edward.

  ‘What woman of any initiative would have spent almost her entire adult life living in discord with a difficult mother?’

  ‘You… coped with her. She’d have been lost without you.’

  No she wouldn’t,’ said Helen. ‘Mother was entirely self sufficient,

  and you know it.’

  They regarded one another. ‘I told you we shouldn’t push this too far,’ said Edward.

  ‘At the time one justified it in various ways. There was always next year, and the one after. One was just biding one’s time.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Edward. ‘And anyway. .

  ‘One was always about to get the serious, definitive job.’

  ‘Exactly. And in any case . .

  ‘Or get married.’

  Edward, furiously scouring his plate, rambled on about Dorothy.

  ‘Instead of which suddenly I’m fifty-two and mother isn’t there any more. I wish I could subscribe to your theory of mother-as-obstacle.

  It would be comforting. It looks to me, frankly, like a clear case of chronic timidity, laced with apathy.’

  ‘Oh, well in that case, what about me?’ said Edward wildly.

  They looked at each other.

  The waiter, practised at the disruption of moments of intimacy, plumped the bill down beside Edward’s plate.

  ‘In fact,’ said Helen, ‘I’m not feeling particularly glum about all this. It’s a question more of assessment. Taking stock.’

  Edward picked up the bill and examined it.

  ‘Mother’s part in it is one thing. One’s own is quite another.’

  ‘This seems to say three hundred and seventy-five pounds,’

  said Edward. ‘Can that be right?’

  Helen took the bill from him and indicated a decimal point.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ He examined his wallet. ‘I still don’t have enough.

  I hope this doesn’t mean you’re going to rush off and become County Librarian now. Or. .

  Helen laughed. ‘I shouldn’t worry. Neither is likely.’

  The waiter hovered. Helen fished in her purse. Between them they came up with a pile of notes and coins. Neither of them possessed a credit card, and it did not occur to them to offer a cheque. The waiter watched this display with patient interest and carried the loaded saucer away ceremoniously, as though it were a church collection plate.

  Outside the restaurant they paused. ‘I rather enjoyed that in a funny way,’ said Helen. ‘Have you ever noticed that we seldom talk to each other at meals normally?’

  ‘Of course we don’t,’ said Edward. ‘What is there to say?’

  ‘Quite a lot, it seems. Oh well … What shall we do now?

  It’s only half past two. We could go to an exhibition or something.’

  Edward looked unenthusiastic.

  ‘Or do some shopping.’

  ‘Shopping!’ Now he was aghast.

  ‘It’s Louise’s birthday next week, you know. And she’s coming down this weekend. We ought to buy her a present.’

  ‘We don’t know what she wants,’ said Edward, fighting desperately.

  ‘As a matter of fact I do. She’s got all these photos she took with that new camera — all jumbled up in an envelope — and she was saying she ought to put them into something. We’ll get her a photo album.’

  ‘We — you — could get a photo album in Spaxton.’

  ‘We can get a better photo album in London. A more Louise sort of photo album. An up-to-the-minute photo album.’

  Eward gave her a surly glance. ‘It’s the wine. I knew a whole bottle was a mistake. All right, then, if you insist. Where?’

  ‘We’re not far from Knightsbridge,’ said Helen. ‘Big smart shops. That should do.’

  She still felt interestingly exhilarated. Maybe the wine. Or maybe the sun on white stucco (really London was much prettier than one remembered) or the cheerful scarlet of buses or the continuously satisfying recollection of the terns and the oblivious complacency of pink tie and striped shirt in their sealed air conditioned office. Or maybe something else; this curious sensation one had all the time now of the blood running a little faster, the senses being more keenly tuned, of tomorrow or next week being more inviting. Giles Carnaby might be phoning Grey-A stones at this very moment, the phone ringing in the empty hall … Maybe he was putting the receiver down and picking up his pen to write a quick note instead, handing it to his secretary to pop in the post, saying ‘Mind you don’t forget that one, it’s rather urgent.’

  Or maybe not.

  ‘Surely this’ll do?’ said Edward. ‘It looks quite big enough and smart enough.’

  Hoisted back to the London street, she saw them both reflected in the plate-glass of the shop window, superimposed in transparency above silk and fur, gilt and leather, the swaggering dummies with blind inscrutable gaze in their preposterous clothes. Their reflections, gliding above these sumptuous displays, showed a shabby pair, distinctly down-at-heel, as sharply contrasted as the proletarian flotsam in some Victorian street scene, dingy spectators of the nobs in their satin and feathers. The dummies in the windows wore clothes so unlike Helen’s that they might have stepped from some other culture: rainbow colours, fabrics of wondrous texture and design, skirts like puffballs or split like a dancer’s. The chairs upon which they sat or leaned were gilded or of shining chrome and glass; bales of material were half unfurled to spill around more silk and satin; jewellery was flung down in handfuls upon tables or simply on the ground. Prices, where stated at all, were scribbled in decorative script upon tiny cards, an afterthought. Helen watched her own face swim above

  these rich and glowing caverns; did it have a lean and hungry look, deprived, excluded? Well, no, not really. It was her usual face, homely, familiar — diminished merely and made incongruous by the setting; it wandered ghostly, with Edward’s alongside, across the Aladdin’s caves beyond. Any more of this, thought Helen, and I shall have doubts as to who I am, like Alice. I’ll be getting into conversation with one of these fibreglass ladies. ‘Explain yourself!’ she’ll say, and I shall be hard put to it to do so. Her preoccupations would not be mine at all.

  ‘What are you worth?’ she’d ask; I’d certainly have trouble with that one. ‘What do you cost?’ would be a bit easier; around £4.50 an hour would be correct I think. Plus second-hand value of what I stand up in, which by current jumble sale rates would be maybe ten pounds or so. She, on the other hand, top to toe, comes out at well over two thousand; as for structural costs … does one buy or hire her, I wonder?

  ‘Come on,’ said Edward. ‘I can’t hold this door for ever. You’re the one who wanted to come here.’

  Within, there was that rich smell of better-class department stores: an expensively achieved amalgam of perfume, out-of-season flowers, new leather and virgin fabrics. Pace seemed to have slowed up; people did not walk but drifted; sound was muted, mopped up by space and carpeting. The Glovers hesitated.

  Edward looked accusingly at Helen. ‘This way,’ she said firmly, and plunged off into a perfumery hall of gleaming marble, as lush as some Byzantine church. Edward followed; she heard him skid on the floor, in whose black and shining depths were reflected the chandeliers above their heads. All around were Arab women, heavily robed, sniffing their wrists. A bottle of perfume, Helen saw, could cost Ł110. Edward now wore the manic look of
some animal transferred into the wrong environment, as though he might run amok, or bite. Each counter had an assistant behind it, none of them doing anything. Helen headed for the nearest one and asked about photograph albums. They were directed onwards.

  Perfumes gave way to leather goods, and leather goods to food.

  The air was scented now with chocolate, coffee and freshly baked bread. They passed a counter above which hung trusses of pigeons, pheasants and other less identifiable but more disturbing birds; Helen grabbed Edward’s arm to hurry him on but he was already gazing at a row of hares suspended by their feet from a rack. He turned and caught her eye. ‘The butcher in Spaxton has hares,’ she said defensively.

  The assistants behind the counter wore what appeared to Helen to be fancy dress: boaters with scarlet bands and elaborate aprons. One of them — an adolescent with the fair, downy looks of a choir boy — reached up with a pole to bring down a clump of unidentifiable silvery speckled birds. Both Glovers had come to a halt now, mesmerised despite themselves. The boy reached for a chopper and began briskly to decapitate the birds. Enough! thought Helen; she turned to Edward — and he was not there.

  She looked round. Everywhere, expensively dressed people were buying food with an air of dedication. She couldn’t see Edward. She walked from one end of the hall to the other; no Edward. Irritation gave way to a feeling of panic. She told herself to calm down: at the worst they had lost each other and would have to go home separately. She had Edward’s ticket, which was a nuisance, but never mind. But even as she went over all this she continued to hurry from one section of the store to another, searching, her heart thumping. It was ridiculous. Once, when Edward was five, she and Dorothy had mislaid him in Woolworths.

  Dorothy had glared phlegmatically around and said that would teach the silly little wretch to wander off on his own; it was Helen who had rushed to and fro and eventually found Edward, white with shock, cowering beside one of the tills.

  She moved from handbags through gifts to the flower shop and eventually reached a men’s outfitting department where, suddenly, she saw Edward. He was sitting on a chair beside a display of furled umbrellas; he had his head in his hands and was being eyed dispassionately by two male assistants in dark suits.

  As she approached, one of them broke ranks and went to stand over Edward, apparently addressing him. Edward neither looked up nor moved.

  Irritation now displaced concern. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ Helen snapped.

  ‘We have a First Aid Room on the second floor, if the gentleman isn’t feeling well.’

  Edward took his hands from his face and sat up. He was shaking, Helen now saw. He quivered, very slightly, all over, as though he were perished with cold. He simply sat there, shaking.

  ‘The nurse is always in attendance.’

  ‘I’m not ill,’ said Edward. He glanced at Helen as though he had never seen her in his life, and made no attempt to get up.

  The assistant inclined his head diplomatically and when an American was heard to make enquiries about cashmere sweaters he stepped aside.

  Helen said, ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  Edward nodded. He stood up. She put a hand on his arm and felt the rhythmic shivering through the stuff of his jacket. ‘Let’s get Louise’s photo album and then go.’

  She steered him into a lift. She tracked down, at last, the right department. Photograph albums, it turned out, could also cost Ł.110, or thereabouts. They came in tooled leather, they came gilded and embossed and with special paper made in Florence.

  They also came, if you insisted and were prepared to accept a measure of mild public humiliation, in plastic and plain paper.

  Edward stood in silence while Helen negotiated. The shaking appeared to have stopped but he looked dazed. She guided him back to the lift, down to the ground floor and the street and into a taxi.

  Just before they reached the station she said, ‘Was it the birds?’

  ‘Birds?’ He seemed almost normal again; he had been staring out of the window and had commented on a street name he remembered from his London period.

  ‘Those silver birds. At the butcher’s.’

  ‘They were guineafowl,’ said Edward. He spoke quite composedly.

  The whole thing, Helen saw, whatever it had been, was to be ignored. ‘I can’t imagine why anyone would want to eat them,’ he went on. ‘There’d be nothing on them. You’d get twice as much off an ordinary chicken.’

  In the train, Helen thought about money. Money, she realised, had changed its nature over the years. There was both less of it about, and more. Today’s world was one in which five-pound notes gushed benignly from the walls of banks at the touch of a button, in which people had only to scribble their names and anything they wished for was theirs; a world in which — as she had seen on a television programme — unimaginable sums of money flew about the globe at the whim of shirt-sleeved young men who sat tapping idly at keyboards. A world in fact in which the stuff itself— the coins, the notes — seemed barely relevant and indeed a trifle indecent. Sayings of Dorothy’s came to mind: ‘It doesn’t grow on trees, you know.’ You’ve got to learn the value of money.’ Impossible nowadays to say such things to children, presumably. As a child she had had a piggy bank; she could recall the physical satisfaction of its jingling weight in her hands.

  That was wealth. The child of a neighbour in the village had showed her last week his newest share certificate; he had bought British Telecom, he told her gravely, and was thinking of going into Gilts. The family lived in one of the Barratt houses and did not seem to Helen unduly prosperous, but clearly one was losing one’s eye for these things.

  She looked at Edward. He seemed quite all right again. He had bought himself the latest issue of Wildlife and was immersed in an article about otters. The day would be held against her, she knew, if only in the muted way in which Edward was capable of bearing a grudge.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Louise. ‘It’s exactly what I need. However did you guess? Mind, God knows why I keep on recording the children for posterity, the way they are now. When I look back I could weep — dear little things tottering about on beaches. Phil hasn’t addressed a civil word to us in weeks. Anyway — thanks.’

  ‘It’s from Edward too.’

  ‘I took that as read. Since when did Edward go shopping on his own behalf? Where is he, anyway?’

  ‘In the Britches, I think. He’s been trying to do something about the brambles and nettles.’

  I

  Louise flopped on to the sofa. ‘How did you enjoy your day in London?’

  ‘It had its moments,’ said Helen evasively.

  ‘What about the investment people?’

  ‘They made it fairly clear we were too small fry for them. And I the place was more like a botanical gardens than an office.’

  Tim knows some other people. I’ll tell him to …’

  ‘No,’ said Helen. ‘We have still to recover from those.’

  I

  ‘Think about it,’ conceded Louise. ‘So what did you do after that at — it can’t have taken you all day?’

  ‘We had lunch in that restaurant in South Kensington.’

  ‘It doesn’t exist any more.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Helen. ‘So we discovered. We had lunch on its ashes, as it were. Then we went shopping.’

  ‘Well! Quite a spree! Very good for you both.’

  ‘Don’t patronise,’ said Helen. ‘We’re less socially disadvantaged than you imagine. The village provides resources undreamed of in Camden Town. Though I will admit that I find London disconcerting these days. The landscape. Everything seems to be built of mirrors — what on earth has happened to brick? But I grant you that I’m behind the times in some ways.

  Architecture and offices full of botanical specimens are the least of it. Social etiquette, for instance … What’s done and what isn’t.’ She shot her sister a crafty glance. ‘Most of it is quite irrelevant to me, of course, bu
t one keeps a sort of technical interest.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Louise. ‘What are you blathering on about?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know … How people behave … Men and women, for instance. Such as … Do women take the initiative nowadays?’ She felt the beginnings of a disastrous blush and busied herself with a dirty mark on the window, getting out her handkerchief and scrubbing, her back to Louise. ‘I mean — time was, you wouldn’t … Nowadays, would they ring up first — that sort of thing?’

  ‘How should I know?’ said Louise sourly. ‘I’m married, aren’t I?’

  ‘Well … your friends …’ Helen persisted. ‘For instance, if someone hadn’t heard from a man friend for — oh, for a couple of weeks or so — when he’d said vaguely he’d ring — I mean, she might wonder if there was something wrong, if he was ill, or if she’d offended in some way. Would she feel nowadays it was up to her to make contact?’

  ‘Look, what is all this?’ demanded Louise.

  ‘I’m just curious. Detached interest. One ought to know how things are. If they’ve changed or not.’

  ‘You are a funny old thing,’ said Louise. ‘You’re making that window worse, you know. Haven’t you got any Windowlene?

  Actually so far as I can see it’s sod’s law for women, just as it always has been. You know my friend Judith? Well, she’s been having an affair with this bloke for the last year or so and then out of the blue he turned round and . . Here’s Edward. Open the window and he can come in this way.’

  Edward was advancing across the lawn. ‘What did he turn round and do?’ said Helen.

  ‘Oh, some other time … Hi! Thanks for the birthday present.’

  Edward came in at the french window and stared blankly at his younger sister. After a moment he said ‘Oh … Yes.’ And then, ‘Many happy returns of the day. How old are you?’

  ‘It’s next week, not today. And I’ll be forty-three for Christ’s sake. There’s this piece of contemporary mythology that the forties are the best time of your life. A load of cock, so far as I’m concerned. What about you?’

  But Edward had lost interest, apparently. He turned to Helen.

  ‘Have we got any wire anywhere? I want to mend the fence.’