*****Passing On*****

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Good grief — it can’t be three-thirty! Is service included, do you imagine? I can never tell with these things. I feel as though I’ve been going on about myself in the most shameless way.

  What a nice patient woman you are.’

  He laid his hand on hers. There it rested for several seconds, until the waiter arrived and there were things to be done with wallet and credit card.

  ‘And you never did report on the green-headed nephew.’

  ‘He seems to be giving trouble,’ said Helen. ‘My sister was complaining.’

  ‘Adolescence is quite fearful. Be thankful you’re not a parent.

  Though you would be a marvellous one, I’m sure. I do wonder…’

  ‘ He checked himself. ‘Anyway, your sister has my sympathy.

  The boy too. Tell them it all works out in the end.’

  They rose. Coats were fetched. At the door he said ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I left the car in the Market Street car park.’

  ‘I can go back to the office that way.’

  Out into the street, the humdrum Spaxton street, butchers and building societies and banks, known for thirty years but somehow today transformed — gay and quirky and inviting. Pails of summer flowers outside a greengrocer. Small children skittering home from school with enormous satchels banging against their backs. Sunlight on old brick. A boy whistling.

  He took her arm to guide her across a street in which there was no traffic. ‘What a treat! I usually spend my lunchtime in the pub on the corner. Or having a brisk walk. Or sandwiches in the office.’

  ‘I enjoyed it too,’ said Helen. ‘Thank you so much. Perhaps . .’ she hesitated.

  ‘It’s for me to thank you. Sparing the time … Letting me natter on. Oh dear — here’s the wretched car park.’ He pulled a face, then beamed the smile upon her, laid a hand on her arm.

  ‘Perhaps…’ she began.

  ‘Anyway — goodbye and thank you, my dear.’

  And that was that. A quick squeeze of the arm and off. My dear. Perhaps, she said to his back view — diminishing, vanishing, dodging away among passers-by — perhaps you’d like to come and have a drink sometime and meet my brother. Oh well.

  I am unpractised in these things, she thought, driving home. I have forgotten the codes, if indeed I ever knew them. I don’t know the to and fro of it.

  Aflame, she glared at the road ahead. Her mother, sitting squatly in the passenger seat, told her she was fifty-two years old, no beauty and never had been and would do better to pull herself together and think about something else. Go away, said Helen. I’m sorry but go away. This is something you know nothing about, nor ever did.

  She removed all her clothes and stood in front of the long mirror in her bedroom. She saw a body with heavy thighs, legs with the purplish blotches of incipient varicose veins, breasts that sagged and a belly that was far from flat. Viewed dispassionately, she could not see how this body could arouse desire. It was demonstrably female, but very distant from the female bodies displayed in advertisements or on the covers of magazines. It looked to her more like an illustration in a medical journal.

  Edward, returning at the end of his school day, found Helen on the upstairs landing amid what appeared at first glance to be the final sediment of a jumble sale. Shoes and clothing were spread around in desultory heaps. Helen, her arms full, moved uncertainly among them. Reaching the top of the stairs, Edward recognised his mother’s garments.

  Helen looked at him uncomfortably across an armful of pinkish-grey elastic net, boning and suspenders. ‘It had to be done eventually. I suddenly thought — now. And get it over with.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Where can it all go?’

  ‘Well … Oxfam, I suppose, except that I believe they’re rather fussy nowadays. And …’ Her glance strayed guiltily to a couple of black plastic rubbish sacks, stuffed full. She had already come to the conclusion that very little re-cycling could be done; Dorothy had been a parsimonious dresser at the best of times.

  Edward averted his eyes from what Helen was holding: distant malaise lurked there.

  ‘I never realised she had any hats.’

  Nor did I. They must have been for weddings, ages ago. I’m afraid a lot of this has got the moth. Such as the fur coat. She hardly ever wore it and it dates from before the war.’

  ‘What is it, do you imagine?’ enquired Edward with distaste.

  He remembered the fur coat, which used to emerge in his childhood for rare visits to the pantomime or the ballet. It gave his mother the appearance of a small purposeful brown bear and he had hated it.

  Helen picked it up. There were balding patches and a rip in one sleeve. Bear was still the animal that it most closely evoked.

  She held it out to Edward, who shook his head and pulled a face.

  Helen laughed. ‘Whatever it was, it died an awfully long time

  ago. Too long ago to get exercised about now.’ She dropped the coat on to one of the piles.

  ‘That’s not what I was thinking about,’ said Edward. His glance shifted from the coat to the pink tangle in Helen’s arms. He took his glasses off and began to scrub them violently with a grubby handkerchief.

  The sensual feel of fur was one of his earliest memories. Live fur. The warm flank of the cat from next door, to be precise, in which he had buried his face and been rewarded with the consoling reverberation of its purr. An amiable, unrejecting maternal cat.

  He had been under the impression, as a very small child, that his mother was armour-plated, like the rhino in London Zoo at which he had gazed in astonishment. You could not touch the rhino, but it looked like his mother felt. Beneath her tweed skirts and her thick jerseys there was a carapace, a plated stiffness that rejected infant limbs and hands. Later in life he learned about female corsetry and realised what it was one had been up against, but the impression lingered yet of some unyielding natural structure.

  Dorothy did not encourage physical contact. ‘Don’t paw me like that, Edward,’ she would say. ‘No, you can’t hold my hand sit on my laphave a cuddle. Don’t be silly. You’re not a baby now, you’re two/three/four.’ The cat never said things like that; it simply provided a gently throbbing flank until called away on more pressing matters. Hence, perhaps, the disturbing emotions aroused by the sight of dead fur and, even more, that dingy flaccid heap of canvas and elastic, which prompted, now, another murky response, another distant moment. He had lain in bed once, in infancy perhaps, and watched with furtive distress as his mother dressed; presumably she had thought he was asleep.

  Why was he sharing her room? Some crisis induced by visiting relatives, maybe. At any rate, the sight was with him still: that shadowy figure revealing undreamed-of clefts and protuberances.

  He had cowered under the bedclothes, mesmerized, and watched her flopping breasts as she stooped to haul pink drawers up over heavy thighs, had seen hair where surely no hair should be, had printed on his vision for ever the pucker of nipples and the black valley between buttocks.

  He started to retreat back down the stairs. ‘You might at least take some of the stuff down for me,’ said Helen, in a tone of reproach.

  Edward grabbed the black plastic sacks. ‘I’ll help if you want, but I’m sure I’d . .

  Helen vanished into Dorothy’s room, saying tartly that it didn’t matter; it was the nearest they had come to ill feeling for a long time and Edward was left with a further layer of disquiet.

  He dumped the sacks outside the back door by the dustbins, called Tam and set off for the Britches.

  He checked the nest-boxes. There was evidence that something might already have been roosting in one of them, which was satisfactory. They were sold by an organisation that provided work for the mentally handicapped, which made them doubly benign; the only displeasing thing about them was the aggressively rustic appearance — a cross between a cuckoo clock and a miniature cottage orne. Edward had tried unsuccessfully to knock off the superfluous gables and twiggy excrescence
s. They would mellow, he hoped, in the raw winter climate of the Britches.

  It was June now and still warm though past six. The evening sunlight that came down through the leaves suffused the whole place with a golden glow. Edward sat down on his usual log and noted, while thinking of quite other things, that he could hear a robin, assorted tits, rooks, a chaffinch and a magpie. He observed a delicate collar of fawn and pink fungus around the base of a dead tree, vivid green cushions of moss, the crimson flicker of a cinnabar moth against leaf mould, a very small spider with white spots on its back. He heard, but did not register, the screech of the chainsaw in Ron Paget’s yard, the rattle and thump of an articulated lorry taking the bend in the road, the roar of an American F1-11 fighter some two miles above his head. A few feet away Tam was gnawing at something dubious he had found in the undergrowth.

  Edward tried to think of nothing at all; like Tam, like the birds, the cinnabar moth, the fungus, the Britches itself. He felt unsettled, uneasy, disquieted in his very depths, as indeed he had felt since his mother’s death. He had felt like this from time to time all his life and had conquered the feelings eventually, on each occasion, by stern application to other matters and by refusing consideration of what he felt. If you denied a name to something perhaps it would no longer exist. Thus, as a child, had he driven away the shadows on the bedroom wall — the witch-shaped, wolf-shaped shadows. And thus, today, he sat on his log — a delicate pink-grey log furred here and there with green moss — and tried to concentrate on what he could see while thrusting aside what he knew. He watched the moth and the spider, followed the movement of the tits and the robin, saw the valiant growth of a six-inch beech seedling. The Britches rustled and flickered comfortably around him. Tam chewed the ancient corpse of some small creature.

  And Edward, not unfeeling, not impervious, began presently to howl within. Nothing lasts, he wept, everything goes. My mother is dead, who had always been there, for better and for worse. Mostly for worse. And I am forty-nine and getting old and soon it will be too late for all the things I know nothing of but which torment me in the middle of the night and here now in this place which is supposed to be a comfort and a solace. I am lonely and hungry and I have never breathed a word of this to anyone. Nobody knows or cares. I don’t want anyone to know or care.

  Tam dug a hole and stowed away his prize. Then he came and nosed at Edward’s foot, ready to move on. Edward pushed him away, quite violently, and Tam, unused to even such halfhearted maltreatment, looked up in surprise.

  FIVE

  When, after eight days, Helen had heard nothing more from Giles Carnaby she was bleakly self-contemptuous. Her heightened condition persisted, there was nothing she could do about that: the swerves of mood, the burning senses. In an animal, she told herself savagely, it would be called being on heat. Her mother, who had been fading hitherto, returned to fill the black hole by the kitchen sink or to confront Helen on the stairs, saying smugly that she could have told her all along what to expect.

  Louise came again, towing Suzanne, who spent the entire time shuttered off within the earphones of her Walkman; if spoken to she smiled with bland and tolerant self-absorption, like the very old. There was much complaint of Phil. And, obliquely, of Tim.

  Helen, alarmed and suspecting infidelity (there had been an episode in the past concerning which Louise had boiled away on the telephone for months on end), asked what was wrong with him.

  Nothing’s wrong,’ said Louise irritably. ‘Tim is precisely as he always is. That’s the problem, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t you love him?’ asked Edward.

  Louise rolled her eyes in exasperation. ‘God! You simply don’t know the first thing about marriage, do you? Well, bless you — how could you? Listen — tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Right?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘French expression suggesting instability.’

  Edward appeared to think hard for a few moments and then got up and left the room abruptly.

  ‘And what’s the matter with him, come to that?’ said Louise.

  ‘He’s the nearest I’ve ever seen him to snappish, for someone constitutionally incapable of bad temper. The trouble with Edward is that he’s practically a saint. I honestly think he’s never thought anything nasty about anyone in his life, which is what makes him occasionally so impossible. Just as well he never got married — no one could have stood that. Not of course that it was ever on the cards.’

  ‘He has been a bit edgy,’ said Helen. ‘Mother, maybe.’

  Louise sighed. ‘He’s left it about forty years too late to get uptight about mother.’

  ‘Is there some trouble with Tim?’

  ‘Tim and I,’ said Louise heavily, ‘are going through what is called a bad patch. We get on each other’s nerves, to put it bluntly. Hence me here and him there. He is not, so far as I know, having it off with anyone and I certainly am not, more’s the pity in a sense, though to be honest I’ve never felt less inclined in my life.’ She stared glumly at the window. ‘Frankly, I seldom get a glow about anyone these days, including Tim, which I daresay is partly what’s wrong. How sex does bugger things up … Sorry. I shouldn’t talk like this. I know you . .

  The sentence was left unfinished.

  ‘You know I what?’ said Helen tartly.

  Louise gave her a searching look. ‘Now you’re starting to sound like Edward. I don’t know what’s got into you both. I just meant I know you’re… it’s not a subject you get very enthralled by. Sex, I mean. There! Your expression’s gone all peculiar at once. Anyway … Tim and I are just simply out of sync at the moment — I can’t think how else to put it. We’re not connecting.

  Don’t worry — we’re not going to split up, at least I trust not.’

  Suzanne came into the room, the earphones clamped to her head, exuding a distant tinny jangle. She sat down by the window, smiling vaguely.

  It’s not that we don’t love each other,’ explained Louise.

  ‘Within the context of how long we’ve been together. It’s that . .

  ‘Ssh . .’ murmured Helen.

  ‘She’s dead to the world. Lucky little beggar. Extraordinary, isn’t it? Were we like that? No, of course we weren’t. Not even me. Anyway, as I was saying, Tim. .

  Edward appeared, looking agitated. ‘There’s a boy digging up the old kitchen garden.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helen. ‘It’s Ron Paget’s son. You know about it.

  This is Saturday.’

  ‘Do I? Oh — yes. Is this a good idea? Surely we’re not really going to grow vegetables?’

  ‘Ron Paget?’ said Louise. ‘Nobody told me about this. Anything set up by Ron Paget has got to be suspect.’

  Helen explained.

  ‘One fifty an hour would be considered exploitation in London but I daresay it’s par for the course round here. I wouldn’t put it past Ron to be taking a cut for himself. Mind you give it to the boy personally. What’s he like?’

  ‘I didn’t notice,’ said Edward. He went to the window and stood there wiping his glasses: they could all hear, now, the distant thwack and flump of spade-work. Edward turned round, walked irresolutely around the room and then headed for the door, where he halted. ‘I’m off now. There’s an RSPB field-trip — I won’t be back till late. ‘Bye Louise … and, er . . — he glanced at Suzanne, who smiled blankly and placatingly. ‘Oh Helen, by the way, I forgot — that lawyer rang, he wanted you to ring back.’

  ‘When did he ring?’ asked Helen after a moment.

  ‘Um … Yesterday, the day before . .

  Edward left. Suzanne, who had neither moved nor altered her expression, continued to jangle by the window in her private world. Louise began to recount further discontents, unheard now by either her daughter or her sister.

  Helen postponed telephoning, as one might hoard some delicacy, to savour it the longer in anticipation. When at last she did so Giles Carnaby was warmly effusive. ‘Oh, what a relief! I was beginning to think I must be in the
doghouse for some reason.’

  He spoke as though they knew each other well and over a long period. ‘You didn’t get the message? I shall have to speak severely to your brother. Anyway — now that I’ve got you at last … I have a proposition. The choir … my little Monday diversion … We have our big night next week — performance evening.

  Towards which we’ve been striving for weeks. Will you come?

  We all bring friends and family — please come and be mine. We perform and then everyone gets together over wine and cheese.

  Usually quite good fun. Please say you will.’

  Later, released from the spell of that voice, she was plagued by niggling incredulity. Me? Me? Why? What does he mean by it?

  Does he mean anything at all by it? Why me out of all the other women in Spaxton?

  They’re all married, said her mother. Not that that would bother most people nowadays. He must wonder why you’re not, come to that. And look at you jumping to conclusions, going the right way to make a proper fool of yourself. Why should the man mean a thing by it? You’re a client, aren’t you?

  If he took all his clients out to expensive lunches, invited them to concerts…

  Maybe he does, said her mother. Once in a while. How are you to know?

  She was working in the library her regular three days a week now. It seemed amazing to be able to leave the house each time without feeling furtive, and irritable at being obliged to feel furtive. Her mother had never grasped that a job is a commitment.