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

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Clegg will make about a hundred thousand,’ said Peter Sidey, ‘if his application goes through. And the village will lose its last open space. I’ve seen the plans for the houses and they’re peculiarly insensitive — more suitable for Milton Keynes.’ He was a retired architect, past seventy now, who had exhausted himself over mainly fruitless endeavours to obstruct the likes of this opportunist farmer. He would have had a much more tranquil retirement, Helen thought, in some already brutalised corner of the country.

  The Glovers made appropriate noises of concern. Peter Sidey outlined the opposition plans and urged them to write letters and attend a protest meeting. ‘If that piece of land is developed there will be no large open space left in the village except the Green itself. And of course the Britches, thanks to your mother’s public spirited stand over the years. By the way, had you ever realised the name is Saxon by origin? From braec — a word meaning land newly taken into cultivation.’

  ‘Well, it’s the opposite now,’ said Edward. ‘Extremely uncultivated.’

  ‘Quite. Interesting, though — the indestructibility of a name.’

  Helen and Edward broke away as soon as was decently possible. They were both tickled at the image of Dorothy as a defender of the public good. ‘Perhaps we should have told him she spent twenty years not selling the Britches simply to annoy the people who wanted to buy it,’ said Edward.

  ‘Certainly not. The result remains the same, whatever her reasons.’

  As they approached the front door of Greystones Helen heard the telephone ringing within. She felt a rush of excitement and anticipation, and realised that in the preoccupations of the last half hour she had not thought of Giles Carnaby once — definitely a record. Fumbling with the latch key, she rushed for the telephone, thrusting the shopping basket at Edward.

  It was Joyce Babcock. Reminding her at length, in case she hadn’t made a note of it, of the Christmas holiday schedule for the library. When at last she put the receiver down and went into the kitchen she found that Edward had unpacked the shopping. The bottle of detergent stood in reproachful isolation at one end of the table.

  Thinking of Giles Carnaby, of course, was not so much a considered process as an involuntary twitch. She did not want to think of him but could not help it. Indeed he was there most of the time, presiding within her head, dimming a little when her attention was engaged, all-pervasive in times of relaxation. At night he filled the room. She heard again every word he had spoken; she reconstructed his face, his body, his clothes.

  A man she had met three times. With whom she had spent six hours or so. Who had displayed a friendly interest in her.

  She saw herself, and did not care for what she saw. She stood to one side and observed this pathetic self-deluding fifty-twoyear-old in a state of romantic yearning and sexual excitation.

  Given to the observation of others, she now observed herself, but without charity. She agreed with her mother: riding for a fall, driving nails in her own coffin, only herself to blame.

  And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to be done.

  Edward, offended by the detergent, wandered out into the garden and was instantly distracted by the sound of digging from beyond the yew hedge. Rather desultory digging. Of course — that boy was here. He went to the gap in the hedge and saw

  Gary at the far end of the kitchen garden. He was not digging at all now but taking a breather, evidently. A prolonged breather, during which he took a bar of chocolate out of his pocket and unwrapped it in a leisurely way.

  Edward stood there.

  Gary half-turned, spotted him out of the corner of one eye and began to dig again with great fervour.

  Edward continued to stand there for another minute or two.

  Then he plunged off into the Britches to check the nest-boxes.

  ‘He what?’ exploded Louise. ‘A row with the headmistress about evolution? Only Edward could have a row about evolution.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Helen. ‘It was the stock subject for argument in the late nineteenth century, in some circles.’

  ‘Oh, then . . Trust Edward. I wish he had resigned — it would have been hilarious. So what else is new?’

  Helen reached out for Edward’s anorak, lying on the oak chest, and put it round her shoulders. She wished, not for the first time, that the telephone was not in the hall, always the coldest place in the house. The telephone was in the hall because Dorothy had said that telephones had to be in halls; it occurred to Helen that there was no longer any reason for this to be so. In one moment of combined panic and acceptance she knew that the telephone would stay exactly where it was.

  ‘I’ve ordered the memorial stone.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Gravestone. Sorry — it’s what the brochures say.’ She described the choice. ‘Do you think that sounds all right?’

  ‘I suppose so. God! What a thing to have to do. I’m sorry — everything gets shoved on to you.’

  ‘Edward helped.’

  ‘Well, good. But now I’m feeling guilty. I ought to be there.

  Actually life has been fairly murderous lately. The office. And Tim has been having a go of his sinus plus conjunctivitis and something else he describes as angst and is being generally unsupportive. And Phil is playing up. Actually I think I may come down this weekend, just to escape. So … anything else?’

  Helen put the anorak on. ‘Ron Paget tried to get us to build on the Britches again.’

  Louise laughed. ‘Tell him Edward’s turning it into a conservation area for endangered species. Actually, Ron doesn’t know it, but he’s got a point — you really ought to think about money a bit. Tim wants you to see some people he knows who do investment advice — then you’d get more out of those shares.

  Apparently they’re all in the wrong things.’

  ‘We don’t want…’ Helen began.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Tim’s going to fix it up. You can have a nice day out in London — do you good.’

  ‘We don’t …’ But Louise was off on another track. Helen stared at the oak chest and wondered what was in it. She couldn’t remember anyone having opened it in years. There was a torn squab cushion on the top and it was traditionally used as a place to dump coats, scarves and gloves. Helen thought she could distantly recall having seen it open with her mother upended over it, rummaging. It had been Dorothy’s territory, as indeed had all of the house, except for areas of communal use. It occurred to Helen — listening to Louise, contemplating the chest — that in all the years she and Edward had lived at Greystones they had fully occupied only their own bedrooms; elsewhere, they perched.

  As soon as Louise had rung off she removed the cushion and opened the chest. The contents reeked of damp. On top was a rug, colourless with age and stained with mildew. Helen picked it out and dropped it on the floor; beneath was a tangle of string.

  So that was where mother had kept all that string from parcels which must not be discarded lest it be needed. There was a stack of crumpled brown paper, some of it addressed to herself and to Edward or Louise and bearing injunctions about not opening before Christmas; she recognised the handwriting of aunts and godmothers.

  Beneath the layer of string and paper was a foetid mass of material: old curtains and cushions, felted blankets, a porridge of gloves and belts, garments decayed almost beyond identification.

  Moth and mouse had thrived down here. Helen reached in and stirred with distaste; a brown knitted pixie hat surfaced that her

  mother used to wear long ago, unravelled now to a skeletal condition. She spotted a sweater she once gave Edward for a birthday, and various throw-outs of her own. She remembered her mother, standing squarely at the front door, fending off supplicants from the village school Parent-Teacher Association, the Darby and Joan Club, the summer Fete; Greystones never had jumble. Had her mother harboured some primitive superstition about the totemistic quality of one’s possessions?

  Rejected the thought of her things in other hands?


  She poked again — dug right down to the bottom and up through the shambles came something that signalled with painful clarity. Honey-coloured muslin. Mousseline de soie, to be precise; a grandeur of definition that she had cherished, aged eighteen.

  Faded now to dirty cream, and thrust down in a crumpled ball to the base of the chest — but still instantly known. That dress.

  She pulled it up and shook it out. There it was — complete with the taffeta underskirt that had once (once only) rustled so satisfyingly. She sat down and examined it minutely — spread it over her lap and investigated. It was undamaged; creased into a wrinkled network, yes — its honey glow extinguished — a poor drab thing but unstained, untorn, unshrunk.

  She smoothed the dress across her knees and pondered this.

  The cupboard in which it was not. The moment of surprise, of faint alarm. The rail of intimately known clothes — her two tweed skirts, her three cotton frocks, her winter coat, her wool pinafore dress. And an airy space at the end where should have hung, in all its glory, the honey-coloured muslin — her first and only evening dress, the amazing, unexpected, enhancing present from her godmother.

  ‘Mother! My evening dress isn’t in my cupboard!’

  Dorothy’s back view, squat and priest-like before the altar of the kitchen stove. Stirring a pan, her head wreathed in steam, hairpins jutting from the bun at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Mother!’

  heard you. No need to shout. That dress went to the cleaners.’

  ‘But mother… It didn’t need cleaning. I’ve only worn it And I need it for Saturday — for the Clarks’ dance.’

  ‘It had perspiration marks.’

  ‘Oh mother, it didn’t … Never mind, I’ll go and get it. It will be ready, won’t it? Where’s the ticket, I . .

  And Dorothy turns, red-faced from her brew, or so it seemed.

  ‘They had some disaster with it, apparently. No point in going round there. It was spoiled. The stuff they use — these chemicals.’

  And turns again to the stove, furiously stirring.

  ‘No! Oh no … Oh, mother … But then I’ve nothing for Saturday. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ says Dorothy. ‘I’ll take in my old brown silk for you. There’s a good hem on it, too, it can be let down. That’ll be perfectly all right — Rose was out of her mind buying you that ridiculous creation anyway, far too low cut and tight in the bust.’

  And what, one now wonders, happened to the brown silk, of which there is no sign — neither here in the chest nor upstairs among mother’s things. It is all too well remembered: the slimy feel of it, hanging limp and unfitting around her as she stands awkward on the threshold of the Clarks’ drawing-room, where the carpets are rolled back, the parquet gleams and in the corner the big hired radiogram is asserting that the lady is a tramp. She prays to be noticed; she prays to be ignored. Gone is the rapturous unfamiliar feeling of equality, of authority, induced by the mousseline de sole at her cousins’ dance two weeks before. She does not look nice; she knows that she does not look nice. A few yards of material have changed her from one person into another.

  Is one’s grip of things to be always so fickle?

  ‘I’ve emptied the hall chest. I thought you might use it for your files.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was anything in it,’ said Edward.

  ‘It was bung full.’

  ‘Stuff of mother’s, I imagine.’

  ‘Not entirely. There was a dress I had when I was eighteen.’

  Edward looked at Helen warily, alerted by her tone.

  ‘A dress mother said the cleaners ruined. Not the case, it now seems.’

  Edward, shying away from disagreeable exposures, supposed that mother must have made a mistake.

  ‘Mother didn’t make that kind of mistake.’

  ‘So long ago,’ murmured Edward, sidestepping. ‘I don’t know how you can remember. .

  ‘Since when,’ said Helen, ‘does one forget?’

  He remembered now, though would not have done so otherwise.

  He left Helen and went to have a bath and in the cold steamy bathroom there came to him this vision of a distant unreal Helen looking — well, radiant was the unexpected word that came to mind — looking not her usual self at all in some frock that glowed and billowed and rustled as she came in at the front door late, pink-cheeked, a touch dishevelled and greeted by the stone wall of Dorothy’s disapproval. Where had he been then? Lurking on the stairs; listening from his bed?

  Edward lay in the bath as the water cooled around him — as usual it had never been adequately hot — and allowed physical discomfort to complement his state of mind. He thought of Helen, with distress and in helplessness. He did not know quite what was implied by all this business of dresses, but he sensed something ugly — and flinched. His mother trundled around on the edges of his thoughts and he tried to push her away. She came back, unquenchable and impervious.

  When he was very small Helen had been all that he was not; wise, mature, equipped with skills and resources. He sheltered under her wing; above all, he sheltered from their mother. And then had come the awful perception that Helen too was vulnerable; he had seen her exposed, humiliated, disappointed. He had realised that the refinement of distress is that you are obliged to suffer not just for yourself, which is the easier part, but for others as well. He suffered for Helen, and suffered again now — in retrospect in the chill bathwater in the dank Greystones bathroom where condensation sent rusty trails from the pipes

  down every wall. He thought of Helen, and felt for Helen, as some wincing extension of himself. If anyone had asked him — God forbid — what were his feelings for his sister he would have replied that he was fond of her.

  When Edward was about twenty he had once intercepted the look exchanged by a young married couple. He could no longer remember who they were, but their faces were with him still, and that look: those two pairs of eyes, from which shone a brilliant collusive intensity — an intensity that excluded the rest of the world.

  On that occasion he was awed and intrigued; he hoped and expected that one day he too would share such a look with someone. Subsequently, he came across the look on various faces — a mother lifting a baby from a pram, a child running towards its father, a woman sitting beside a hospital bed, lovers by the dozen. Awe gave way to a certain bleakness; he felt the excluding quality of those eyes — they were never looking at him. The only eyes that ever gazed thus into his were those of a succession of dogs.

  Nor did he ever so gaze himself. At the only time in his life when he would have liked to he was so crushed by doubt and diffidence that he kept his eyes scrupulously trained upon the ground, or the table in front of him, or the wall behind the shoulder of the person concerned. Whole conversations took place during which Edward stared out of windows, or at carpets or pavements or the branches of trees.

  ‘Do you realise that you have this exasperating habit of never looking at one, Edward?’

  Oh yes. Only surreptitiously, when unobserved — soaking up, then, the tilt of the jaw, the structure of the hairline, the wonderful singularity of nose, of mouth, of eyebrow.

  ‘Edward, are you with me or are you not? I sometimes wonder.’

  Only too much so, alas. Only too much so.

  Those times were reduced now to a swirl of unchronological slides — images of a room, a street, a skyline — some with accompanying sound.

  A tube train. Circle Line. Paddington, Bayswater, Notting

  Hill … An advertisement about Amplex: two people staring in distaste at an unsuspecting third. ‘Well, Edward — what about this Italian trip … Would it be fun?’ And the whole scene becomes incandescent: the cheerful rocking train, the interesting faces of people, promise and potential.

  The Chinese restaurant. Waiting; alone. Watching the door.

  Through which, at last, comes the expected face and with it another, known also, and the evening is dashed, the stomach twists, the chop su
ey smells sour.

  Greenwich Park. The perfect ginger circles of autumn leaves beneath the trees. A tug hooting from the river. Sparrows at their feet. His own hand reaching out in despair to touch another, which is instantly withdrawn. ‘Sorry, Edward . .

  Trudging from one grey day into another, on and on, until at last it doesn’t matter any more, or so it seems.

  SEVEN

  ‘This is a complete waste of time,’ said Edward.

  ‘Louise arranged it — at least Tim did. We could hardly say no.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just have written these people a letter?’

  ‘Apparently they like to see you once to begin with.’

  Edward, still rebellious, gazed out of the train window. He hadn’t been to London in years, and didn’t wish to.

  ‘It’s your money too,’ said Helen reprovingly.

  ‘There isn’t much of it anyway.’

  ‘That’s the whole point. These investment people can make the capital produce more — put it into different things.’

  Edward grunted, apparently intent on Didcot power station.

  In fact he was observing a flock of lapwings in a flooded field; his spirits lifted a notch. The lapwings were followed up by some tufted duck on a reservoir — a frustrating snatched glimpse but enough to dispel most of his gloom. By the time they reached Paddington he was more cheerful. They studied the Underground map to see how to reach their destination. Both were made nervous now by the prospect of the appointment and the tricky matter of timing. How long would it take to get there?