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

by Penelope Lively

Should they go at once or have a cup of coffee first? Too late would not do; too early would be awkward. They stood amid the station crowds, arguing. Edward was in favour of coffee; Helen wanted to go.

  ‘It takes half an hour to get anywhere in London on the tube,’ said Edward.

  ‘Twenty years ago. And anyway we don’t know exactly where it is. I forgot to ask Louise.’ Helen was becoming flustered. ‘Ring her up then.’

  This presented a further problem. Neither of the Glovers had used a public telephone for a long while and were astonished to find themselves confronted by a totally unfamiliar contraption.

  They stood before it in perplexity, Edward banging his head against the plastic hood, and tried to work out what to do from the illustrative diagram shown, like foreign tourists. Behind them, other intending users glared in contempt. Eventually Helen got through; Louise was in a meeting, she was told, and could not be reached.

  They took the tube. Emerging at the station in the City (with fifteen minutes in hand, Helen noted to her relief) they found themselves in an alien landscape. Blank-faced office blocks reared around them; everyone else carried a briefcase and a daily paper.

  They hesitated, getting in the way of this purposeful world.

  Eventually, Helen asked directions of a newsvendor.

  Their destination turned out to be one of the largest and glassiest of the office blocks. The Glovers approached it with apprehension, unused to such places. The central lobby was several stories high. It included a number of thirty-foot trees and a tide of foliage that would not have disgraced Kew Gardens.

  One entire wall was constructed as a glass cliff down which fell a waterfall some six feet wide; the pool into which it tumbled smoked with spray and the whole effect was disconcerting, as of some plumbing disaster on a majestic scale. The Glovers stood around at a loss; this did not seem to be the sort of place in which business could be carried on. Eventually Helen spotted a reception desk, discreetly tucked away behind a large weeping fig; they advanced across wastes of polished marble and were directed to a lift. As it rose Edward sad thoughtfully, ‘One gets the impression that this sort of place must cost rather a lot of money.’

  The lift stopped. The doors opened and they stepped into a thickly carpeted, perfectly silent and very large room, again rampant with greenery, in which a girl was sitting behind a desk smiling brightly. At the sight of them she sprang forward and offered to get them a cup of coffee. She ushered them into deep leather chairs, offered Edward a copy of the Financial Times (which he took, cravenly) and pranced off down a corridor. She wore an emerald green silk shirt, a very short black leather skirt and black tights.

  Edward dropped the newspaper on to the carpet. He gave Helen a look of reproach and accusation. Helen stared doggedly at a Swiss cheese plant.

  The coffee arrived, followed a few minutes later by two tall and thin men who introduced themselves and led the Glovers to another room, barely identifiable as an office except for one discreet filing cabinet. An immense window overlooked the river.

  More foliage. A large low glass table to one side of which the Glovers were directed. Their hosts drew up chairs on the other; the one who was apparently the senior of the two said, ‘Julia, I think we could manage some more coffee …’ The leather skirted girl tripped off.

  Courtesies were exchanged. The Glovers, cautiously, observed their hosts; both wore suits that spoke of much expense, the senior and thinner with a striped shirt, the other with a lilac shirt and pink silk tie. They sat there drinking coffee and looking at the Glovers with detached interest. Edward wore his green suit, Helen her camel coat. Both, in fact, were dressed as for their mother’s funeral except that Helen had a new white blouse with a frill down the front and her pearl necklace. Edward’s shoes were dirty and bits of the Britches still clung to his trousers.

  The striped shirt man now began to talk about the portfolio.

  Pink tie tapped at a calculator. Striped shirt said that the position could undoubtedly be improved, with a judicious mixture of playing safe and maybe doing something a bit interesting with Japan or the Far East but of course unfortunately there wasn’t all that much room for manoeuvre. He wondered if there were any other assets. Helen explained about the house. Striped shirt nodded. He asked if there was anything else. Edward looked warningly at Helen and Helen heard herself say that there was a small piece of land. Striped shirt and pink tie perked up a little.

  They asked for particulars; pink tie made some notes.

  But there’s no question of selling it,’ said Edward.

  Striped shirt raised an eyebrow.

  Edward lapsed once more into strangled silence. Helen explained why it was impossible to sell the Britches. This took a couple of minutes, during which striped shirt and pink tie sat back, long legs crossed and polite smiles of amusement or possibly incredulity on their lips. Pink tie tapped again at his calculator and wondered, with a quick glance at striped shirt, if Miss Glover and her brother had considered that realisation of the asset would bring in … well, at a conservative estimate around ten, fifteen thousand extra income? Helen replied that they had.

  There was a short pause. Edward, who appeared to have detached himself from the proceedings, stared out of the window.

  Helen now had a curious prickling sensation up and down her spine. I am not to be intimidated by house plants and silk ties, she thought. Striped shirt tapped a gold pencil thoughtfully against his teeth and said that of course one had every respect for someone wishing to take such a stand and that in that case we must see what could be done with the portfolio as it was. Such as it was. He flashed Helen a nice white smile: ‘We can certainly get the income up on what it is now. And I don’t imagine you have particularly expensive tastes, either of you — vintage claret or fast cars.’ Both men were now smiling genially; the sort of smile people give to earnest but not very bright children, or to social inferiors.

  And why the hell shouldn’t I have a penchant for claret?

  thought Helen. She felt as though, had she been a dog, all her hair would have been standing on end. She looked stonily across the table, telling herself that all she and Edward had to do was get out of here, as soon as possible compatible with the observance of social niceties and the maintenance of civilised behaviour.

  She forced herself to sit tight and retain a noncommittal but not overtly offensive expression while striped shirt talked about unit trusts and pink tie came in once or twice with deferential followups or corrections. She counted to a hundred, in her head, twice, and tried to think about something wonderfully different.

  Edward was now looking at the river with great intensity; he leaned forward a little, as though to see something better.

  And then at last everyone was shuffling chairs on the pile carpet and getting up and there was a lot of shaking of hands and Edward and Helen were in the lift once more, smoothly and silently descending.

  Edward said, ‘What terrible people.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Do we have to pay them a lot of money?’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  But it was clear that his attention was now elsewhere. He set off across the marble lake at a canter, with Helen panting behind.

  Outside, he headed for the bridge and there, halfway across, he came at last to a halt, with traffic rushing past, the river gleaming below and the city reaching away in an infinite complex parade of shining white and pearly grey with light snapping from windows and cars. He leaned over the parapet and gazed.

  Helen joined him. ‘What are you looking at?’

  Edward pointed. ‘Terns.’

  Helen looked down. The water was a greyish-green, streaked with gold by the sun, and above it wheeled and drifted numbers of birds. Others floated slowly downstream, sitting upright like bathtoys amid a flotsam of bottles and skeins of plastic and what seemed to be sandwiches, while several more patrolled a little shingly beach almost beneath the piers of the bridge.

  ‘I thought they were ju
st gulls at first,’ said Edward. ‘I could see them from the window in that place. Then I realised they were terns.’

  ‘I thought terns liked coasts and estuaries, not the middle of cities?’

  ‘They do. That’s the point.’

  The Glovers stood alone on the bridge and watched the terns.

  They dipped and swirled over the golden water, disappearing sometimes under the bridge, sweeping off in a flock to examine the wake of a passing launch. One small colony remained all the time on their beach, an isolated solitary place of grey pebbles below greenish breakwaters; high above them the blind-eyed office blocks glittered pink and yellow in the sun. Edward was enthralled; he leaned his head on his hands and gazed. Once, he turned to Helen and smiled apologetically; ‘Sorry … We’ll go in a minute.’

  But Helen was in no hurry. She stood there beside him, acknowledging the marvellous presence of the terns, and as she did so the thought came to her that striped shirt, and pink tie, and Julia of the leather skirt, presumably passed them by five days a week without knowing that they did so. One is supposed to feel a charitable surge at revelations of deprivation, but oh how satisfying not to do so.

  Edward straightened. ‘I’m hungry — aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll find somewhere for lunch.’

  They were both, now, in a state of mild exaltation. This curious fusion of experiences had made them elated and slightly feverish. Helen clutched Edward’s arm as they dodged through the traffic. They remembered details of the past hour, giggling.

  ‘What are unit trusts?’ said Edward. ‘I couldn’t understand a word he was saying.’ I’m not sure — but did you notice his socks? I never saw such smooth socks on a man.’ Forging onwards in this way, they found themselves away from the river and in a hinterland of commercial London that was as alien to them as New York or Hong Kong. Money reared up all around; it towered in the form of plate glass, stainless steel, polished marble, Portland stone, concrete, brick and slate. For Helen, London meant the leafy calm of Twickenham, where they had lived in early childhood, subsequent rare excursions to the Royal Academy or the Tate and occasional visits to Louise in Camden Town. For Edward, it was a bedsitter in Bayswater, the rioting children of the secondary modern and the distresses of those disturbing years. For both of them the landscape in which they now stood was quite unrelated to any of this. They came to a stop. Edward said ‘This doesn’t look like the sort of area for restaurants.’ He gazed at a glass block, soaring upwards, in whose mirror cliff-face swam the distorted white reflection of a Wren church spire.

  ‘No. Where was that French place Louise used to take us to?’

  ‘Somewhere near South Kensington tube station, wasn’t it?’

  Clutching at the safety of recollection, the Glovers set off for more familiar regions. And indeed, surfacing again at South Kensington, some atavistic instinct for the lie of the land took them directly to the street in which Louise had had an office, fifteen years or so ago, and where two or three times a year they had met for a meal.

  ‘That’s it!’ said Edward. And then, more doubtfully, ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I think so. The outside’s different, somehow. Better go in and see.’

  Once in, there was no going back. Handed from one briskly obsequious waiter to another they found themselves tucked into an upholstered corner, served up with menus and dealt drinks that neither of them was conscious of having ordered. It was very noisy; every other table was full and music babbled from the walls.

  ‘It used to have check tablecloths,’ said Edward. ‘And artificial onions and fishing nets hanging from the ceiling.’

  ‘Well, they’re gone.’

  ‘Never mind.’ Edward picked up the menu. ‘It’s called Maggie’s Wine Bar now, apparently. Looks rather expensive, I’m afraid.’

  They ordered. Edward finished his glass of sherry; he seemed quite restored now.

  ‘You were very good with those men. I’m afraid I rather backed down.’

  ‘You did,’ said Helen.

  ‘They made me feel like… some species that had got into the wrong time slot. That ought to be extinct.’

  ‘Do you feel more comfortable now?’

  ‘Marginally,’ said Edward, glancing round. ‘I could put up some sort of valiant struggle for survival.’

  ‘You’d have to adapt, not just survive. Even I know that.’

  ‘True. That might be more difficult.’

  They grinned at each other. ‘So what do I say to Tim?’ enquired Helen.

  ‘Say we were too small fry for them. He ought to have known that anyway.’

  ‘He meant well.’

  ‘People are always meaning well,’ said Edward. ‘That’s often the trouble.’

  The food arrived, and a bottle of wine. Edward looked warily at It. ‘Do you think we’ll manage all that? I ordered a half carafe.’

  ‘They’ve taken the cork out now.’

  ‘Oh well . .

  ‘The problem about us,’ said Helen, ‘is that we’ve never felt the same way about money as most other people seem to.’

  ‘I’ve never thought of it as a problem.’

  ‘It’s the only way we seem to be like mother.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Edward fervently.

  ‘Louise isn’t interested in money as such, but she quite likes things. Buying things. You and I can’t manage even that to any extent.’

  Edward was tucking in to his meal. ‘This is rather good.

  Perhaps eating in restaurants is nicer than I think it is. I suppose the difficulty about us is that so far as money and possessions are concerned we’re at a more primitive stage than the rest. We’re not interested in surplus. It’s like being aborigines or North American Indians after the colonists have arrived. When everyone else is busy accumulating they get bothered about anyone who is quite happy with a modest sufficiency.’

  ‘And look what happened to the aborigines and the Indians,’ said Helen.

  ‘Mmm. Perhaps that’s why I felt so uncomfortable with those men. But then there were the terns getting away with it on the other side of the window.’

  ‘The terns get away with it because they aren’t noticed.’

  ‘I’ve always thought I did quite well at being inconspicuous myself,’ said Edward. ‘But I take your point. One hasn’t a hope, really. With the likes of Ron Paget around, and those chaps in their glass skyscraper.’

  Plates were removed. More wine was poured. Helen caught sight of a silver-grey head at the far side of the room and twitched; not Giles Carnaby, of course not, how could it be — here? And I hadn’t thought of the blessed man in the last two hours — at least barely thought. Ten days now and he hasn’t telephoned.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ enquired Edward.

  ‘Nothing. Do you imagine that we are the way we are about money because of mother or because we would have been like that anyway?’

  ‘Interesting. I don’t know. Conditioning must have something to do with it — it always does. We weren’t trained to be acquisitive.’

  ‘Presumably the children of the poor aren’t either. And we’ve never been the poor, in a proper sense. Tim obviously thinks we’re going to be, in our old age — that’s why he got us involved with these investment people.’

  Edward sighed. ‘Old age will be quite bad enough without being patronised by people like that. I think I’ll settle for poverty.’

  ‘It’s not just conditioning,’ continued Helen. ‘Presumably inheritance comes into it too. Inherited characteristics. Like we’ve both got slightly flat feet, the same as mother, and Louise has her wiry hair.’

  ‘We’d better not push this too far,’ said Edward. ‘Or we shan’t like what emerges.’

  They were both now inflamed by the unaccustomed wine.

  Neither particularly wanted any more but a lifetime’s resistance to waste went deep. They drank, doggedly.

  ‘Flat feet and a tendency to be frugal are nothing very terrible.

&nbs
p; You aren’t like her in any other conspicuous way. Nor is Louise.’

  ‘And nor are you,’ Edward put in, promptly.

  ‘Look at us, though — sitting here talking about her.’

  Edward pondered. ‘When she was alive we hardly ever did, do you realise?’

  Helen nodded. Tacit acceptance; the occasional glance of collusion; unspoken shared expertise in methods of evasion and camouflage. ‘There was no need, was there?’

  ‘Then why do we do it now?’

  ‘Exorcism, said Helen briskly. ‘Or something of that order.’

  ‘Don’t you feel guilty? I do.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Edward tipped the last of the wine into their glasses. ‘When did you first realise other people’s mothers were different?’

  When I was about five, I think.’

  ‘You were always more sophisticated. I was twenty-one at least.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Helen, ‘we mustn’t exaggerate. Other people have difficulties with their parents.’

  ‘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.’