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

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Continuing humid,’ Edward wrote. ‘Cuckoo-pint in the corner near the road has increased — eight specimens this year. Wood spurge also doing better. Green woodpecker fledglings have flown. Neither spurge, cuckoo-pint nor woodpeckers will feel satisfaction at this, of course, nor indeed anything at all; they exist, simply, and that is that. Exist, replicate — if circumstances permit, and expire. The entire wood does that and nothing else, year after year — the dominant emotion is fear. When it sings and blossoms in the spring it is not happy; it merely does what its genes tell it to do. Such subtleties as happiness and misery are contributed by me, along with satisfaction at increase of cuckoo pint and survival of woodpeckers. The point of all this being that …’ He put down his pen and stared out at the Britches, which shifted gently and continuously in the light wind. Edward was not a great reader but he knew quite well that he was broaching the oldest and most central concern of literature; he felt appropriately diffident… I don’t know if it is a comfort or a mockery.

  The beauty of it. The permanence. Everything that is in my head, everything that I feel; the fact that the natural world thinks nothing and neither laughs nor cries.’ He pondered again.

  ‘Though that is true only up to a point — last year after the dog fox was killed on the road the vixen called for three nights, the saddest sound I ever heard.’ He paused again. On his bookshelves were the tattered copies of Tarka the Otter and the works of Cherry Kearton that he had read and re-read as a schoolboy, weeping the while. ‘But is the vixen sad or do I attribute sadness to her? All that can be said for certain is that I respond to all of it — vixen, trees, plants, birds, the lot — but it does not respond to me.’ Tam, who had been sleeping on the bed, woke suddenly, scratched himself, jumped down and marched to the door, where he stood, whining imperiously. ‘All right,’ said Edward. ‘In a minute.’ He wrote: ‘And also that it sustains me, in ways that I can’t explain. Especially now. Things still bad. Not sleeping etc.

  Was churlish to Helen.’ Tam, at the door, continued to whine.

  TWELVE

  I suppose, Helen thought, that the interesting thing about my condition is the loss of self-control. Eventually one will see this as interesting rather than demoralising. It will be possible to look back and observe that those in love become utterly self-destructive.

  Oneself in love. At the moment I can no longer act with common sense and deliberation, because there is only one course open, and that is determined by obsession. I am obsessed by Giles; all I can think of is whether I shall see him again, and when. What the outcome of seeing him might be is beside the point; I have become incapable of calculation. Normally behaviour — or at least my behaviour — is governed by certain processes; weighing one course of action against another, thinking about consequences. In this predicament, one does nothing of the kind.

  One responds to some basic drive, like an animal. In youth, I found this exhilarating, I remember.

  She tried, as therapy, to recall previous experiences. She was probably, she realised, shorter on this than most people. Apart from that early sexual encounter, which did not count as love, there had been Peter Datchett and two others. With Peter Datchett, it had been a question of ripening interest rather than obsession. The others, in so far as she could recover her feelings of the time, seemed to have involved love — inflammation of the senses, certainly. At eighteen — the period of the mousseline de sole dress — she had found herself hanging around a certain area of Twickenham, where they were then living, in the hopes of encountering the doctor’s son, with whom she had had a strangled conversation at some social gathering. He had subsequently taken her to the cinema, where she had been startled to feel his hand creep into hers. Four weeks later she had seen him in the cinema queue with another girl, and had perceived that her day was over; in between, she had known disorientation and obsession, diagnosed her trouble, and felt exhilarated. Later, in her twenties, she had become quietly and patiently infatuated with a married colleague. The man had never behaved towards her in other than a friendly and decorous way; nevertheless, she burned. When after a year he moved away to another job, she felt acute distress and thought continuously of him for many months. It was that experience, in recollection, which most closely reflected her present state.

  Late one afternoon Giles came into the library. Helen had taken over the ‘Returned Books’ counter temporarily from one of the juniors and looked up to find him standing in front of her, smiling.

  He held up empty hands. ‘I’m not a customer. Nothing to declare. But I did have something in mind — a biography of Mahler.’

  ‘We have Donald Mitchell. I’m not sure if it’s on the shelf.

  You’ll find it in. .

  ‘I’d hoped for personal service,’ said Giles.

  Helen glanced round. ‘When Janice comes back from her tea I can hand over here.’

  ‘Good. I’ll fend for myself till then.’

  Five minutes later she joined him in the Biography alcove. ‘I’m sorry I was out when you phoned — Edward did remember to tell me this time.’

  ‘Did I phone? Yes, so I did — this week has been hectic, though not in any interesting way. Nothing to report on your mother’s affairs, I’m afraid. Now — what do you advise? Mahler is out.

  Shall I embark on two volumes of Henry James?’

  They discussed books for a few minutes. Giles made his selection. He glanced at his watch. ‘I must be off. Choir night, so I get myself an early supper. Thank you for your invaluable help — what luck to find you. I was afraid I might have struck one of the days you aren’t here.’

  There was to be no arrangement made, then. Choir night.

  Helen thought of the dark woman; in the mind’s eye she saw her — laughing and talking with Giles. She felt a gust of despair. For

  a moment she was quite faint; the library rocked around her — the browsing readers with shopping baskets set down beside them, the books in their bright rows, the humming strip lights.

  She took a deep breath, gathered herself, the room settled; Giles was tucking his pile of books under his arm, picking up his briefcase. She said, ‘Then what were you telephoning about?’

  ‘About?’ He looked at her in surprise. And something else: something chilly, something that warned. Stop, she told herself, stop.

  And continued. ‘If there’s nothing to report. .

  ‘Oh,’ said Giles. ‘Yes … Let me see now, what did I have in mind? Mahler, perhaps. And to say thank you for that lovely picnic. I was telling Edward about the heron we saw.’ He was about to go; he turned to her. Well — goodbye, my dear, he was about to say, so glad I found you. And would be gone, leaving her to stare into blank days ahead. No, she thought, no.

  ‘I should like to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Helen … Of course.’ He laid a hand on her arm, placating.

  ‘Very soon. It’s difficult to talk here, isn’t it? And I have the blessed choir. We must organise something — very soon.’

  ‘And you’ve given me the impression you wanted to see me, too.’ Appalled, she heard herself forge on.

  Tut my dear …’ A woman edged past them into the alcove, murmuring apologies. Giles continued, his voice losing its solicitous intimacy. ‘We must talk again. Soon. Definitely. And thank you again for your help.’ He smiled: a public, neutral smile. The woman looked at them for a moment over the book she had pulled from the shelf.

  He went. ‘I can never find R to Z,’ said the woman plaintively.

  ‘Something funny happens after P.’ Helen supplied assistance.

  She could hardly hear the woman’s queries; her stomach twisted; his bland little words ticked in her head — soon, very soon. Well, said her mother, I should think you may have gone and done it now.

  She was having dreams of unabashed sexuality. It was not Giles, though, who featured in these dreams. She consorted, these nights, with strangers — men who were temporarily vivid when she awoke but who faded as the day progresse
d until, after a few hours, they vanished entirely. Since the picnic, the young man by the river had joined her twice; she herself, interestingly, had not been the Helen of today but her own younger self and indeed not even that — some other girl who was both alien and deeply familiar, a doppelganger, a mirror-Helen. She had bathed naked from a deserted beach with this man, and lain with him afterwards among sand-dunes. In the morning, while the dream

  remained with her, she felt searingly deprived, as though she had been abandoned, as though she had lost someone known and loved. And the loss was in part the loss of some aspect of herself, as irretrievable as past happiness.

  She remembered that somewhere Dorothy had kept old photograph albums and, on a whim, began to search for them. They were not where she had expected to find them, in the big tallboy in the sitting room, in which lurked an unvisited confusion of old magazines, moth-eaten balls of knitting-wool, paper patterns, Edward’s school reports, Louise’s sketch pads, buttons, string.

  She ran them to ground eventually in the bottom of Dorothy’s wardrobe, an area she had not yet steeled herself to clear. Pulling them from under some old blankets, she sat down on the bed and began to leaf through the pages: photographs fell out, battered, uncherished, not stuck-in — this was no lovingly tended relic.

  Here was a curly-haired Louise, smirking in a sunsuit on a grey, shingly beach; here was Edward in knee-length shorts, hair clipped to his scalp and ears sticking out. And here was Helen, a forgotten Helen with anxious chubby adolescent face, wearing a crumpled cotton dress and tilted sideways — her mother had been a careless photographer. All these prints, indeed, were under-or over-exposed, with their subjects askew; heads were chopped off, feet and hands loomed giant in the foregrounds. Nevertheless, photographs had been taken; there had been a deliberate attempt to record, to retain. Helen, shuffling through them, remembered Louise in the churchyard: even mother must have had the odd twinge …

  Here was her father, too. Always on the edge of things. He stood diffidently to the side of a group, or featured as a background — the pair of legs clutched by baby Louise, a blurred figure in a field beyond Helen and Edward who sat on a rug eating sandwiches. That particular snap prompted the memory, the afternoon returning as she stared at it — the sandwiches had been of marmite, Edward had found a hawk-moth caterpillar.

  But what was their father doing, lurking indistinctly over there under a tree? That Helen could not remember. And nowhere did he appear alone: never, it seemed, had Dorothy turned the viewfinder of the old box Brownie deliberately upon her husband.

  Equally, she was absent herself; naturally enough — she had been the photographer. At the back of the album was a clutch of glossy professional pictures, and in these Dorothy could be found, glaring out from Louise’s wedding group, standing rigid beside Edward on his graduation day. For both occasions she had worn the same hat — an uncompromising chenille turban; Helen had disposed of it a month ago with the rest of her things and, as she looked at the photographs, felt again the curious dry but slimy touch of it. And there also, in an earlier picture, was the brown bear fur coat: Dorothy, flanked by Helen and Edward as children, stood on a pavement against a background of London taxis and buses — they must have been caught by a street photographer on one of those pantomime or ballet outings.

  Dorothy looked determined rather than festive; she would have been in her forties at the time but already stood as though planted, like an elderly woman. She had never seemed young, Helen realised; not even in the haziest reaches of recollection.

  But it was not for Dorothy that she searched, nor even for her father. She hunted herself, putting aside all those pictures in which she appeared — not as child but as a grown woman. There were not so many. The sequence ended abruptly in the late fifties; the camera had packed up. Helen could even remember the occasion; the shutter jamming, her mother’s fit of temper, the thing flung into the dustbin. And never, of course, replaced; such a purchase would have been an unjustifiable extravagance.

  The last photograph of herself showed her at about twenty-five, here in the garden at Greystones, sorting apples into baskets.

  Clearly Dorothy’s principal intention had been to record the apple harvest — a prodigious one; Helen’s presence was incidental, like one of those figures introduced for purposes of scale or composition. But she had turned her face to the camera and it had caught a look that she could find nowhere else and indeed that seemed to belong to another girl; she barely recognised herself. She saw a person who was young, yes, but — more than that — who wore an expression of arresting vivacity and expectancy.

  And who looked thus at her mother — what had she seen?

  Of what had she been thinking? Helen turned the picture over and saw that Dorothy had pencilled on the back ‘181bs Laxtons; 271bs Coxes.’ One of those trees had blown over in a storm a few years later; the other survived as a diseased and sterile relic.

  She sat on her mother’s bed and studied her own distant and alien face. The eyes, indeed, met hers — alive, expectant, vulnerable. She felt as though confronted by a child: it’ll be all right, she wanted to say, I’ll see that it’s all right.

  A letter came from Giles: a typed, official letter concerning her mother’s affairs. But folded within it was a handwritten note — ‘So good to see you at the library, albeit briefly. Though I thought you seemed not quite yourself, and trust all is well now — do let me know if there is anything I can do. Yours affec. Giles.’

  What am I supposed to make of this? she wondered. And with the thought came a spurt of irritation. I am supposed to make anything, or nothing, of it; obscurity and ambiguity are built in, whether deliberately or because that is his habit. Just as he has behaved since we met in a manner that avoids interpretation.

  She telephoned that evening, before she could change her mind. She picked up the receiver without planning what she would say.

  ‘This is Helen.’

  There was no hesitation, no coolness to his voice. ‘How nice — and how are you? You’ve had my letter? As I explained — we should be able to get those shares transferred next month, and then you can go ahead and sell them, or re-invest or whatever you wish. It might be as well to. .

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘And thank you for your note.’

  ‘Ah .

  ‘There is, in a sense, something you can do. Perhaps we could meet.’

  Giles said at once, ‘Of course. Let’s see … Tomorrow? What about tomorrow — Saturday? I am bespoke in the evening, but the daytime is free, once I’ve done my domestic chores. Why don’t we have a pub lunch and a breath of fresh air somewhere pleasant?’

  He had suggested the landscaped grounds of an eighteenth century house, noted for their expression of the picturesque: ‘I’m not a great one for stately homes, but you can have a good walk there.’ They had lunched in a crowded riverside pub, where Giles had talked smoothly and continuously on a general level.

  He continued to talk thus now, as they walked down the grand vista, away from the formal gardens and into the woodland rides, where classical figures loomed from the undergrowth and the serpentine rill wound away towards a distant temple. They stopped at the balustraded terrace overlooking the small lake, and leaned over; below, enormous golden fish lay around in the green water.

  ‘Carp?’ wondered Giles. ‘Or orfe, are they? There’s something called an orfe, isn’t there?’

  Helen said, ‘I think I should find myself another solicitor.’ She had not considered the words; they arrived, simply, and once said, seemed right.

  He turned to her. She saw him, for the first time ever, startled.

  There was a sudden nakedness to his face. Then the nakedness was covered: he had seen what lay ahead. He said, with deliberate care, ‘But of course, my dear, if you feel we are not coming up to scratch. You have a perfect right.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with professional things. It’s because I am in love with you.’

  There was a sile
nce. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Giles. He sounded entirely artificial. He looked down at the fish. ‘My dear Helen . .

  ‘Which is my fault,’ said Helen. ‘But it makes life difficult.

  And I have to say that although what I feel is my fault, and my responsibility, you have, up to a point, encouraged me. Or at least you have left me not knowing what to think.’

  Giles sighed. ‘Then I am to blame. Please let me say, Helen, that I have the very greatest affection and respect for you. Please realise that. I value your friendship enormously, and I’d hoped to continue to do so.’

  She watched the fish. Carp, or orfe. They lay at angles to each other, drifting very slowly so that the gold-splintered pattern of the lake changed continuously. She heard what he said and she thought, so that is how it is, and how it is going to be. She felt nothing very much, except the sense of moving inexorably from one moment to the next, and accepting what each brought. She followed the slow gyration of one very large, cream-coloured fish and said, Tut you aren’t in love with me, which would make it, I’m afraid, an awkward friendship. Of course, my feelings may change — I’m well aware of that — in which case all this will seem rather silly. I’ll probably wish I’d never mentioned the matter, but it seems necessary to me at the moment, so there it is. What isn’t very important to you has become important to me — disturbingly important. There is an imbalance, and I feel that I can’t allow it to go on. For my own sake, I suppose.’