Passing On Page 5

  Don’t just stand there, you stupid woman. Put hot water in teapot, cups on tray, and milk in jug. The man will think you’re half-witted. Don’t look at him like that, either. God knows what he will think.

  ‘Let me carry the tray for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Helen.

  They returned to the sitting room.

  ‘Oh — I’ve forgotten the sugar.’

  ‘I don’t take it,’ said Giles Carnaby. ‘My wife always went on at me about getting fat. I am a bit too fat.’ He peered down at the front of his trousers. ‘Don’t you think? No — I’m not asking you, you’ll be too polite to do other than prevaricate. Anyway, no sugar. Your delightful time-slip kitchen has completely distracted me from the matter in hand. Is there anything you — or your brother — would like any further advice about?’

  Helen racked her brains. Advice? Surely they needed advice?

  Of course they needed advice; she reviewed, in a flash, the whole unsatisfactory condition of Greystones, of her state of mind, of life itself. How can we stop the drain flooding whenever it rains?

  Why do I have to feel guilty because my mother has died? How can I achieve a comforting complacency?

  ‘I can’t think of anything.’

  ‘Oh dear. What a pity. I don’t in the least want to go back to

  the office. Let’s have another cup of tea and perhaps something will spring to mind.’ He held his cup out. ‘I like this house. It feels so … established. I imagine you’ve lived here a long time.’

  I must remember ‘established’, thought Helen. Next time Louise is on at us about brightening the place up a bit. Established.

  ‘Nearly thirty years. We came here just after my father died. We’d been living in London and mother always hankered after a village.’

  ‘And it came up to expectations?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Helen. ‘Villages are red in tooth and claw and my mother was naturally contentious.’

  ‘Really? How interesting. What is it that is being contended about?’

  Helen reflected. ‘Who owns what, on the whole, and what they are doing with it. Conservation versus making money. All that. Oh — and with side-issues about noise and personal vendettas and things people’s children have been up to. There’s no end to it.’

  ‘And do you take part? And your brother?’

  ‘Only in a desultory way. Edward not at all, I suppose. We are considered a bit eccentric. And then there’s the Britches.’ ‘Ah. The bit of woodland. What about it?’

  Helen explained. Giles Carnaby listened with attention. When she had finished he said, ‘Yes. I can see how this would be seen as perverse. Your mother was not acting according to the spirit of the times. She could have made a hundred thousand or so.

  Was it that she was ecologically minded, like your brother?’

  ‘Not in the least. She just liked saying no to people. She especially liked saying no to Ron Paget.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The builder along the road.’

  ‘Ah yes. Does he drive a very affluent-looking red car? I think I saw him coming out as I arrived. You realise it would be perfectly possible to sell the — what’s it called? — this land now if you wished?’

  ‘That’s out of the question,’ said Helen. ‘Edward would be terribly upset.’

  ‘Then so long as your finances are healthy there is absolutely no reason why you should. Perhaps that’s why your mother didn’t include the… the. .

  ‘Britches.’

  ‘Curious name — what does it mean? Why she didn’t include the Britches with the house. Maybe she didn’t feel confident that your nephew would share the family resistance to material prosperity. Maybe she thought he’d sell it to your builder friend — in the fullness of time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helen. ‘I should imagine that was precisely why.

  She knew we never would.’ She thought of her mother with a flash of respect, successfully pursuing her struggle against Ron Paget from beyond the grave.

  The whole situation is a touch bizarre, but nothing for you to worry about. The lad can’t ever evict you, even should he turn out a villain and who’s to suppose he will? The green hair tells us nothing, I assume — it’s purely totemic and tribal. Anyway, at sixteen, he remains an unknown quantity. I speak from authority — my own son didn’t solidify, as it were, until he was well over twenty. And you have no need to sell the land so your brother can go on enjoying his ecology.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You’re protective about your brother, aren’t you? Oh dear — I’m sorry, none of my business. Now I’m exceeding my brief.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m seduced by the ambience — I keep forgetting I’m here in a professional capacity.’

  Ambience, thought Helen. Ambience and established. Just you wait, Louise. She smiled back — no, beamed: felt her face fixed in this idiot grin of wellbeing and response.

  ‘More tea?’

  ‘What did the lawyer say?’

  ‘He said they never realised mother hadn’t told us about leaving the house to Phil and it didn’t save much tax anyway.

  And he liked the kitchen.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Do you remember that old film with a man being chased across an enormous field by an aeroplane?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ said Helen. ‘Nice, anyway. Very nice, actually.’

  Protective.

  That, yes. One had no choice, really. Given mother. Given Edward.

  She had taken them, aged maybe four and seven, to someone else’s birthday party. Children skittering all over polished parquet floors: children more practised and assured than they were.

  Musical chairs. Hunt the slipper. Balloons. Attendant nannies.

  They did not have a nanny. Mothers gathered in a drawing room.

  She had tugged at her mother’s sleeve, whispering, ‘Edward’s wet himself— what shall we do?’

  ‘I’m talking to Mrs Carew,’ said her mother. ‘Be quiet, Helen.

  If you’ve got something to say wait till I’ve finished.’

  ‘But mother. .

  Her mother turned on her a scalding gaze. ‘Don’t interrupt, Helen. And go away, please. Play with the others.’

  Helen led Edward to the bathroom. His pants dropped, damply. Once there she took his things off. His socks, too, were sodden. She tried to dry them on the bathmat. Edward simply stood, compliantly lifting a foot when required. Once, he said ‘Will there be crackers for tea?’ She wiped him down with lavatory paper and put his pants back on; they were still wet but there was nothing else for it. She stuffed his underpants and socks behind the Carews’ radiator. Then she washed her hands and his and led him downstairs again. He was talking once more about crackers. All she could think of was whether anyone would notice that he had no socks on.

  He was sent to boarding school at nine. It was inevitable. ‘Don’t be silly, Helen,’ said her mother. ‘Of course he won’t hate it.

  He can play football and all that sort of thing. What do you mean — he doesn’t like football? All boys like football. And there’s no point in going on at Daddy about it. Daddy agrees with me.’

  Or so she said. And so he appeared to do — backing into the study, newspaper in hand, with deprecating gesture. Distant, hazy, dead Daddy. Long since drowned out by other voices, other opinions; bleached now to a faded outline, a few mannerisms, a vague remembered preference for anchovy paste as opposed to jam. Could a lifetime be reduced to that?

  But in the event Edward, who might have been expected to suffer deeply and conventionally at school, in fact went through it in some kind of trance. He retreated so far into himself, became so withdrawn and unresponsive, that in another age he would probably have been classified as subnormal. As it was, he was simply left alone to operate some private sensual filter system, which admitted air and nourishment but excluded the grinding scatological barbarity of his peers and the ugly monotony of the nin
e years’ imprisonment to which he was condemned. He must also have admitted instruction, since he passed examinations — though only just. He was no good at games, but survived again by a system of practised self-effacement — dreaming long afternoons away in the long grass of the cricket pitch at deep square leg, trotting helpfully around on the wing at football. From time to time he was bullied, but his anonymity was so expert that after a while even the bullies lost interest. There is no fun in negative response; screams of pain are essential.

  ‘How did he get into the kitchen anyway?’ said Edward. ‘Lawyers don’t go into kitchens. Didn’t you receive him in the sitting room?’

  ‘One thing led to another, somehow.’

  ‘I see.’ He was busy fiddling with the knobs on the television set. It was an ancient model and required much coaxing; Edward’s favourite programme was due in five minutes. ‘Do you think mother did it all on purpose? The Will, and Phil and everything.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Helen.

  The television screen shuddered into life and produced a delicate Seurat landscape composed of coloured dots, with just discernible trees and moving figures. ‘Blast!’ said Edward. He hammered the side of the set and the dots turned from green to red. He turned to look at her for a moment: ‘There’s really no point in us getting worked up about it now. About her, I mean.’

  ‘Absolutely none.’

  ‘I suppose she couldn’t bear the thought of not dictating things any more. It’s bad enough for anyone to know they’re going to die eventually but I suppose it’s even worse for people like mother. Like medieval kings. Poor mother. We never realised what she was going through, really.’

  limn. Maybe not.’

  Upstairs, a window slammed. Involuntarily, they both leapt to their feet. And sat down again sheepishly. ‘God!’ said Edward.

  ‘Are we ever going to get used to it?’

  ‘Eventually, I imagine.’

  Edward hit the other side of the television set and a head and shoulders shot into clarity, talking about pesticides. He sighed and slumped into the armchair.

  The programme, that evening, dealt among other things with the Barnacle geese of the Arctic. The Barnacle geese migrate north in the breeding seasons to a wide river valley bordered by low mountains. In order to preserve their young from the marauding foxes of the plain the geese nest two or three hundred feet up a mountain cliff. As soon as the young are fledged it becomes necessary to get them down off these crags to the feeding grounds below. To this end, the parents lead the chirping fluffy bundles across the rocks until they reach the precipitous edge. Then the adult birds, squawking anxiously, launch themselves into the air and circle around, calling the babies.

  The camera dwelt unflinchingly on the ensuing horror as, one by one, the pathetically cheeping goslings hurled themselves over the edge. It lingered on the plunging balls of fluff as, embryonic wings outstretched, small feet flailing, they plunged to the rocks below. There, a fox trotted up and down sniffing. The parents rushed around calling frantically. It came as a surprise to learn that about fifty percent of the chicks survive this charming natural arrangement.

  Edward and Helen watched in appalled silence. The programme ended with some stunning tour de force photography — a blood red Arctic sun hanging low in an orange sky above an exquisite wilderness in which wolves and caribou, foxes and geese were left undisturbed to do what they liked to one another.

  Edward, after that, found it difficult to sleep. In his head, the goslings churned around with other, more personal, matters.

  The peculiarly savage twist to the distress he felt about the goslings was that there was nowhere to direct one’s outrage. It was easier, in a way, to lie awake boiling about the barbarities of Canadian seal-slaughterers or the ecological insensitivity of English farmers. There was no one and nothing to blame for the goslings. There was nothing to join, no one to whom to send a contribution, no letter to be written to a newspaper.

  In the darkness at the end of the bed Tam snored in loud staccato bursts; from time to time he changed position in his sleep and tried to shove Edward’s foot out of the way. He was a dog entirely devoted to the pursuit of self-interest; Edward and Helen, discussing this, always came up against the intractable point that presumably there could be no other kind of dog, or indeed of animal. Animals always act out of self-interest, unless in the interests of their young, and that too can presumably be defined as self-interest in a genetic sense.

  Tam, Edward suspected, would not even act in the interests of his young, should he have any. Since he was rising ten and had never given more than token attention to the village bitches this was unlikely. Edward loved Tam, in the complex and distorted way in which people can be said to love animals, though he had loved other dogs more. Tam was one of a series; he had predecessors and would no doubt have successors, and Edward sometimes thought of the others in the way in which people review other children or other spouses. He also knew quite well that these were the terms in which he thought of them, and why.

  He had never shared his bed with a person. He had come near to it, once or twice, but a long time ago. Even those occasions, now, were dimmed; they were rosier, too, in recollection than in cold reality. He flinched from the thought of the people involved.

  What was left was the memory of something else: his own feelings.

  He had a vivid, and much earlier, memory of the first occasion on which he had realised that feelings were something to which a word was attached, and that they were recognised by others.

  He was quite small — his head did not reach above the windowsill below which he stood — and through the open window came Helen’s voice, high-pitched in indignation, crying out to their mother ‘You’ve hurt his feelings! Why did you say that!’ And three things fused within his head: Dorothy’s derision of his ineptitude at something, what he felt in consequence, and the fact that Helen understood how he felt even though it hadn’t happened to her. Now that he knew what they were called, he realised also that he had them all the time, with kaleidoscopic intensity, and hence that others must do so too.

  Their mother also, presumably, though in her case expressions of feeling more usually took the form of anger. Dorothy found outbursts of rage exhilarating; she would descend the next , morning blithe and invigorated, while everyone else crawled around punch-drunk from emotion. Louise was the only one who was a match for her. She learned in infancy to throw spirited tantrums in response to her mother’s anger, holding her breath and going blue in the face in a way that alarmed even Dorothy, who held that most childish ailments were put on. The tantrums were, of course, up to a point, but they were impressive all the same. When too old for tantrums, Louise resorted to argument and shouting matches. And, eventually, she left.

  Helen and Edward, on the other hand, withdrew. Once they grew beyond being afraid of Dorothy’s temper, they dealt with it by evasion; they simply got out of the way whenever she brewed up. Living with her, they learned to treat her as the weather — elemental and inescapable.

  Feelings also may be inescapable, Edward learned, but there are ways of cheating them. Of diverting them. Of hiding from them. Your own howls can be drowned out by the howls of the rest of the world, if you set about it properly. If you are naturally self-deprecating, and exceptionally under-endowed with egotism, the process comes almost naturally. Eventually you are exercised only about the atrocities around. Or so it can seem.

  Helen also thought about the Barnacle geese that night, though with less intensity. The image of the plunging chicks lurked in her head, nagging, but it was other matters that kept her awake.

  Feelings, of course — those maddening unquenchable onsets of disease. She reviewed Giles Carnaby’s visit and was aware of having existed, during that hour or so, on two different planes; at one level she had listened to Giles Carnaby and talked to Giles Carnaby, at some other level she had undergone strange physical and emotional experiences. She had gone hot and cold; she had felt slightly
dizzy; she had been unable to take her eyes off him.

  All this while discussing her mother’s testamentary arrangements.

  She had not felt thus for roughly fifteen years and had not expected to do so ever again.

  Edward — in so far as he thought about the matter — had always assumed that his sister was a virgin. He was wrong. Other people’s sexual lives are of course deeply mysterious; even so, Edward’s assumption was understandable. To his knowledge, she had had few abiding relationships with men and not many transient ones either. It was lack of opportunity as well as his knowledge of her character that made virginity seem likely.

  In fact, Helen had first gone to bed with a man when she was twenty-three. She found the whole performance embarrassing but distinctly pleasurable. She quite liked him but was not in love with him, and recognised the experience as a purely sexual one. The man made vague suggestions about keeping in touch, and then vanished. Helen settled down wretchedly to await the outcome; she doubted if the correct precautions had been taken and knew that copulation leads, more often than not, to pregnancy.

  She told no one and sat it out stoically. When, on the seventeenth day, her period arrived the relief and elation she felt were like a religious experience. Indeed, she went down on her knees beside her mother in church that Sunday and thanked the Lord, furtively and guiltily. She did not say to Him that she wouldn’t do it again because she did not expect the opportunity to arise. Nor did it, for quite a while.

  Dorothy’s attitude to sex was one of withering contempt. She did not disapprove, she despised. The subject brought out in her a particular look — an expression of obstinate rejection, a clamping of the mouth, a hardening of the eye. Each time Helen saw it she thought of her father, and shivered for him.

  Louise, at sixteen, discovered boys. The row with Dorothy and Louise’s flight to London and to art school was about sex rather more than about educational opportunity. Dorothy had opened the front door at the wrong moment late one evening and discovered Louise on the top step, in a fervent embrace with the publican’s son. The ensuing commotion kept everyone up till the small hours of the morning. ‘You’re disgusting!’ bawled Dorothy.