Passing On (13 page)

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 suey 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?

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.