Passing On (2 page)

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The words, in fact, are beautiful — the rhythms, the resonance. The meaning is another matter, for us unbelievers. Mercifully. Eternal life is an appalling idea, especially in mother’s case.

And that, at last, was that. They could start to turn away, look at each other, they could leave her there under the sycamore and go. And now, damn and blast it, Helen feels tears prick her eyes, surge up, begin to trickle — and she looks at Edward and sees that he is the same. They both scowl and furtively dab. We can’t leave her here, thinks Helen, we can’t just put her in there and leave her. Mother.

But they can. And do. She is dead. Helen thinks, almost for the first time, mother has died. She is not here any more.

Incredulous, she searches the group around the grave: Edward, Louise, Tim, Suzanne and Phil. No mother, any more.

‘I thought they’d never go,’ said Louise. ‘Cousin Phoebe — may I be preserved from cousin Phoebe, now and for ever. Who was the good-looking bloke with the silver hair?’ She stood at the drawing-room windows, open into the garden, sniffing and mopping her eyes. ‘Oh those bloody flowers. .

‘Surely,’ said Helen, ‘there must be some flowers in Camden?’

‘Not a lot. Anyway florist ones are worse, for some reason.

Was he the solicitor?’

‘Yes. He’s writing to us all. About the Will.’

‘Oh, all that bumph …’ said Louise vaguely. suppose you wouldn’t think of selling the Britches now? Make this place a bit more comfortable? It’s perishing cold, as usual — frankly I don’t know how you endure it.’

‘Of course we’re not going to sell the Britches,’ said Edward.

They stood at the window, the three of them, and looked into the garden, on which rain now fell once more, after a tactful intermission for the funeral. It was defiantly unkempt; the lawn was a hayfield, the yew hedge drooped almost to the ground, the only surviving plants were vigorous shrubs and a few creepers swarming up above the general level of growth. None of them saw this, since it had been ever thus.

Louise saw fuming pollen, and longed for the tarmac of North London. Helen saw their mother, thick-set, irritable, wearing brown corduroy, stumping across the grass with a query or an order on her lips. Edward saw a flycatcher, a pair of great tits and a collared dove. He looked for the flycatcher’s mate, and wondered where the nest was.

They did not look like siblings. Helen and Edward, at fifty two and forty-nine respectively, were not physically alike though they shared a certain style: Edward’s shiny suit, Helen’s rather unbecoming dress, obviously chosen without interest or prolonged thought. Edward was fair, thin, blue-eyed, and slightly stooping; Helen was shorter, brown-haired and fresh-faced, a woman who would be unremarkable in a group — only a second glance would reveal distinctive features: the bright eyes, the neat set of the nose. Louise, ten years younger, seemed of another generation and culture — her clothes raffish but also metropolitan, her hair unruly but tinted with salon highlights.

Of course not,’ said Louise, turning from the window. ‘I never really imagined you would.’ She patted Edward’s arm. ‘You’d feel uncomfortable being comfortable, wouldn’t you? I’ll help you wash up and then we’d better push off. Where are the others?’

‘Taking glasses into the kitchen,’ said Edward. ‘Don’t bother about the washing-up.’

Louise flung herself into a chair. ‘All right. Maybe the kids’ll do it. Wonders never cease.’

Helen picked up a plate of uneaten bits and pieces and took them through to the kitchen, where Tim Dyson stood looking with distaste at the crammed sink. It was a large, low ceramic sink, of the kind more often seen nowadays in a garden, planted with alpines. Quite possibly Tim did not recognise it as a sink, being accustomed to stainless steel. He always avoided the kitchen at Greystones; in fact Helen could not remember having seen him in there before. Normally, he kept to the drawing room and the dining room while domestic chores were being undertaken; he had not spent a night in the house for many years.

Louise, during her mother’s illness, had visited on her own.

The children — it was hard to think of them now as children, given their appearance, but fifteen and sixteen is more child than adult — were eating sausage rolls. Suzanne swallowed quickly and said, ‘I’ll wash, Helen — I don’t mind.’

‘Don’t bother. We’ll do it when you’ve gone. I think Louise wants to be off.’

Suzanne’s metamorphosis was less startling than Phil’s. Her hair stuck up spikily from her scalp in a way that seemed to defy gravity, her eyes were black-rimmed and there was a general impression of leather and metalwork. Phil, though, was almost unrecognisable. Helen’s first reaction had been that someone had followed Louise and Tim into the house, then that Louise had let Phil bring some undesirable friend, that it was too bad of Louise, that he certainly couldn’t be allowed to come to church, and at last, with pure astonishment, that this was Phil. He too was black-leathered and slung about with chains; his boots had spurs; there were chrome studs all over his back. It was his head, though, that startled most: the shaven scalp, the jet-black crest with streaks of emerald. Helen, punch-drunk with strain and exhaustion, had been on the edge of hysterical laughter. Neither Louise nor Tim had apparently thought the matter worth comment. Presumably they were so used to it. Helen had not seen either of the children for almost a year, she realised. A year

is a long time, in more eventful lives. Louise and Tim led eventful lives. All Louise’s phone calls were catalogues of activity and disaster; they were both always over-worked, over-stressed, on the brink of startling achievement or notoriety, and plagued by minor illness. Louise had hay-fever, cystitis and migraine; Tim had high blood pressure and sinus trouble. They were always in need of holidays for which they could not be spared.

Louise worked for a firm of design consultants; Tim was in advertising. Long ago, Louise had been Helen’s baby sister — adorable, charming, vulnerable, to be looked after and protected.

This Louise seemed very far away and inaccessible now: from time to time, though, she surfaced, weeping over the telephone of betrayals, impositions and the cruelty of fate. More often, the Louise of today scolded Helen for conservatism, retrenchment and, above all, for not standing up to their mother. ‘I live with her,’ Helen used to say. ‘You don’t. That is the difference.’

Louise got out, as she put it, when she was seventeen. She had a series of rows with Dorothy and flounced off to art school, where she conned the authorities over the question of parental consent and support. There was more trouble. Eventually Dorothy gave in, reluctantly and vociferously, and Louise, from then on, was at one remove from Greystones, returning for Christmas and the occasional weekend, an unruly emotive draught of alien worlds. ‘You and Edward can’t just stay here for ever,’ she said, each time. ‘I mean, for God’s sake, Helen, you’re thirty . .

have to see what turns up,’ Helen would say.

And in the event nothing did. Or not enough.

When the Dysons had gone Helen and Edward got down to the washing-up. Edward stooped over the sink — always inconveniently low — while Helen dried. Helen would have preferred to be left to deal with the mess on her own, in which case she could have brought out her illicit bottle of Fairy Liquid, but Edward would have been hurt to be shooed away at this moment. He wanted to talk. A scum of grease floated on top of the washing up water; the dishes were slimy. Edward, an ardent conservationist, ignored the fact that detergents had been biodegradable for

fifteen years. Lurid still in his mind’s eye were the foam-packed rivers of the sixties, the rafts of dead fish, the blighted vegetation.

Detergent never disgraced Greystones, or at least none that Edward knew about.

He said, ‘How did Phil’s hair get like that?’

‘It’s dyed, I suppose.’

Edward pondered. ‘He seems a perfectly nice boy still. What an awful day. The bit in the churchyard was worst of all.’

‘Yes. Do scrape that plate before you wash it. Shut up, Tam!’

Tam, Edward’s rough-haired white terrier, squatted in the middle of the floor moaning with lust. He was a dog of unassuageable greed. Edward looked down at him, and then at the table, on which was a dish piled with sausage rolls and volau-vents.

He said, ‘Would we eat these, do you think?’ Without waiting for an answer he slid two sausage rolls and a chicken volau-vent into Tam’s bowl. Helen said nothing. They looked at each other, both realising that this had never before been done openly and unashamedly. Tam, as though in recognition that from now on things were going to be different, belched with roomy satisfaction. Dorothy had fought, for forty years, a vigorous and vindictive campaign against Edward’s animals, from the kitten smuggled in when he was a schoolboy to the official but resented dogs of later years.

Now I feel guilty,’ said Edward. ‘Is it always going to be like that?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out, I suppose.’

Edward, dabbling inefficiently in the murky sink, said ‘I’ve never seen these plates before, where did they come from?’

‘They were a wedding present of mother’s, I think. We never used to use them, but I had to get out everything for today, or there wouldn’t have been enough.’

As it was, nothing went with anything else, a medley of glasses, cups, plates surviving from once complete sets. Chipped cups, rogue saucers without a partner, pieces of cloudy pre-war pyrex. ‘There is absolutely nothing at Greystones that is nice to look at,’ said Louise once, in a fit of rage, and Helen, dispassionate and not caring one way or the other, could see that she was absolutely right.

‘Actually,’ said Edward, ‘they’re rather pretty.’ He held the plate clear of the sink to inspect it and it at once slid from his fingers to crash into several pieces upon the tiled floor.

They scrabbled for dustpan and brush, bumping into each other. Edward, assembling the bits on the draining-board, said anxiously, ‘Isn’t there some process for mending things like this?

Riveting or something?’

‘Why bother?’ said Helen.

‘But …’ He looked at her. ‘No. I see what you mean. All the same …’ He stacked the pieces on the shelf beside the Coronation biscuit tin where, Helen suddenly saw with awful clarity, they would stay for the next five years.

They finished clearing up and went back into the drawing room. It was early evening now and the wet garden glinted in the low sunshine. Beyond it was the shaggy mass of the Britches and above the blackbirds and robins came the shrill whine of a chainsaw in Ron Paget’s yard. The mantelpiece clock struck six and the chainsaw ceased abruptly.

Helen watched him walk towards the Britches. She knew exactly where he would go. He would sit on the fallen tree-trunk somewhere in the midst of that muddle of vegetation, doing nothing. He would come back in half an hour or so, apparently in some way renovated.

The village, at the outer rim of the Cotswolds, was also on the edge of notability. It was not one of those places that people tell each other they mustn’t miss. The church was good but not exceptional. There was a respectable acreage of limestone, mullioned windows and drip-moulding but few single buildings of any distinction. There was nothing much to take a photograph of. Nor was there any antique shop or anywhere selling country jams, dried flowers and basketry from Hong Kong. The village store was a small supermarket and sold food only, rather expensively and of second-rate quality. Most people shopped ten miles away on Saturdays, by car.

Most of them also worked ten or fifteen miles away. They worked in offices and hospitals and shops. There were a few schoolteachers and a scattering of retired people, the rector and his wife in a new Barratt’s Executive Home and an industrialist and his family in the Old Rectory. Sociologically classified, they would have come out as preponderantly A’s and AB’s with a sprinkling of C’s; council housing had been kept to a minimum in Long Sydenham and what there was was mainly built before the war. The Glovers, Edward and Helen, and — hitherto — Dorothy, were presumably AB or thereabouts, by occupation (Edward taught, Helen worked as a part-time librarian). In terms of income and life-style, though, they were a bit of a puzzle, to the rest of the village, at any rate.

Within the village wealth was unequally distributed. Of course; it always is. There were the Hadleys at the Old Rectory who were so very much richer than everyone else that they were beyond competition, outside the fray. Their sleek cars, Mrs Hadley’s even sleeker hunters, the rumoured house in the West Indies and yacht at Fowey were like the attributes of gods, only to be expected. Beneath them, nearly everyone else jostled within an income band narrow enough to allow for plenty of resentment, aspiration and emulation. The matters at issue were housing, cars, electrical and electronic appliances, holidays and children’s schooling — probably in that order. Right at the bottom were those poor enough to be immune from competition, concerned only with survival. There were not many of these, Long Sydenham being geographically fortunate: a handful of old age pensioners, a couple of large families (considered feckless), a single parent (ditto) and a few unemployed, most of whom were very young.

While none of these were in danger of starvation, they were nevertheless obliged to contemplate daily the lavishness around them, from the Hadleys’ Mercedes gliding past their door to the five pound box of chocolates in the village shop, almost equally inaccessible. The advertisements on their television screens made certain that they should be in no danger of forgetting the range of consumer goods available and the urgency and intensity of normal need for these things.

The Glovers were a problem, where wealth status was concerned.

The house, one of the largest and — at least potentially — most valuable in the village, put them in one category. So did their accents and their education; old Dorothy’s self-confidence was generations deep. But patently there was no loose cash swilling around at Greystones. You only had to look at their cars, at the furnishings within (nothing new within sight, no central heating, no dishwasher, only the most decrepit old twin tub washing-machine); none of them was known to go abroad at all. As for their clothes …