Passing On (29 page)

into the saucer. He was beaming graciously. ‘No sweat, Helen.’

He sat down. ‘You know what? Edward ought to go to a therapist. You got therapists down here?’

Helen took a long drink of tea. ‘What would a therapist do?’

she enquired. ‘Show him how to be happy?’

‘What a therapist does,’ explained Phil, is help you come to terms with yourself, see.’

‘Ah,’ said Helen. They sat in silence. Tam pushed his food bowl around the floor, ostentatiously demonstrating its emptiness.

Phil shoved him with a booted foot. Tam withdrew to the door and sat there with his ears back, twitching. Helen thought of Edward, ten miles away: doing what? Feeling how?

Sunlight flowed through the slats of a blind and made a rectangular golden stain on the wall beside his bed. The rim of this stain dissolved into a blur of rainbow colour. He tried to remember the principle of the refraction of light, failed, and saw that some small winged insect was making its way slowly across the rainbow. It turned from red to blue and yellow as it moved; he could see lacy wings and the quivering of antennae. Then it arrived on the unlit part of the wall and became an undefined grey blob.

There was a curtain round the bed. He could hear the clack of shoes on linoleum floors, voices, the rumble of a trolley. The sounds were loud and individual; they rang in his head. In the same way light was very bright, shape and texture were distinct and interesting; he stared at the shadow cast by a fold of the sheet, at the glinting silver surface of a tray on the bedside table.

There was a glass of water. The water itself contained light — circles and streaks of light — and the enlarged distorted brilliantly blue image of a pen lying beside the glass.

It had been like that all along: the exaggerated, insistent sense of the physical world. And he had known, also, that he was clinging to it, clutching with his finger tips: that he had been wrong, wrong. He heard a blackbird, and the clapping of pigeon wings, and then Helen’s voice, and Phil’s. He felt himself moving, being moved. He felt himself vomit. He tried to say

something, and could not. He wanted to sleep, and fought to continue hearing and feeling. He saw light and movement.

He had begun to slide into that fog so quickly. He had crammed the pills into his mouth — two of the bottles were almost empty so he had shaken everything out, frantically, chewing and swallowing as fast as he could. And then he had sat there, watching Tam digging under a bush. And the fog had closed in.

But through it had come the blackbird, that pigeon.

The curtain parted. A nurse stood there. She smiled. She spoke. Edward turned his head. He said, at last, ‘What time is it?’

‘I could come now,’ cried Louise. ‘I want to come. I can get in the car and be there by midnight. I want to talk. How can this have happened …? Edward … And I’m going to strangle that man Paget. I’m going round there to strangle him with my bare hands. You what? Going to bed… I don’t know how you can go to bed, frankly. I doubt if I shall. I mean, how can none of us have realised that he might …? How can we have been so bloody ignorant? Yes, of course one always had the odd twinge … the way he would shut himself up inside himself, you know what I mean? You couldn’t ever talk to him about it. And after the debacle with that school one realised how vulnerable he was.

But this I never imagined. You know what I want? I want to get him up here to see a marvellous man I know about who does a new sort of… Well, there’s no need to be quite so dismissive.

You always condemn things you don’t know anything about.

Oh, I’m sorry. God, what’s the matter with me? It shows what a state I’m in. Can’t I come now? All right, then — tomorrow. And go to bed and sleep, you need it.’

Edward is coming home today, she thought. Who might not have been. I might be waking into an entirely different day. It is not a good day, it is dangerous and difficult but it might have been something quite other. It feels in some curious way like a beginning, not an end. All is not right with the world, not by

any means, but nevertheless I have this interesting sense of a future. A sense that things can be done: by me, by Edward.

And her mother, she noted, remained absent. Dorothy had nothing to say about all this; she was elsewhere, on another plane of time and experience, going about her business. With a jolt, Helen realised that she could not conjure up her face. She could no longer see her, or hear her.

He sat beside her. She found herself driving with exaggerated care. She said, ‘Louise is coming this afternoon.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, Edward… Why do you think?’

‘I’d rather there wasn’t any fuss,’ he said after a minute.

‘There isn’t. There won’t be. She wants to see you, that’s all.

See us.’

He made no further comment. She saw him looking intently out of the window, as though they were passing through new and intriguing landscapes. And Edward, for his part, saw not the familiar reaches of the road from Spaxton to their home but strange and arresting conjunctions of tree and skyline, of field and hedge. He saw the pale rim of the horizon, grey clouds tipped with lilac, the golden flare of stubble, rich brown plough sweeping up to the dark cushion of a wood. He feasted. His mind was blank; he seemed to be the passive vehicle for a pair of devouring eyes.

The phone was ringing as they came into the house. She saw the look in Edward’s eyes. ‘I’ll answer it. If it’s anyone for you they can leave a message.’ Edward went into the sitting room.

She picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’

‘Helen?’ said Giles Carnaby. There was a pause; I knew this, she thought, I knew it before I answered.

‘You sound a little … distracted. I hope I haven’t picked a bad moment.’

‘No,’ she said. No more than any other.

‘Ah. Then I’ll be brave and plunge. I wondered if we could

meet. I ask with great diffidence. But it would make me very happy if you’d say yes.’

Helen noted the pattern of light on the hall floor: shifting spheres and bars — like fish, like golden fish in a pond. ‘I’d rather not,’ she heard herself say.

‘Oh.’ There was a silence; the fish rippled and flickered. ‘I was afraid you would say that. It wasn’t, of course, a business meeting I had in mind. Things progress, on that side. We’ll be in touch, in due course. What I had in mind was entirely selfish.

That last occasion was … well, not very satisfactory, was it? I was hoping you might have had a change of heart.’

I see, she thought: I am intransigent, insensitive. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea.’

He sighed. A delicate, regretful sound; quite natural, to the untutored ear. She would hear it, she accepted, for quite a while.

‘Then I’ll say goodbye, Helen.’

‘Goodbye.’ She put down the receiver.

Edward appeared, and at the same moment Phil came clumping down the stairs. Edward said, ‘Tam doesn’t seem to be anywhere about.’

Helen looked at Phil. ‘Have you seen Tam?’

He shook his head. ‘I think it went in the garden. You all right now, Edward?’

Edward blinked. He looked away. ‘Yes thanks. I suppose so.’

‘That’s good,’ said Phil. ‘Oh — I forgot. Mum rang — they’re all coming, Dad and Suzanne too. S’a bit much, innit? They’ll be here for lunch, she said.’

The fridge was all but empty. There seemed to be nothing in the larder but decaying potatoes. Helen went to the shop, bought cold meats and the wherewithal for a salad; Louise, on this occasion, would be uncritical. She set off home, rounded the bend in the road, and there twenty yards from the Greystones gate was Ron Paget. Waiting, it would seem. She walked towards him, resolute.

‘I gather you’ve had a bit of an upset. Your brother better now, Miss Glover?’

She eyed him. Who? The doctor? Impossible. Phil? Equally so. One would never know. Villages have eyes and ears. They have their own methods.

‘He’s all right.’

‘I been talking things over with Pauline. We’ve decided we’ll not take this business to the police. It’s not going to do our boy any good, and that’s the main thing. So I thought I’d let you know.’

‘You must do what you want,’ she said.

‘So the best we can do is put it behind us. You and us both.

We’re neighbours and have been for a long time and I’m not a man that likes trouble. So that’s the way it is.’

‘It’s entirely up to you. We are not making any sort of bargain.’

He looked pained. ‘Miss Glover, who’s talking about bargains?

I told you, we don’t want to see our boy put through any more.’

‘Very well,’ said Helen. ‘And now I must go. I’m expecting my sister.’

‘There’s something else I’ve got to tell you. I’m afraid there’s been a tragedy with that little dog of yours. One of my men found him just now, outside the yard. Dead. They reckon he’d eaten something. Likely someone’s been putting rat poison down.

Shame … Never rains but it pours, does it? Would you want the men to bring him over or shall I ask them to deal with it quietly, not to worry your brother?’ His expression was inscrutable.

No, not inscrutable; there was a tremor of concern.

Carefully calculated concern.

She took a deep breath. ‘I’d appreciate it if the men could see to it.’

He nodded. ‘No problem. Right, then. Let bygones be bygones, right? And so far as your bit of land goes — well, you know how things stand where I’m concerned.’

She stared at him, incredulous, and then walked past him to her own gate. She let herself into the house, put the shopping basket down on the kitchen table and went upstairs. The door of Edward’s room was closed. She knocked. ‘Edward? I have to talk to you.’

They had come, and they had gone: Louise, Tim, Suzanne. And with them went Phil. He had appeared in the kitchen as Helen was clearing the table; the others had gone into the sitting room.

‘I thought I’d get a lift to London with Mum and Dad. There’s some things I got to see to.’

‘Oh, I see. Right you are, then, Phil.’

‘S’a pity about Tam. I mean, he was an awful dog but Edward liked him, so it’s a pity.’

‘Yes. We could have done without that just now.’

‘Anyway, thanks for having me. And take care. .

She had been reminded, wryly, of the hours after the funeral.

There they all were, gathered together again in an atmosphere of ritual ceremony in which were combined elements of unspoken relief and of mourning. Nobody referred to what had happened.

Louise flung her arms around Edward on arrival; Edward stoically endured this without overt signs of rejection. Tim shook him by the hand. Suzanne gleamed at him from behind a newly reconstructed coiffure which almost obliterated her face. Phil was startlingly genial; he welcomed his parents with the air of some benign Edwardian uncle receiving poor relations. He pressed refreshments upon them and suggested a tour of the garden. Louise, cornering Helen in the kitchen, hissed: ‘He claims he cut the grass. Is that true? I don’t believe it. What the hell have you done to him? And he says he’s coming home.’

They had sat around in the sitting room, that least inhabited of the Greystones rooms, always tinged with damp, always chill.

They had talked with animation of anything except that of which all were thinking. Edward, from time to time, had joined in. It had been agreed that Helen and Edward should come up to London for Christmas. Helen had heard herself saying that she planned to get a new washing machine and see about some electric storage heaters for the winter. Periodically someone would refer to Dorothy, but her presence now was dimmer, she was no longer the insistent unavoidable black hole that she had been on the earlier occasion. And then eventually there had been shiftings and glances at watches.

And so they were alone. Conspicuously alone — it was Tam who was now a hole, a silence, a small absence. His food bowl, standing by the sink, was a mute reproach. Helen, putting it into the scullery, met Edward; they exchanged looks that were filled with some odd kind of guilt. Edward said, ‘Do you think Ron Paget poisoned him?’

‘We’ll never know, will we? I suppose he may have done.’

Edward sat down at the kitchen table. He was still pale, and had the translucent look of someone emerging from illness, but there was also an alertness about him; he had lost the frozen passivity of recent weeks. He kept staring out of the window.

‘Poor Tam. I feel as though it were my fault.’

‘I know. One does. It may be no one’s. Better to assume that.

Anyway, Tam is the least of it. You can get another dog.’ As soon as she had said it she saw the flaw, and winced.

‘Yes,’ said Edward. ‘I daresay I shall,’ he added, quite neutrally.

‘By the way … I ought to tell you — I’ve found us some new solicitors. People called Wyndham and Fowler.’ Their eyes met.

She looked away.

‘I see.’ Edward paused, then went on with sudden violence. ‘I never liked him. I couldn’t see what . .

‘I know you didn’t. Let’s not talk about him, if you don’t mind.’

‘He was the sort of person who is all over everyone. Anyone.’

‘Possibly. I was aware of it myself. But makes no difference, you know, under the circumstances.’

Edward looked straight at her. He was trembling slightly. ‘If I ever saw him again, I’d punch him on the nose.’

She laughed. ‘I shouldn’t. We’ve had enough trouble as it is.’

The room was stuffy. She got up and opened the back door.

Outside, everything shone in the late afternoon sunshine. She stood for a moment, seeing that the chestnuts in the Britches were showing autumn colour, that the yew hedge was swagged with spiders’ webs. She searched for something else; she scanned the garden for her mother, invited that familiar, forbidding brown figure to come stumping across the grass. But Dorothy was not there, nor had been, Helen realised, for any of the last days. She had ceased to comment, had removed herself, it seemed, to some other plane — from which, Helen saw, she might continue to dispose, but differently.

She said, ‘Why do pigeons fly upwards and then come hurtling downward clapping their wings?’

‘It’s a mating display.’