Passing On (4 page)

The girls liked him. They recognised that his disciplinary powers were so weak that there would simply be no point in challenging them. Also he was amiable, he listened to what they told him with apparent interest, and he never gave them bad conduct marks or reported them to the Head. He demanded little of them, so they demanded little of him. His lessons were gentle, dreamy affairs that seemed to go on and on for ever, with sunlight lying in bars across the desks and flies buzzing at the window. He had long since been removed from teaching duties involving anyone old enough to be within hailing distance of such public examinations as Croxford House bothered with, and simply pottered around with the eleven and twelve year olds in the more decorative areas of English history. He also read to them from books that he himself remembered having enjoyed when he was their age. Modern children’s fiction had passed him by. He read Alice, The Wind in the Willows and The Water Babies to the juniors while they handed notes to each other, knitted under their desks or lay with their heads on their arms, apparently asleep. Edward still loved Alice and had never noticed that the children did not. He read, effectively, to himself and was happy. It reminded him of being read to by his mother — except that this was an elusive memory since Dorothy had seldom done so. She was profoundly bored by books. It was Helen who had read to Edward, and subsequently to Louise. What Edward was reviving was a cloudy, luxurious sensation of acquiescence to someone authoritative, more skilled and with access to a wondrous other world. Helen would have been about nine at the time.

Helen, disposing of the invalid equipment in Spaxton, was reminded not of reading to Edward but of her mother’s antipathy to the printed word. One of the accelerating problems of her final years had been the entertainment of a vigorous old woman, sound of mind and body, who had no interests.

Dorothy Glover’s attention was concentrated on a personal reference system. She read the Births, Marriages and Deaths columns only of The Times, with a practised eye that could pick out any known name in three seconds flat. Novels met with approval only if the setting was familiar. ‘I’m extremely fond of Persuasion,’ she would say, ‘I went to school near Bath. It’s by far her best book.’ Her knowledge of personal connections was compendious — she knew of cousins unto the tenth degree, she remembered everyone she had ever met, their names, their occupations and their attributes. She knew all this with the dry detachment of an official at Somerset House; she had no interest whatsoever in people as such. She was expert and scholarly in disposing of extraneous material; there was the world which related to her, to which she had been or to whom she had spoken, and there was the rest, which was irrelevant. Needless to say, she could not see the point of history and ignored politics. She never voted. She was a Tory by inclination, but would have denied political affiliations with indignation, claiming that she had no time for politicians and owed her opinions to common sense and using her head. ‘Stupid’ was her favourite term of abuse; interestingly, though, ‘clever’ was not a word used in praise. She was more likely to call someone ‘too clever by half’.

She read books only for good reason, and noisily when she did so, pointing out the personal resonances whereby the work satisfied her — the familiar place or the name with associations of some kind. She had once written to a well-known novelist to ask if a character in her novel was related to a family of the same name Dorothy had known. The author’s polite but acid response had been read to Helen and Edward over breakfast, as they squirmed: ‘What on earth does the woman mean — “… your unusually literal view of fiction”? Is she trying to be funny or something?’

As Helen, Edward and Louise grew up they had come to recognise their mother’s outlook for what it was. They realised with discomfort that she was not so much egotistical as fettered — trapped within a perpetual adolescence. She moved for ever within a landscape whose only point of reference was herself.

The Red Cross lady received the commode and the backrest with nicely gauged murmurs of sympathy. Helen parked the Morris and set out to do some shopping. Spaxton, a medium sized market town, supplied all those needs that the village could not meet. Helen and Edward, unfastidious eaters and exceptionally unacquisitive, had fewer needs than most people. Even so, there were occasional requirements. Today, a screwdriver with which to do something about the broken lamp, Earl Grey tea (one of Edward’s few indulgences) and a sweater for herself. She walked down the High Street and plunged into the new shopping precinct, a futuristic place in which the shops had no fronts but opened straight into the shining heated covered walk, like some awkward parody of eastern booths. Her mother walked beside her, in her more strident persona of ten years ago, criticising loudly and attracting glances. ‘I know,’ said Helen. ‘I don’t care for it either, aesthetically, but I see no reason why people shouldn’t have a better choice of things to buy, if that’s what they want.’

She stopped to contemplate a display of sweaters. Blue. Interestingly patterned.

‘You can’t wear that sort of thing,’ said her mother. ‘It’s too young for you. You’re fifty-two. And too short and too fat.

Louise could get away with something like that, I daresay. Not you.’

‘I may be a little more adventurous,’ said Helen. Tor a change.’

‘Brown,’ snorted her mother. ‘Brown’s right for you. That’s what you always wear.’

Helen left her outside and went into the shop. She held garments up against herself and tried to see both face and garment with detachment. The face was — well, unassuming was the word that sprang to mind — neither particularly attractive, nor unattractive either, the complexion better than average, something interesting about the eyes, the chin a touch stubby. She saw age and decay, but did not too much care. She would not have especially wanted to be younger, but would welcome change.

Brown, she now observed, sent her face into compliant anonymity; she held up a sweater rich with stained glass window colours — blues and reds and a spice of green — and thought she saw an answering glow above. She bought the sweater. Her mother, waiting outside, made noises of disapproval. ‘Well,’ said Helen, ‘maybe. And again maybe not. We shall see. I shall see. Anyway, I need uplift.’ She turned away and her mother, with a curious, unprecedented look of vulnerability on her face, began to fade, like the Cheshire cat in Alice. Help me, she seemed to be saying, save me, keep me. And Helen, with tears pricking her eyes, treacherous and deaf, marched out of the shopping precinct, clutching the sweater, the screwdriver and the packet of Earl Grey tea.

‘We’ve each got a letter from the lawyers,’ said Helen.

Edward stood at the kitchen door, eating Puffed Wheat out of a bowl and throwing bread to the birds, who lurked in droves.

Greystones, it sometimes seemed to Helen, sustained entirely the local wildlife, if it could be called that; they bought a loaf a day just for the birds, in winter. The garden was festooned with coconuts and mesh feeders as though with exotic Chinese decorations.

Edward turned back into the room. ‘I shan’t have time to read mine — I’ll have to get the bus again. Have you seen a pile of exercise books anywhere?’

Helen opened her letter. Edward prowled the room, went out into the hall and returned, still murmuring plaintively about exercise books.

‘It’s about mother’s Will.’

‘Yes,’ said Edward. Did you see me with them last night, can you remember? Maybe I never brought them back at all.’

‘Mother hasn’t left Greystones to us. Just the Britches.’

Edward halted. He stared at her.

The house is left to Phil.’

‘Phil?’ Edward gaped. ‘But why?’

‘It’s to do with tax. Inheritance Tax. At least up to a point it is. This lawyer seems a bit puzzled. He’s a new one. The old one did the Will, apparently, five or six years ago. It’s left to Phil because that way some tax is saved, but there is a proviso that we go on living here till our own deaths.’

‘Oh,’ said Edward. ‘Then I suppose it doesn’t really make much difference.’

‘I suppose not.’

They looked at each other. ‘I wonder why mother never told us,’ said Edward, at last.

‘So do I.’

Edward, now, opened his letter and read it. The letters were identical.

‘I don’t think Louise is going to be awfully pleased about this,’ said Edward.

At that moment the phone rang. Helen went into the hall to answer it.

‘I don’t believe it!’ shrieked Louise. ‘What on earth is all this about? What the hell was mother thinking of? It’s crazy. Why didn’t she ask us about it? Oh God — I can’t talk now, I’m half an hour late already and I’ve got an important meeting. Look, we’ll come down on Saturday, we’ve got to talk about this.’

Helen returned to the kitchen. ‘She isn’t.’

Edward was hunting for his exercise books again. He opened the bread bin and peered inside. ‘Oh dear . . Could I have left them on the bus? Louise is furious, is she? Do we have to answer these letters?’

‘They’re fairly conclusive,’ said Helen. After a moment she added ‘I’ll ring him up — Mr Carnaby. It does seem to need a bit of explanation.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Edward, relieved. He lifted the bread board and found his exercise books underneath. ‘There they are . . knew I’d brought them back.’ He sounded quite happy now.

‘Can I borrow your car this evening — there’s a Naturalists’ Trust meeting in Spaxton.’

Helen, as she moved around the house that morning, thought about responses to possession. She owned very little: a car (coveted, admittedly, by Ron Paget, which gave it an enhanced status), a wardrobe full of clothes (which no one would covet), some books and knick-knacks. She owned also some stocks and shares left to her by her father, which brought in, nowadays, about a thousand pounds a year. Edward and Louise had received the same legacies when John Glover died in 1958. Everything else had gone to Dorothy, naturally enough. Helen recognised that she, and Edward, and Dorothy herself, for that matter, were not as others are when it came to possession. She seldom wanted anything. Edward was the same. Her mother had hated spending money, not out of parsimony but laziness. Whatever it was in the make-up of most people that responds to the sight of goods for sale had been left out, in their case. Equally, they derived no pleasure from ownership. Helen could just remember a certain frisson induced by an evening dress when she was eighteen, but this had seldom been repeated.

Louise was rather different. Louise had a lot of clothes and a big untidy house in Camden Town crammed with furniture acquired at sales and from junk-shops. She bought pictures and then got tired of them and shoved them in cupboards and bought others. She owned, probably, a considerable bulk of material goods, obtained impulsively and without calculation, and frequently disposed of in the same way. Louise was generous, vague and impatient.

And now Phil owned Greystones.

Pondering this, Helen went out into the garden. Something ought to be done about the garden, she supposed. There were obstacles to anything being done, though, quite apart from apathy. Insecticides could not be employed, nor fungicides or weedkillers or any of those labour-saving devices used by everyone else. Just as mice and moles could not be trapped, or flies and wasps sprayed. Neglect and conservational sensitivity together had turned the garden into a fine acreage of cow parsley, buttercup, dandelion, bindweed and nettle. In fact, Helen rather liked it as it was, though it was annoying not to be able to walk across the lawn without getting wet to the calves. It really should be mown.

Tam was hunched over something, gnawing. As she approached he laid his ears back and began to growl, still frantically gnawing. He had got the withered carcass of a blackbird, Helen saw. ‘Drop!’ she ordered. Tam snarled and shuffled sideways. Helen seized a corner of the blackbird and tugged. Tam tried to bite her hand, letting go of the blackbird in the process. Helen marched to the rubbish heap with it, Tam mobbing her heels and yapping hysterically. She flung it as high and as far back as she could. Tam watched balefully and then walked off with his whole rear end twitching, as though something were stinging him.

Helen supposed that she would live at Greystones for the rest of her life. She supposed that Edward would also. Edward’s attempts to live elsewhere had never come to much. There had been the time when he worked in London with maladjusted children and shared a flat with a man he had been at college with.

The children were uncontrollable and scared the wits out of Edward; also, he couldn’t stand the traffic noise. After eighteen months he packed it in and returned to Greystones, where he was perfectly happy doing a bit of private coaching and spending the rest of his time on volunteer stuff for the Nature Conservancy people until a casual criticism by some relative sent him into a crisis of conscience. Edward announced that he was thirty-four, had no purpose in life, and ought to be serious about his career.

He applied for a job at a minor public school and got it. When, after eight months, he resigned and returned to Greystones, Dorothy was put out. ‘What on earth does he want to give up so easily for?’ she demanded. ‘It’s not as though they’d be impossible boys, like that lot in London.’ Helen, who knew why, said nothing. Edward got the job at Croxford House and lost that hunted look.

And Helen? Helen, too, had left Greystones. More than once.

She had left to go to college, and had returned of course in the vacations. She had taken that first job in the county town fifty miles away, lived in a bedsitter and drifted back to Greystones at weekends. There seemed no reason not to do so, and anyway It

Edward was usually there. ‘Helen’s looking for something to do locally,’ stated her mother, to those who displayed any interest.

‘It’s ridiculous her trailing off like this every Monday morning.’

And so inevitably the local opportunities had arisen — the part time work at a school, then at a technical college, and eventually at Spaxton library. Helen herself saw, now, with crystal clarity, the slide from indecision to an inevitable self-perpetuating arrangement; she saw how what might have been an undistinguished but useful career, dignified by such a title, had turned into a series of jobs. At the time, fatal steps are set:loin recognised as such. There had been, for so long, the presumption that at any moment something would crop up to provoke change. There had been Dorothy, making assumptions. There had been Edward.