Passing On (8 page)

well, to have a sort of great rapprochement… and each time she’d spoil it by coming out with … well, the things she always did come out with. You know.’

‘I know.’

‘So now I feel … Ugh! Guilty. Nasty.’

Edward came in. ‘Hello. What are you feeling guilty about?’

‘Mother, of course,’ said Louise morosely. ‘Here’s a glass and the bottle’s on the bookcase. Listen, was she the way I think she was or did I imagine her?’

Edward poured himself a glass of wine and looked doubtfully at it — not because he questioned its quality but because drink was unusual at Greystones and had connotations of ritual celebration — Christmas and birthdays. The note struck right now did not seem to be one of celebration. He took a gulp and sat down at the other end of the sofa.

‘She once threw a plate at me,’ Louise went on. Did you know that? One of those blue and orange ones. It missed.’

‘I thought they were supposed to be Crown Derby, those,’

said Edward. ‘It shows what a temper she must have been in.’

Louise glared at him. ‘I was seventeen and a half at the time.

All I could think was — other people’s mothers don’t do things like this.’

‘There’s probably more of it around than one imagines.’

Helen had finished what was in her glass. ‘Mother was the way you think she was. And the way I think she was and the way Edward thinks she was. She was demanding and assertive and dogmatic and possessive and she always thought she knew best about everything. She bullied us. She bullied everyone who gave her the chance. She was prejudiced and inflexible and opinionated. She never listened to what anyone else said. She had a vile temper. There are also other things that she wasn’t.

She wasn’t avaricious or malicious or cruel in any deliberate sense, though the result of some of the things she did was cruelty of a kind.’

The others stared at her. ‘I’m not sure you should say all this,’ said Edward rather wildly.

‘What’s the difference between saying it and thinking it? And it’s true. And it can’t hurt her now because she’s dead. Also, it doesn’t mean I feel any differently about her.’

There was a silence. Louise, eventually, spoke. ‘What did you feel about her?’

‘I loved her, I suppose,’ said Helen. ‘One does, willy-nilly.’

‘Sometimes I hated her,’ said Louise.

‘Oh, that too.’

Further silence. Louise reached for the wine bottle and shared out what was left. ‘Edward, that dog of yours is disgusting.’

Tam was sitting under the standard lamp, salivating lavishly as he gazed at a fly that wandered across the shade. Edward poked him with a foot. Tam gave a propitiating wag of the tail, licked his lips and concentrated once more on the fly.

Edward said, ‘Well, it’s over, anyway. Poor old mother. She’s not here, quite simply. We’re on our own now.’

Helen laughed. ‘Clearly that is just what we are not.’

Edward gave her a stern look. ‘Wine always sets you off. Don’t give her any more, Louise.’

Tor Christ’s sake!’ cried Louise. ‘She doesn’t get enough booze, that’s the trouble. This house has always been like some Temperance cell. Mother again — just because she didn’t care for it herself. Oh — enough, enough! Look, I came here to talk about myself, not mother.’

‘Good,’ said Edward comfortably. The sturm und drang of Louise’s private and professional life gave him all the vicarious satisfaction of television soap opera. ‘What happened over the row in your office about the new restaurant contract?’

Louise looked at him sharply. ‘My life isn’t some sort of spectator sport, you know. Anyway, it’s nothing to do with the office. It’s Phil. Classic teenage stuff, I suppose, but it’s got a bit beyond a joke. He wants to leave school, go and hang out with a bunch of down and out friends, all that nonsense.’

Edward was losing interest. ‘Talk to him,’ he advised kindly.

‘That’s pathetic!’ snapped Louise. ‘Frankly we feel more like hitting him at the moment. I have a permanent stress headache.

If! was anyone else I’d be on tranquillizers.’

The telephone rang. ‘I’ll go,’ said Helen. Out in the hall, she picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’

‘Miss Glover? Helen … May I? Giles Carnaby here. I have one or two further little things I ought to discuss with you. I wondered if you might like to meet me in Spaxton for a spot of lunch?’

She returned to the sitting room. Louise was still talking about Phil. Edward was picking burrs out of Tam’s coat. They both looked at her. Louise said, ‘That wine has turned you bright pink — it must be even more vicious than I thought. Let’s open another bottle. And your stew’s burning — I can smell it.’

When Louise was a little girl Helen had been immensely proud of her. ‘Louise is going to be the pretty one,’ Dorothy said, when Louise was about two; and said it rather too often, thereafter. In fact Louise was not pretty, but she had a quality of vibrancy that did very well instead. Nowadays, in the company of good looking women she appeared louche — her skin was bad and her hair messy. But beside most women — Helen included — she was a curious illustration of why one woman is attractive and another not. You were simply more inclined to look at Louise than at others. And as a small child she had been compelling, with her bounce, her bright eyes, her mop of hair. Helen, escorting her along a street or into shops, had delighted in it: ‘Yes, she’s my sister. Yes, she is quite a handful — come along, Louise.’

She sometimes saw a shadow of Louise in her own face, with interest and quite without rancour. Patently, the life of an attractive woman is different from that of a plain one — and not exclusively in a sexual sense: a personable appearance conditions the world’s response to most people. Louise’s looks invited attention; Helen’s did not. But, that being said, Helen knew that the gulf between her experience and her sister’s could be attributed to personality and inclination quite as much as to the cast of nose or mouth. Louise was extrovert and unwary; Helen was reserved and cautious. Louise, from the age of two, had fought their mother; Helen had propitiated and avoided confrontation.

Louise had grabbed at opportunities (and, on occasion, paid for it); Helen had hesitated, considered the pros and cons, and then found that it was too late.

She had never envied Louise; rather, she had feared for her.

She had stood in the wings, over the years, and watched with apprehension as Louise was crossed in love, had rows and reconciliations, got the sack, went broke, suffered a fallopian pregnancy and an attack of shingles and smashed up a car. She came to realise, too, that while temperament may condition experience it also determines how we overcome it. She herself would have been felled by any of these things, she suspected; Louise shrieked her protests, and prospered. The mystery, as Helen saw it, was that two people could emerge from the same circumstances and set about dealing with the world so differently: follow the thread back and you reached, in each case, the same hearth, the same cot, the same indoctrinations, Dorothy’s uncompromising lap.

Will this do?’ said Giles Carnaby. ‘I thought of the Crown, but I can’t stand all the bucolic laughter from Rotarian lunches. And that wine bar place is too young and the White Hart is too elderly. I hoped this might fill the gap — it’s new, apparently.’

The restaurant struck Helen as unlikely to survive long in Spaxton: the menu was ornate in every sense and the prices high.

There was hardly anyone else there. It was also elegantly under lit; she had difficulty in picking out Giles until she spotted the gleam of his silver hair in a far corner. He jumped to his feet as she approached and fussed around with her coat; his hand lay for an instant on her shoulder.

‘It’s fine,’ she said.

‘Are you sure? I’ve been having misgivings about the decor.

We could always do a bolt somewhere else.’

‘Not now they’ve got my coat. And you’ve unfolded your napkin.’

‘So I have. Sheer nervousness.’ That winning smile. ‘Well, we’re stuck with it. Shall we get the rather boring business bit over first or do you want me to stow it away until the coffee?’

There was some matter of the whereabouts of share certificates, it turned out, and an explanation about probate and how long it took. It occurred to Helen that all of it would have gone nicely into a letter; quite a short letter. She sipped her sherry and thought about this.

‘There!’ he concluded. ‘Honour is satisfied. Now tell me what you’ve been doing? How is the young man with green hair? By the way — the Earl Grey has been an absolute treat. I think about you every time I brew myself a cup — not that I wouldn’t do that anyway but the combination vastly cheers up breakfast, always a slightly dismal time these days. What do you have for breakfast?

I’ve been imagining you in that amazing kitchen, and your brother except of course that he is a blank since we haven’t met.’

The trouble about this multi-faceted style of conversation was that it left you not knowing quite which bit to deal with first.

Helen, a little breathless, tried to talk and attend to various unspoken responses and queries. She felt both heady and in some way disadvantaged. The food was rather good; wine at lunchtime was of course always a mistake but one could repent that at leisure, later on.

Various things emerged, also to extend their impact later.

Carnaby & Proctor had only become thus four years ago, when the Carnabys had moved down here from London since Gillian Carnaby, already ill, had wished to spend her last years elsewhere.

Then old Mr Proctor had retired, as anticipated, leaving Giles in partnership with young Simon. Giles rather missed London at times, but was adjusting. There were compensations.

(What were they? Who were they?) The house was pleasant enough but Giles was not good at housekeeping. The son, a marine engineer, was abroad. Giles enjoyed long muddy walks, preferably in company (whose?), opera, sweet and sticky puddings (the choice of dessert occasioned much heart-searching) and travel books of the 1930s. He sang in an amateur choir on Monday evenings, voted Liberal, was allergic to strawberries and had bicycled across France when he was twenty. He didn’t know one end of a car from the other, could never see the point of Picasso but accepted that he was probably an ignoramus, seldom drank spirits and liked to do a little mild gardening. He had a gold filling rather far back in his mouth that glinted when he laughed heartily. He paid bills with Access.

‘Good grief — it can’t be three-thirty! Is service included, do you imagine? I can never tell with these things. I feel as though I’ve been going on about myself in the most shameless way.

What a nice patient woman you are.’

He laid his hand on hers. There it rested for several seconds, until the waiter arrived and there were things to be done with wallet and credit card.

‘And you never did report on the green-headed nephew.’

‘He seems to be giving trouble,’ said Helen. ‘My sister was complaining.’

‘Adolescence is quite fearful. Be thankful you’re not a parent.

Though you would be a marvellous one, I’m sure. I do wonder…’

‘ He checked himself. ‘Anyway, your sister has my sympathy.

The boy too. Tell them it all works out in the end.’

They rose. Coats were fetched. At the door he said ‘Where are you going?’

‘I left the car in the Market Street car park.’

‘I can go back to the office that way.’

Out into the street, the humdrum Spaxton street, butchers and building societies and banks, known for thirty years but somehow today transformed — gay and quirky and inviting. Pails of summer flowers outside a greengrocer. Small children skittering home from school with enormous satchels banging against their backs. Sunlight on old brick. A boy whistling.

He took her arm to guide her across a street in which there was no traffic. ‘What a treat! I usually spend my lunchtime in the pub on the corner. Or having a brisk walk. Or sandwiches in the office.’

‘I enjoyed it too,’ said Helen. ‘Thank you so much. Perhaps . .’ she hesitated.

‘It’s for me to thank you. Sparing the time … Letting me natter on. Oh dear — here’s the wretched car park.’ He pulled a face, then beamed the smile upon her, laid a hand on her arm.

‘Perhaps…’ she began.

‘Anyway — goodbye and thank you, my dear.’

And that was that. A quick squeeze of the arm and off. My dear. Perhaps, she said to his back view — diminishing, vanishing, dodging away among passers-by — perhaps you’d like to come and have a drink sometime and meet my brother. Oh well.

I am unpractised in these things, she thought, driving home. I have forgotten the codes, if indeed I ever knew them. I don’t know the to and fro of it.

Aflame, she glared at the road ahead. Her mother, sitting squatly in the passenger seat, told her she was fifty-two years old, no beauty and never had been and would do better to pull herself together and think about something else. Go away, said Helen. I’m sorry but go away. This is something you know nothing about, nor ever did.

She removed all her clothes and stood in front of the long mirror in her bedroom. She saw a body with heavy thighs, legs with the purplish blotches of incipient varicose veins, breasts that sagged and a belly that was far from flat. Viewed dispassionately, she could not see how this body could arouse desire. It was demonstrably female, but very distant from the female bodies displayed in advertisements or on the covers of magazines. It looked to her more like an illustration in a medical journal.

Edward, returning at the end of his school day, found Helen on the upstairs landing amid what appeared at first glance to be the final sediment of a jumble sale. Shoes and clothing were spread around in desultory heaps. Helen, her arms full, moved uncertainly among them. Reaching the top of the stairs, Edward recognised his mother’s garments.

Helen looked at him uncomfortably across an armful of pinkish-grey elastic net, boning and suspenders. ‘It had to be done eventually. I suddenly thought — now. And get it over with.’

‘Yes, of course. Where can it all go?’

‘Well … Oxfam, I suppose, except that I believe they’re rather fussy nowadays. And …’ Her glance strayed guiltily to a couple of black plastic rubbish sacks, stuffed full. She had already come to the conclusion that very little re-cycling could be done; Dorothy had been a parsimonious dresser at the best of times.