Passing On (23 page)

‘Sorry,’ said Helen. ‘I didn’t realise you were talking to me, in fact.’

They had arrived at the grave. ‘Do you think it’s all right?’

Helen enquired, after a moment.

The stone? Fine. Nice lettering. Simple and straightforward.’

‘It’s considered a bit austere by some.’

‘Of course. Look around. It sticks out. Offends against the prevailing taste. Well, that would have given mother quiet satisfaction.’

They stood in contemplation. ‘You know something?’ said Louise. ‘She’s changing. In the head, that is. I’m beginning to see her differently. She’s losing her edge, somehow. Fading.

What about you?’

‘Fading? I wouldn’t say that, no. I’m seeing her differently. I wouldn’t say that I’m seeing her faded. Interesting. And even more interesting is the way in which I see myself differently.

What I am and what I’m not, and why. All of which slots in with what you’ve just been saying. Did mother foul me up? As you put it. Or does one hammer the nails into one’s own coffin?

As mother used to have it. Sorry about the language. Inept. It slipped out.’

‘What do you mean — fouled up? You’re not. .

‘Of course I am. As are we all. To a greater or lesser extent.’

‘Oh, gawd …’ said Louise, turning from the grave. She dumped herself down on the low stone wall that skirted the churchyard.

Helen joined her. ‘Mother, I now discover, once scuppered my romantic prospects. Do you remember Peter Datchett? No — I daresay not — and in any case who’s to say what would have come of it? I might at this moment be living in anguish with Peter Datchett. Perhaps I should thank mother. But one would prefer to have made one’s own mistakes. And there’s the question of the yellow muslin dress — not on the face of it a central matter but … but again there is this sense of one’s fate having been manipulated by another. By mother, to be precise.’

Louise was staring intently. ‘I do remember Peter Datchett. I always wondered why he disappeared without trace. What did she do? And what yellow dress? I simply can’t see you . .

‘No, I’m sure you can’t. And you would have been about seven at the time. What bothers me is not so much the loss of either Peter Datchett or the yellow dress, but the awful glimpse of my own acquiescence.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Louise after a moment.

‘Why should you? Neither do I, in a sense. I see, simply, that at some point I became pathologically compliant. The habit of avoiding confrontation with mother became a habit of not confronting anything. Of accepting without question. You used to go on at me about getting out. You were of course entirely right.’

‘Oh, goodness… One said that sort of thing. I didn’t always mean . .

‘It’s all right,’ said Helen. ‘I’m not bemoaning the past. I’m merely casting a beady eye on it. Hoping, perhaps, to learn something.’

Louise, dissecting a cushion of moss, laid green fronds upon her knee — and switched tactics. ‘What did mother do?’

‘Oh — failed to hand over a letter. A sin of omission rather than of commission, quite possibly. One will never know. I’m more interested now in what I didn’t do. Put up a fight. Rage against the universe.’

‘You aren’t that kind of person,’ said Louise.

‘Ah, there you have it. And why not?’

‘Nor is Edward …’ continued Louise, shredding the green fronds, sweeping them to the ground.

‘Precisely. Whereas you are. Odd, isn’t it? I can see you now — it’s my earliest memory of you, incidentally — I can see you now biting mother. Aged about one.’

Louise laughed. ‘What did she do?’

‘She put you in a cot and shut the door on you. You yelled for an hour without stopping.’

‘No wonder. It’s surprising I’m as normal as I am. That we all are.’

…’ Helen rose. ‘We’d better get back. I haven’t done anything about supper. Edward will be getting restive.’

‘Where is he, anyway? He was around for five minutes when I arrived and then he vanished.’

‘In the Britches, I expect.’

‘Edward’s relationship with that place would keep half a dozen psychiatrists busy. Oh, that sounds snide. It’s not meant. You know. When I was little I thought the light shone out of Edward’s eyes. Now I get frightened for him. The world’s a brutal place and he wanders around worrying about toads and orchids. He wouldn’t have enough sense of self-preservation to come in out of the rain. In the dark ages people like Edward got crucified or burned as witches. He lives in a jungle today and he doesn’t know it.’

‘Hardly,’ said Helen. ‘Here.’ They were turning out into the village street again now, leaving behind them the stone ranks of the dead, with their propitiatory offerings of flowers and foliage.

A clutch of young mothers gossiped outside the shop, with children eddying around them. Radio One leaked from the open windows of a house.

‘Of course. Social violence is universal, and I don’t mean mugging and burglary. A place like this has fangs like anywhere else, given the circumstances.’

‘Edward’s rather popular in the village.’

‘That’s not what I’m getting at,’ said Louise. She appeared to lose interest in the subject and began to talk about Suzanne.

Suzanne wished to leave school at sixteen and become a hairdresser.

Louise fulminated. Helen heard Dorothy, twenty-three years ago, screaming at Louise. Louise, glancing at her sister, caught the silent comment and said, ‘There is absolutely no parallel. Mother was obstructing, purely and simply. I’m trying to stop Suzanne making an idiotic mistake.’ Then she started to laugh and added, ‘Do you always know what I’m thinking? God — it’s as bad as marriage!’

By the time they got back to the house it was past eight. There was a rich and spicy smell; Helen had left the dinner in the oven.

‘Coriander …’ said Louise, sniffing. ‘You really are into contemporary cuisine, aren’t you? Mother would have a fit. Here — I’ll lay the table.’

Edward came down from his room. Helen served the meal.

They began to eat. After a few mouthfuls Edward put his knife and fork down and said, ‘Oh — the lawyer rang. Half an hour or so ago.’

‘Funny time to ring up,’ said Louise. ‘Out of office hours.’

Edward started to eat again. ‘She goes to the opera with him.’

Louise turned sharply to Helen, who felt herself turn a treacherous red. ‘What’s all this?’

‘And picnics,’ said Edward.

‘The probate thing will be sorted out in a month or so,’ said Helen in strangled tones. ‘Apparently.’

‘Picnics?’ demanded Louise. ‘Picnics where?’

‘He uses after-shave stuff,’ said Edward. ‘I don’t really like him.’

‘So what?’ snapped Helen.

Louise, wide-eyed, looked from one to the other. ‘What on earth is going on?’

‘Nothing,’ said Helen, ‘is going on.’ She got up. ‘Would anyone like some more of this?’

Louise turned to Edward. ‘What did he want?’

‘He didn’t say,’ said Edward smugly. ‘He just chuntered on a bit and then rang off.’

Helen dumped a spoonful of stew on to each plate except her own and sat down again.

‘This is delicious,’ said Louise, in a social tone. ‘You must give me the recipe.’

After three days Helen dialled Giles Carnaby’s number. There was no answer. The next evening, too, he was out. She rang his office, and then panicked at the secretary’s voice, and put the receiver down without speaking. This, she thought, is how adolescents behave; to this is one reduced.

‘I hate August,’ said Joyce Babcock. ‘Nothing but overdue books and kids fooling around. And the town jammed with coaches.

Nothing happens in August. Everyone’s away — even the people you never think you’d miss, like the neighbours. I’ve not spoken to a soul in the last fortnight, except for you — sorry, no offence meant. No, I tell a lie — I saw Kate Blackford outside Marks. You know — from Oxford Central. She’s living up here now. So we had a nice chat. Oh — and this’ll interest you — while we were talking who should go past but your solicitor friend. Again. I’m always seeing him, aren’t I? Anyway, he didn’t see me but Kate recognised him too — her sister works in his office, apparently.

And the thing is he wasn’t alone, he had someone with him — that woman who runs the Choral Society, I can’t remember her name, with black hair, youngish. And Kate says her sister says he’s quite a one for the ladies. Apparently he led his wife an awful dance. You know his wife’s dead? Apparently she was ever so nice. Anyway, I thought you’d be interested.’

I know, said Helen to Dorothy. Of course I know. I’ve always known, probably. It makes no difference. Unfortunately. No difference whatsoever.

And how do I know she’s not just a friend? Like I’m just a friend.

Why did he send another postcard? Telephone? He didn’t have to. And of what value is the testimony of Kate Blackford’s sister?

Why does he not telephone again?

‘So …’ said Louise. ‘Back in the nest. Where things have not changed. Tim has seen a new specialist and is going in to have his tubes drained. Phil disappeared for twenty-four hours and had me ringing up the local police station. Who demonstrated what you might call a profound lack of interest. So I took it out on Phil when he did show up which was natural enough I suppose but probably unhelpful. Now he’s off again. God knows where. It was lovely seeing you. Listen — what is going on? This bloke … You haven’t gone and fallen, have you? I remember him now. The Older Man type who came to the funeral. I know you were getting pissed off with Edward needling you like that, but you can tell me, surely. I worry about you.’

‘Continuing humid,’ Edward wrote. ‘Cuckoo-pint in the corner near the road has increased — eight specimens this year. Wood spurge also doing better. Green woodpecker fledglings have flown. Neither spurge, cuckoo-pint nor woodpeckers will feel satisfaction at this, of course, nor indeed anything at all; they exist, simply, and that is that. Exist, replicate — if circumstances permit, and expire. The entire wood does that and nothing else, year after year — the dominant emotion is fear. When it sings and blossoms in the spring it is not happy; it merely does what its genes tell it to do. Such subtleties as happiness and misery are contributed by me, along with satisfaction at increase of cuckoo pint and survival of woodpeckers. The point of all this being that …’ He put down his pen and stared out at the Britches, which shifted gently and continuously in the light wind. Edward was not a great reader but he knew quite well that he was broaching the oldest and most central concern of literature; he felt appropriately diffident… I don’t know if it is a comfort or a mockery.

The beauty of it. The permanence. Everything that is in my head, everything that I feel; the fact that the natural world thinks nothing and neither laughs nor cries.’ He pondered again.

‘Though that is true only up to a point — last year after the dog fox was killed on the road the vixen called for three nights, the saddest sound I ever heard.’ He paused again. On his bookshelves were the tattered copies of Tarka the Otter and the works of Cherry Kearton that he had read and re-read as a schoolboy, weeping the while. ‘But is the vixen sad or do I attribute sadness to her? All that can be said for certain is that I respond to all of it — vixen, trees, plants, birds, the lot — but it does not respond to me.’ Tam, who had been sleeping on the bed, woke suddenly, scratched himself, jumped down and marched to the door, where he stood, whining imperiously. ‘All right,’ said Edward. ‘In a minute.’ He wrote: ‘And also that it sustains me, in ways that I can’t explain. Especially now. Things still bad. Not sleeping
etc.

Was churlish to Helen.’ Tam, at the door, continued to whine.

TWELVE

I suppose, Helen thought, that the interesting thing about my condition is the loss of self-control. Eventually one will see this as interesting rather than demoralising. It will be possible to look back and observe that those in love become utterly self-destructive.

Oneself in love. At the moment I can no longer act with common sense and deliberation, because there is only one course open, and that is determined by obsession. I am obsessed by Giles; all I can think of is whether I shall see him again, and when. What the outcome of seeing him might be is beside the point; I have become incapable of calculation. Normally behaviour — or at least my behaviour — is governed by certain processes; weighing one course of action against another, thinking about consequences. In this predicament, one does nothing of the kind.

One responds to some basic drive, like an animal. In youth, I found this exhilarating, I remember.

She tried, as therapy, to recall previous experiences. She was probably, she realised, shorter on this than most people. Apart from that early sexual encounter, which did not count as love, there had been Peter Datchett and two others. With Peter Datchett, it had been a question of ripening interest rather than obsession. The others, in so far as she could recover her feelings of the time, seemed to have involved love — inflammation of the senses, certainly. At eighteen — the period of the mousseline de sole dress — she had found herself hanging around a certain area of Twickenham, where they were then living, in the hopes of encountering the doctor’s son, with whom she had had a strangled conversation at some social gathering. He had subsequently taken her to the cinema, where she had been startled to feel his hand creep into hers. Four weeks later she had seen him in the cinema queue with another girl, and had perceived that her day was over; in between, she had known disorientation and obsession, diagnosed her trouble, and felt exhilarated. Later, in her twenties, she had become quietly and patiently infatuated with a married colleague. The man had never behaved towards her in other than a friendly and decorous way; nevertheless, she burned. When after a year he moved away to another job, she felt acute distress and thought continuously of him for many months. It was that experience, in recollection, which most closely reflected her present state.

Late one afternoon Giles came into the library. Helen had taken over the ‘Returned Books’ counter temporarily from one of the juniors and looked up to find him standing in front of her, smiling.