Passing On

  ‘Why has that boy come back?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake!’ exclaimed Helen, maddened by the recalcitrance of the meat as much as by her brother. ‘He’s come back because I want him. And he’s called Gary. You know that.’

  ‘I simply don’t see the point.’

  ‘The point is to get things cleared up a bit. The garden is a disgrace . ‘

  ‘We could do it ourselves.’

  ‘Yes. But we aren’t going to, are we?’

  ‘He’s digging up all the groundsel. There’ll be no cinnabar moths next year.’

  Helen flung down her knife. ‘Oh, Edward, don’t be ridiculous!

  The point of a garden is to grow things. We’ll have potatoes instead of moths, which makes a lot more sense.’

  He was panting, she now saw, as though he had rushed from somewhere. He clutched the door frame. We’re having a quarrel, Helen thought. This hasn’t happened in years. Whatever is the matter?

  Edward wiped a hand across his forehead. He walked into the room and headed for the door, without looking at her. She heard him cross the hall and go up the stairs. A moment later a flop on the mat announced the arrival of the post. Helen stood over her bleeding bite-size chunks of meat in a state of agitation; annoyance with Edward was fused with some nameless, indefinable anxiety. She went into the hall. She could hear Edward overhead, moving about in his room. She hesitated. No, she thought, he’s being absurd. She stooped and picked up the post. There was an electricity bill and a postcard from Giles Carnaby.

  He said: ‘I won’t say wish you were here since it rains incessantly and I am not a sadist. However, we contrive to have a very pleasant time. But perhaps you too are kicking up your heels elsewhere by now. If so, I hope all goes well. Do you know this lovely spot?’ It was signed, merely, Giles.

  She turned the card over. Tarn Howe glowed beneath an unsuitably blue sky.

  Helen returned to the kitchen. She had forgotten Edward. She put the card upright on the dresser and gazed at it.

  We? said Dorothy. Who’s we, I wonder? Funny he should

  think you might be on holiday. He never enquired, did he? Take it or leave it sort of fellow, if you ask me.

  Be quiet, said Helen. She returned to her task. She chopped herbs; she peeled mushrooms. Every few minutes she glanced again at the postcard.

  Upstairs, Edward sat on his bed. He sat quite still, with his hands clenched in his lap. Tam, excluded, scrabbled indignantly at the door. Eventually Edward heard, and let him in.

  ‘What is this?’ said Edward. He put his knife and fork down and stared at his plate.

  ‘It’s called Boeuf something or other. Don’t you like it?’

  ‘It’s very nice.’

  ‘Then aren’t you going to finish it?’ she asked, a few minutes later.

  ‘I’m not particularly hungry. Sorry.’

  Helen cleared the plates. ‘Look — I’ll tell Gary to leave part of the vegetable garden undug. For the moths or whatever. All right?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s not important.’ He looked at her — evasive, placating — and picked up the local paper. He began to read a piece about the proposed transformation of a disused mill into a luxury hotel. Helen started to say more, and then changed her mind. Oh, Edward, she thought impatiently.

  The days inched by. Helen went to the library, did what had to be done, returned from the library. She persisted in her relationship with the new recipe book; the kitchen at Greystones was filled with strange aromas. She was experimenting with a risotto when Ron Paget appeared at the door. He was so tanned that for a moment Helen failed to recognise him. The whites of his eyes gleamed from a chestnut face. He stepped into the kitchen and put something on the table.

  ‘Thought I’d bring round the little brown envelope — for the guttering and that.’ He inspected the pan simmering on the stove, and sniffed. ‘Very nice. Pauline used to be keen on that sort of thing, but she’s gone off it since we gave up Italy as a holiday venue. She’s into seafood at the moment. We tried the Seychelles this year. You ever been out there, Miss Glover?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Amazing skin-diving. Quite something, let me tell you. I should think your brother might fancy that, being as he’s so keen on wildlife.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Helen. ‘Scotland’s more Edward’s line.’

  Ron nodded sagely. ‘It’s pricey, of course, but I said to Pauline — come on, we owe it to ourselves.’

  ‘I thought Gary was looking very sunburnt,’ said Helen.

  Ron laughed. ‘Oh, Gary’s been in Wales with the school camping trip. I’m not for taking the kids on holiday. Grown-up amusements, that’s the idea. Pauline likes some fun at the discos.

  Fair enough — it’s not exactly the bright lights living down here, is it? I’m not fussed for myself, but Pauline’s younger and she’s been used to town life, see what I mean?’

  ‘Really?’ No, Helen thought — I will not ask where Pauline hails from because that would prolong the conversation and anyway I don’t want to know.

  ‘East Croydon, Pauline grew up. I daresay you’re wondering how we ever came to meet — Club Mediterranee it was. I’d gone along with some of the lads — my first wife was never that keen on travel — and there she was. So abroad’s always a bit nostalgic for us. You going away this year?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  A strained expression appeared on Ron’s face which Helen eventually interpreted as being intended to convey concern, or sympathy, or both. ‘I’ve kept that bill as low as I possibly can, Miss Glover. I think of you as a special customer.’

  Helen turned to the stove; the risotto looked to be heaving over-enthusiastically. She wished Ron would go. ‘Very kind of you. I’m-not doing without a holiday because I’m feeling hard up though, but because I don’t particularly want one.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you don’t miss what you’ve never had. You’ve always been one for a quiet life, haven’t you?’

  This is impertinent, she thought. My mother would have thrown you out by now. If indeed you had ever got in.

  ‘Still — it’s never too late to break loose, is it?’

  Helen faced him. Enough. ‘Look, Mr Paget, I don’t think…

  ‘And you’ve got the means right there at the bottom of your garden.’ He waved a hand in the direction of the Britches. ‘You should give yourselves a chance, you really should. And I’ll tell you something else in my opinion there’s going to be funny things happen to the market in a year or so. You might see prices fall.’

  ‘That’s a risk we’ll have to take, then. I wish I could convince you, Mr Paget, that we’re not interested in selling the wood. Not now and quite probably never. There really is no point in going on about it.’

  Ron shrugged. ‘You’re a mystery to me, Miss Glover, you really are.’ His glance strayed around the kitchen. Assessing the extent of our poverty, thought Helen. Wondering how long we can hold out. He moved towards the door. ‘I’d say you could do with a touch more garlic in that, by the way — Pauline always used to go quite heavy on the garlic. Cheers, then.’

  Later that day, she went into the Britches. Edward had gone to a meeting of the local ornithological society. Looking from the sitting room window at the shaggy mass of the copse, she thought again of Ron, and, on an impulse, opened the french windows and walked across the garden to the gap that marked Edward’s comings and goings. She hadn’t been in there for months. It seemed a good idea to see what it was she was defending with such tenacity.

  Edward’s regular trail led to the nest-box area in the centre, where there were old trees and the open space with the big fallen mossy trunk on which he sat. Helen, too, sat for a few minutes.

  Less attuned than Edward to the internal noises of the Britches — the birdsong, the hum of insects — she was conscious of the insistent presence of the world beyond. She heard distant traffic from the road that skirted the far side of the wood; she heard machinery and me
n shouting in Ron Paget’s yard; she flinched as

  an aircraft ripped the sky, miles above. When she got up and walked again — struggling through the exuberant growths of high summer — she noted Edward’s recent efforts at clearance and control. Left alone, the place would rapidly choke itself to death, it seemed. Edward’s interference in fact made adjustments that favoured his own view of the direction nature ought to take; nature itself generated a free for all. And in a free for all there are those who survive and those who perish. Edward’s attempts to manipulate seemed both touching and, eventually, fruitless.

  The Britches will outlast us both, Helen thought, carrying on in its mindless way until scuppered at last by economic circumstances and the likes of Ron Paget.

  She started back towards the house. The telephone might ring, with no one there to pick it up. She forged her way through the tangle of growth and decay, thinking of Giles Carnaby.

  ELEVEN

  ‘I saw your friend,’ announced Joyce Babcock, ‘that solicitor.’

  She watched Helen, covertly. ‘Crossing Market Street. Going to his office, I should imagine. He had a briefcase.’

  Helen continued to check through a publisher’s catalogue.

  Quite calmly. ‘Did you? He must be back from his holiday then.’

  I wonder when? said her mother. Hasn’t hurried to get in touch, has he? It’s Wednesday now. He’d have come back at the weekend, most likely.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know, anyway. Of course it’s too late for that book. But I suppose he might want it just to see what he’s missed. It’s still on the shelf. Shall I put it in Reserve?’

  ‘I shouldn’t bother,’ said Helen.

  She took her lunch an hour late. There were some food items to be bought; she was persisting, doggedly, with the recipe book.

  She made her purchases carefully, forcing herself to consider the quality of meat, to search out some stem ginger. Then she set off back to the library. There were two routes she could take. One kept to the main streets; the second, marginally shorter way, passed through the side road in which Giles’s office was situated.

  She took this one.

  They met, in fact, in the main shopping street, several minutes from his office. She saw him from fifty yards away, coming towards her; then he spotted her and when they came together he was smiling and had a hand outstretched with which he took her elbow. ‘So there you are! What a nice surprise! You’re not off gadding somewhere, then… Did you get my card?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘And you rang about that book. My secretary said. Bless you.

  Frankly, with the weather the way it was fell-walking lost its charms. We had to find other diversions. I was about to get in touch with you — there are faint signs of life on the part of the Probate Office. Which way are you going?’

  She walked beside him past Boots, past Baxters, past Rumbelows.

  Giles talked about Rydal Mount and Ruskin’s house. She listened to him intently — and not at all; I am not cured, she thought, indeed things are worse if anything.

  He halted. ‘Well, I must leave you here. So — I’ll be writing you a boring letter about business matters, but can’t we meet?

  Saturday I am tied up, but Sunday … How are you fixed on Sunday?’

  Helen said that she was not fixed on Sunday. Not at all.

  ‘Then let us do something nice together.’ He pressed her elbow. ‘I’ll give you a ring. Goodbye, Helen.’

  That was a bit of luck for you, wasn’t it? said Dorothy. Running into him like that. Good luck or good management. But now you’ll never know whether he’d have made a move or not, will you?

  Edward started to make unusual entries in his diary. All his life he had kept a diary; it was a detached record of matters like the arrivals of the first migrants, the occurrence of various plant species in the Britches, and the prevailing weather. The years went by in a bundle of exercise books, seasons succeeding one another as flycatchers came and went, orchids were noted and then vanished, temperatures varied from the normal. He himself featured not at all. It would have been a sad disappointment to anyone ferretting in the top drawer of his desk. He had at one time suspected his mother of doing precisely this.

  Now, no one would pry. Edward, alone in his room in the long wastes of those summer days, looked back into the exercise books and noted his own absence. The first chiff-chaff had shown up exceptionally early in 1970, he saw; the last kingcup had been seen in 1967. Neither of these facts seemed, now, of much interest. He had been thirty-two in 1970; there had been certain events that were crucial to his life. Suddenly he wanted to recover his responses to these, not the arrival of the chiff-chaff.

  He would have liked to be able to confront and examine his own previous self. The diary was mockingly silent.

  ‘August 15th,’ he wrote. ‘Cleared bramble from area by the big beech. Very few speckled wood butterflies this year. Counted four young magpies. Cool; thunderstorm p.m.’ He put the pen down. And so on and so forth, he thought. As though I did not exist; as though it were an automaton who cleared brambles and counted magpies. He began to write once more. ‘Next year I shall be fifty years old. I shall die when I am between seventy five and eighty, in all likelihood; Helen will outlive me — women live longer, it seems. Neither of us will leave progeny. Less successful, in that way, than anything around.’ He looked out of the window, at the fecund garden. ‘If the purpose of life can be said to be replication, then we have both failed dismally.’ He sat motionless, staring out at the Britches, for five minutes. He then wrote: ‘It is only so, of course, in a biological sense.’

  ‘Had you forgotten?’ said Giles. ‘You hadn’t — oh good. And the weather forecast is promising — now, what do you fancy? A long walk? Some gentle carriage exercise and a pub lunch?’

  ‘I could make a picnic,’ Helen said.

  ‘What a lovely idea! Excellent! Should I collect you at about eleven, then? In that case… Wouldn’t your brother like to join us.

  She hesitated. ‘I doubt it. But I’ll ask.’

  ‘I’m making a picnic. Giles Carnaby is coming. Do you want to come?’

  ‘No,’ said Edward without hesitation.

  Giles drove decisively, with a hint of aggression; the car was powerful, and more fully furnished than any Helen had experienced. He put on a tape of Vivaldi and then switched it off because he said they had too much to talk about. It was he, in fact, who talked. He was a considerable talker, Helen realised.

  What he said was informative if a touch inconsequential; you didn’t remember too much of it but the effect was cumulative. It was a kind of verbal display; listening, she was disconcertingly reminded of a bird idly preening, limbering up with bursts of song, stretching a wing … It came to her, in fact, with dry detachment, that Giles was a somewhat self-centred person.

  Most of what he said pertained to himself. Occasionally he asked a question or sought an opinion; you had the impression that the answer had glanced off his surface. He appeared to listen with flattering attention; you also felt that possibly he had not heard.

  Perceiving all this, she knew also that it made no difference.

  None whatsoever.

  They had decided to make for a small river valley in which there was an isolated church reached by a footpath across fields.

  Helen had gone to some lengths over the picnic; the recipe book included a relevant section, she discovered. Flaked tuna with mayonnaise was new to her but she had managed and was quite proud of the results. Giles, when they had parked the car, dived into the back and produced a bottle of wine. They set off across a water meadow rich with buttercups and decorated with Friesian cows, like a television advertisement for some environmentally dubious product: petrol or fast cars. A heron rose from the river and flapped away into a clump of tall trees in the distance.

  They inspected the church. Giles was not, evidently, much interested in churches. Helen, for a moment, came into her own; she pointed o
ut salient features, found some medieval paving and a battered Norman font. Giles listened — or not — and then put a hand on her arm to steer her towards the door. ‘Come on, I’m starving — time to find an idyllic spot in which to eat.’

  The river seemed the obvious place. They chose a point at which the bank reached steeply down to a pool, a slight bend in the course having eaten away a miniature beach on the far side.

  It was thick with alder and willow; the water, green and shaded, flashed from time to time with coins of reflected sunlight.

  ‘Perfect!’ said Giles.

  Helen unpacked the food. He poured the wine (he had remembered glasses, too). They ate and drank, sitting tucked into long grass that screened them from the river; they could hear the flow of it, and the occasional plop of a fish. I suppose, Helen thought, this is one of those moments in life that will live in the head. Whatever comes of it. Giles declared the sandwiches excellent. He ate everything she had brought, and then lay back, glass in hand. ‘What heaven!’

  Helen said, ‘We’ve got company.’

  On the far side of the river a dog appeared — a collie, leaping in excitement. Followed at once by a young man, dark-haired, sunburnt, wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

  The man, if indeed he realised they were there, paid no attention to them. He threw a stick into the river and the dog went after it in a flying leap, landing with a huge splash and paddling furiously, its black head sleek like a seal. It came out, shaking so that water spun off in silver spray. The man threw more sticks and it jumped again, ecstatic, diving and swimming, in and out. And then he sat down and stripped off his shirt.

  Now he’s going in too,’ said Giles. ‘I wish he’d go away. Our peace is wrecked.’

  The man pulled off his jeans and stood up. He was naked. It seemed to Helen that he must surely be aware of them; if so, they were of no interest whatsoever. She heard Giles say — embarrassed? — ‘A proper child of nature, evidently …’ The young man stood for a moment on an overhanging ledge of the bank, looking down at the water; the dog swam round and round below; the man’s body was flecked all over with light and the shadow patterns of leaves, so that he seemed some human extension of the place. He was spare, muscular, young. Then he threw up his arms and dived into the river.