Passing On Read Online Free PDF Page B

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