Passing On by Penelope Lively

picked it up. There were balding patches and a rip in one sleeve. Bear was still the animal that it most closely evoked.
    She held it out to Edward, who shook his head and pulled a face.
    Helen laughed. ‘Whatever it was, it died an awfully long time
    ago. Too long ago to get exercised about now.’ She dropped the coat on to one of the piles.
    ‘That’s not what I was thinking about,’ said Edward. His glance shifted from the coat to the pink tangle in Helen’s arms. He took his glasses off and began to scrub them violently with a grubby handkerchief.
    The sensual feel of fur was one of his earliest memories. Live fur. The warm flank of the cat from next door, to be precise, in which he had buried his face and been rewarded with the consoling reverberation of its purr. An amiable, unrejecting maternal cat.
    He had been under the impression, as a very small child, that his mother was armour-plated, like the rhino in London Zoo at which he had gazed in astonishment. You could not touch the rhino, but it looked like his mother felt. Beneath her tweed skirts and her thick jerseys there was a carapace, a plated stiffness that rejected infant limbs and hands. Later in life he learned about female corsetry and realised what it was one had been up against, but the impression lingered yet of some unyielding natural structure.
    Dorothy did not encourage physical contact. ‘Don’t paw me like that, Edward,’ she would say. ‘No, you can’t hold my hand sit on my lap have a cuddle. Don’t be silly. You’re not a baby now, you’re two/three/four.’ The cat never said things like that; it simply provided a gently throbbing flank until called away on more pressing matters. Hence, perhaps, the disturbing emotions aroused by the sight of dead fur and, even more, that dingy flaccid heap of canvas and elastic, which prompted, now, another murky response, another distant moment. He had lain in bed once, in infancy perhaps, and watched with furtive distress as his mother dressed; presumably she had thought he was asleep.
    Why was he sharing her room? Some crisis induced by visiting relatives, maybe. At any rate, the sight was with him still: that shadowy figure revealing undreamed-of clefts and protuberances.
    He had cowered under the bedclothes, mesmerized, and watched her flopping breasts as she stooped to haul pink drawers up over heavy thighs, had seen hair where surely no hair should be, had printed on his vision for ever the pucker of nipples and the black valley between buttocks.
    He started to retreat back down the stairs. ‘You might at least take some of the stuff down for me,’ said Helen, in a tone of reproach.
    Edward grabbed the black plastic sacks. ‘I’ll help if you want, but I’m sure I’d . .
    Helen vanished into Dorothy’s room, saying tartly that it didn’t matter; it was the nearest they had come to ill feeling for a long time and Edward was left with a further layer of disquiet.
    He dumped the sacks outside the back door by the dustbins, called Tam and set off for the Britches.
    He checked the nest-boxes. There was evidence that something might already have been roosting in one of them, which was satisfactory. They were sold by an organisation that provided work for the mentally handicapped, which made them doubly benign; the only displeasing thing about them was the aggressively rustic appearance — a cross between a cuckoo clock and a miniature cottage orne. Edward had tried unsuccessfully to knock off the superfluous gables and twiggy excrescences. They would mellow, he hoped, in the raw winter climate of the Britches.
    It was June now and still warm though past six. The evening sunlight that came down through the leaves suffused the whole place with a golden glow. Edward sat down on his usual log and noted, while thinking of quite other things, that he could hear a robin, assorted tits, rooks, a chaffinch and a magpie. He observed a delicate collar of fawn and pink fungus around the base of a dead