Passing On by Penelope Lively Page A

tree, vivid green cushions of moss, the crimson flicker of a cinnabar moth against leaf mould, a very small spider with white spots on its back. He heard, but did not register, the screech of the chainsaw in Ron Paget’s yard, the rattle and thump of an articulated lorry taking the bend in the road, the roar of an American F1-11 fighter some two miles above his head. A few feet away Tam was gnawing at something dubious he had found in the undergrowth.
    Edward tried to think of nothing at all; like Tam, like the birds, the cinnabar moth, the fungus, the Britches itself. He felt unsettled, uneasy, disquieted in his very depths, as indeed he had felt since his mother’s death. He had felt like this from time to time all his life and had conquered the feelings eventually, on each occasion, by stern application to other matters and by refusing consideration of what he felt. If you denied a name to something perhaps it would no longer exist. Thus, as a child, had he driven away the shadows on the bedroom wall — the witch-shaped, wolf-shaped shadows. And thus, today, he sat on his log — a delicate pink-grey log furred here and there with green moss — and tried to concentrate on what he could see while thrusting aside what he knew. He watched the moth and the spider, followed the movement of the tits and the robin, saw the valiant growth of a six-inch beech seedling. The Britches rustled and flickered comfortably around him. Tam chewed the ancient corpse of some small creature.
    And Edward, not unfeeling, not impervious, began presently to howl within. Nothing lasts, he wept, everything goes. My mother is dead, who had always been there, for better and for worse. Mostly for worse. And I am forty-nine and getting old and soon it will be too late for all the things I know nothing of but which torment me in the middle of the night and here now in this place which is supposed to be a comfort and a solace. I am lonely and hungry and I have never breathed a word of this to anyone. Nobody knows or cares. I don’t want anyone to know or care.
    Tam dug a hole and stowed away his prize. Then he came and nosed at Edward’s foot, ready to move on. Edward pushed him away, quite violently, and Tam, unused to even such halfhearted maltreatment, looked up in surprise.

FIVE
    When, after eight days, Helen had heard nothing more from Giles Carnaby she was bleakly self-contemptuous. Her heightened condition persisted, there was nothing she could do about that: the swerves of mood, the burning senses. In an animal, she told herself savagely, it would be called being on heat. Her mother, who had been fading hitherto, returned to fill the black hole by the kitchen sink or to confront Helen on the stairs, saying smugly that she could have told her all along what to expect.
    Louise came again, towing Suzanne, who spent the entire time shuttered off within the earphones of her Walkman; if spoken to she smiled with bland and tolerant self-absorption, like the very old. There was much complaint of Phil. And, obliquely, of Tim.
    Helen, alarmed and suspecting infidelity (there had been an episode in the past concerning which Louise had boiled away on the telephone for months on end), asked what was wrong with him.
    Nothing’s wrong,’ said Louise irritably. ‘Tim is precisely as he always is. That’s the problem, I suppose.’
    ‘Don’t you love him?’ asked Edward.
    Louise rolled her eyes in exasperation. ‘God! You simply don’t know the first thing about marriage, do you? Well, bless you — how could you? Listen — tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Right?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘French expression suggesting instability.’
    Edward appeared to think hard for a few moments and then got up and left the room abruptly.
    ‘And what’s the matter with him, come to that?’ said Louise.
    ‘He’s the nearest I’ve ever seen him to snappish, for someone constitutionally incapable of bad temper. The trouble with Edward is that he’s practically