Read Online Passing On by Penelope Lively - Free Book Online Page B

the kitchen opening cupboards. ‘I hate these glasses — where are those green ones? Ah, there … You need a proper corkscrew — this kind is hopeless. Here — let’s take a drink through to the sitting room. It’s perishing in here.’
    Settling into the corner of the sofa she continued, ‘It feels so peculiar here now. I keep expecting — oh God, I don’t know quite what I keep expecting. And I keep wishing I hadn’t fought with her so much. You know I kept trying, all this last year, to …
    well, to have a sort of great rapprochement… and each time she’d spoil it by coming out with … well, the things she always did come out with. You know.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘So now I feel … Ugh! Guilty. Nasty.’
    Edward came in. ‘Hello. What are you feeling guilty about?’
    ‘Mother, of course,’ said Louise morosely. ‘Here’s a glass and the bottle’s on the bookcase. Listen, was she the way I think she was or did I imagine her?’
    Edward poured himself a glass of wine and looked doubtfully at it — not because he questioned its quality but because drink was unusual at Greystones and had connotations of ritual celebration — Christmas and birthdays. The note struck right now did not seem to be one of celebration. He took a gulp and sat down at the other end of the sofa.
    ‘She once threw a plate at me,’ Louise went on. Did you know that? One of those blue and orange ones. It missed.’
    ‘I thought they were supposed to be Crown Derby, those,’
    said Edward. ‘It shows what a temper she must have been in.’
    Louise glared at him. ‘I was seventeen and a half at the time.
    All I could think was — other people’s mothers don’t do things like this.’
    ‘There’s probably more of it around than one imagines.’
    Helen had finished what was in her glass. ‘Mother was the way you think she was. And the way I think she was and the way Edward thinks she was. She was demanding and assertive and dogmatic and possessive and she always thought she knew best about everything. She bullied us. She bullied everyone who gave her the chance. She was prejudiced and inflexible and opinionated. She never listened to what anyone else said. She had a vile temper. There are also other things that she wasn’t.
    She wasn’t avaricious or malicious or cruel in any deliberate sense, though the result of some of the things she did was cruelty of a kind.’
    The others stared at her. ‘I’m not sure you should say all this,’ said Edward rather wildly.
    ‘What’s the difference between saying it and thinking it? And it’s true. And it can’t hurt her now because she’s dead. Also, it doesn’t mean I feel any differently about her.’
    There was a silence. Louise, eventually, spoke. ‘What did you feel about her?’
    ‘I loved her, I suppose,’ said Helen. ‘One does, willy-nilly.’
    ‘Sometimes I hated her,’ said Louise.
    ‘Oh, that too.’
    Further silence. Louise reached for the wine bottle and shared out what was left. ‘Edward, that dog of yours is disgusting.’
    Tam was sitting under the standard lamp, salivating lavishly as he gazed at a fly that wandered across the shade. Edward poked him with a foot. Tam gave a propitiating wag of the tail, licked his lips and concentrated once more on the fly.
    Edward said, ‘Well, it’s over, anyway. Poor old mother. She’s not here, quite simply. We’re on our own now.’
    Helen laughed. ‘Clearly that is just what we are not.’
    Edward gave her a stern look. ‘Wine always sets you off. Don’t give her any more, Louise.’
    Tor Christ’s sake!’ cried Louise. ‘She doesn’t get enough booze, that’s the trouble. This house has always been like some Temperance cell. Mother again — just because she didn’t care for it herself. Oh — enough, enough! Look, I came here to talk about myself, not mother.’
    ‘Good,’ said Edward comfortably. The sturm und drang of Louise’s private and professional life gave him all the vicarious