Free Passing On by Penelope Lively Page B

one, I’m sure. I do wonder…’
    ‘ He checked himself. ‘Anyway, your sister has my sympathy.
    The boy too. Tell them it all works out in the end.’
    They rose. Coats were fetched. At the door he said ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘I left the car in the Market Street car park.’
    ‘I can go back to the office that way.’
    Out into the street, the humdrum Spaxton street, butchers and building societies and banks, known for thirty years but somehow today transformed — gay and quirky and inviting. Pails of summer flowers outside a greengrocer. Small children skittering home from school with enormous satchels banging against their backs. Sunlight on old brick. A boy whistling.
    He took her arm to guide her across a street in which there was no traffic. ‘What a treat! I usually spend my lunchtime in the pub on the corner. Or having a brisk walk. Or sandwiches in the office.’
    ‘I enjoyed it too,’ said Helen. ‘Thank you so much. Perhaps . .’ she hesitated.
    ‘It’s for me to thank you. Sparing the time … Letting me natter on. Oh dear — here’s the wretched car park.’ He pulled a face, then beamed the smile upon her, laid a hand on her arm.
    ‘Perhaps…’ she began.
    ‘Anyway — goodbye and thank you, my dear.’
    And that was that. A quick squeeze of the arm and off. My dear. Perhaps, she said to his back view — diminishing, vanishing, dodging away among passers-by — perhaps you’d like to come and have a drink sometime and meet my brother. Oh well.
    I am unpractised in these things, she thought, driving home. I have forgotten the codes, if indeed I ever knew them. I don’t know the to and fro of it.
    Aflame, she glared at the road ahead. Her mother, sitting squatly in the passenger seat, told her she was fifty-two years old, no beauty and never had been and would do better to pull herself together and think about something else. Go away, said Helen. I’m sorry but go away. This is something you know nothing about, nor ever did.
    She removed all her clothes and stood in front of the long mirror in her bedroom. She saw a body with heavy thighs, legs with the purplish blotches of incipient varicose veins, breasts that sagged and a belly that was far from flat. Viewed dispassionately, she could not see how this body could arouse desire. It was demonstrably female, but very distant from the female bodies displayed in advertisements or on the covers of magazines. It looked to her more like an illustration in a medical journal.
    Edward, returning at the end of his school day, found Helen on the upstairs landing amid what appeared at first glance to be the final sediment of a jumble sale. Shoes and clothing were spread around in desultory heaps. Helen, her arms full, moved uncertainly among them. Reaching the top of the stairs, Edward recognised his mother’s garments.
    Helen looked at him uncomfortably across an armful of pinkish-grey elastic net, boning and suspenders. ‘It had to be done eventually. I suddenly thought — now. And get it over with.’
    ‘Yes, of course. Where can it all go?’
    ‘Well … Oxfam, I suppose, except that I believe they’re rather fussy nowadays. And …’ Her glance strayed guiltily to a couple of black plastic rubbish sacks, stuffed full. She had already come to the conclusion that very little re-cycling could be done; Dorothy had been a parsimonious dresser at the best of times.
    Edward averted his eyes from what Helen was holding: distant malaise lurked there.
    ‘I never realised she had any hats.’
    Nor did I. They must have been for weddings, ages ago. I’m afraid a lot of this has got the moth. Such as the fur coat. She hardly ever wore it and it dates from before the war.’
    ‘What is it, do you imagine?’ enquired Edward with distaste.
    He remembered the fur coat, which used to emerge in his childhood for rare visits to the pantomime or the ballet. It gave his mother the appearance of a small purposeful brown bear and he had hated it.
    Helen