Collected Stories

Her Mother’s Daughter

Her mother considered it ill-bred to eat sweets on the street, and worse to eat fruit or ice-cream. Her mother was tidy, and required tidiness in others. She peeled an apple in a particular way, keeping the peel in one long piece, as though it were important to do so. Her mother rarely smiled.

Her father, now dead, had been a lexicographer: a small, abstracted man who would not have noticed the eating of food on the street, not even slices of meat or peas from their pods. Most of the time he hadn’t noticed Helena either. He died on her eighth birthday.

Her mother had always ruled the household. Tall and greyly dressed, she had achieved her position of command without resort to anger or dictatorial speech; she did not say much, and what she did say she never found necessary to repeat. A look informed the miscreant, indicating a button undone, an unwashed hand. Helena, possessing neither brother nor sister, was the only miscreant.

The house where she and her mother lived was in a south-western suburb of London. Next door on one side there was a fat widow, Mrs Archingford, who dyed her hair a garish shade of red. On the other an elderly couple were for ever bickering in their garden. Helena’s mother did not acknowledge the presence of Mrs Archingford, who arrived at the house next door when Helena was nine; but she had written a note to the elderly man to request him to keep his voice down, a plea that caused him to raise it even more.

Helena played mainly by herself. Beneath the heavy mahogany of the dining-room table she cut the hair of Samson while he slept, then closed her eyes while the table collapsed around her, its great ribbed legs and the polished surface from which all meals were eaten splintering into fragments. The multitude in the temple screamed, their robes wet with blood. Children died, women wept.

‘What are you doing, Helena?’ her mother questioned her. ‘Why are you muttering?’

Helena told a lie, saying she’d been singing, because she felt ashamed: her mother would not easily understand if she mentioned Delilah. She played outside on a narrow concrete path that ran between the rockery and the wooden fence at the bottom of the garden, where no one could see her from the windows. ‘Now, here’s a book,’ her mother said, finding her with snails arranged in a semicircle. Helena washed her hands, re-tied the ribbon in the hair, and sat in the sitting-room to read Teddy’s Button.

Few people visited the house, for Helena’s mother did not go in for friends. But once a year Helena was put in a taxi-cab which drove her to her grandparents on her father’s side, the only grandparents she knew about. They were a grinning couple who made a fuss of her, small like her father had been, always jumping up and down at the tea-table, passing plates of buttered bread to her and telling her that tea tasted nicer with sugar in it, pressing meringues and cake on her. Helena’s mother always put a bowl beside Helena’s bed on the nights there’d been a visit to the grandparents.

Her mother was the first teacher Helena had. In the dining-room they would sit together at the table with reading-books and copy-books and history and geography books. When she began to go to school she found herself far in advance of other children of her age, who because of that regarded her with considerable suspicion. ‘Our little genius,’ Miss Random used to say, meaning it cheerfully but making Helena uncomfortable because she knew she wasn’t clever in the least. ‘I don’t consider that woman can teach at all,’ her mother said after Helena had been at the school for six weeks and hadn’t learnt anything new. So the dining-room lessons began again, in conjunction with the efforts of Miss Random. ‘Pathetic, we have to say’: her mother invested this favourite opinion with an importance and a strength, condemning not just Miss Random but also the milkman who whistled while waiting on the doorstep, and Mrs Archingford’s attempt at stylish hair. Her mother employed a series of charwomen but was maddened by their chatter and ended by doing the housework herself, even though she found anything like that exceedingly irksome. She far preferred to sit in the dark study, continuing the work that had been cut short by death. In the lifetime of Helena’s father her mother had assisted in the study and Helena had imagined her parents endlessly finding words in books and dissecting them on paper. Before the death conversations at mealtimes usually had to do with words. ‘Fluxion?’ she remembered her father saying, and when she shrugged her mother tightened her lips, her glance lingering on the shrug long after its motion had ceased. ‘A most interesting derivation,’ her father had supplied, and then went on to speak about the Newtonian calculus. The words he liked to bring up at mealtimes had rare meanings, sometimes five or six, but these, though worthy of record, had often to be dismissed on what he called the journey to the centre of interest. ‘Fluxion, Helena, is the rate at which a flowing motion increases its magnitude. The Latin fluxionem. Now flux, Helena, is different. The familiar expression, to be in a state of flux, we know of course. But there is interestingly a variation: in mathematical terms, a drawn line is the flux of a point. You understand that, Helena? You place a dot with your pencil in your exercise-book, but you change your mind and continue the dot so that it becomes a line. With flux remember our pleasant word, flow. Remember our good friend, fluere. A flowing out, a flowing in. With fluxion, we have the notion of measuring, of calculation.’ Food became cold while he explained, but he did not notice. All that was her memory of him.

More interesting than Helena’s own household were the households round about. The death that had taken place, the honouring of the unfinished work, her mother’s seriousness, were far less fascinating than the gaudy hair and dresses of Mrs Archingford or the arguments of the elderly couple in the garden of the house next door. Sometimes a son visited this couple, an unkempt figure who intrigued Helena most of all. Now and again she noticed him in the neighbourhood, usually carrying a cage with a bird in it. On one occasion he sat in the garden next door with a cage on either side of him, and Helena watched from a window while he pointed out to his mother the features of the budgerigars these cages contained. His mother poured tea and his father read a newspaper or protested, in a voice loud enough to carry to Helena’s window, that the conversation about budgerigars was inane. On another occasion Helena saw the unkempt son entering Mrs Archingford’s house with a cage and later leaving empty-handed, having presumably made a successful sale. She would have liked to report these incidents to her mother, but when once she referred to the elderly couple’s son her mother stared at her in astonishment.

When she was twelve, Helena brought a girl called Judy Smeeth back to tea. She had asked her mother if she might, since she had herself been to tea several times with Judy Smeeth, who was considered at school to be stupid. She was stout, with spectacles, and experienced difficulty in covering her large thighs with her gymslip. When teachers drew attention to this immodest display she laughed and said she did the best she could.

Helena’s mother looked at Judy Smeeth blankly, and afterwards said she didn’t think she’d ever met a more unattractive person.

‘She’s my friend at school,’ Helena explained.

‘Biscuit after biscuit. No wonder she’s the size she is.’

‘She invited me to her house five times.’

‘You mean by that, do you, Helena, that when she comes here she must make up for all those visits by grabbing as much as she can, by filling herself with biscuits and Swiss roll? Is there not a more attractive girl you could have as a companion?’

‘No, there isn’t.’

‘That was said roughly, Helena.’

‘She’s my best friend.’

Helena’s mother vaguely shook her head. She never talked about friends, any more than she talked about her mother or her father. Helena didn’t know if she’d had brothers or sisters, and certainly that was not a question she could ask. ‘Gosh, your mother!’ Judy Smeeth said in her amazed way. ‘Didn’t half give me the jitters, your mother.’

Many months later, in answer to Helena’s repeated pleas, Judy Smeeth was permitted to come to the house again. On this occasion they played with a tennis ball in the garden, throwing it to one another. Unfortunately, due to a clumsy delivery of Judy’s, it crossed the fence into Mrs Archingford’s garden. ‘Hey!’ Judy cried, having climbed on to a pear tree that grew beside the fence. ‘Hey, lady, could we have the ball back?’

Her plump hams, clad only partially in navy-blue school-regulation knickers, were considerably exposed as she balanced herself between the pear tree and the fence. She shouted again, endeavouring to catch the attention of Mrs Archingford, who was reading a magazine beneath her verandah.

‘Hey! Yoo-hoo, lady!’

Mrs Archingford looked up and was surprised to see the beaming face of Judy Smeeth, bespectacled and crowned with frizzy hair. Hearing the sound, she had expected the tidier and less extrovert presence of the girl next door. She rose and crossed her garden.

‘It’s only the ball, missus. We knocked the ball a bit hard.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Mrs Archingford. ‘D’you know, dearie, for a minute I thought your appearance had changed most peculiarly.’

‘Eh?’

Mrs Archingford smiled at Judy Smeeth, and asked her what her name was. She picked the tennis ball out of her lupins.

‘Judy the name is. Smeeth.’

‘Mine’s Mrs Archingford. Nice to meet you, Judy. Come to tea, have you?’

‘That’s right. Thanks for the ball,’

‘Tell you what, why don’t you and what’s-her-name climb over that fence and have a glass of orangeade? Like orangeade, do you?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

‘Tell you what, I’ve got a few Danish pastries. Almond and apple. Like Danish pastries, Judy?’

‘Hey, Helena, the woman wants us to go over her place.’

‘No,’ Helena said.

‘Why not?’

‘Just no.’

‘Sorry, missus. Cheerio then.’

Judy descended, having first thrown the ball to Helena.

‘Hey, look,’ she said when she was standing on the lawn, ‘that woman was on about pastries. Why couldn’t we?’

‘Let’s go into the house.’

Her mother would have observed the incident. She would have noticed the flesh of Judy’s thighs and Judy’s tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she struggled to retain her balance. Two of a kind, she’d probably say when Judy had gone, she and vulgar Mrs Archingford. Her lips would tighten, her whole face would look like iron.

‘I don’t want that girl here again, Helena,’ was what in fact she did say. ‘She is far from suitable.’

Helena did not protest, nor attempt to argue. She had long since learnt that you could not win an argument with her mother because her mother refused to engage in arguments. ‘Gor, she don’t half frighten me,’ Judy Smeeth remarked after that second visit to the house. Helena had realized a long time ago that she was frightened of her also.

‘The completion of your father’s work,’ her mother announced one day, ‘is taking a great deal longer than I had anticipated, even though he left such clear and copious notes. I am unworthy and ill-equipped, but it is a task that must be undertaken. So much begun, so much advanced. Someone must surely carry it to fruition.’

‘Yes,’ Helena said.

‘I cannot manage you and the work together, child. I do not wish you to go away to school, I prefer to have you by me. But circumstances dictate. I have no choice.’

So Helena went to a boarding-school in Sussex, and it never at that time occurred to her to wonder how the fees at this expensive place were afforded, or indeed to wonder where any money at all came from. She returned at the end of that first term to find her mother more deeply involved in the unfinished work and also somewhat changed in her manner, as if affected by the lack of a companion. Sarcasm snapped more freely from her. Her voice had become like a whip. She hates me, Helena thought, because I am a nuisance.

The house had become even more exclusive than it had been, no friend from school could ever be invited there now. The wireless, which had occasionally been listened to, was silent. The telephone was used only to order food and household goods from Barker’s of Kensington. Letters rarely came.

Then one afternoon just after Easter, when Helena was fifteen, a visitor arrived. She heard the doorbell from her bedroom and went to answer it because her mother wouldn’t bother to. It would be an onion-seller, she thought, or one of those people who pressed the Encyclopaedia Britannica on you.

‘Hullo,’ a middle-aged man said, smiling at her from a sandy face. His short hair was sandy also. He wore a greenish suit. ‘Are you Helena?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’m your uncle. One of your mother’s brothers. Did you know you had uncles and an aunt?’

She shook her head. He laughed.

‘I was the one who made up the games we used to play. Different games for different parts of the garden. Aren’t you going to let me in?’

‘I’m sorry.’

He stepped into the hall, that awful, fusty hall she hated so, its grim brown curtains looping in the archway at the bottom of the stairs, its grim hallstand, the four mezzotints of Australian landscape, the stained ceiling.

She led him into the sitting-room, which was awful also, cluttered with tawdry furniture her mother didn’t notice had grown ugly with wear and time, the glass-fronted cabinets full of forgotten objects, the dreary books drearily filling bookcase after bookcase.

‘I heard about your father’s death, Helena. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s ages ago now. Seven years actually. He died on my birthday.’

‘I only met your father once.’ He paused. ‘We’ve often wondered about you, you know.’

‘Wondered?’

‘The family have. We’ve known of course that your mother wouldn’t be short, but even so.’

He smiled his easy smile at her. It was her mother who had supplied the money there had been, Helena intuitively realized. Something about the way he had mentioned the family and had said her mother wouldn’t be short had given this clear impression. Not just obsessive in his scholarship, her father had been needy also.

‘I thought I’d call,’ he said. ‘I’ve written of course, but even so I just thought I’d call one of these days.’

She left him and went to knock on the study door, as her mother liked her to do. There was no reply, and when she knocked a second time her mother called out in irritation.

‘An uncle has come,’ Helena said.

‘Who?’

‘Your brother.’

‘Is here, you mean?’ Her mother, wearing reading-glasses on a chain, which she had recently taken to, had a finger marking the point on a page at which she had been interrupted. She was seated at the desk, papers and books all around her, the desk light turned on even though it was the middle of the afternoon.

‘He’s downstairs.’

Her mother said nothing, nor did she display further surprise, or emotion. She stared at Helena, her scrutiny suggesting that Helena was somehow to blame for the presence of this person, which in a sense Helena was, having opened the hall door to him and permitted his entrance. Her mother drew a piece of paper towards her, at the same time releasing her finger from the place it marked. She picked up a fountain pen and then opened a drawer and found an envelope.

‘Give him this,’ she said, and returned to her books.

Helena carried the missive to the sitting-room. The man had pulled back an edge of the grubby lace curtain and was gazing out into the empty street. He took the envelope from Helena and opened it.

‘Well, there you are,’ he said when he had read the message, and sighed. He left the note behind when he went. Her mother had simply ordered him to go away. Please me by not returning to this house, her mother had added, signing her full name.

In the dormitory called the Upper Nightingale Helena retailed the excesses of her mother. How the elderly couple in the house next door had been written to and requested to make less noise. How Mrs Archingford had been snubbed. How Judy Smeeth had been forbidden the house, how her mother’s sandy-faced brother had been summarily dismissed. She told how her mother had never visited the grinning little grandparents, and how they had never come to the house. She described the house – the Australian mezzotints, the fustiness, the dim lights and curtained windows, the dirtiness that was beginning to gather. In their beds, each with a pink lover, other girls of Upper Ni|htingale listened with delight. None of them had a mother whose tongue was like a whip. None feared a mother’s sarcasm. None dreaded going home.

When she closed her eyes after lights-out Helena saw her mother in the dark study, listing words and derivations, finding new words or words no longer used, all in loving memory. ‘Oh God,’ pleaded Helena in those moments given up to private prayer at the beginning and end of church. ‘Oh God, please make her different.’

Her mother supplied her with money so that at the end of each term she could make her way from the school by train and then across London in a taxi-cab. It was not her mother’s way to stand waiting at a railway station; nor, indeed, when Helena did arrive, to answer the doorbell until it had been rung twice or three times. It was not her way to embrace Helena, but instead to frown a little as if she had forgotten that her advent was due on a particular day. ‘Ah, Helena,’ she would say eventually.

These holiday periods were spent by Helena in reading, cleaning the kitchen, cooking and walking about the avenues and crescents of the neighbourhood. When she painted the shelves in her bedroom, her mother objected to the smell of paint, causing Helena to lose her temper. In awkward, adolescent rage, unreasonably passionate, she shouted at her mother. The matter was petty, she was being made petty herself, yet she could not, as she stood there on the landing, bear for a second longer her mother’s pretence that the smell of paint could not possibly be coming from within the house since no workman had been employed to paint anything. There was astonishment in her mother’s face when Helena said she had been painting her shelves.

‘I went out and bought paint,’ she cried, red-faced and furious. ‘Is there something sinful in that? I went into a shop and bought paint.’

‘Of course there’s nothing sinful, Helena.’

‘Then why are you blaming me? What harm is there in painting the shelves in my bedroom? I’m seventeen. Surely I don’t have to ask permission for every single action I take?’

‘I merely wondered about the smell, child.’

‘You didn’t wonder. You knew about the smell.’

‘I do not care for that, Helena.’

‘Why do you hate me?’

‘Now, Helena, please don’t be tiresome. Naturally I do not hate you.’

‘Everyone knows you hate me. Everyone at school, even Mrs Archingford.’

‘Mrs Archingford? What on earth has Mrs Archingford to do with it?’

‘She is a human being, that’s all.’

‘No one denies that Mrs Archingford is a human being.’

‘You never think of her like that.’

‘You are in a tiresome mood, Helena.’

Her mother turned and went away, descending the stairs to the study. Without a show of emotion, she closed the door behind her, quietly, as if there had not been an angry scene, or as if no importance could possibly attach to anything that had been said.

In her bedroom, that afternoon, Helena wept. She lay on her bed and pressed her face into her pillow, not caring how ugly she was making herself, for who was there to see? In waves of fury that came and calmed, and then came on again, she struck at her thighs with her fists until the repeated impact hurt and she guessed there would be black and blue marks. She wished she had reached out and struck her mother as she stood at the top of the stairs. She wished she had heard the snap of her mother’s neck and had seen her body lifeless, empty of venom in the hall.

Twilight was gathering when she got up and washed her face in the bathroom. She held a sponge to each puffed-up eye in turn, and then immersed her whole face in a basin of cold water, holding it there for as long as she could. Her hair was bedraggled as a result, clinging to her damp face. She looked awful, she thought, her mouth pulled down with wretchedness, but she didn’t care.

She walked along the crescents and the avenues, and down by the river, finding a common she’d only visited once before. She wished she could simply go on walking through the evening, and never return to her mother’s house. She wished that some young man in a motor-car would call out to her and ask her where she was going and say jump in. She would have, she knew she would have.

Instead she turned around and found her way back to the house, her footsteps dawdling and reluctant the closer she came to it. It was ten past nine by the clock in the sitting-room. Her mother, sitting by the electric fire, did not ask where she’d been.

‘He will be forgotten,’ she said instead, ‘if I cannot complete his work.’

She spoke in a voice so matter-of-fact, so dry and spiritless that she might have been reciting a grocery list. Vaguely, Helena had listened when once she’d been told that the work consisted of the completion of a scholarly book, an investigation into how, over centuries, the meanings of words had altered. ‘Difficult as it is,’ her mother vowed, still without emotion, ‘it shall not go unfinished.’

Helena nodded, for some reason feeling sorry she’d been so cross. There was a silence. Her mother stared without interest at the electric fire.

‘When you were little,’ Helena dared to begin.

‘Little?’

‘A child.’

‘I didn’t much care for being a child.’

‘I just wondered if –’

‘When you don’t much care for something you prefer not to dwell upon it, Helena.’

The conversation ended, as abruptly as other attempts to elicit information always had. ‘Of course I shall endeavour,’ her mother said. ‘I intend to continue to make an effort. He would consider it pusillanimous if I did not.’

Helena tried to imagine her as a child and then as an older girl but in neither of these efforts was she successful. The only photograph in the house was of her mother and her father on their wedding-day, standing against an undefined background. Her father was smiling because, Helena had always guessed, the photographer had asked him to. But her mother had not heeded this request.

‘I’ve cooked us moussaka,’ Helena said the next day, wanting to make up for her outburst. ‘A kind of shepherd’s pie.’

‘Good heavens, child, how very ambitious of you!’

Her mother left most of it on her plate and went away to find herself a slice of bread. Some time later they spoke again of cooking. Helena said:

‘There’s a course you can take.’

‘A course, Helena?’

She explained, her mother carefully listened. Her mother said:

‘But surely you can take a more interesting course? What would be at the end of this, for instance?’

‘A job, if I am lucky.’

‘You would cook in some kitchen, is that it? Other people’s food? Food for mouths in a hotel – or a hospital or a school? Is that it?’

‘Well, perhaps.’

‘I can only call it pathetic, Helena, to cook food for people in an institution.’

‘Cooking is something I like.’

‘I do not understand that.’

Genuinely, Helena knew, her mother didn’t. The meals they ate – which as a child she had assumed to be as all meals were – had never been prepared with interest. Meat and vegetables arrived from the food department of the Kensington store and had, with as scant attention as possible, found their way on to the mahogany surface of the dining-table.

‘The course doesn’t cost a lot.’

‘Child, it doesn’t matter what it costs. Your father would be disappointed is what matters.’

There was resentment in her mother’s voice. There was astonished disbelief, as if Helena had confessed to a crime. ‘I’m glad he’s dead,’ her mother said, ‘so that he need not suffer to see his only child becoming a cook.’

‘I’m sorry it’s such a tragedy.’

‘It makes no sense, child.’

Her mother turned away, leaving the sitting-room, where the brief conversation had taken place. Helena might have told the truth: that any course, in cooking, in typing and shorthand, in nursery management, in accountancy or gardening, would have fulfilled her need, which was to close the door of the house behind her and never to return.

She worked in the kitchens of Veitch and Company, paper manufacturers, helping to cook canteen food for two hundred employees. Braised steak, silverside, gammon, beef, roast potatoes or mashed, peas, carrots, Brussels sprouts, broad beans in season, trifle or Black Forest gâteau, stewed plums or custard tart: they were dishes and tastes which represented a world as distant as it could possibly be from her mother’s and father’s. ‘Helena!’ a voice shouted in the kitchens one day and there was Mrs Archingford on the telephone, talking about the police and how the name of Veitch and Company had been discovered on a postcard in the dark study, where Helena’s mother had been found also. It was Mrs Archingford who had noticed the curtains not drawn back in the sitting-room of her mother’s house, who had worried and had finally spoken to a policeman on the beat. Starvation was given as the cause of death on the death certificate: still struggling with the work in the study, Helena’s mother had not bothered to eat. Not having visited her for more than three years, Helena had tried not to think about her while that time passed.

‘You’ll forgive me, dear, if I fail to attend the funeral,’ Mrs Archingford requested. ‘She didn’t care for the look of me and no bones about it. Would be a trifle hypocritical, should we say?’

Helena was the only person who did attend the funeral. While a clergyman who had never known her mother spoke his conventional farewell she kept thinking of the busy kitchens of Veitch and Company–all that mound of food, while her mother had absentmindedly starved.

She cleared the house, taking a week off from the kitchens. She gathered together her mother’s clothes – and her father’s, which still remained – and placed them ready in the hall, to be collected by a charitable organization. She telephoned a firm which a girl in the kitchens had told her about, which purchased the contents of uninhabited houses. She telephoned a house agents’ and put the house on the market.

She found nothing, in her mother’s bedroom or the study, that belonged to the past, before the time of the marriage. There were no personal letters of any kind, no photographs privately kept, no diaries. There was dust everywhere, some of her mother’s clothes were unwashed; the gas cooker in the kitchen, the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, were all filthy. But the order which was absent elsewhere dominated the study. The papers and notebooks dealing with lexicographic matters were arranged tidily on the long rectangular table beneath the window, and on the desk itself were two stacks of lined foolscap, one covered with the tiny handwriting of Helena’s father, the other with her mother’s, larger and firmer. The pages were numbered: there were seven hundred and forty-six of them. I do not know about a title for the work, her mother had written in the draft of a letter she had clearly been intending to dispatch to a publisher. My husband left no instruction, but some phrase may particularly strike you from what he has written himself, and a title thus emanate. The work is now complete, in the form my husband wished it. Had her mother put aside all other form of life as the final pages were composed, pathetically clinging to the relationship her wealth had bought? Helena wondered if she had bothered to go to bed since she had not bothered with food. She might have died of exhaustion as well as of starvation. She might have lost track of day and night, afraid to leave the study in case the long task should by some awful mischance be lost when the end was so very close. She imagined her mother struggling with sleep, weak in her body, the clarity of her bold handwriting now the most important fragment of her existence. She imagined her blinking away a sudden dizziness, and then moving in the room, one hand still on the desk to balance her progress, another reaching out into the gloom. She imagined her dead, lying on the unclean carpet.

On the foolscap pages there were underlined words, printed in capital letters: Nympholepsy. Disembogue. Graphotype. Imagist. Macle. Ram-bunctious. The precision of alphabetical order, the endlessly repeated reflections of her mother’s seriousness, the intensity of her devotion to the subject out of which she and the man she’d married had spun a life together: all that lingered in the study, alive in the conjoined handwriting on the foolscap pages and the notebooks. The explanations of the paragraphs were meaningless to Helena and the burden of reading them caused her head to ache. She didn’t know what to do with all the paper and the writing that had been left so purposefully behind. She didn’t know what to do about the letter to a publisher, probably the last effort her mother had made. She closed the study door on all of it.

She did not sleep in the house. Each evening she returned to her two-room flat near Shepherd’s Bush, where she turned the television on immediately to drive the house out of her thoughts. She sat in front of the bustling little screen with a glass of whisky and water, hoping that it, too, would help to cloud the images of the day. She longed to be back in her noisy kitchens, surrounded by different kinds of food. Sometimes, when she’d had a second and a third glass of whisky, the catalogue of the food which had become her life reminded her in a wry way of the catalogue of words in the study, one so esoteric, one so down-to-earth. Toad-in-the-hole, cabinet pudding, plaice and chips, French onion soup, trifle, jelly surprise.

One morning she arrived at the house with a cardboard carton into which she packed the foolscap pages. She carried it upstairs and placed it in a corner of the bedroom that had been her parents’, with a note to the effect that it should not be taken away by the firm she had employed to take everything else. The books in the study would go, of course. In her small flat she could not possibly store them, and since they were of no possible interest to her what was the point?

Mrs Archingford kept ringing the doorbell, to ask if she would like a cup of tea or if she could help with anything. Mrs Archingford was, not unnaturally after the years that had gone by, curious. She told Helena that at Number 10 the elderly couple’s son had moved in, to look after them in their now extreme old age. Birds flew about the rooms, so Mrs Archingford reported; the son was odd in the extreme.

‘I dare say you’ll be relieved to turn your back on the house?’ she probed. ‘No place for a young person, I shouldn’t wonder?’

‘Well, I don’t want to live here, certainly.’

‘My dear, however could you?’

Mrs Archirigford’s tone implied a most distressful childhood. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear, her tone suggested, that Helena had been beaten and locked in cupboards, just to teach her. ‘Most severe, your mother was, I always thought.’

‘It was her way.’

‘Forgive a nosy neighbour, dear, but your mother didn’t look happy. Her own worst enemy, as I said one time to the gas man. “Be brisk about it,” she ordered him, really sharply, you know, when the poor fellow came to read the meter. Oh, years ago it must have been, but I often remember it. Imagine that said to a meter man, when all the time he has to go careful in case of errors! And of course if he had made an error she’d be the first –’

‘Actually, my mother wouldn’t have noticed.’

‘Why don’t you slip in for a Nescafe and a Danish, eh? Smells like a morgue this hall does – oh, there, what a clumsy I am! Now, take that as unsaid, dear!’

Helena replied that it was quite all right, as indeed it was, Mrs Archingford pressed her invitation.

‘What about a warming cup, though? D’you know, I’ve never in all my days been inside this house? Not that I expected to, I mean why should I? But really it’s interesting to see it.’

Mrs Archingford poked a finger into the dust on the hallstand, and as she did so the doorbell rang. Women from the charitable organization had come for the clothes, so Helena was saved from having to continue the conversation about Nescafe and Danish pastries. That morning, too, a man arrived to estimate the value of the house and its contents so that death duties might be calculated. Then a man who was to purchase the contents came. He looked them over and suggested a figure far below that of the death duties man, but he pointed out that he was offering a full removal service, that in some unexplained way Helena was saving a fortune. She didn’t argue. In the afternoon Mrs Archingford rang the bell again to say the estate agents Helena had chosen were not the best ones, so the woman in the Corner Shop had told her when she’d happened to allude to the matter while buying smoked ham. But Helena replied that the choice had been made.

A few days later she watched the furniture being lifted away, the books and ornaments in tea-chests, the crockery and saucepans and cutlery, even the gas cooker and the refrigerator. When everything was gone she walked about the empty rooms. Why had she not asked the sandy-haired man who had come? Why had she not made tea for him and persuaded him to tell her anything at all? Through a blur of mistiness she saw her mother as a child, playing with her brother in the garden he had mentioned. Helena stood in the centre of the room that had been her mother’s bedroom and it seemed to her then that there were other children in the garden also, and voices faintly echoing. Trees and shrubs defined themselves; a house had lawns in front of it. ‘Come on!’ the children good-naturedly cried, but her mother didn’t want to. Her mother hated playing. She hated having to laugh and run about. She hated being exposed to a jolliness that made her feel afraid. She wanted peace, and the serious silence of her room, but they always came in search of her and they always found her. Laughing and shouting, they dragged her into their games, not understanding that she felt afraid. She stammered and her face went white, but still they did not notice. Nobody listened when she tried to explain, nobody bothered.

These shadows filled her mother’s bedroom. Helena knew that the playing children were a figment without reality, yet some instinct informed her that such shadows had been her mother’s torment, that their dreaded world had accompanied her even after she had hidden from them in a suburban house where the intolerable laughter was not allowed. Companions too ordinary to comprehend her mother’s different nature had left her afraid of ordinariness, and fear was what she had passed on to an ordinary daughter. Helena knew she would never marry; as long as she lived she would be afraid to bring a child into the world, and reflecting on that now she could feel within her the bitterness that had been her mother’s, and even the vengeful urge to destroy that had been hers also.

Curtains had been taken down, light-shades removed. Huge patches glared from ancient wallpaper where furniture had stood or pictures hung. The bare boards echoed with Helena’s footsteps. She bolted what it was necessary to bolt and saw that all the windows were secure. She banged the hall door behind her and for the last time walked through the avenues and crescents she knew so well, on her way to drop the keys through the estate agents’ letter-box. The cardboard carton containing her father’s work, and her mother’s achievement in completing it, remained in a corner of an empty bedroom. When the house was sold and the particulars completed the estate agents would telephone her in the kitchens at Veitch and Company to point out that this carton had been overlooked. Busy with meat or custard tart, she’d say it didn’t matter, and give the instruction that it should be thrown away.