Passing On by Penelope Lively Page A

difficult to sleep. In his head, the goslings churned around with other, more personal, matters.
    The peculiarly savage twist to the distress he felt about the goslings was that there was nowhere to direct one’s outrage. It was easier, in a way, to lie awake boiling about the barbarities of Canadian seal-slaughterers or the ecological insensitivity of English farmers. There was no one and nothing to blame for the goslings. There was nothing to join, no one to whom to send a contribution, no letter to be written to a newspaper.
    In the darkness at the end of the bed Tam snored in loud staccato bursts; from time to time he changed position in his sleep and tried to shove Edward’s foot out of the way. He was a dog entirely devoted to the pursuit of self-interest; Edward and Helen, discussing this, always came up against the intractable point that presumably there could be no other kind of dog, or indeed of animal. Animals always act out of self-interest, unless in the interests of their young, and that too can presumably be defined as self-interest in a genetic sense.
    Tam, Edward suspected, would not even act in the interests of his young, should he have any. Since he was rising ten and had never given more than token attention to the village bitches this was unlikely. Edward loved Tam, in the complex and distorted way in which people can be said to love animals, though he had loved other dogs more. Tam was one of a series; he had predecessors and would no doubt have successors, and Edward sometimes thought of the others in the way in which people review other children or other spouses. He also knew quite well that these were the terms in which he thought of them, and why.
    He had never shared his bed with a person. He had come near to it, once or twice, but a long time ago. Even those occasions, now, were dimmed; they were rosier, too, in recollection than in cold reality. He flinched from the thought of the people involved.
    What was left was the memory of something else: his own feelings.
    He had a vivid, and much earlier, memory of the first occasion on which he had realised that feelings were something to which a word was attached, and that they were recognised by others.
    He was quite small — his head did not reach above the windowsill below which he stood — and through the open window came Helen’s voice, high-pitched in indignation, crying out to their mother ‘You’ve hurt his feelings! Why did you say that!’ And three things fused within his head: Dorothy’s derision of his ineptitude at something, what he felt in consequence, and the fact that Helen understood how he felt even though it hadn’t happened to her. Now that he knew what they were called, he realised also that he had them all the time, with kaleidoscopic intensity, and hence that others must do so too.
    Their mother also, presumably, though in her case expressions of feeling more usually took the form of anger. Dorothy found outbursts of rage exhilarating; she would descend the next , morning blithe and invigorated, while everyone else crawled around punch-drunk from emotion. Louise was the only one who was a match for her. She learned in infancy to throw spirited tantrums in response to her mother’s anger, holding her breath and going blue in the face in a way that alarmed even Dorothy, who held that most childish ailments were put on. The tantrums were, of course, up to a point, but they were impressive all the same. When too old for tantrums, Louise resorted to argument and shouting matches. And, eventually, she left.
    Helen and Edward, on the other hand, withdrew. Once they grew beyond being afraid of Dorothy’s temper, they dealt with it by evasion; they simply got out of the way whenever she brewed up. Living with her, they learned to treat her as the weather — elemental and inescapable.
    Feelings also may be inescapable, Edward learned, but there are ways of cheating them. Of diverting them. Of hiding from them. Your own howls