Passing On by Penelope Lively Page B

can be drowned out by the howls of the rest of the world, if you set about it properly. If you are naturally self-deprecating, and exceptionally under-endowed with egotism, the process comes almost naturally. Eventually you are exercised only about the atrocities around. Or so it can seem.
    Helen also thought about the Barnacle geese that night, though with less intensity. The image of the plunging chicks lurked in her head, nagging, but it was other matters that kept her awake.
    Feelings, of course — those maddening unquenchable onsets of disease. She reviewed Giles Carnaby’s visit and was aware of having existed, during that hour or so, on two different planes; at one level she had listened to Giles Carnaby and talked to Giles Carnaby, at some other level she had undergone strange physical and emotional experiences. She had gone hot and cold; she had felt slightly dizzy; she had been unable to take her eyes off him.
    All this while discussing her mother’s testamentary arrangements.
    She had not felt thus for roughly fifteen years and had not expected to do so ever again.
    Edward — in so far as he thought about the matter — had always assumed that his sister was a virgin. He was wrong. Other people’s sexual lives are of course deeply mysterious; even so, Edward’s assumption was understandable. To his knowledge, she had had few abiding relationships with men and not many transient ones either. It was lack of opportunity as well as his knowledge of her character that made virginity seem likely.
    In fact, Helen had first gone to bed with a man when she was twenty-three. She found the whole performance embarrassing but distinctly pleasurable. She quite liked him but was not in love with him, and recognised the experience as a purely sexual one. The man made vague suggestions about keeping in touch, and then vanished. Helen settled down wretchedly to await the outcome; she doubted if the correct precautions had been taken and knew that copulation leads, more often than not, to pregnancy.
    She told no one and sat it out stoically. When, on the seventeenth day, her period arrived the relief and elation she felt were like a religious experience. Indeed, she went down on her knees beside her mother in church that Sunday and thanked the Lord, furtively and guiltily. She did not say to Him that she wouldn’t do it again because she did not expect the opportunity to arise. Nor did it, for quite a while.
    Dorothy’s attitude to sex was one of withering contempt. She did not disapprove, she despised. The subject brought out in her a particular look — an expression of obstinate rejection, a clamping of the mouth, a hardening of the eye. Each time Helen saw it she thought of her father, and shivered for him.
    Louise, at sixteen, discovered boys. The row with Dorothy and Louise’s flight to London and to art school was about sex rather more than about educational opportunity. Dorothy had opened the front door at the wrong moment late one evening and discovered Louise on the top step, in a fervent embrace with the publican’s son. The ensuing commotion kept everyone up till the small hours of the morning. ‘You’re disgusting!’ bawled Dorothy.
    ‘You’re a revolting little trollop, do you hear me?’ And Louise, incoherent and weeping but primed with righteous outrage, shouted back that Dorothy didn’t own her, that other people’s mothers didn’t … that every other teenager in the country … that this wasn’t the nineteenth century, for heaven’s sake!
    Louise and Dorothy kept up a spasmodic battle about Louise’s sex-life until Louise married Tim, at which point Dorothy lost interest. Helen and Edward were an altogether simpler matter.
    So far as Dorothy was concerned they had nothing to do with that sort of thing; they weren’t ‘silly’ like Louise. When Helen struck up friendships with men Dorothy moved into the offensive with a strategy of disparagement: ‘That poor young man — one wonders what