Passing On Read Online Free Page B

much on the cards, too. There might no longer be any stigma on spinsterhood in Hampstead or Fulham, but down here things were a little different. The girls still married at twenty; marriage remained their objective and the means whereby they acquired status. Mrs Hadley of the Old Rectory gave a great many parties, the purpose of which was to infiltrate her two daughters into the
    local aristocracy. No nonsense about universities or interesting jobs for them. Here was a tacit agreement on what life for a girl was all about. And Croxford House, while paying lip-service to more up-to-date ways of thinking, would not have entirely disagreed.
    Edward taught English, History and Biology to the juniors, and Current Events to the seniors. He was the only male teacher except someone who came on Wednesdays to coach tennis in the summer, and he was regarded with kindly patronage by everyone save the headmistress, who thought him distinguished (in a social rather than an intellectual sense) and had hired him for that reason, fifteen years ago.
    The girls liked him. They recognised that his disciplinary powers were so weak that there would simply be no point in challenging them. Also he was amiable, he listened to what they told him with apparent interest, and he never gave them bad conduct marks or reported them to the Head. He demanded little of them, so they demanded little of him. His lessons were gentle, dreamy affairs that seemed to go on and on for ever, with sunlight lying in bars across the desks and flies buzzing at the window. He had long since been removed from teaching duties involving anyone old enough to be within hailing distance of such public examinations as Croxford House bothered with, and simply pottered around with the eleven and twelve year olds in the more decorative areas of English history. He also read to them from books that he himself remembered having enjoyed when he was their age. Modern children’s fiction had passed him by. He read Alice, The Wind in the Willows and The Water Babies to the juniors while they handed notes to each other, knitted under their desks or lay with their heads on their arms, apparently asleep. Edward still loved Alice and had never noticed that the children did not. He read, effectively, to himself and was happy. It reminded him of being read to by his mother — except that this was an elusive memory since Dorothy had seldom done so. She was profoundly bored by books. It was Helen who had read to Edward, and subsequently to Louise. What Edward was reviving was a cloudy, luxurious sensation of acquiescence to someone authoritative, more skilled and with access to a wondrous other world. Helen would have been about nine at the time.
    Helen, disposing of the invalid equipment in Spaxton, was reminded not of reading to Edward but of her mother’s antipathy to the printed word. One of the accelerating problems of her final years had been the entertainment of a vigorous old woman, sound of mind and body, who had no interests.
    Dorothy Glover’s attention was concentrated on a personal reference system. She read the Births, Marriages and Deaths columns only of The Times, with a practised eye that could pick out any known name in three seconds flat. Novels met with approval only if the setting was familiar. ‘I’m extremely fond of Persuasion,’ she would say, ‘I went to school near Bath. It’s by far her best book.’ Her knowledge of personal connections was compendious — she knew of cousins unto the tenth degree, she remembered everyone she had ever met, their names, their occupations and their attributes. She knew all this with the dry detachment of an official at Somerset House; she had no interest whatsoever in people as such. She was expert and scholarly in disposing of extraneous material; there was the world which related to her, to which she had been or to whom she had spoken, and there was the rest, which was irrelevant. Needless to say, she could not see the point