The Service Of Clouds (11 page)

But to return home was unthinkable. She had gone to Miss Pinkney and asked, white-faced, pinch-mouthed, for a room, and one had been given to her, a room and infinite, quiet, tactful kindness. There had not been prying questions, nothing was expected of her beyond the formal, bleak words of explanation she had given.

She had lain in a high bed among dark furniture and lace curtains, lace coverings, and worked, as at a difficult but finally not impossible exercise, at turning her thoughts and imaginings away from the place she had left, and from what had happened there. She felt old, in some exhausted way, enervated by shock, and the knowledge of grief. It was as though her childhood, indeed, her whole youth, had not ended, but been taken from her, like limbs in some dreadful amputation.

It occurred to her that she had loved the boy purely and unconditionally, in a way she had loved no one else save her father – and how much of that love had come later, with hindsight and his absence, and her vague sense of guilt at the loneliness of his death? As she thought of the man and his life and his illness, so her love had blossomed. But he was not there to receive it and so, inevitably, it had shrivelled too. But her love for the boy Hugh had been a fresh, alive, springing thing, called up by the keenness of the understanding between them, by his nature, his perceptiveness and quick intelligence, and by the simple liking they had had for one another’s company.

She spent a week, bruised and exhausted by grief, and by the shock of the abrupt ending to a part of her life, sheltered unquestioningly by Miss Pinkney, eating and drinking little, but sleeping, in great, deep draughts of sleep, from which she woke suddenly, aching and unrefreshed. Then, the thoughts and memories and visions of the past were like flares lit and burning
in her brain. She wanted to climb out of herself, or close some door in her own head to escape from them, and could not; she was imprisoned with them in a sealed room, and they were insistent, unrelenting. She went out sometimes, to walk about the streets in a frenzy of restlessness that was like an eczema on her skin which was intolerable when she stayed still, and indoors, but was scarcely eased by walking – except that there were distractions then, the sight of trees, the calm, unchanged façades of the old buildings.

After a week, she roused herself, as if at the end of some feverish illness.

She made her plans.

‘You should see your mother,’ Miss Pinkney said.

But she would not. She was too proud, and too afraid, also, of being sucked back into the dark, claustrophobic, stale little house. Her mother’s drawn face, sunken in its folds of disappointment and bitterness, would make her falter, out of guilt. She would lose her nerve, and it was frail enough already, she was aware of that.

She went to London without seeing them.

No one was there on Fridays. She exulted in the silence.

Only the sun came, clean as a knife on to her pillow, and then fanned out across the wall, milky white. There was no one she had to smile for, though sometimes she caught herself smiling, out of habit.

‘I’ll go then.’

She never replied, always pretended to be asleep, and undisturbed by his morning movements.

‘I’ll go then.’

After the door closed, and the car went away, the house settled back upon itself, and then she heard the birds, vociferous in the bushes in spring, the robin and blackbird through the winter. She hated the dead, silent garden of high summer.

He had set the tray of tea beside the bed, with boiling water in a flask. It scalded her mouth, but then seemed to burn down into her joints, and, in burning, to ease and loosen them.

She would read then, the same books her mother had read, genteel old-fashioned novels which resembled one another, and from time to time took up
Pride and Prejudice
again, or
Jane Eyre
and
Anna of the Five Towns
. From childhood she had had the knack of immersing herself so deeply in a book that her lungs seemed to fill with it. But surfacing into the pale, cushioned bedroom was the greatest pleasure of all.

On Mondays, she was taken for physiotherapy – like laundry,
she thought, collected and delivered back to the door. On other days Mrs Hoyle came. But on Fridays, she was alone.

She dared not look into the future.

They were not unhappy, or ill-suited. They did as well as many, she thought. But the house, its emptiness and silence, were hers, she was greedy to be alone in it, restless and nervous when she was away. As a child, journeys had terrified her, and she never liked to be in any strange town. The idea of foreign countries was unimaginable.

The sun slipped down the wall and splashed on to the white stool.

It took an hour to get up, to dress. It was worse in the cold of winter, when her joints set hard as posts in concrete. But when it was over, she could sit at the window, and feel the house around her, for reassurance.

Her name had been Elizabeth Connor, and her father had kept the pharmacy, which was where Molloy had seen her, the first week of his work in the town practice. He had been twenty-eight, but a qualified doctor and so had seemed even older, and on the same level as her father. Set apart. He had come in to introduce himself – though word had gone round, they had known all about his coming, his history. He had wanted a special prescription made up, for Miss Gogarty of Chapel Finn, and even began to go into the exact detail, before she had blushed, hurrying to stop him.

‘Oh, that is not for me. My father will see to it. I’ll call him down.’

She could not even handle the medicines. The tablets and powders and jewel-coloured liquids had fascinated her, since she had been lifted up on to the counter as a small child. But she was only allowed to sell hairbrushes and shaving brushes, toothbrushes and pastes and vanishing cream in opaque white pots. She had never thought of doing any other job. Her life was securely bounded by their home, which was the adjoining house, and by the shop.

The next afternoon, he had come back. They were only five minutes off closing for the day.

‘Oh, I’ll just fetch Father.’

But she was the one he wanted, he had said.

The blackbird hopped suddenly from nowhere, on to the terrace, and froze, sensing change, the open door, her figure in the chair. She exulted in the thought of the day ahead, divided into its small, individual portions of pleasure.

The clock struck.

When the door closed behind the woman, whose name was Miss Marchesa, and her footsteps had gone away down the bare-boarded stairs, there was absolute silence, for all that this was a house in London, and then Flora felt such acute and sudden loneliness that she caught her breath, as though she had been slapped stingingly across the face, and wrapped her arms about herself, for comfort and for protection. But it was not only a momentary feeling she must bear. This was the fact. She was alone in London and of no interest or concern to anyone.

The room was small and narrow, partitioned out of the corner of another larger room, so that the window was only half a window, and oddly placed to one side. It was early afternoon. Eventually, she became used to the deadness of the house at this time, when those who did not go out slept, as she would also begin to know the small creakings and stirrings of five o’clock, and then the early evening noises of women returned from work, when doors banged and water flushed and drained away down basins.

There was a border of Greek keys around the top of the walls, and then dirty white space up to a high ceiling, and a radiator with rust marks, squat and serpentine.

When at last she crossed to the window, she saw that she was above the tops of the plane trees, as well as the roofs of the houses
opposite, and that the weather vane on the spire of a church glittered, white-gold, against the insubstantial summer sky.

Miss Marchesa was known to a friend of Miss Pinkney’s. Together, they had tried to do the best for her. The house, in Kensington, was perfectly respectable. Unmarried women who worked as confidential secretaries lived there, and widows with older daughters, thin, quavering, blameless women, with a little money that would never be quite enough.

Flora was too young, Miss Marchesa had written in reply to the enquiry, she had never had a girl alone in the house at such a young age; she could not be responsible. But Miss Pinkney’s friend had replied that supervision would not be expected, and only an inexpensive room, with breakfast and supper, were required.

It was the first week of September. The streets were dusty, the grass in the parks worn brown and threadbare. But the air shimmered with warmth that lasted from dawn until dusk, as London hung suspended, between high summer and a gilded, roseate autumn that ran on and on into everyone’s memories.

Flora left her things still packed and the grainy towel untouched beside the washbasin, and went out of the silent, soup-smelling house into the hazy streets.

For the rest of her life, she was to feed off the glory of the next few weeks, when London lay at her feet, open and friendly towards her, and she walked it, as over some richly patterned, vibrantly coloured carpet, exploring every pathway of the intricate design. For this time only there was no loneliness, but simply the state of being alone, and this was entirely satisfying. She would not have been able to absorb and respond to everything so fully; the impact of the buildings, pictures, open spaces, and of the golden autumn days and soft nights, would have lessened, if she had had private company to distract her.

Public company she had, and it delighted her. She sat on city steps and park benches and seats beside the river, looking, questioning, so that, in sleep, her mind still seethed with images, like some crowded picture by Hogarth or Brueghel.

She went to classes, in art history, Italian and French, both language and literature, at the Institute at which Miss Pinkney had obtained a place for her (and to the fees of which she contributed more than half – though Flora was not to discover it until years after). Apart from these, and the hours she spent in galleries or simply walking about London, she worked as a tutor to two fat, bland Belgian girls living with their father in Wimpole Street, who were uninterested in anything but staying dully at home, between trips to Ghent and Bruges. The hours Flora spent with them were a form of torment, because they passed so slowly, and were so infinitely tedious, and unrelieved by any lightness, any humour or liveliness or affection. Money was earned from them, that was all. Within their heavy, gloomy house, and inside Miss Marchesa’s in Kensington, Flora felt suffocated, as if her chest were stuffed with dry woollen cloth. The lack of light in the rooms oppressed her, so that only when she was outside or else in the great airy galleries and marble spaces of the museums could she breathe freely and feel a lightness of body and liberation of her thoughts and imaginings. She became two separate people who did not relate to one another, but the one who returned, like the shorthand typing women and the widows, to Miss Marchesa’s lodgings, and who went dutifully, four times a week, to Wimpole Street, was not the real, the living Flora Hennessy.

She came to love London intimately, and allowed it to absorb her, using it to block out all thought of her years at home, and of the house Carbery overlooking the sea. The boy, Hugh. She would never think of that. It was like an open sore which she must not touch or disturb in any way. But somewhere, at the back of her mind, floating and pale, he sat, as she had last seen him, very upright, button-eyed in the back of the open Lagonda car, hours before his death.

Home, her mother and Olga, lay somewhere else, unregarded, and without interest.

The classes at the Institute were enjoyable, and she was well taught. To the staff, she was an enigma but, because she seemed entirely self-contained, self-reliant, after a time they simply
accepted that it was so. She impressed them with her application and the doggedness she showed, which she never allowed to become muddied or diverted by other concerns. She had a good eye and a talent for detail, she remembered things conscientiously, she was too detached, too serious for her age. Yet it seemed that she did not fully belong, did not allow herself to become wholly absorbed or committed, and never for a moment lost or forgot herself. To the other students, she offered friendliness but never friendship. They did not know her. To them, this was at first a tease, a challenge, but later, as they failed with her, it became merely an irritant, so that after a few weeks of probing, and attempts at discovery, they simply left her alone. Most of them, in any case, were young women in the charge of chaperones, aunts and older married sisters, marking time, and only mildly interested in the lectures and classes and outings. Flora, for whom life in London in these early weeks was miraculous, a gift and her salvation, could not understand or sympathise with them. She felt infinitely older, in experience and in understanding. Life mattered. She had been given this chance, and seized it, drank from it greedily, as from a beaker of intoxicating liquid.

London began to fill again. There were grand cars in the streets, and the evening pavements were bright with men and women in dinner dress. Flora watched, listened, enjoyed, but never envied, in the same way as she noted, and pitied, the bundled old women asleep on churchyard slabs and the wild-eyed beggars with bare, broken feet – pitied, but did not weep. To her, they were a warning. Otherwise, they did not touch her own life.