The Service Of Clouds (25 page)

They stood for a long time, side by side, and she smelled the sweet sicky smell of Olga’s perfume mingling with the heavy, perfumed smell of death, and reached suddenly for her sister’s
hand and pressed it to her. Then, they went out together, over the polished linoleum floor, out of the polished parlour, into the evening rain and, on an impulse, she directed Macey’s taxi not back to the house but on into the town, to Brom’s Hotel. They drank gin, and then ate in the dining room, a good meal, mussels and lamb chops, and had wine, and for the first time in their lives, it seemed, were friends, and strangely close, though of her new life, as of so much that belonged only to her own past, Flora did not talk, for those things were buried and private to her and never to be shared. She let Olga talk, laugh, tell, confide, for Olga had no inner life, and nothing hidden about her at all. So that, in the warmth of the soft red-shaded lamp that was set on their table, and of the food, and the wine they had drunk, Flora looked into her sister’s bright, open face, and envied her.

The house was sold and the contents easily, quickly disposed of. What little money would come from it they were to share. Flora felt no flicker of affection for it all, nothing but relief and freedom, after the clearing up, after the bleak funeral. They worked together but spoke little, the brief time of closeness over, as they accepted, though they felt the effects of it still and so were gentle and friendly towards one another. For moments on end, Flora would stop still to look at her sister, watch her, study her, as though this time between them had to be learned like a lesson and stored away in memory, to be fed off for the rest of her life – as indeed was the truth. She will succeed, Flora thought, she will blossom, and her energy and openness will be rewarded, she will attract love and friendship and success and the generosity of others. She will win.

The thought pleased her, not for her own sake, nor even for Olga’s, but for May Hennessy’s, as some sort of a recompense.

She had returned expecting to be content. And she was, content with the shop and her work there, the pleasing daily routine, the calm and orderliness, content with the sky, the sea, the neatness of the houses, her own cottage, her walks beside the sea, morning and evening.

Yet in walking, a week after her return, she knew suddenly, in a moment of absolute revelation, that content was not enough; and knowing it, remembered Olga, vibrant, confident, easy with life, and eager for it. I am young, Flora said, whatever youth is I have it now. Content should not be enough. Must not be. What I must have is … she looked about her, searching. Rapture. And recognising that, within minutes she recognised more, as if she had opened a flood-gate within herself, and swirling, seething waters had poured in, overwhelming her.

Her reaction to the betrayal of Tadeusz, which she also thought of now as in some part a betrayal of herself by her own feelings and impulses, had been to close those gates, to drop down a portcullis against all feeling, all life, anything from the world outside which might disturb her. She had believed in Tadeusz and her responses to him, surrendered to them, loved, hoped, and given herself up to that hope, of the new life to which she believed he would take her. She had only allowed her defences to be lowered once before in such a way, in her love for the boy Hugh. Twice, she had been dealt the worst of all blows.

She had not allowed herself to wonder about Tadeusz’s betrayal, to speculate as to its possible cause or whose fault it might be – if indeed there was fault and not another terrible accident. She had frozen, some time during that night following his absence, frozen all feeling, all reaction, all thought, and only acted, calmly, coldly, decisively, to distance herself from him and what he had done, and from all memory of it.

But her mother’s death and the sight of her body, the visit to the dismal house and the disposal of their old life, above all, Olga, had thawed her, and she felt the upsurge of a warmth and a confused return of feeling.

She sat on a breakwater in the weak sunlight.

She was content. That was sure. That would not change. She loved this small strange town full of unknown people, and the glory of this setting, day after day. She would not leave it, partly just because of the content, but more because she saw that she must not run away again, as she had run before; from where she had run had always been clear – but to what? She had run here, and this must suffice.

Except that she felt the lack of something which she had seen for the first time in her younger sister, a vibrancy, an urgency, a carelessness, an openness to feeling. She lacked Olga’s courage for life, she thought now. And, thinking it, turned her face instinctively to the sun. But it did not warm her.

She would not run again. She must make her life, embrace everything it might offer her, out of what she found to hand. It was only that she did not yet know how. But having been granted this revelation, she did not doubt that she would succeed, knew, quite surely, that something, some way, some solution, lay ahead, and that she would reach it and recognise it.

Then she was able to turn and look back, without trembling, at Henrjyk Tadeusz, and, for the first time, his face came clearly to mind and she looked into it. There had been no change. She had loved him and trusted in him without reservation, and she did so still.

The memory of her time with him was painful, the memory of his betrayal infinitely worse. Above all, she was bewildered. Yet
his absence and the suddenness of the change, from hope to despair, were like a death. Their effect upon her was the same as if he had indeed died, as the boy Hugh died, so much so that she wondered if he were indeed dead and she knew it in some subliminal way not open to reason or explanation. She must deal with what had happened, then, in the same way as she must with a death. She had been shocked, and angry in its aftermath, and had acted precipitately, as was her way. But she had not grieved or mourned the loss of love and of hope, nor the absence of his person. She did so now, crystallising the grief into moments of pure sorrow as hard and clear as drops of resin wept from the bark of a tree. Her tears were inner tears and did not moisten her eyes or her face. They were all the more bitterly wrung from her for that. She would not love in such a way, with such grave openness and trust again, or in such commitment. So she resolved. It did not occur to her that a repetition of such feeling were possible in any one human lifetime. The brief, sharp business of mourning and the acknowledgment of it, was gone through, and followed by forgiveness, though she was unsure what she must forgive. Later, she realised that, with her grief and forgiveness, went a leavetaking.

The process cleansed her, so that in the shop for the rest of the day she felt as if she were somehow beginning her life again, and that another attachment to her past, her old self, had been broken.

She thought of Olga, and when she had a short, bright letter from her, was surprised at the pleasure she felt, and replied at once, in the same open, free tone, revealing both everything and nothing at all. She did not want to see her sister, would never deliberately invite her here, and yet if she had appeared that day might have welcomed her with genuine pleasure and fondness, and without resentment.

But Olga did not visit, nor write again for many months, and so she, like May Hennessy, the old house at Dorne, the rest of her old life and those who had peopled it, receded from her, joining Miss Pinkney, the fat Belgian sisters she had once taught, Leila Watson, Tadeusz even, in some untouchable, distant and strangely perfect place. Only the boy Hugh seemed closer to her,
and more real, the boy Hugh and the white picture in the Rotunda Gallery of the woman before the open window.

Thinking of the picture, she began to visit the small library to look for books on art and, then, finding little of interest, to cycle inland or take the bus into the next town.

The town itself was hateful to her, dull, dirty, lying low on either side of a flat river plain with brick chimneys at its heart, and she fled from it with her books, to ride the long straight road towards the sea with joy in her heart at the first thin silver line of it ahead. But the books did not satisfy her as they had once done, and even the beauty of the paintings seemed dead, cold and separate on the pages, the life at their heart sealed up and unreachable, a life that had once been lived but was far remote and over. She respected the pictures dutifully, but they did not excite her; she would have had only formal dead words in which to write of them now.

She took greater pleasure from the arrangement of folds in silk or damask or the drape of muslin on a stand, the pattern of colours, scarlet to shell pink, pale sky to indigo, mushroom to earth and chestnut brown on the reels of thread. The harmony and quiet order of the shop delighted her in the way the paintings had once done, the symmetry and order and formality of its patterns satisfied, so that at times she caught herself standing at the counter or in the doorway and looking back at it as if it in itself were a picture, art not life.

But still she was restless, still she lacked. This is satisfaction, she said, this is contentment, this is evenness and quiet and inner prosperity. This. This is not enough. There was a hollow at the heart of things. It was in part an isolation, her own self-chosen separateness, but also an urge to be as unidentifiable, unnoticed and unremarkable as a single stone on the shingle beach, a mere fragment of the ordinary world – for she thought that she had never truly been that, never known how. But even more, what she felt was an emptiness, a desire for completion, a need for a focus to the sense of urgency within herself.

Seven months were to pass, months in which she glided over the surface of things, not unhappy, not restless, not in any way distraught, months in which she knew herself to be simply waiting, though for what she did not know. Seven months, before it came to her.

For the rest of her life, she always said, ‘What was to happen, did,’ and believed that the pattern had been laid out, and she had only to follow it. It was one with her belief in the angel or the star, this conviction that she had somehow only to fulfil her destiny. The Bible she found crammed with prophecies fulfilled. She did not for a moment inflate her own importance, or believe that she was singled out, merely that what was to happen would.

Did.

It was so clear and straightforward she might have laughed at it, had it not seemed such a solemn, even a momentous business, as did the whole of life to her; she had sometimes been light-hearted and joyous, but had never understood frivolity. Even laughter was to be taken seriously.

It was to happen.

Did.

She walked back into Desmond’s shop after her lunch, to find a man sitting on the chair kept for customers, an open suitcase beside him on the counter. Miss Desmond had looked up at her.

‘Flora.’

Flora had stopped. The hand, up to unbutton her coat, had frozen near her collar.

‘This is Mr Molloy, Mr Tigh’s successor, from Farradew’s. I am going over the order with him myself today.’

He had half-stood. He was very thin, with the whitest skin she had ever seen on a man, but shadowed on his lower cheeks and jaw by a grape-ish blueness where a beard might break through. His hair was a rich, reddened brown, thick as a woman’s hair at the neck, luxuriant, springing, shocking hair. And seeing him, seeing the white skin, the grape-blue shadow, the rich hair, Flora had not seen some young man, a Mr Molloy, the new traveller from Farradew’s, Silks, Haberdashery, Drapery, with whom she had no business to do. She had seen, had heard herself say with an inner conviction, ‘Then this is the man I am to marry.’ For she had also seen at once the way he had looked at her, coming through the door of the shop. ‘This must do, then. What is to happen will.’

After Henrjyk Tadeusz, there would be no more love, no possibility of giving herself up, whole and entire, past and present and future, to anyone or to a new life. There would simply be a man to marry, to conclude some sort of unfinished business and end a time of waiting. More than this, she did not know, simply because more was not yet vouchsafed to her. But that it would be she was in no doubt.

She was obliged to turn away quickly, going into the lobby and pulling the curtain to conceal the fearful trembling of her hands as she finished unbuttoning her coat.

Why did she marry? Why had the idea that she must do so come to her with such urgency?

Because of what came next, as it always would. Because of the boy Hugh.

She did not love Lawrence Molloy, because love of a man in that way was not an option for her now, she had closed herself to it, after Tadeusz. But she needed Molloy. She was grown tired of her own isolation. She thought that she wanted to swim in the stream of ordinary life, wanted what others had, though she did not need status, or respectability, concepts she neither acknowledged nor understood.

But even more, she felt herself, quite simply, to be in the grip of her fate. She would marry Lawrence Molloy, because the moment she had seen him, she had known that it would be so, and because of what would follow. Did.

That day, she had come out of the lobby after hanging up her coat, and crosssed the shop, going behind him to the window, where she was in the middle of changing the display of scarves and gloves, and as she had passed him, he had stood again and moved his chair out of her way, though it was scarcely in her way. She had murmured her thanks.