The Service Of Clouds (26 page)

She liked dressing the window, arranging, then standing back, re-arranging before going outside to judge the effect until she was
satisfied, as she did so remembering those windows endlessly passed and viewed and admired on the Saturday afternoons in Lord’s Parade. She liked to create a tableau, or a pattern, some slightly unusual effect that would draw the eye. Once, she had put a single pair of champagne-coloured kid gloves in the bare window, one glove pulled on to a display hand, the other on the floor beside it, and, for two days, Miss Desmond had allowed the window to remain, perhaps merely to please her, before giving in to her anxiety that it looked uninviting, bare.

Now, she was aware of Mr Molloy from Farradew’s in the shop behind her, aware that he was prolonging his visit. When Miss Desmond called for a tray of tea he drank his slowly, deliberately, not watching her, but conscious of nothing else.

Flora left at four minutes past six. It was winter, already quite dark. He was waiting for her a few yards down the high street. He wore a hat on the luxuriant hair and raised it.

He was staying at The Ship Hotel, he said, perhaps she would take supper with him?

Closing the door of the cottage, she felt weak with shock that this was happening as she had known, planned even. Yet the plan was not hers, she was merely following one that had been pre-ordained, recognising the future as she had seen it ahead of her. Washing and changing carefully then, before going out to meet the young man, Lawrence Molloy, at The Ship Hotel, she felt both a sense of inevitability and of relief, and of panic, too, as if she were powerless in the face of what was to happen. Yet she was no more powerless than she had ever been, was willingly acquiescent, eager, even, for this new future. For the bad had already come about, a sequence of miseries, wrong turnings, accidents, mistakes and betrayals. What had she to fear?

She was neither vain nor artful. But she took care over her appearance.

He was thirty-one years old. He had suffered a nervous illness after leaving school and spent some time in a hospital. Now, more fortunate than many, he had this job, which gave him a salary
and freedom, an interest. He liked it, he said, for the things he sold as much as for any of those he met, loved as she did the colours and patterns of the materials and the silken threads.

‘Yes,’ Flora had cried in recognition. ‘Oh yes!’ It seemed very important, this sharing, a joke between them at once, and a secret too, for whoever else would understand?

‘And the places,’ he had said, pouring out a tumbler of water for her slowly from the carafe on the table between them. ‘I like the different places I go to. More than the people. I’ve often been troubled by people.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, until now.’

Flora had looked up at once, directly into his face.

‘Now, I feel the need to have a settled place to come back to.’

He had come back, appearing in the shop four days later, and again the following week. He invited her to drive with him on that Saturday to Brodie Veagh Castle, thirty miles away.

They had climbed a hundred and seventy stairs, to the top of the tower, counting as they went, and when they came out on to the parapet it was like being above the clouds. He had pointed out the distant silver rim where the sea met the sky. There was a lightness, an airiness and a softness about everything above the heavy grey stone tower.

‘We should be married,’ Lawrence Molloy said, and it was quite plain, quite obvious.

Flora had turned away from him, to look all around. What was to happen would, then. Had.

Yet she recognised a split second in which she had a free choice and could have turned away and refused her fate. There was no obligation. Only if she acquiesced and accepted would everything afterwards take an inevitable course. She knew herself to be in the second, the eternal now. It lasted forever, her whole lifetime, from birth to death.

‘Yes,’ she said gravely, turning away from the sky and the clouds and the distant silver line of the sea, towards Lawrence
Molloy, and the white of his skin and the ruddiness of his luxuriant hair set as they were against the stone behind him.

‘Yes.’

The split second had been not so much a measurement of time as a place in which she had been standing, an open space like a chasm, between her past and her future.

‘Yes.’

She stepped aside, and the space closed together, like the line of light beneath a closing door.

It is April. There is no reason for any of them to think of Flora Hennessy, at one moment or another in the course of this day, scattered as they are and most of them unknown to one another.

But they do think of her, in passing, perhaps reminded by this or that, by chance, and their thoughts of her, however fleeting, are a link between them, although they do not know it, and their thoughts, if one is to be sentimental, form an invisible aura about her, of friendship, of kindness, of memory. Were she aware of it, as possibly she is, it will strengthen her.

April. But cold in London, icy cold, and the outlines of things sharply cut under a brittle sky, the pavement scoured and whitened by a bitter wind.

In his dark, important rooms, among the heavy pictures, the draped blinds, the leather-bound volumes, the magazine proprietor, lifting his tea-cup to his lips, thinks of her, her face comes to him, he is reminded perhaps by this act of lifting the tea-cup, of a day, any day, when she sat before him here. He sees her pale face, gravely beautiful, in the dim room.

If she were to know his thoughts she might be surprised, encouraged, flattered. (Or else no longer interested.) For he remembers her young, fresh, untutored, unspoilt talent, her eye, her vision, her clarity of response, her earnest words, and with
regret, as he drinks his tea, as the pigeons coo fatly on the ledge outside the window.

Flora Hennessy, he remembers, and stops as if to look at her, calm, proud, pale, young. Unknowable. A puzzle to him.

Flora Hennessy. And wonders, before he is interrupted by a knock, disturbed by business, pressed to make some decision or other. And so forgets. Though her presence in his room still lingers. And in his mind.

In another place by the sea, another tall, lodging house, grey and gaunt as an old stick of a woman, Miss Marchesa, overseeing some domestic activity, simply looking up as a door closes, and for no reason at all, recalls Flora Hennessy (but whose last name she does not, in fact, quite remember). The girl in the corner of the dining room, eating alone, aloof, proud, strange. Not entirely welcome. Disturbing. Something happened. Some illness? Something untoward.

Miss Marchesa frowns, turning back to chastise, for a job carelessly done, in this lodging house which is much the same as the London house, except that there are no working women, no typists running water in all the basins of the house at seven in the morning, and again every evening at seven. Instead there are old women, faded, forgetful, trembling women, who go nowhere, but stare into space, or sometimes, unseeingly, out at the grey, heaving sea, all day, all day.

The soft closing of a baize door has brought Flora Hennessy to mind. It is April. She scarcely pays the memory any attention, for it is of no significance to her in her new lodging house, her new life, any more than it was in the old. (Though in feverish dreams much later, the lodging house and her own meals, taken alone at the dismal corner table, near to the swinging kitchen door, the sound of the water, running at seven in a dozen washbasins, will come back to Flora, swirling and receding, mingling with the pursed lips of the respectable Miss Marchesa.)

How often do such thoughts of another person coincide, if it could be known? How often do they each recall Flora Hennessy,
her face, her manner, her graveness, her strange pride, reminded fleetingly by this or that?

But on this day in April there is nothing at all unusual in the parents of the boy Hugh thinking of her, at the house called Carbery, for she is linked, inextricably, it seems, with their last memories of him, she is forever about the house, as he is, in a doorway, hurrying behind him down the stairs, running across the lawn towards the silver sea. She and the boy are always laughing, their laughter rings silently through the silent house. His room and the schoolroom are as they were, exactly as they were, on the day of his death. (Though Flora’s room is bare, dust-sheeted, closed. There are in any case far too many rooms in this house, hers will never be needed.) In the schoolroom are the exercise books in which Flora has written, the timetable of lessons on the wall. And so she is always here with them, with him, and will never leave. Her face, her voice, her laughter, the sight of her in the straw hat, sitting with him under the cedar tree, their books spread about them, is as clear as any of the pictures on the walls. On this day in April, when it is unusually cold, the sea glazed and still, as if it were varnished on to board, on this day, waking they think of her, because their first thought, separately and unspoken, is the same, is their dead boy, he bright-faced, solemn, and Flora Hennessy, pale and grave. But at once, crowding out the thought, the picture that follows in their minds is of another child, not yet born. They are uncertain about it, guilty even, trying to keep the picture of the boy, and that of Flora, most vividly in mind. For if they had loved him with such passion, they had come to love her, too, a little for herself, most because of her love for him, and the fact that he had loved her, so fully and freely and devotedly in return.

And so it is that Flora walks invisibly before them, smiling through the house, with its view beyond the tall windows and the green lawns, of the silver sea under the thin cold April sun.

In Surrey the sun is cold, but less so, for it is never truly cold here in this sheltered village tucked beneath the Downs, always sheltered, from the worst of any wind or winter. There is a
greenness over everything here, a green lichen veiling every churchyard stone and creeping over every wall, a leafiness and a softness of green meadow and ferny banks unfolding to the little brook. But still, pale smoke coils up out of a dozen cottage chimneys where fires are lit, stoves warm kitchens and parlours. As with the parents of the boy Hugh, so with Leila Watson, no day ever passes in which she does not think of Flora, and with sadness and a sense of loss (for she has had no letter, no word, has written but her envelope was returned to her, after months, as addressee unknown).

Her small, square house is neat and warm and comfortable; it shelters her. It is next to that of her late husband’s sister and across the green from that of his mother and along the lane from that of his second sister, she is in the heart of an enclosing, loving, sheltering family and will never lack for love or company or concern. They have not altogether understood her absence from them in London, yet saw that somehow it was necessary to her, and, besides, it does not matter at all now, that time is a dream and quite forgotten, now that she is here with them again.

Flora, she wonders, opening her bedroom window and letting in the cold, sweet-smelling, green-smelling April air, shaking out her pillows, stroking the little black cat before it streaks thinly down the narrow stairs.

The kitchen smells of apples and woodsmoke and the sun comes in through the green tracery of plants in pots on the ledge. Leila Watson will grow old here. She is already, somehow, grown into the old woman she will one day become, that person is curled, dormant within her, like a flower within a bulb, waiting to emerge at the appropriate time. Her house is the house of a neat, contented old woman, aunt, great-aunt, curiously sexless.

Flora. She wonders what she might do, how to obtain the forgiveness she vaguely still feels that she needs, how to re-make their old friendship. For her family please and comfort and shelter her, but somehow are not enough.

Flora. And suddenly a memory of walking with her, arm in arm, and laughing, through the streets of London, on the way back from some cool, high gallery to the flat at the top of the
Bloomsbury house, returns, achingly to her, and she longs to be there, among the buses and hurrying footsteps, under the street lamps, close to the cooing pigeons on the ledge.

Flora, whom she could not protect, or save from the ultimate cruelty of love. (Though Leila Watson has never been angry with the memory of Henrjyk Tadeusz, believing him to have been quite helpless and blameless, to have been simply ordered abruptly elsewhere by his regiment, by doctors, by his own family, or else to have had some appalling accident – for she understands about accidents, after the shocking death of her husband, expects, indeed, that they will happen, for years to come she assumes that everyone she knows will die some sudden and terrible and quite unforeseen death.)

Flora.

But after all, she thinks, turning to greet one of her late husband’s nieces who has come running in, after all, I never understood her. Never really knew.

April cannot come and go quickly enough for Olga Hennessy, nor May either, for on the first of June she is to sail to America, where she will dance in a musical comedy, and have success, sufficient to be asked to dance again and again, until she leaves the line for a leading part, small enough – but enough to be noted all the same. For now, she is resting and practising and teaching dancing to small girls and seeing her friends in the town, where she is happy, pretty and happy, but not conceited, not thoughtless.

She thinks of her sister, not all the time, not every day, but often enough and with affection; but above all, with bewilderment and a sort of awe. ‘Florence is deep,’ their mother had said, ‘Florence is clever. Wilful. But clever. People will hear of her. One day people will talk of her. You should respect your sister. You should look up to her.’ Though her tone had always been puzzled. And Flora has puzzled Olga almost from the beginning, there has always seemed to her an aura about her, like a freezing zone through which she might never penetrate. But she has loved her in spite of it, and rather more as she has grown up – which she did very early, without the usual struggles and pain; she loves
Flora because she senses a fragility within the frozen zone, a lack of human knowledge and strength, which will lead, must lead, to her ultimate unhappiness. She would like to protect her, for she herself is at ease with and in the world, has had the measure of it from birth; the world will never catch her unawares. But they will not coincide, these sisters, the paths they take will never converge, because they are so unlike, as is so often the way.