The Service Of Clouds (29 page)

The stories themselves. After the sewing was put away, or when he had gone to bed, or in the pale, sunlit early mornings, lying beside her, she had told or read to him, every story in the world, it seemed. He told them now, the stories of enchantment and transformation and fabulous beasts, of spindles and gingerbread and black lakes out of which naiads came singing, into which swords plunged, of rainbow’s ends and rocks of gold and mice that spun and cats that talked, of dragons slain, tasks set, trials undergone, everlasting sleeps, rewards, banishments, disguises, spells, wonders. He told her the stories, and then what his mother had told him of her own story. Every day, sitting beside her, or else standing at the narrow window looking out on to the rain. He told her and, in telling, gave everything to her, as he had never before given, gave of himself.

‘Elizabeth.’

Perhaps she heard him.

After a month, when she was still alive, defying them, because there was nothing more to be done for her there he took her home. She could neither move nor speak. She would live, or, suddenly, die, they said. He knew. Meanwhile, he must live, in the spotless, silent house, feed her, clean her, move her, dress her, undress, brush her hair, cut her nails. Talk to her. Talk. And at
night lie in the narrow bed on the other side of the room, straining to hear her still breathing, even in his own sleep.

When he had help for a few hours he went out, to walk in the air. ‘Have a bit of life,’ the woman said.

He walked along the flat, wet sand, or on the path beside the sea when the tide was high, neither happy nor unhappy, but settled as he had never hoped to be, content enough, giving to her what he had never before given. For now he had everything and the past was wholly returned.

Only at night, in his dreams, he wandered the empty hospital corridors, hearing the tap drip and the window left unfastened bang loosely in the wind, seeing the grass and weeds growing up through the cracks in the paving stones, and he longed then for that life and mourned it all and woke in terror, unable to find his way out of the building, which they had locked against him, and back to Elizabeth.

Only at night, in the dreams, he lay beside the dying, the old woman Annie Hare, Ettie Marshall, the old men, re-claiming each one, restoring them, too, briefly to life, and then consigning them to death again, as he watched with them.

‘Elizabeth,’ he said, waking, anxious. Needing her.

‘Elizabeth.’

Perhaps she heard.

‘Will you be there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not late?’

‘No.’

‘Will you ever be late?’

‘No.’

‘Will you always be there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Every day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Until I’m dead?’

She did not laugh at him. She had never laughed. The anxieties, clearly written on his pale-skinned, serious face were too intense, she felt them as he did.

She met him every day at the gates of the school, always arriving there too early, so that when he looked out of the window at the end of the afternoon, he would see her there. Her own anxiety matched his, her own need. She might have asked him, ‘Will you always be there? Until I am dead?’

During the day, when he was not with her, she worked on the hats and at clothes too; she had taught herself to sew children’s gowns, out of silk and lawn, using the smallest of stitches, to smock and tuck and embroider. Word had spread, people sent to her from miles away. Miss Desmond displayed the garments, and
they went for grand christenings and outings from the houses of the county rich. She was not happy when he was away from her but she was perfectly at ease, perfectly occupied, the work she did satisfied her. But when he came home, it was put away and then her whole attention and interest was for him.

He was clever. She read to him, borrowed books for him, taught him, talked to him, answered his questions, kept up with him easily until he was eleven. After that his interests narrowed and focused, he gathered speed and left her behind. What remained were the pictures and her stories. Nothing changed that.

‘What will I do? What will happen? How shall I get there?’

‘On the bus, from the crossroads.’

‘Will you come on the bus with me?’

His face tightened, his eyes darting in panic. (He had won a scholarship to the King’s School twenty miles away. She had worked with him, and for him, night after night, though it was never in doubt. His cleverness astonished her. She went in awe of him now.)

‘I shan’t go.’

She sat beside him at the table.

‘Listen …’ She made him face her. ‘I will be here. You will be there, at school. That will make no difference to anything else. Has it ever? Ifs only miles. What are miles?’

‘Away.’

‘You will go.
Must
go. There is nothing for you here.’

‘I shall be afraid.’

‘For a while, and then you will know what it is like and grow used to it and so not be afraid any longer.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I know.’

‘I want you to come.’

‘No.’

He turned away.

On the first day, she walked with him to the crossroads and waited, but when she saw the bus approaching, down the straight
road, left him. Must. He had been too closely in her company, too tied to her love, bound up with her in his every thought and movement, waking and sleeping, breathed as one with her, as though he had not been separated from her body at birth. She sometimes feared that she had obstructed him, for all their happiness, for all their richness of life, for all their love, and that he was marked by it.

At the end of the day, she had waited some distance from the crossroads, not wanting to shame him in front of others. But he had come out, running and stumbling towards her and fallen anyhow into her arms, crying with relief.

‘I thought you might have gone. I thought you wouldn’t be here and I would never see you again.’

‘Why? Why did you think such a thing?’

He could not say. He was silent, pressing her arm to his body.

‘I am here.’

‘Will you always be here? Until I’m dead?’

‘Until you don’t want it.’

He stared at her as if she had spoken in some strange tongue, for how could they imagine such a thing, that either would not want the other, now, ever?

They had walked entwined together down the hill towards the house and beyond the house the silver sea.

He remembered his mother’s smell. Not a smell of anything. Her smell, the smell of her flesh and her hair, the smell of her clothes. Like a small animal he had sought it out and nuzzled towards it.

The cottage had smelled of cloth and the steam from the hot iron against felt and straw, of the cold flagstones on the scullery floor, of books, of the salt sea. (Though by the time he had left her it was changed, by the shrivelling and wasting of the flesh, desiccation, ageing, the slide into death. For all he had not known it, or refused to know. Things were the same, he said, when he returned from the hospital, nothing would have happened, things would be as they had been, and the cottage, the sight of her, her smell miraculously restored to him. Nothing could change, he would not allow it, he had power. So he said. She is well. Things will not change. So he believed.)

Sitting beside Elizabeth now, he knew her smell, it was familiar, antiseptic, inhuman, masking the other smell of her illness, the bodily, orifice smell. And this room had its smell, cold and sickly, of perfumed air, linen, pillows, an inanimate smell. But close to her, through it, he smelled Elizabeth.

‘We’ll go for a walk.’ (For he spoke to her, now that she could neither move nor speak, now that he had nowhere else to go, for hour after hour, told her everything, or as much of it as he could bear to remember, dare to speak.)

The room was full of a soft, diffused light coming through the half-drawn curtains. He had fed her, spoon by careful spoon. It was the middle of the afternoon. No voices. No sound.

Elizabeth lay, eyes open, silent, motionless on the high bed.

‘We’ll walk, up the hill, away from the town. Past the Baptist chapel. The gulls are crying. We’ll stop here. There’s the smoke from a train. Look back. There’s the sea, you know that, over the rooftops. Our rooftop. You know that. There’s a woman with a dog. We don’t know her. She doesn’t look at us.

‘Past the church and out on to the straight road. There, you can see the forest. Daft, isn’t it, to call it a forest? Only we do call it that. She does.’

They had walked this way before, from the town towards the crossroads and the forest, rather than along the shingle beach to the next bay, and then further, to the cliff and the cave and the rock pools. He would take her there, tell how it felt to have the sea anemone suck his finger into its soft mouth, feel the bright, satin weed, smell the salt fish stench deep inside the cave.

Tomorrow, perhaps, or the next week.

But she had seen inside the cottage in the evening when the lamp was flaring, seen the hats on their stands and the beautiful embroidery, heard the hiss of steam from the iron. Seen him, as he sat at his books. Seen his mother at work. Seen how it was between them. He had shown her everything in the room, the furniture, piece by piece every ornament, every scrap of ribbon and trim. The shining steel scissors lying in the centre of the table.

After so long, she knew.

‘We’ll go back then, Elizabeth. You’ll be tired. It’s a good stretch.’

Perhaps she heard.

He reached over and held the beaker to her lips, pressing the corner of her mouth so that the water dribbled in, massaging it down her throat with his finger, wiped what ran away into her neck, which was most of it. He took the ivory-backed brush and brushed the front of her hair where it had flopped forward out of place. Moved one arm, then the other, set her hands in new positions.

The room was still. He did not speak again. She had had enough of walking, enough pictures put into her head for this day.

‘Elizabeth.’ He bent and touched his lips to the paper-dry skin. Smelled her smell.

‘Elizabeth.’ Drew the curtains.

Left her.

Perhaps she heard.

Behind the medical school, a park led to playing fields but beyond that rose the violet-blue hills. When he had first seen them, even in the midst of his despair his heart had leaped, for they seemed to be a horizon that was utterly private to him, the hills beckoned and promised. The buildings would house him, in them he would learn his skill, they were merely necessary, but the hills reassured him with the promise of an escape.

He was afraid of everything he saw, though he must keep the fear hidden; he seemed to stand outside things even as he was in the midst of them. He was alarmed and intimidated. He would work here. The rest was an alien landscape full of strange faces and voices loud with confidence. He kept back in the shadows that fell from the huge building across the grass.

But he wanted the hills. He was inland here, and glad of that, tired for now of the sea and the everlasting sound of it dragging up, dragging back, the coldness of it and the seagulls’ cry. He could not have said so, fearing to betray and afraid of his own disloyalty. Longing to leave meant a rejection of her and of his home and he could not admit that. But the thought of the violet-blue hills filled his mind now, in the dusk, as he leaned out of the window of his room on the evening before his departure. He longed for the space there, now, even for the corridors and high ceilings and echoes of the hospital buildings. He was tall, he felt stifled in the cottage, his arms and legs might at any moment
have protruded through a window, a door, as they extended beyond his cuffs and the hems of his trousers, his head might have pushed through the fragile ceiling to the sky. She had to look up to him now.

Everything was ready for him, everything clean, mended, ironed, folded, labelled, packed into the canvas bag. His room was already empty of him.

The sea soughed softly, creaming on to the shingle.

He had worked, driving himself forward, for only this, that she could be proud. He would fulfil her wishes for him.

When he was ten, he had taken up a wounded bird from where it lay broken-backed on the shingle, and tended it, keeping it in a box in the scullery and, when it died, he had dissected it meticulously, studying the way it was made, its wings, frame, skull. It had been a thing of great beauty to him in death just as in soaring raucous life; and coming upon him, she had said, ‘You should think of doing that. Tending things.’

‘Yes.’

‘But not birds. Don’t waste yourself.’

And so he had turned his attention to people, looked at them, studied their bodies, their shape, their movements, noting deformities made by age or disease, the tell-tale signs of illness. He read them. It was always clear to him. It was the old he studied the most, and there were many of them in these streets, shuffling, deaf, awkward, hump-backed, thinning, struggling against time and the forward surge of the rest of life. He recognised their fear and their loneliness, answered to them as he watched them, he warmed to their frailty and their simple power of endurance, as he felt alien from the others, vibrant, assured ones thrusting forwards into life full of heedless, casual strength, milling round him. He had no friends, as she had not, longed for none, shunned company. What he needed of human closeness, influence, presence, he took from her, as he had taken everything else, his breath, it seemed. He saw the world through her eyes and what he knew of those other worlds he had learned from her. He was in time with her ambitions and desires for him, liked their quiet, steady, close way of life together. It was as though the same
blood flowed in and through and round them both, as if he fed from her breast and they had never been separated.