The Service Of Clouds (30 page)

Yet in his head now, he saw the line of violet hills and from them he took something quite new, some strength or life or inspiration, some hope and sustenance, and as he took it, concealed it.

He had told her everything. She had been with him as he had first gone into the hospital buildings, saw them as he described them, every ceiling and moulding, every archway and doorway, the interview room, the lecture halls, the laboratories and dissecting rooms, the covered walkway that led to the hospital, the smell, the echoes. As he had looked, listened, spoken, written, judged, she had followed him, as he told it to her afterwards. As he had done so, it had been the same as on the day he had first gone to the infant school, when he had gripped her hand, eyes closed, describing, remembering and struggling to tell of his bewilderment, the sense of strangeness he had felt as he had sat at the low table, with a plate of mashed potato and gravy before him, and, for a few seconds, had stood outside himself, looking on, had thought, ‘I am. I am. I am. Here. Here. This is me. I am eating potato. I am. Here.’ But he had never been able to convey that. He had carried the particular potato and gravy smell with him forever. As he had looked down at the plate of meat and fried potato in the hospital, he had known it again, in exactly that way, the sense of standing outside his body looking down, saying, ‘I am. I am. Here. Now. Eating. I am.’ But the person who sat among the others at the refectory table staring at the plate, at the plate of fried potato, the meat, had not looked up, had not been aware of him, had not heard. ‘I am. I am. Here. Now. I am here. This is.’

She had asked, ‘Did you eat?’

‘Yes. Fried potato. Meat. Fruit pie. You queue up.’

‘So it was cold?’

‘Yes. When I got a place at a table. Yes, it was cold.’

The first of years of cold, snatched, hospital food, the smell of the potato forever in his nostrils.

But then there had been the line of hills. Those he had not
spoken of. She did not know of their existence. When he thought of them now, his stomach flared with the excitement of something he did not understand, some secret, clutched to him, for in truth they were simply hills in the distance, and of no possible relevance to him, or to the life he would live now.

The other flare was of fear, and that too he had pushed down and out of reach, out of consciousness. Because he knew, as he had looked at her that morning, every morning for weeks, saw again the infinitesimal changes, in the skin beneath her eyes, in the eyes themselves, and in the slight cautiousness in her movements as if she feared not so much pain as some falling apart and dissolution. There was no acknowledgment between them, of her illness or of his watchfulness, but that she was ill was something quite certain and known to him, inside her some terrible thing, some flaw, long dormant, was beginning to work like yeast, in stealth and darkness. If he had closed his eyes he thought that he might have seen it, like a stain spreading and seeping through her veins.

But nothing was said, nothing could be said, she went about life as before, self-contained, purposeful, working or walking, or sitting quietly in the chair, by the window or beneath the lamp reading, or else staring ahead of her, hands resting on her book.

She was proud, she said, and determined for him, hungry for his future. They had achieved this together and he was to go away. That was all. But would come back, in a few weeks, and then, regularly, time after time, until he came back to her forever. It was only, she thought, a temporary absence.

‘I am not old. I am young. Nothing changes.’ But her own face looking back at her from the oval mirror was changed. She saw her young face overlaid by this unfamiliar, older one, not lined but curiously fallen, the skin bleached as cotton cloth.

‘I was Florence Hennessy who became Flora Molloy.’

And then the tide of memory rose up and drowned her.

When she woke from her drowning it was three o’clock in the morning. She sat at the open window, seeing the moon play upon the shifting surface of the water, bathing the shingle.

What confused her was the inconsistency of time, and its unreliability. She could no longer depend upon it, for this day had lasted a hundred years, moving forward as indetectably as growth, and the previous eighteen years had lasted less than a moment. That much she knew, yet the shock of it was still great to her and terrible. She remembered the falling snow that had surrounded them, could have stretched out of the window and felt it soft as a cold feather in the cup of her hand. She saw the infant’s eggshell skull in the pale eerie snowlight.

The sea slipped up over the shingle, lost its footing, slipped back again.

The house was light and empty as a paper house. There was no
life in it, nothing stirred in the air around her. She felt transparent and brittle as a chrysalis discarded.

When he had walked away she had thought that he might have drained her life out of her and taken it, trailing behind him like an invisible cord, but she saw that he had not, that he was separate, whole and entire, and that the cord had shrivelled and crumbled away into nothing at last.

She regretted nothing. Her life here with him had been her absolute fulfilment; everything had led to it. Yet now her lack of discontent, the satisfaction she had had for so long from so little, seemed strange to her. She remembered her early passion for her independence and to make her mark upon life, away from her mother and Olga and the dark house, the excitement at what she saw all around her, her fervour of hoping.

Over the next days and weeks alone it was the pictures that came back to her, slowly at first, a recollection now and then, a reminder in the way the light fell and the pattern of clouds, but soon, with urgency, crowding into her mind. Instead of other memories, which seemed to recede, she had these. It delighted her that they were not lost, but imprinted still, clear, fresh, detailed. She needed no other reminders. She had only to sit at these windows and almost unbidden they could come quietly back to her with a clarity and vividness that the faces of people did not have, and she rested in them and was sustained by them day and night.

She slept the day that he left and for hours of every day after, great draughts of sleep, and, when she was not sleeping, floated through time, unthinking, unfeeling, as it grew dark and light and dark again around her, as the tide rose and fell.

And when finally she woke, coming to herself again, for a few minutes it was as if he had never existed and the years with her son had never been, that she was alone, as she had always been alone, in some strange place – the house called Carbery, Miss Pinkney’s house, the room in the lodging house of Miss Marchesa, the convalescent home, the Bloomsbury flat. She had moved on from one to the next until she had ended here, and settled at last. Yet now, the purpose of it gone, she felt detached, as if she might simply move on and away yet again, and then again, in an eternity of hopeless change.

But she was ill and for that reason, as well as to await his return, must stay.

She felt intermittently feverish, and drained of all energy. She did not want food, only had a craving for cold water, which she drank from the scullery tap, cupped in her bare hands.

On the second evening, she took the lidded basket and a linen bag, in which the scraps of fabric, the ribbons and braids were stored, and emptied them out carefully, and arranged them on the table, shading the spectrum of colours precisely, until they
began to form a picture. The scraps held their life here, his childhood and the years of his growing up and all of her work and purpose with them. Looking at them, Flora looked at every day, every month, every season, in darkness and in light. She began to cut them into even pieces, to piece the picture meticulously together, arranged and re-arranged until her eye was satisfied, then began, little by little, to sew. The stitches were minute and exact. She had time, she thought, to finish.

She walked less now, and never far, and paused for breath, standing on the shingle beneath a steely sky, watching the gulls soar and the boats come sweeping in. No one paid attention to her, no one came.

When she was not sewing, she slept, or sat at the window, getting up now and then to drink the water which alone seemed to sustain her.

He wrote, twice, sometimes three times each week, and his letters were life to her, joy, interest and satisfaction. Yet, reading them over and over again, she felt apart and that already the ending was embarked upon. But he thought of her, he said, in everything.

That he was profoundly unhappy in everything he did not say. Only the work, the excitement of learning, steadied him, so that the moment he woke he turned his mind to it in anticipation, and to hold back the demons of fear and uncertainty.

He went about his daily routine, from lecture room to laboratories to hospital ward, easily for all his unease.

Only the idea of staring into the face of death disturbed him, only the corridors leading to the mortuary held terror during the early days, so that he lay awake, anticipating that journey, steeling his nerve, plunging violently in and out of dreams in which the dead floated like corks on the surface of the water.

He had his studies and his ambition, he had the time in which he wrote the letters, and in which he read his mother’s letters to him; he had the picture, which he carried within him, of the cottage, and the view from his room of the wide seashore. He had the line of hills.

He did not go to them, knowing that in reaching them they would lose all interest for him, all power to enchant. When he had free time he walked or cycled out in other directions, alone or with anyone who cared for his company. He told them nothing of himself. That he had learned the habit of closeness and self-containment from her over the whole of his childhood he perfectly understood, and occasionally, looking around him, listening to the others, he was disturbed by it, felt awkward, uncertain where or how he might find his place in their world. They had an ease and a sureness which he lacked and sometimes envied. Then, the hills would hold out hope for him, and he did not mock himself for the power he invested in them.

For the rest, he studied the working and the healing of bodies and minds, and longed and at the same time did not long, to return to her. And the small, hard stone of terrifying knowledge, that his mother was ill and would never be well again, lodged like a bitter kernel within him.

The sea roared in to drown her and the gulls swooped to gorge on her flesh. The pale slabs of sky were dead and staring as fish-eyes, framed in the cottage windows and the walls of the cottage pressed inwards until she could not breathe. The silence boomed in her ears but when she cried out, there was only emptiness to hear.

Her pride was no longer of use to her.

The ghosts slipped in then. Turning her head quickly, standing in the shadows of the stairwell, she might have glimpsed them – but whether they were the ghosts of the dead or of the living she could not have discovered.

(Leila Watson’s address, torn up and discarded. Olga’s letters left unanswered, and in the end, unopened.)

She dreamed of her mother and saw in the mirror that her own face was become like her, though years too soon. She understood well enough that it was her punishment. Rejection bred rejection from one generation to another and her pride turned in upon her.

She was thin and hollow as a straw.

But now and then a little shard of memory broke off and floated back to her like a feather on the outgoing tide, to nourish her. A glimpse of a picture came into her mind, a fragment of Miss Pinkney’s voice, comforting.

‘Come to us,’ Leila Watson had said. And held out her arms,
and the shelter and consolation she had so despised turned on her to mock her.

Once, Tadeusz was in the room, laughing with Lawrence Molloy, before they turned and left together and a tunnel of forest trees and blackened bushes echoed to their fading voices. They had spoken to her in the language of Tadeusz, which she could not understand.

Her skin burned up. Only when his letters came did she get up and struggle to wash and dress and go about the cottage, tidying pointlessly. (The sewing was finished, the cover she had made folded and wrapped and put away, and her life with it.)

Once or twice, a face peered in through the windows, until, mistaking some real living person, some passer-by, for one of the ghosts, and in any case hating the staring slabs of sky now, she drew the curtains across all of the windows save one.

In the town, here and there, people mentioned her. It was noticed that she no longer walked on the beach, no longer collected work from Desmond’s shop.

Once or twice, Miss Desmond herself came and knocked, knocked, knocked on the door of the cottage, out of concern, Miss Desmond, not bent, not frail, not changed in any way save to have become very old.

But Flora had slept and the knocking had sounded only through her dreams, making her afraid but not waking her.

Miss Desmond had gone away (and written a letter to Hugh Molloy, and so, in the end, perhaps, brought about a resolution).

She might have dressed and gone out, walked through the town to the doctor and presented her illness, but she shrank from what would follow, the inevitable, public end to her life, not from pain but from failure and humiliation. She would not relinquish anything now, would not weaken as she had once weakened. She might have written to him. He would have come to her, needed, perhaps, an excuse to do so. She longed for it and in the last days thought of nothing but his voice, his presence, his footstep, his body filling the small room, all of her remaining energy was concentrated upon it. But in her waking dreams and odd bursts of
feverish delirium, she saw him not coming to her but running, running away, growing smaller to nothingness in the far distance.