The Service Of Clouds (9 page)

She had set about finding the situation alone, and with caution, rejecting other possibilities in favour of this one, and replying to an advertisement placed in the daily newspaper, and which she consulted in the library – for no papers came to the house.

‘You are very young.’

‘I am seventeen.’

‘That is very young!’

‘I shall be eighteen at the turn of the year.’

‘We had thought of a mature person.’

But he looked at her sharply, as if considering her afresh.

‘My wife is resting,’ he said. ‘She will be here presently.’

Beyond the tall windows, the lawn, the shadows flat on the grass. Stillness.

He was a pale man with fair, flat hair and small features. But his voice was pleasing. Tiny, transparent specks of dust jazzed inside a beam of sunlight. The house was silent.

‘You have been to a good school. You have an excellent report.’

‘Flora is a conscientious girl, though she is not altogether easy to know. We had hoped for her to go on to some form of higher education, but family circumstances have not permitted this. Her father died recently. She will make a good and thoughtful tutor.’

Miss Pinkney had sat alone at her desk, hesitating with her pen, struggling to find the words that would convey the essence of Flora Hennessy. ‘Reserve.’ ‘Self-possession.’ ‘Determination.’ No. When the girl had come to tell her of the cancellation of any plans for college, she had looked out of defiant blue eyes and Miss Pinkney, faced with the look, had been unable to offer help or sympathy. Do not pity me, the eyes had said. Do not dare to question, to suggest any word of affection or warmth, or any regret for me.

The girl’s pride was absolute and, seeing that, Miss Pinkney
had said nothing at all, merely inclined her head and made a note upon her pad.

She had supposed that Flora would simply sit at home with her mother, be a companion in the house and hope for a husband to provide for her future. When the letter had come from the MacManuses of Carbery, asking for a reference for the girl as a tutor to their son, she had been surprised, but also admiring. She had wanted to be of some help, though she thought that she would not see the girl again, that she was part of a past that had somehow failed her.

‘She presents herself well, is sensible and mature. I am confident that she would take her place properly within the household.’

Flora sat quite still on the straight-backed chair, hands crossed together in her lap. She would come to this house. It seemed to her to have been arranged a long time ago. The interview was superfluous. She saw herself moving about in these high, light rooms. Flora Hennessy. (For Florence was quite dead. Florence might never have been. Florence belonged to her home, and to the years with her father and mother and Olga, years which she had already consigned to the past.)

She continued to look out of the windows, at the cedar tree and the Wellingtonia, and the silver haze which was the sea. Then, after a moment, she heard the footsteps of a child. But she took a little time before she turned her head slowly, and then stood, to face her future at the moment it began.

‘Are you a woman?’

‘I am not a man!’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘You should say what you mean.’

His face paled, with the effort of concentrating. She would not help him.

‘Or a girl. Are you just a girl?’

‘No one is “just” anything.’

He looked at her in despair.

‘I am neither then,’ she said. ‘Not old enough for the one, but past the other. Neither.’

‘Like a unicorn,’ he said quickly. And then, as she burst into laughter at him, laughed too, in relief.

His name was Hugh. He was six, and his graveness and oldness sorted with hers. They kept an invisible, formal barrier between them which suited them both, teacher and pupil, girl and child. They respected one another. There was liking and, gradually, complete understanding. Yet he too had a reserve, a privacy, to match hers. She looked at him and did not have any idea what was going on in his head, what places he inhabited. They shared a love of stories of a rare kind, fairy-tales and grim dark fables, curious legends. Their lessons revolved around mythical creatures, crones who lived in caves, impenetrable forests and magic
plants, stones by which the future could be told. The emotions and deeds that filled their talk were strong as black tea. Thirst after revenge, passion for power, tyrannical rage, the jealousy and plotting of evil stepmothers, crusts to eat and rags for clothes and beasts that spoke and consoled, and trees with spying eyes.

She planned their timetable of lessons with the help of books, and followed it exactly. Spelling. Mathematics. French. Scripture. Natural History. Art. Conversation. But within the lessons, they roved about as free as wild, parentless, naked children in the mythical wastelands, plucking nuts and fruit from trees and berries from bushes, and drinking asses’ milk. They read the books in the long library, and made the stories fit the timetabled subjects, as they chose, learned poetry and turned stories into plays and painted the plays into pictures, and went down the garden, on to the cliffs and out to the rocks on the beach, to gather whatever was there in season – seedpods and grasses, limpets and crabs and shells, cones, skeletal leaves, wild poppies and chalk-blue scabious and the chrysalises that clung to stalks. In the schoolroom they labelled everything, and decorated the labels elaborately, like the letters of illuminated manuscripts. Scripture was stories. Moses in the Bulrushes. Daniel in the Lion’s Den. David and Goliath. The Parable of the Seed and the Sower or the Labourers in the Vineyard. And then there was their mutual discovery of other, stranger gods, and more exotic legends. But there was no catechism and no morals were drawn or preached, and when these were doled out to them on Sundays, in the musty church, like so many portions of cold gruel, both of them, quite instinctively, set them aside untouched.

They spent a large part of every day together, in the house full of airy space and light in which their voices and footsteps echoed, or else sitting out on the grass under the great trees. She had nothing to do with the business of his eating and sleeping and dressing, there was a nursery nurse for that, and so their time together was not spoiled with domestic irritations or conflicts. She was surprised how much the company of the boy pleased and interested her, and what satisfaction she achieved in teaching
him. He was alert and quick and their interests and dislikes coincided. In teaching him, she continued to lean.

Any other life had ceased to exist. She scarcely thought of her home at all and had closed the doors of her mind on the farther future. She neither dreamed nor yearned nor allowed herself to regret, but for the first time since very young childhood lived wholly in the present, and in those imaginary places which she and the boy inhabited.

Carbery itself gave her great satisfaction. The parents were often away and the other servants kept to their own quarters. She always ate her evening meal alone, after the boy had gone to bed, and later, sat in the library, or a small upstairs sitting room which had a view of the sea from its windows. Sometimes, when it was still warm in September, she went out, to walk in the garden or the fields beyond the house, and on to the cliff path beyond. She was given one day off, and very often part of Saturday and Sunday, when visitors came or they took the boy out, and at first she went out too, almost dutifully, walked or took the bus into the town, and went again to the gallery, and walked through the streets of familiar houses, and sat beside the lake in the park.

Once, she met Miss Pinkney, and went at her invitation to have tea in Maud’s. The place seemed strange, as if she was seeing it from the other side of a looking-glass. She drank tea, which she had never done here, and ate an ice, which was the same and served in the same tall glass, with a long spoon, and yet which tasted quite new, and unfamiliar.

But it was at this meeting, sitting straight-backed and composed at the table in Maud’s, that she felt her composure weaken, too, and her iron self-restraint fail her, so that she was suddenly giddy and uncertain. One moment, she was sipping her tea, intrigued at the idea of things being as they had always been, and, the next, she felt a peculiar frightening sense of unreality, as if she had forgotten who she was, and why she was in this place. For after all, who was she? She was Flora Hennessy, who would never again be Florence. She was tutor to Hugh MacManus, of Carbery. At the turn of the year, she would be eighteen. But her limbs felt strangely elongated, her fingers tingled and would not
grip the cup, and when she glanced around, the walls shifted as if they were clouds which might at any moment dissolve.

‘Are you quite well?’

Who was this woman, with the brown mole on the side of her mouth and hair like wire? Where did she belong? Her own back ached with the effort of keeping taut and stiff, the muscles of her stomach were sore, because she was constantly tightening them, as if, in relaxing, she might collapse to a soft, confused heap upon the ground.

‘Would you like some more tea? I will ask them to make it stronger.’

The voice came and receded, ballooned out and grew horribly, like some aural fungus. Who was the woman?

‘Florence?’

‘No.’

‘Flora.’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you like some more tea?’

‘Thank you.’

Who am I? Where am I? Who is she? What has happened to me?

The tea came.

‘Use both hands. It will be steadier.’

She obeyed like a child. No. She struggled then. Not a child.

‘Do you eat properly? Are you given enough time to yourself? The company of a young child can be exhausting. Are you able to meet your own friends?’

Gradually, the ordinary questions calmed her and she was able to reply. The room settled, solidified and became Maud’s again, and comforting.

‘Teaching is tiring. When one is conscientious. You will need to replenish your own stores of energy.’

Hearing the assured words, the sense, the anxious tone, she felt touched by something she had not realised that she lacked, affection, concern, the caring of another person, and in the light of
Miss Pinkney’s kindness, she felt herself open, there and then, and grow, in an instinctive and immediate maturity.

Nobody tended the gardens now. Dandelion and ragwort came up through the broken paving stones and were left to blow to seed in a sudden wind, and the great horse chestnut split up the side, making a heavy branch unstable. But nobody sat there now. (Though they sent a man two or three times that summer to mow the grass, and, because he liked to make the best of the job, he planted wallflowers in the earth beneath the windows of the wards. It was hot, and the smell of them, coming faintly to their nostrils, sent the old men and the old women in their narrow bedsteads sailing back to childhood past, and cast them up on its beach, to lie there.)

And the emptiness crept up and up, like a slow tide, to where they were left huddled together. Vans came, to be filled with the contents of wards and offices, and then the doors of the rooms were closed and padlocked, and the high ceilings seethed with the dust, as it settled back in the sun. (For winter went out one night and spring came in the next day, and, it seemed, summer the next, the blossom flared briefly and was over.)

The whispering began, broken sentences drifting by like smoke or clouds, shredding away, half-heard, and those words that were heard troubled them, the talk of closing, leaving, going away. Where? Where? They dropped suddenly down a black hole of sleep, and dreamed of abandonment, forgotten in the high ward alone, after the doors were closed and locked and the last van had
driven away. Where? The blackness lightened to grey, and, in the cloudiness, they wandered again about the rooms of childhood homes and married homes, finding odd brown pots carefully filled with pennies, and a calendar ringed in red, a geranium bright on the window-sill, and the insurance book tucked behind the clock. Familiar beds and chairs and shoes, and handles that fitted familiarly into the hand.

But the wheels of a trolley that no one would bother to oil screeched at the corridor corner. A bell rang. Those who remained raised their voices, and, waking, the old people were startled by the sunlight through squares of high windows, by brightness and the green bed rails, and the smell of warm meat and vegetable water blotted out the scent of the wallflowers. They grasped in a panic at the sheets, trying to grasp this present, this place in which they found themselves (for they could not hold the wallflower-filled past from which they had woken). They reached out hands, to clutch at the hand of the nurse. The last blossom fell on to the grass like stars.

Another death, and then another, on the same day, disturbing them. Would there be no one left? Was this the way they would all go?

Molloy came and sat with them in the white mortuary, and walked the deserted corridors and in among the beds, huddled together at the end of the long rooms, saw bleeding gums, and eczema that scaled feet and between fingers, and sores where sticks of bone pressed up to the skin. Their eyes were filmy, sight veiled, ears muffled, there was a blurring and felting and silting over of each sense. Yet, within, flames flickered and leaped up behind their eyes, quick, bright, darting movements of perception, understanding, fear, before they retreated back, into the safe carapace of memory.