The Service Of Clouds (10 page)

The hands of the clock scarcely moved. An hour was a dreadful shuffle of nothingness and tedium. (Yet Molloy’s days raced crazily away from him, and he careered downhill with them, powerless.)

The leaves of the chestnut tree spread, and fanned out like fingers. The candles had never been so many, or so bright.

(They would fell the tree. The trunk was a danger, and in any case, it was old. An obstruction.)

The doors were open, on to the broken paving of the terrace. One or two of them sat outside, in basket chairs. An old man shuffled on to the grass and stood, feeling the dryness of it, against the dryness of bare feet.

Swifts screamed about the clock tower, and dived and sped like skaters around the blue rink of the sky. And after a last morning of babel and hurtling, reckless flying, left, and the silence after them was absolute and terrible.

The back of the house got all the sun, afternoon and evening, and the living room had doors on to the garden. (In May, the pear tree was clotted with blossom, like paper snow along the branches. The leaves were thick, and darker now, the little hard fruits already showing.) In sunlight, the house gleamed in its cleanness. The rows of books were tight, edge exactly to edge along the shelf. The clock ticked with a very precise tick into the ordered kitchen.

Sometimes, during these days, his mind would be full of it. It was as though he had suddenly walked in through the door and stood there, huge, bringing in dust from the road and the smell of antiseptic, something alien. He felt that he was set down in his own house without use or purpose, and blundered from room to small room among the ornaments and objects, in a panic, like some cornered animal.

He never saw her. Whichever rooms entered his mind, she was always in the next, and he did not disturb or intrude upon her. The way of the house, and her life when he was away from it, were mysteries to him. He knew at what times the woman came in to assist her and when she left, and, sometimes, if there had been a visitor. Nothing else. He did not know how she spent her days. When he returned in the evening, the house seemed untouched, as empty of life or even the after-echo of life, as when he had left that morning.

Soon, he would not leave.

On fine days, she sat at the open window, looking at the birds on the bird table and flitting in the branches of the pear tree. But she did not go out there. She felt the cold too easily now. Or the heat.

Walking the corridors, pushing open the swing doors, listening to the odd, disconnected cries and mumblings of the old men and the old women, he felt his heart lurch as he remembered, as if he were waking from oblivious sleep to the dreadful reminder of some tragedy. He turned his mind away. He would not face the future. He preferred to go into it blindly, and unprepared.

He did not speak to her about it, nor know her feelings, whether she dreaded the thought of him filling up her solitary days and the neat silent spaces, pressing the smoothness out of cushions, dirtying crockery at the wrong times, breaking the tight clean pattern of her routine, and fraying it. When they spoke, it was of the insignificant, the time of this, the news in the village of that. Radio. Weather. Household necessities. They did not talk of her physical state. It never changed, and so there was nothing to say, and of course, he was not her doctor.

(Though he saw that she moved less now, and was slower, shuffling on the sticks from chair to table. She went to bed an hour before him and the routine was stumbling, awkward, painful.)

She smiled. Her smile was a fixed thing on her soft, powdery mouth. She had determined some years before on her role, which was to be sweet acceptance, meekness, patience. A refusal to refer to her condition, or ever to complain.

Smile.

The sun moved around the house from front to back, lightening the opposite wall. In the kitchen, the clock ticked.

No one entered the silence. No one broke into her days, once the woman who helped her had left. Only the birds hopped on brittle legs about the terrace.

In the bathroom, mirrors and white enamel surfaces flashed, as
the sun struck them through a chink in the frosted glass. The bedroom was dim and peachy, blinds half-drawn. A china ballerina held the lamp up in her arms.

The afternoon slipped imperceptibly down. The light hazed and reddened. The dead grate held fir-cones, piled together in a little, dry, careful pyramid.

No one came.

There was ham and tomato and potato salad, cold plum tart, ready under the plates. The milk was covered by a weighted muslin cloth.

It seemed that there would be another death. Molloy would not leave the ward yet.

From high in the pear tree, a blackbird sang and sang to her, for some sort of company.

That time of Flora’s life was like a clear bubble, in which she was perfectly happy and perfectly suspended, quite separate and detached from the rest. She would sometimes look back on herself there, in surprise and curiosity, as though upon a young woman in a picture, another person, in another life, unconnected to her own later self except by the thin thread of memory.

In the three years at Carbery, she learned the moods of the sea, and those moods defined her days and nights. The house was like a ship, sailing by itself high above the bay. She knew when she awoke to a strange dullness of the air that the sea fog rubbed its back against the windows. The gauzy mornings of early spring, and the black nights out of which the wind gathered itself, to come marauding over the garden, delighted her. She spent hours sitting on the window ledge of the empty attic rooms, looking towards the sea.

They were excellent companions, she and the boy. He had a sharp, inquisitive mind, flashing a sudden question like a blade that cut to the heart of a thing. His face was always pale, the skin delicate and transparent as petals beneath his eyes, and, on his stalk-like neck, the bones infinitely slender.

He had sudden silence, periods when he withdrew into himself as she withdrew, so that there was a complete understanding between them. At other times, he did not belong to her at all but
went away, across some invisible line, and then he was theirs, and withdrew wholly into their world, excluding her.

He had his seventh birthday. He wore a sailor suit. He became formal to her, his eyes guarding private thoughts.

She went home dutifully once a month, for a day and a night, and dreaded the time, and could bear the visits back to the old world only in the knowledge that she would leave again and return to Carbery. She would not talk of her life there and in any case her mother was not interested. She looked inward, or back to the life she now saw as entirely happy, satisfied, fulfilled, when John Joseph Hennessy had been alive. Her only other concern, in a possessive, cloying, anxious way, was for Olga. She lived her own life through the child, busying herself with her activities, her friendships, and so Flora could feel detached, freed from her mother’s interest and curiosity by her younger sister.

She would not yet think of her own future. She would stay at Carbery until the boy went away to school, when he was eleven. She spent no money, but saved her salary in the Post Office bank, and at times, seeing the steadily increasing figures entered in the columns of the account book, felt a flare of excitement, and in the light and brightness of it, saw the promise of the life she had once planned, briefly illuminated again and possible.

In the library at Carbery she read widely, as she chose, and looked at books of paintings, learned to love areas of literature and the work of certain artists with an instinctive and acute response. Others were puzzling and impenetrable to her. She learned not to struggle for long, but to drop them like a mouthful of some unappealing food, discarded on to her plate.

The year turned. She was twenty. But, still, she watched the sea, and the bubble held, and the rest of her life was far away.

It was May. It was a perfect day, as warm as high summer, the air still, the sea brilliant, stuck over with little white boats.

They had gone out, the boy with his father and mother in the large car, visiting on the other side of the county.

She was reading about lost cities – Troy, Atlantis, Lyonnesse, and from time to time looked up and out to sea, from her high point on the grassy cliff, and imagined them there; if she half-closed her eyes, they rose up and glittered again in all their beauty before her.

She thought of the hedgerows of bridal hawthorn, wreathing the fields around her home, saw the buttercups and dandelions, gold everywhere upon the grass.

At four, she walked slowly, contentedly up the sloping lawn towards the cedar tree and the tea that would be set there.

Except that the tea was not set, and she saw the maid come running out of the house, a scrap of white hurtled as if by a sudden wind towards her, arms outstretched wildly, eyes black and huge in her stricken face.

The boy was dead.

The words came over and over again as she ran, incoherent, garbled, from the mouth that was so mis-shaped in shock and grief.

Flora had watched them leave, from her window. He had been sitting with boot-button eyes in his pale face in the high, open back of the Lagonda car, stiff, serious, expectant.

There had been an accident then, and he was dead.

She stood, very calm and absolutely still, after the girl had shuddered into silence and the sea and the sky had hardened and glazed over, and become dead, for all that the sun shone down on them. They were frozen things in a picture. But she looked on it from the outside now, as if already she had no place here.

She had turned her back on the sea and followed the maid into the house, and inside the air had smelled different and unfamiliar, as though the rooms were already a part of the past.

It was the first grief of her adult life, and she had no idea how to bear it. For there was only a short time of numbness, and the odd sensation of distance, and then the pain of it began. She felt it in her body, and crumpled up, bending and holding her arms tightly around herself. She could tell no one of it. When they returned, and she saw them, she could not speak.

The silence of the house and the dimness of the room behind the drawn blinds was no longer a peaceful welcome and altogether soothing to her, it was the airless, choking silence of death, in which she was taut and alone. Frightened.

‘It was the worst of all,’ she said to her own son (who had been named Hugh), ‘nothing else was ever so.’

She had not explained, nor said more.

Later, he had stared into the mirror at his own face, trying to match it to what she had told him of the other boy. The worst. Nothing was ever so. (Though there had been the one other thing, but of that she never spoke to him at all.)

He had not dared to ask if anything might ever be worse; if his own death would affect her, in some mightier, more important way. But that night, looking up at her as she sat on his bed, he saw the absoluteness and strength of her love for him, and for no
other one, and the dead boy withered back into that remote past of hers which did not concern or trouble him.

May had never been so hot. Things came crowding out together, lilac and laburnum and the great smoky plumes of the wistaria hanging from the wall.

But on the day of the funeral, the fog came up from the sea, stuffing itself into the rooms, like soft, damp pillows, greying the garden. The house was muted. She could not believe that anyone would be alive there again. They were stiff, waxen things. She was invisible. For them, she had simply ceased to exist.

They had brought him home the day before. The coffin stood beneath the tall blind windows of the long room, on a pedestal. It was taken for granted that she would go in, at the time set for all of the servants, and so, unable to refuse, she did so, but kept to the last and, when she came up to him, closed her eyes, so that she never saw him again, in any way. (And for the rest of her life regretted it, and never ceased to be haunted in her dreams by a hollowness, as of something unfinished, unknown. There was no resolution, and so in the dreams, she continued to search; she followed after and almost glimpsed the boy. But never caught him, never did see. Rooms were empty, blinds snapped abruptly up, and then, in the sudden flooding in of summer light, were bare and echoing. She ran down lanes and over the grass to the cliff edge, and even, sometimes, flew off it and fell, into waking consciousness before she could discover him. It was years before she spoke to her own son of it, though after she did so there was an easing and blurring of the dreams, which then came rarely until, in the last few days of her life, they returned, vivid, as if freshly painted, before her.)

She had followed the black funeral figures, out of the house to the waiting cars, but, just at the door, turned back, and retreated unnoticed by any of them.

Her steps had terrified her, sounding through the empty house.

An hour later she had walked away, alone, down the long drive between the trees, in clinging fog which had nuzzled her, like
some dead, vaporous creature, and crept in through the sides of her mouth, tasting peculiar and metallic there.

She had not looked back, nor seen the house, Carbery, or any of those belonging to it, again.