The Service Of Clouds (13 page)

That morning, there had been two letters beside her plate in the dining room at Miss Marchesa’s. Few of the other women were down, because it was the weekend. They would sleep on, or else
had left already, on outings to relatives or to the shops of the West End.

Miss Pinkney had little items of news, and some brisk encouragement and affectionate concern, a newspaper cutting about an exhibition of art, due to arrive in London from Berlin. Flora had never been oppressed by her attention. They maintained a polite, adult distance from one another, a certain respect and reserve that she appreciated, and tried to imitate carefully in her replies.

The letter from her mother was entirely of complaint, the pages steeped in whining discontent. Olga had been unwell, had been seen by a specialist, which had cost a good deal of money, had an infection in her kidneys, or her blood. Her mother could not help her mind dwelling on all the illness on their father’s side. The roof tiles had slipped in a storm, and would leak through the coming winter, because there was no money for repairs. The great elm had been struck by lightning and fallen, toppling part of the walls. Neighbours did not call. Old friends had moved away. There were mice in the house. Did Flora plan to remain in London indulging herself forever? Had she work? Should she not think of returning home, to find a position? Olga’s illness had prevented her from going to a private party at the Hall, where she would have met many of the County children. The doctor’s bills were worrying. She had had to let Eileen go. (Which in any case was for the best. A young man had come calling, hanging about the yard for her, and even been discovered trying to talk to Olga.) Her own back had ached for the whole of that summer.

Flora had skimmed the words, and did not alight on any of them, so that minutes later they had left no trace on her mind. Yet the mood of the letter affected her own, dulling and greying the brightness of the day. But the wide river and the great trees that lined its banks as it ran out of London, and the laughter of the others on the steamer, filled her heart.

When they moored, everyone spilled down the gangplank at once, and on to the grass, spread out rugs and opened baskets and drank beer and lemonade from the bottle with their heads tipped back. She looked, and saw them as a picture (and so it was to remain, frozen as a bright canvas forever in her memory).

The boat moored beside the river bank for an hour. It was the early afternoon, still cloudless, still warm, the shadows soft upon the grass. She sat looking at the water, and the willows that dipped into it. The leaves were yellow, scattering down. A horse chestnut tree was half bare, its lower branches still full, like dropped petticoats falling about its feet. Flora, held within the day, knew suddenly, piercingly, that this was all, and the last of summer, and looked and looked, at the picture of the people on the grass, wanting in some way to make this scene, this bright, late day that was before her, into something more than a memory.

The steamer hooted, and there was a stirring, laughter and packing up and the crying of children. The picture broke into fragments. But, looking back at the empty bank, as they turned and moved slowly away, she saw everything in that green and golden empty space as it had been until a few moments ago, fixed indelibly, out of time, in some other, immortal dimension.

She turned from the rail. A breeze blew chill off the water, and the sun was setting, not as it had set day after day for these past weeks in a blaze of scarlet and violet and gold, but hazily, sinking into sullen, leaden cloud. The banks dropped dully away. The trees were gaunt.

It is over, she said.

A tune was being played on an accordion, and people began to sing. A woman made room for her on the slatted bench, sharing her own rug. A bottle of beer came round. When she drank, it was bitter-sweet and curious in her mouth. The woman’s child fell asleep and, in sleeping, slumped against Flora, and she moved a little, to make it comfortable. She had had nothing to eat since breakfast, and now the beer came round again and she drank more and the accordion and the singing blurred and swayed together inside her head. The dusk crept in from the banks on either side, as the fog began to rise off the river.

And then, out of nowhere, she saw the face of the boy, Hugh, his sloe eyes looking at her out of his pale face, and, feeling the other child heavy against her, she began, shielded by the darkness and the singing and the sound of the steamer’s engines, to weep the tears she had never wept, but, seeing them, nevertheless, the
woman reached for Flora’s hand and held it under the warmth of the rug, and then they simply sat in silence and the gathering dusk and the air was raw and chill and smelled suddenly of winter.

The summer was paid for at once. There were no clear, cold, bright mornings, with early frost crisping the grass. The days never came fully light. An acrid fog clung about the buildings of London, yellowed the streets.

She woke to the gurgle of the basins above, and the sheets of her bed felt damp, the windows were smeared with fog. The faces of the women at Miss Marchesa’s were pinched and sullen at breakfast. Everywhere, people coughed. But in the Institute the rooms were overheated by coke boilers and their stuffiness felted her lungs. She retreated again into the cold galleries. But pictures had inexplicably become dead things, and she found no comfort there. She read John Ruskin, on the painters of Italy, Florence and Venice and Rome, and longed for them, and for the warmth and the sunlight.

November dragged into December. She supposed that she must go home for Christmas. She was worried about money, and no longer ate in the café with Leila Watson, but bought a bruised apple or a few plums from the street barrow, at the end of the afternoon when they were cheap, and ate them for lunch the following day. Her shoes needed repairing, she had walked so much through London. But the fat sisters went back to Belgium for good and there was no other demand for her teaching. No money. She read more and more, lying for hours on her bed, or else simply sat at her window looking into the fog. She felt neither
happy nor unhappy, but detached from all feeling, as from all other people. It occurred to her sometimes that this ought not to be so, that her solitary life was abnormal in a young woman and would make her strange.

‘What will you do?’

But there was nothing.

It was colder. A bitter wind blew exhaustingly all day, and at night roared into her dreams and banged doors about there. She felt deranged by it.

Turner’s wild stormscapes billowed by her head.

She ate too little. Miss Marchesa remarked several times in the kitchen on her scarcely touched plates.

The term ended at the Institute. She had taken her preliminary examination, shivering in the hall in spite of being at a desk close to a radiator. From time to time she pressed her hand on to it, trying to get the heat to penetrate through to her bones. But it would not. The questions were not difficult, she had everything ready to set down and yet the words would not come, or else they appeared, jumbled together. When she looked at them, they were little black spiky insects crawling about the paper. That night, her sheets turned to water, and she drowned in them. In the morning, the walls of her room collapsed softly in upon her, when she tried to get out of bed.

The world woke to winter, day after day. A new ice age, people said. A comet had been seen in the sky, or so the talk went.

The earth hardened, nights were black with frost. A tongue of ice inched up the river.

Miss Pinkney left everything – a letter, half-written, the ink-bottle all uncapped – and came at once when the news reached her, travelling to London through hours of the bitterest cold.

Braziers burned holes here and there in the freezing fog.

Never such a winter, never such cold, they said.

(But so people always do, so they will fifty years later, when temperatures drop down hard again, and cold creeps along the corridors of the hospital, which is empty now. Icicles pierce down through holes in the roof and cracks in the ceilings.)

Never such cold, as they blunder clumsily about, wrapped and muffled through the freezing streets.

Out in the countryside, the fields are ghost white.

May Hennessy does not eat for a week, from anxiety, she says, but then eats and eats too much, sitting about, hollow-eyed. But Olga has recovered and is bright and becoming insolent, makes unsuitable friends. Of course, she is too young to be left. May
Hennessy cannot come to London. Besides, her back has ached all winter.

Never such cold. Cats freeze to death, along with small rabbits in hutches, and little frail birds everywhere.

Miss Pinkney sits beside a shrouded lamp all day, all night. It does not matter that the mother has not come – for Flora is too ill to recognise anybody.

There is a camp bed which Miss Marchesa has put up, grudgingly, in the room. None of this is convenient. She does not like to have illness in the house. But Flora cannot be moved, and must not be left. Miss Pinkney is quite adamant.

Ferns of ice thicken on the inside of the window panes each morning.

They are skating on the river, lit by flares. It is tremendous pleasure.

But the old die alone, or else merely suffer swollen, stiffened joints and cracking skin and sores; every day brings some new misery. Bundles of rag and paper lie heaped in doorways, and are turned over, and found to be tramps, or old women, frozen to the step.

Miss Pinkney reads, which has always been her salvation, Swift and Sterne and Smollett, Dryden and Pope, for she is still in love with the calm, cool eighteenth century, after all these years. But it is hard to concentrate.

She wipes Flora’s face and hands with a damp flannel, smoothes her hair, and, needing a little more warmth and rich, teeming, comforting life, turns to Trollope and Dickens, and some historical romances found on the landing here.

And then, in a night, without warning, the fog evaporates, and
the sky is pricked all over with stars, fever bright. The moon hangs, a great lantern above the silver river. At dawn, the sun blazes up out of a hard, pale, brilliant sky.

Never such a winter, people say. Look, how extraordinary! How beautiful.

Miss Pinkney embroiders a table runner, badly. She has asked for her food to be brought up to the bedroom but, after the first day, this is not convenient. She must go to sit in the brown dining room with the secretaries, the mothers and daughters, and when she does so, looking round, cries out silently for Flora, stiff and proud and young, alone in the midst of them.

Upstairs, later, she stands, looking out of the window at the transparent sky and the branches of the bare trees outlined with ice, that cracks sharply under the little warmth of the sun. But it will harden and freeze again, there is no easing of this cold. The washbasin is plugged with ice.

[The sinks and basins in the old hospital are empty and the water drained, the sewerage pipes disconnected and hanging bare from the walls. But still, here and there, a tap drips, and the drips are seized and held by the cold roof. Slates slip and cracks run across the tiles of the mortuary.

The rooms are completely empty. There is not a scrap of paper or cloth left in any corner, everything was swept away. The bolts and padlocks freeze to the doors.

But Molloy still walks the empty corridors in his mind, sleeping or waking, hears the moaning and stirring and sudden little cries of the old men and the old women (dead now) and the rush of wind up the basement stairs, the hushing sound of the ward door as it closes.

But this is more than fifty years away.]

In the late afternoon, the sun glows, and the light stains the frozen
snow and the fronts of the houses rose red, and splashes on to the white wall opposite Flora’s bed. Children race home, arms whirling, still gleeful in the snow.

Never such a winter.

But Flora knows nothing of it, neither the darkness nor this new, bright, glittering beauty, she is lost down labyrinthine corridors and passageways, where mists blind and confuse her, and bats cling to the walls of her head. Her skin is raw and her eyes burn in harsh, dry sockets. Or else there is cold water running between her sheets, and she shivers, her body is cold as the ice in the frozen water trough. She stumbles and falls down into a deep pit, and the pit hollows out to a cave in which sudden lights flare, and there are booming, terrifying echoes, and then, blank, thick dark. She breathes through a mesh of rusting wire that grates, making her cough, and her mouth is full of nails, foul, sour, metallic.

An old doctor came once. But now, there is a different, much younger one, sent and paid for by Miss Pinkney.

He touches Flora’s forehead very tenderly, with the back of his hand, fearing for her.

The house emptied. The basins in the rooms above were silent. Even these women had people to welcome them for Christmas, friends, aunts, and married cousins. Miss Marchesa’s family, a sister and a widowed brother in Putney, would be together, though she would return to the lodging house each night, preferring her own bed, she said (and sometimes they found each other’s company a strain).