The Service Of Clouds (16 page)

(Miss Pinkney had returned home quite abruptly, to her own life, and, in time, Flora would question the fact, piece together an answer to her questions, and be angry. But her letters came regularly, full of good reasons and of her unchanged concern.)

‘When you are stronger,’ Leila Watson drew the curtains softly against the late evening sun, ‘we will talk about it all. Not now. Not yet.’

She would have answered, but could not make the words come together, and then the Sister came rustling into the calm and shaded room.

Flora slept.

And the song of a late thrush poured into the garden from the lilac tree, to soothe the poor, burned, half-crazed man sitting beneath it, and the tide sighed up and back over the shingle; and
the sounds rinsed Flora’s sleep. (And in her sleep, she cried out: Where would I go. Where would I go? But silently, disturbing no one, and, in the morning, did not remember.)

‘The last time … last … last … last.’

His footsteps sounded down the hollow corridor, in and out of the abandoned rooms.

‘Last … last, last … last …’

There was a hole in the corner of a ceiling showing through to the sky. Clouds. He had a key to the padlocks. He came again and again. Walked through these corridors, trying to come to terms with the emptiness.

He knew what would be said of him. ‘A madman now, that Dr Molloy, going in there still, walking about.’

One afternoon, with the frail winter sunlight finding a way somehow through the smeared and shuttered windows, he found himself weeping alone there. His face when he touched it was wet with tears.

‘Then I am mad,’ he said, and struggled to remember the textbooks. ‘Mad. Insane. Deranged. Crazed.’

He wiped his face, but the tears were like a spring spouting, or blood from a wound that would not be staunched, flowing down his face.

The building was full of echoes. Voices. Ghosts.

He should see someone. Visit a doctor?

‘Doctor Molloy?’

Voices. Ghosts.

But she was real. Her cardigan had a slight egg stain, beside the top button.

‘I saw your car turn in. I was on my way shopping.’

She looked up and around her. What did she remember?

‘But it is done with,’ she said. Her voice was gentle to him. ‘It is nothing now. Not to me, not to you. The old place.’

He felt like a child with the tears running down. He was surprised not to feel any shame, in front of her.

‘Don’t come again. It isn’t good. Not on your own, wandering about. No one knowing.’

He let her lead him, holding his arm, as if he were an old, blind man, out of the doors. ‘The last time,’ she said. The padlock clicked.

But I am not an old man, he thought, not blind.

‘Then what am I?’

‘We must both make new lives for ourselves. That has to be the way of it.’

He turned, and looking back, saw at last only a half-derelict building, the window panes broken here and there and weeds growing up out of cracks between the paving stones. Nothing to him. But he searched his mind for another place, another time, for he had mislaid them.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Not now.’

He saw a woman with a square jaw, heavy, plain. Generous to him. What would she do after this? He did not know. He realised that he knew nothing about any of them, and had not cared, absorbed in himself. He put a hand briefly on her shoulder. What did she feel? Where was her life to be?

‘Goodnight, Sister.’

She watched him go slowly to his car, saw him safely away, out of concern, before looking once behind her, at the grey barracks of a place, with the clouds gathering and darkening around it.

Molloy went straight to the shore, and walked there, close to the water’s edge, as the small waves pleated over and over, and felt a great relief as at the lightening of a burden, and a sudden astonishing exhilaration, so that he wanted to shout to the
expanse of sky and sea. But only walked on to the headland, turned, and walked back, as the rain fell out of banked clouds, softly, on to the sea.

The blow did not fall in the expected way. She had prepared for the blow of illness. Life dealt that often enough; she was familiar with it from her work in her father’s shop, for people told things to the chemist, fearing to go to the doctor, hoping to have their fears dismissed by someone who was, after all, medical. And then she had married Molloy.

She thought about it sometimes, sitting on the back step looking down the garden on fine evenings. Tumours. Tremors. Paralysis. Parkinson’s disease. Strokes. The long catalogue of Latin names. She was prepared, not being confident or trusting of life.

They had been married and at the house in Linney Street for almost five years and the garden had come into itself, the new hedge growing up, borders and bushes plumped out. The birds had their hiding places.

The blow came from behind; and even as it felled her, she felt betrayed, cheated by it because it was different.

He walked in the front door and through the house, to find her. It was the first week of May. She had noticed that the swifts were back, soaring above the market clock.

‘You like the sea, Elizabeth,’ he said. His shadow fell across her book. ‘The sea and the country quietness.’

She did not understand him. In a moment, she would take a colander and pick the early gooseberries.

‘You would like a bigger garden.’

‘Oh, I’ve as much as I can do with. There isn’t a deal of time, after work.’

‘But you’d not have to work there.’

There?

‘Unless it suited you. I’d never stand in your way, if you wanted.’

‘I’ll make tea.’

She would make tea to give herself time, trying to sort out his meaning. But he followed her, standing in the doorway, blocking out the sun.

‘St. Andrew’s. It’s a fine, small hospital. I’m to be the Consultant. To specialise there.’

She stared.

‘Gowan Bay.’

‘That’s a hundred miles away. To the west.’

‘A hundred and thirty miles.’

She could not imagine it.

‘The hospital is on the edge of the little town and the sea is ten minutes only.’

‘I don’t know the sea.’

The Greel Lakes had been her watering places.

‘You’ll come to know it.’

‘We’re to move? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘It’s a very good place, a very good chance – the best. The best chance for me, to do what’s important, and give up the rest.’ He made a movement of his hand and she followed it, and saw the young and the infectious, those who were only ill in passing, fly from him, and the shadows of the old and dying gather round him close as a cloak.

But this small house was everything. She looked out desperately to the garden and had a crazy, panicking thought of somehow taking it with her there. There.

‘Is it decided then?’

‘You wouldn’t prevent me, Elizabeth? You would surely not want ever to do that?’

She looked up into his face then, and saw his purpose, and saw, too, that there was no unkindness.

‘The sea,’ she said, trying out the word.

As so often, he ate quickly, and went back, to a patient. And after he had gone, there was the space, in which she could stay quietly.

The blow, falling as it did, had confused her, so that now she did feel ill, as if it had been that that had come to her after all; her limbs were heavy and oddly weak, when she walked to the bottom of the garden and the little wild patch beside the fence, she felt as if she had never done this thing, put one foot in front of the other and moved behind them. The whole place looked strange, altered, the light and the shadows fell in a different way, troubling her. It was as if the garden and house were distorted, dream images of their real selves.

The swifts were high in the sky, swerving madly. On the ground, beside a pockmarked stone, a snail lumbered for a moment within its shell, before gliding forwards down the smooth path.

It was cool. She should go in and make a fire to sit beside.

Her childhood rooted her in the town, but something else clove her to this house and garden. She was not certain what, or why it should be so powerful.

She must sever it then. If she let her thoughts burrow down like worms they would destroy her. She would accept, and experience the pain as terrible, once, and be done.

When he came back, at first light, as the birdsong filled the garden, she was awake, waiting.

‘What month would we leave?’

August. And so there was the whole summer to get through, the soft pale mornings and evenings when the shadows lay long on the grass.

She tended the garden still, most carefully, keeping the flowerbeds neat, tidying and clipping, setting every blade and leaf in place, in a sort of frenzy. And it was hard, there was rain
throughout June, billowing and heavy, blurring the line of everything, weighing the bushes down, and making the growth lax and soft. She simply worked harder in the face of it.

The house was soon emptied and cleaned, and no longer hers.

‘Here’s a toast to your brand new life, Elizabeth,’ her father said, lifting his sherry glass, at the end of her last day. They seemed glad to have her go, bustling her away into her future, anxious to settle back in contentment with one another.

August, and the sky had dried out, hardened and brightened, the grass was brittle and bleached as hay. The harvest moon rose, huge and melon ripe. In the light of it, she took a flame-torch to the garden.

The blankets had writing across them, and the sheets, the pillowcases and towels too: ‘Property of St. Andrew’s Hospital’ in bold, bright blue.

So they were a part of the hospital, in a hospital flat, in a hospital building. It was as if they had no life, no independent existence at all. She might have been given, or sold to it. ‘Property of St. Andrew’s Hospital.’

He had watched her, for weeks after coming here, after the fire, though he had said little, and asked no questions. She knew only that he had understood, at last, the power of her feelings.

‘Would you want to go away somewhere for a while?’

‘Away?’

‘On a holiday. I’ve time owed to me. We could go …’

‘Where?’

‘Wherever you would like. The mountains. Or to Paris.’

‘We’ve a move to make.’

‘You’ve not been in an aeroplane.’

‘There’s the sea to get used to.’

‘Well …’

But she knew that he would give up easily enough, and with relief, anxious to begin his work, and was glad of that, never finding it easy to go against him or to argue; she could not muster thoughts and words sufficiently well for argument.

They would not go on a holiday. There was enough strangeness
already, enough change and difficulty and difference, and lack of ease.

‘We’ll take on the flat until we find a house you like.’

‘You.’

‘I know how it is, Elizabeth.’ There was a softness then in his way of speaking.

He had come in very late and seen the smouldering garden, smelled the paraffin and scorched grass, and doused it with cans of water, until the smoke blackened and the smell turned to a stench, sickening her. In the morning, the sight had been terrible, the bushes dripping and blackened, plants twisted in death, and all the birds frantic.

The hospital flat was above a canteen and offices, in a building set behind the main building. There was no garden, nor even any grass to be seen, though a few trees grew beyond the perimeter fence, and an old hedge of blackthorn and quickthorn and elder. She felt released from the past and from her old self, and suspended here, in a time that was out of the real stream of her life. It was very quiet, but there were people to watch going about along the asphalt paths below. The windows were large and cloud-filled, as autumn blew in from the sea.

To her surprise, she was not unhappy. Sometimes she went down to the wards and helped them serve lunch, or change water jugs and arrange vases of flowers and they treated her very politely, and cautiously; there was an invisible space between them, but no unfriendliness.

They said: ‘He is a wonderful man,’ almost every day to her, and she believed it. He belonged to them, though they, like her, could not know him.

Someone had scratched across the base of all the saucepans ‘St. A. H.’ and marked every piece of china, with nail varnish.

There was an old black bicycle which the handyman spruced up for her to use, and that was marked too, in white letters along the mudguard. But she was grateful, and went out on it for hours alone across the scoured countryside, where the bushes were bent
low, grown that way from flattening themselves against the wind. She liked the sand dunes and the little mounds of gleaming rock, and the smell of the seaweed at low water. But by October, it was wet and the wind blew too strongly for her to ride against it, and she retreated to the flat, and the hospital wards, and felt very safe there, and quite useful, and the old life was safe, too, sealed off and protected in her memory. She rarely thought about it. But in dreams sometimes, she wandered around the old garden at Linney Street, and sat on the step in the darkness, smelling the grass and the damp night air, before the fire took them.