The Service Of Clouds (17 page)

The stiffness began that winter, with the endless days of seeping damp and cold, the wind that always blew. She felt it in her joints and her limbs each morning on waking; a stiffness at first, and lack of ease, but not pain. She spent longer in the wards, reading to old men and women from the newspaper, giving help in the pharmacy. She found that she was very happy indeed here, sheltered and safe. It was as if no harm could come to her there, nothing touch her at all. She ate with them at lunch time and if there was nothing at all for her to do, and even the cupboards had been tidied beyond tidiness, she simply sat in a corner reading.

And it was a great help, they said, she was very useful, there was always room, wasn’t there, for an extra pair of hands? Though they often looked at her questioningly, uncertain of her, not quite relaxed when she was among them.

January was clamped in iron cold, the wind pierced every crack, fog and damp wreathed about outside the windows trying to insinuate themselves.

There was a morning when the stiffness burned into her like a brand, and he prescribed tablets. She remained in bed. But the pain scarcely eased, and the stiffness paralysed her a little more each day, she could barely move from one room to the other. He sent for a colleague and, later, for a specialist from St. Edmund’s Hospital, in the city. One of the nurses brought up flowers, and later, lunches and dinners came on trays from the canteen.

The branches of the trees beside the perimeter fence were bare
and twisted. As she looked out of the window at them, hour after hour, they seemed like her own limbs, sapless and blackened.

Nevertheless a strange peace came to her, in the grey hours, and a contentment like that she had known sitting on the back step looking down her garden at Linney Street, and she gathered it gratefully around her. But those other mornings and evenings might have been a hundred years ago, and certainly in her youth – for she felt old now.

He drove her to the city, for another consultation, with another doctor, for X-rays and examinations and tests. She saw him conferring with them, at the end of a corridor, or in an empty cubicle, but she felt quite detached and calm, unafraid of anything they might know or discover about her.

But they knew nothing, and nothing was discovered.

He drove her back in silence, and on the way she felt the stiffness tightening, as if something that until now had still been warm, pliable, fluid, was setting hard, turning to steel or stone. She could barely shuffle from the car.

They must move then, he said, the stairs were quite impossible now, and there were no other hospital flats. He took a day off, and another. On the third, he found the old, single-storey, clapboard house, facing the sea. Someone had made a small garden, of shells and stones and bits of bleached driftwood, bone-pale, whitened by the wind and the sea-salt, not dark, as the tree trunks were dark. Steely blue, globular thistles and sea-peas grew like bristles.

He had chosen it for the wide windows, he said. Living room and dining room and bedroom faced the sea.

‘The sea is everywhere.’

‘It is.’

‘Look at the sky, at the light changing. And the little garden.’

‘Yes.’

He got all the help to move, unpacked everything and set it out. She had to do nothing.

‘In summer, you will have the beach and the dunes to walk on.’

He was anxious to get back to the wards.

It did not feel right to have the old things from Linney Street around her here, familiar and yet belonging entirely to that other place, the other life. The blankets were her own; there were no scratch marks and letterings on the pans and the china.

From every window, she saw the huge sea, moving heavily about within itself, pressing forwards, cutting off her escape.

‘This!’

Leila Watson said, letting the door swing open, and standing back, as if in triumph.

And so they paused for a moment on the threshold, looking, at the sunshine splashed on to the bare boards from the skylight – looking, but not yet going in, and Flora felt the moment to be important, and the start of something. And then they stepped into the flat, and that was the end of something else, her past, she thought, her youth, even.

The rooms were at the top of one of the tall, plain-fronted houses in a Bloomsbury square, with iron railings and two steps to the front door.

‘This!’

The ceilings sloped. They were on a level with the clouds. London sailed, far below.

(Leila Watson’s house in Surrey had been let very advantageously, so that she had been able to take the lease. She wanted to live in London, she said. ‘Surrey was the past. This is now, and the future.’)

Flora stood looking out, as she had looked out of the window at Miss Marchesa’s; but that looking had not been in happiness. The houses on the opposite side of the square matched this house exactly. Pigeons were settled in the groin of the roof. She felt as if she were floating, suspended so high. But the roots of the house
ran down firmly into the ground, and she was rooted with them, in touch with the life of the square, and the surrounding streets, the whole of London.

She turned, smiling, to Leila Watson.

The arrangement was this. That Leila was to teach at a small school in Cavendish Street, from which pupils would also come at times, individually, to be coached by Flora, who had infinite patience; and she would continue her own study of art, but privately. She could not have faced returning to the Institute.

‘We shall manage quite nicely,’ Leila Watson said. And when Flora had written to tell about it all in one of her letters to Miss Pinkney, there had been a reply at once, containing a considerable amount of money, by cheque. ‘I have savings,’ she had written. ‘Quite enough for my needs and the rest are of no use to me. It is what I long intended to do for you.’

She had wanted to return the money, at once.

‘But you cannot,’ Leila Watson had said. ‘You must not.’

‘You think that it would offend her?’

‘I know that it would hurt her.’

Now, Flora went about the rooms, picturing them furnished, lamp- and fire-lit. It was September. She had completely recovered. But the illness had cut her off from something, some place, as well as changed her, and she could not go back.

She opened the window, and a street seller’s cry came up from the corner of the square.

‘We shall make new friends, and have them in. We shall have suppers and discussions. Life will begin properly again.’

Life. Flora looked around her in a moment’s panic, wondering what life was.

It was now.

For there came a time of great happiness, a settled time, fulfilled, expansive, serene. Life promised and life paid, so that, looking back, she saw it as vibrantly coloured, like the Bloomsbury sitting room, plum-dark, glowing, rich, intense, with a ruby and earth-brown rug and Turkish cushions bought from a junk stall, and two silk shawls with glittering threads woven here and there, that caught the light of the gas fire. The room became the heart of their lives.

Yet they saw little of one another. Leila was all day at the school, Flora at lectures, in the galleries, or teaching and studying at home. They worked. The new friends and the discussion groups did not materialise, were never missed.

Flora had begun to set down her analyses of certain paintings, in short paragraphs, and then, her confidence increasing as the ideas came together, at greater length, until finally, meticulously, she copied out the ten pages she had written, in a storm of excited recollection, on the pictures in the Rotunda gallery. She had no need to see them again, for she carried them vividly with her; it was her own passion, first aroused, that she was desperate to convey.

After more than a month, the letter came.

‘Your article interests me greatly. You write with delightful
freshness and conviction. The paintings brought to life and recreated, in your words …’

She held the sheet of paper, engraved with the letterhead of the journal, shaking in her hand.

There are moments, pure as fire, which we experience and which we do not forget, and sometimes, when they come, we know them for what they are, as Flora knew, standing in the small Bloomsbury sitting room with the letter in her hand. ‘I shall remember this,’ she said. And was to do so, through everything that came later, for it was lit as brightly as any of her other beacons, and would light her to her grave. But before she had time to savour the joy of the letter, there was another, telling her that Miss Pinkney was dead, and she was plunged into the middle of the journey home, giddy with the swiftness of it all, knowing there must be her mother and Olga to visit, to stand before, and to placate.

Leila would remain, to preserve their daily contentment and industriousness, their room, and the circles of light within it, the books and papers, and pleasant, quiet exchanges about this and that, until her return. Flora thought that the satisfaction of the past weeks might, surely, sustain her through those to come.

She felt sadness at the death of Miss Pinkney, bound up confusedly with regret for those things that had never been spoken between them, knowing the strength of the kindness and the affection she had received. She owed Miss Pinkney everything, and knew it – owed her education, her escape, her present life. Life itself even.

Death. She held the word in her head, in her mouth, to taste and make sense of.

But after the funeral, she walked away, and found herself, out of past habit, taking her old route through the streets of the town towards the park, and the streets had not changed, so that she felt confused, as if she had stepped back into a dream world. She had changed. She had been a child then. Staring at the tall, cream-painted houses, the pillars, the flights of shallow steps, the half-moon fans above each door and the lace of wrought-iron railings
and balconies, she felt that she was looking into the past through a mirror.

It was cold, a brilliant day, the trees pricked clear against the sky. She walked on, and sometimes looked down in amazement at the paving stones beneath her feet, and they were the same stones, rubbed and scored in the same way, she remembered the marks upon each one, from time after time of stepping, looking down. The park gates were wide, as if the place waited for her.

At the funeral, there had been faces she knew, and which recognised and wanted to know her, but she had sat apart and not acknowledged anyone. They had been changed, as the brick and stone were not, strangers, now as then; but she could not be concerned about them, not out of aloofness, or even the simple difficulty of knowing in what way she might relate to them again. She was aware of nothing but grief.

The news of Miss Pinkney’s death had shaken her; on the journey, she had thought of her, remembered her words, her kindnesses, her presence – though, strangely, without being able to bring her face to mind. She had, she thought, been mourning, been moved, affected, distressed.

But, in truth, she had felt nothing. But, sitting in the hard, dark pew, seeing the coffin brought in and carried past her so closely that the arm of a bearer brushed her shoulder, a wave of realisation, and pain, had surged through her, knocking the breath from her body. She saw Miss Pinkney, her face, the set of the hair on her head, the odd way she often held out her hand as she spoke, all was as clear as day. But the woman she saw was here, on the stone step before her, she saw the face, the hair, the hands, tallow, stiff, still, cold, shrouded, lidded. Dead.

The words of the service came to her as though distorted, from deep under water, down a tunnel, or spoken in some obscure language. Her mouth was puckered and dry, so that she could neither pray nor sing.

She had not loved Miss Pinkney, in any sense she could make of that word, but she understood now that Miss Pinkney had loved her, unreservedly, generously, but almost impersonally, without desire, or thought of response or reward, and that the
love had been all-knowing, all-seeing; she had been able to rely upon it, without heed.

No one else, perhaps, would love her in such a way again.

As she walked from the church she wept and her weeping was for the death and for herself, and the terrible realisation.

She went through the gates of the park, and walked on, more slowly now, down the path, between grass and flowerbeds, under the formal trees, towards the water. A nurse pushed a pram. A grey woman sat hunched on a bench. In a lance of sunlight, a little wet dog stood, shivering, and they were apart, each contained within a bubble, separate, and separating.

The last section of the path bent round between great, dense laurel and holly bushes, so that the water was not visible, might not have been there, and coming upon it was always a surprise, every time she had always anticipated her own start of pleasure at the sudden reflection of the lake, curving so beautifully away.

Then, as with the rush of grief, so came the next thing, a devastating, split-second of presence, and awareness.

She was between the high, dark shrubs, out of the sunlight. A blackbird scuttled in the soil at the holly root, after fallen berries. The sky was bright, above her head. Somewhere, on the other side of the water perhaps, a child laughed. And in that second, Miss Pinkney was beside her, or just ahead, or at her shoulder, was all around, was close enough to touch, enveloping her, unseen but sensed and so absolutely that mere sight was quite unnecessary. The sense of her, the simple presence, made Flora stop dead, her hand flying to her mouth, made her say aloud, ‘Oh. Oh, so you are …’ And then, for a time out of time, they stood together, speaking what was not spoken. The vividness, the certainty and clarity of the moment which was less than a moment and was a lifetime, was absolute and imprinted on her heart and mind and memory forever, so that she never questioned or doubted it afterwards – nor spoke of it, save once. She did not look for meaning, reason, explanation, and neither understood nor tried to understand. That it had been was sufficient, then, and later.