The Service Of Clouds (19 page)

The weather calmed and brightened, though it was still cold. She could not have gone outside. The dogs were walked again. She recognised some of them now as they snuffled about the gate. There were people to greet. She began to smile at them, and, after a while, it was by her smile that she came to be known, and remarked upon.

It had begun in this way all those years ago, with Elizabeth at home in her pain, yet not unhappy, not in need of him. Or so it seemed.

The epidemic of death was easing; the previous night they had not called him, he had slept through, on the mattress in their old flat. So many of the old were tough as leather, only strengthened not outworn by the hard life, surviving and sitting up now bright-eyed in their beds, sharp-witted and triumphant at having skipped nimbly out of the way of death.

He had been standing in the corridor, pausing outside the swing doors, and the life of the place seemed renewed and reinvigorated, it hummed like electricity around him, he heard the voices, the footsteps, purposeful, cheerful, and felt pleasure and satisfaction in it and a sense of belonging.

Then, from within a cubicle, a single voice sharp with impatience and with another note, too, of something like cruelty, something like pleasure.

‘You’ll lie down again there.’

Nothing more. ‘You’ll lie down again there.’ But spoken with finality and with malice.

Molloy stepped forward a few paces quietly into the little curtained space. Bare bed, bare walls and the light glaring in. The old woman had fallen back, cowed and silent on to the thin pillow. Her eyes were tear-pricked, glittering, afraid.

‘Nurse?’

A young girl, loosely fat, pasty from laziness and self-indulgence, hair ill-combed beneath the cap. He moved up to the bed and saw the frightened, darting eyes on his face searching for reassurance.

‘Are you not comfortable?’ And he put out his hand to her, and after a moment she drew hers out from beneath the bedcover and first touched, then clutched at him.

‘We were wanting to sit up, would you believe? In such a state!’

‘Fetch another pillow. Help me with the backrest.’ He was angry, scarcely able to look into the girl’s bold face, spoke to her as he did not often speak to any staff, and she was all aware of it.

The woman was dying, would die, of a carcinoma but the disease moved slowly through her as it will through the tissues of the very old, she was weakening and failing not suffering aggressive pain. She would take her time over her dying which he believed to be her privilege but the girl was impatient, had thought there was nothing left, no human being worth bothering with, no point in prolonging matters. A stupid girl; but others were stupid and yet had gentleness and sensitivity. She had none. He noted it.

The woman was named Ettie Marshall. He had propped her up on three pillows and sponged her hands and face, drawn the blind a little against the glare.

‘But I like to know what is going on in the world out there, I don’t like to be all shut in and dark,’ she said.

She had had a husband, long ago, but no children, a father and mother and five brothers and all were dead. She had locked her own front door for the last time, she said.

In the sluice room the nurse talked to herself under cover of the running tap. Where was the point of dragging it out, she’d no one, she’d be more comfortable dead, best off, she’d a body like an old scrawny hen, she’d lost her teeth, she was the sort of old woman like the witches of her childhood who had screamed at her for being a slut, fatherless and dirty, for any reason and none, because they came from the wrong side of the track. But she was
better than any of them now, young still and with some authority. The water ran round and round in the bedpan she was holding. She watched it idly, not caring to move. ‘Witch,’ she said.

It had begun in that way. He sat with Ettie Marshall for an hour and returned late that night and through the weeks that followed – for her life extended into weeks after all and she sparkled with it, with the enjoyment and the laughter and the remembering. He let her remember and the memories flowed through her veins and refreshed and strengthened her so that the sickness shrank back a little, and was quieted like an animal cowering and tamed for a while, and slept in its cave. He gave her what no one had given to her since childhood, for she had had happiness then, and love and running riot with her brothers, health and gaiety and company. But then a bad marriage to a morose man and only loneliness after. So she told him. What he gave her was time in which to tell, quietness in which to remember. He prompted her with a question now and then and his questions stirred the memories so that sparks shot up through them and they blazed.

And he realised the satisfaction of it, listening to Ettie Marshall hour after hour and the time he took and his presence beside her were his atonement, for he would have sat in this way with his mother when she lay dying. He had not but only because she had kept her dying from him, out of her fierce, passionate love and protectiveness and ambition for him. He had been taking the first-year examinations. But in sitting with Ettie Marshall he sat with her, in giving life back to this old woman even as she was dying he could begin to forgive that other, most terrible betrayal.

Ettie Marshall spoke of childhood happiness and married misery, of joy and cruelty, freedom and love, bitter isolation and disappointment. Every day there was something freshly, vividly remembered and so restored to her, before being in its turn laid to rest and he in his turn told her his own stories, his own truth, told everything that he remembered together with his most dark and private feelings in a way he had never told any other soul nor ever would again. When she received what he had to say, as a gift given, she took it without remark and so he felt that she had
buried it and that it was safe. He had carried secrets, hurt, dark matters, and they had been a burden and the telling of them eased him so that now he had no need ever to speak of those things again, they were his but no longer only and painfully his.

When the time came for her to die – for the beast was only sleeping, after all, and stirred and woke and sprang eventually – he remained with her day and night and would have no one else near her. He eased her, kept company with her, tended to her, and she asked him the questions about death that were unanswerable. It was the first dying that he took upon himself of hundreds and he learned everything from it but most of all that this was home to him at last, his true vocation.

‘Shall I close my eyes?’

‘Or they will be closed for you.’

‘Will you be the one to close them?’

‘I will.’

‘No other?’

‘No other.’

‘Shall I see my brothers?’

‘I believe it.’

‘Here in this room?’ Her eyes were hungry on his face.

‘Do you want it?’

‘I’m afraid of it not being so. Will it be so?’

‘Your brothers – tell me.’

She told him through hour after hour, night after night, all the time he could spare to her, which became all the time that he had, and as she told him of her brothers and her childhood days with them like wild things in the hills, fetching the horses down bareback holding on to their manes, driving the sheep in and fishing the waters, she was born again and lived it anew. The marriage had been endurance and hard grey years, but the man had died in the end, a sudden death, shocking, brutal and then over, releasing her to make the best of things. And as Molloy sat listening, wiping her face now and then as she talked to him, he saw the procession of all the people she had once been pass through her again in turn, saw them in her face and on the flush of her skin, the brightness of her eye. This sallow husk had been a
firm-fleshed, bounding child and a young girl and a grown, vigorous woman and all were here packed into her small, brittle frame, the room was full of spirits; she was dying and yet fully, blindingly alive here with him. He was drawn back and back to her, absorbed, attentive, wrapt; in giving to her he paid what for so long he believed that he had owed.

He sat with her until her death and after it, closed her eyes and went with her through the corridors to the morgue, and abandoned her there. Afterwards he drove to the sea and walked alone beside it and knew and cared nothing that at the hospital, they talked of him, whispering among themselves.

‘I wonder that you wanted us to be married. I do often wonder that now.’

She had never mentioned such a thought. But on this early morning, after the night of Ettie Marshall’s death, she had been up at first light and in the kitchen, sitting at the table in her dressing gown and waiting for him.

‘Are you not happy, Elizabeth?’

He had asked it of her before.

‘I often wonder it now – just what would have been your reason.’

‘Do we not do well enough together?’

‘Well enough.’

He set a pot of fresh tea on the table between them.

‘But it seems that you have no need of me – of anyone at all, that you need only your work to satisfy you, day and night.’

‘An old woman was dying.’

‘Yes.’

‘Died.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was with her.’

‘Oh and there is good in that, all the good. I could not do it.’

‘You might.’

‘No.’

He felt restless and awkward under her questioning.

‘You are closed against me. Shut away from me. Well, I suppose there is nothing more to be said.’

‘Then you are unhappy.’

‘I am …’ She stared ahead and he saw now that she was searching as she often searched but could never find an answer.

‘I will do as you ask, whatever you want.’

‘But it is not a case of that – of doing.’

‘I cannot change.’

‘I would not ask it.’

He stood, drained suddenly and exhausted after the hours of watching beside Ettie Marshall, his limbs weak as water.

‘Go to bed!’ Elizabeth said.

‘It troubles me. What you say.’

‘It need not.’

He felt helpless. Things were as they were. He did not want talk such as this and questions, probing, disturbance, had never had those things, he needed her as she was, self-contained and quiet, needed the equilibrium.

‘There is nothing to be done,’ she said.

They were silent for a moment. He saw that her hair was dry as a bird’s nest, as though starved of some essential nourishment that once had given life to it.

‘I have never wanted things otherwise.’

‘Well then.’

‘You should know that. We do what we do and live with it afterwards. I did not ask for you without thought or caring.’

‘No.’

‘I would have you content too, Elizabeth.’

‘Am I to believe it?’

‘Yes. What else would you do?’

‘Nothing. Nothing else.’

He left her then, sitting in front of the china teapot with the birds patterned on the rim and the kitchen walls watery with early morning sunlight and knew that she would continue to sit there, separated from him by her thoughts and questionings for a long while as he slept.

But he did not sleep at once, for her questionings had entered
his head and they fluttered there, disturbing him, and he asked them of himself now over and over without lighting upon the answers, and in the end had to leave them. He had married Elizabeth and told the truth that it had not been without thought or caring. It had been right, but there were no reasons that he could have named to her and reasons did not signify. They were as they were and life went on. His fulfilment, his satisfaction and purpose were elsewhere, as she knew and had always known, in the past and with the dying and all of it lay like a chasm between them.

The following week he took her home to her mother and father and to the shop, where nothing had changed in the least detail so that she felt faint at the sight of it and at the old familiar smell as she walked through the door, the past rushed up and knocked the breath from her.

It was such a little time ago, her life here and her growing up, and all the neatness and order of it before she had met Molloy, yet she felt so changed, so far removed from it in age and time and distance, as though she were altogether a stranger.

When he had told her that they would come – for the death of Ettie Marshall had released something in him, earthed him somehow so that he was able to give this time easily and freely to her – she had not slept for the pleasure and anticipation.

Yet sitting across the hearth from her mother and father she felt the old disappointment, and the sense of being even more excluded. They were content, locked into their tight little world, governed by the absolute and regular pattern of their days, harmonious, inward-turned, wanting no other. They asked kindly about her home, her life and his, the hospital, the small differences there must be of weather or habits, the lie of their land, the sea, that might be of some interest, yet she saw that they were not interested. They cared for her, loved her, dutifully and honestly; if she had ceased to exist she thought that they would mind it for a while but then scarcely notice it or remember her after.