The Service Of Clouds (20 page)

They stayed for three nights and on the first she dreamed of the house in Linney Street, walked in the door and through each of the rooms, sat on the back step and, looking down the garden, saw every bush, every plant in place just as they had been, and woke in tears for the happiness she had known there and would not go near that side of the town.

On the second evening, pinning up the hem of a dress she was altering for her, kneeling in front of her on the floor, her mother said abruptly, ‘Have you felt no need of children, Elizabeth?’

The question was shocking because her mother had never spoken intimately, never, even in her girlhood, asked such private things and Elizabeth recognised that she had been able to do it now only under the pressure of her own need.

She did not reply and after a long time of silence in which her mother knelt and pinned and moved and pinned again, the question which had lain heavily between them was simply no longer there, though the void left by it was unbridgeable.

That night she did not dream, and scarcely slept, but lay silent and still, searching about for the truth of her own feelings. Children had not been born to them, that was the fact, children had never been in any way referred to, and after the first year of their marriage there had not been the opportunity made for them. She did not know why, could not have asked, and when she tried to bring them to mind now the visions were altogether strange, of the white, bland babies in cribs and small children with jerky movements, she saw them as if in the far distance, walking about and calling and now and again turning to her to stare. They were not hers, she felt no interest in them and knew quite certainly that he would not. Instead she simply saw the two of them and their lives that were parallel and inseparable and which ran ahead of her on and on until they became faint and finally invisible. The lines seemed to have no interruption in their smoothness, no bends or breaks and neither point nor purpose.

London. The summer, but only fitfully hot. Clouds like mushrooms billow up over the black river and behind the domes and spires, the roofs and towers.

Flora, writing her papers, meticulously and with growing confidence, able to express and articulate, to justify, Flora, sitting, receptive, quiet and contained for hours in the galleries and afterwards in front of book after book. Flora walking in the wind and fleeting sun beside the river.

Flora is beautiful. The illness has done that for her, carved out her bones and tautened the flesh, paled and refined her.

Flora, one Sunday afternoon, suddenly, bewilderingly, blindingly dissatisfied, made angry by the pictures, as though she were starving and they were mirages of food that dissolved to an airy nothingness before her.

[She had gone restlessly, hungrily about the galleries, frantic, feverish, snatching at this one or that, a red, a stroke of white on white, a blue, a shadow, a cloud, a shape, a reflection, a line, longing to be fed, to cram this beauty, this treasure into her for sustenance until she should be satisfied. But they remained as pictures only, hard and inanimate upon the grey walls, giving her nothing, leaving her ravenous.]

Flora running, shocked and full of fear, down the steps and along the pavements and across the wide road to lean on the wall looking down at the black water, the river flowing away from her.

‘Something has happened,’ Leila Watson said. They had not yet lit the lamp. The setting sun splashed scarlet across the sky above the roofs of the square and the room was briefly on fire around them.

They sat opposite one another at the table, books spread. Flora did not speak, could not have told what had happened. That day was packed tight painfully within her: she did not understand it, was unable to clear her thoughts, but only sat mute and pale in the small sitting room among the drapes and cushions. She had returned to find Leila working quietly at marking her pupils’ books and the sight of her and her stillness had calmed her and taken the edge off her fear. They had had tea. She had made a show of working.

‘Something has happened.’

Leila Watson seemed suddenly older and infinitely wise, knowing her own mind calmly, seeing her own way ahead.

The sky darkened and the walls of the room closed in upon them. There were clouds, gunmetal grey, bramble black, where the sun had been and, for a moment, desperately, Flora looked at the sky as on a picture in the frame of the window. But it was not a picture, the flaring beauty had left no trace and panic filled her.

‘The pictures are dead,’ she said, and turned to Leila at last, her face white and streaming now with tears.

Leila did not move to comfort her or speak bland and easy
words, but only sat gravely waiting for Flora to ask for what she might need. But she needed nothing; Leila’s calm and quiet acceptance were sufficient to steady her, so that at last she was able simply to set the thing aside until she could bear to face it again.

Something has happened.

The pictures are dead.

The facts were like small hard stones in some bleak and sunless landscape.

And so they sat as the room grew quite dark except for the faint lightness of Leila Watson’s pale grey dress and the whiteness of Flora’s face, turned towards the window. But after a time Leila got up and turned on the lamp and the pools of dim light seemed in some way to unite them and re-kindle their first intimacy. The books were cleared, the table laid for supper. The curtains were left undrawn, so that the half-moon, when it rose, was clear in the sky over the rooftops on the far side of the square.

‘How confident you are,’ Flora said suddenly, ‘how surely you move. As if you had the answers to things. As if you knew.’

Leila Watson looked up with amusement from laying out segments and quarters of fruit in a pattern on her plate.

‘Knew?’

‘Knew everything. What life is. Death. Yes – knew everything.’

Flora watched the meticulous peeling of the apple, heard the soft moist sound as the blade moved through the flesh.

‘Perhaps you have come up against a terrible truth. Is it terrible? That what you had nailed your colours to is not enough, after all.’

‘That the pictures are dead?’

‘Or if not dead, at any rate no substitute for life.’

‘But you,’ Flora said urgently, ‘what do you have? What is enough for you? What is your secret?’

‘Oh, it is no secret.’

‘Then what? Whatever it is, I envy you.’

‘I learned,’ Leila Watson said at last, ‘to settle for just enough. It gets me through the days sufficiently well.’

Flora looked into her broad-browed face with the hair plaited
around it, and the heavy-lidded eyes, and realised with shame then how little she had cared to know of her, for fear of disturbing the equilibrium of their friendship, provoking confessions, emotions, revealing some chasm of need and longing and loss and distress.

‘How bleak then,’ she said.

‘Not at all bleak. But what has happened – what is happening – to you is important. Or at any rate to be taken as –’ She held up a segment of orange but did not eat it.

‘As?’

‘Oh …’ Leila Watson shrugged.

‘You must say.’

‘Well then, as a sign. A message. At any rate, something with meaning.’

‘What meaning? To have taken away what has been – everything. Yes, yes, it has been everything, that is the simple truth. To have all certainty and assurance thrown about anyhow. To have lost all meaning. What “meaning” has that?’

She felt passionately, ragingly angry.

‘What is left? What is there now for me?’

‘Everything, still,’ Leila Watson said quietly after a moment. ‘Yes. I think – everything.’

The moon was curved and bright as a blade in the sky beyond the window and they remained in silence for a long time, looking out at it.

‘We will go together – or rather, you will take me and show me through your eyes. I am going to learn everything from you.’

Leila Watson wore her brown hat and the coat with the seal collar and an expression, Flora thought, altogether middle-aged, as a governess, a nanny, an aunt. But they were going to one of the galleries – she herself was to choose which – and there, she would be the guide and the teacher, Leila the pupil. But she could not shake off the feeling of a great disparity between them in age and assurance. Leila Watson knew her place in the world.

‘But you,’ she said, ‘know pictures. Your eyes are open. Mine have never been.’

Flora dared not say again, ‘The pictures are dead.’ She knew that she should be grateful for the chance Leila wanted to give to her, and her optimism. But, instead, she felt both nervous and in some odd way patronised.

She chose what she knew would distress her least, a gallery she rarely visited because nothing at all within it had ever pierced her heart; yet about everything there would be plenty to say, narrative and substance and history, myths and legends that could be explained very satisfactorily and interpreted, stories retold. There were formal, heavy, solemn, dark pictures, grave and distant pictures, about which she could be didactic and towards which she felt simply dutiful. She could shelter behind them. It
was crowded, with other dutiful people. They walked slowly and in silence from room to room before the gilded frames.

Dido’s Lament before Carthage. The Muse Apollo. Sisyphus. Eurydice. Actaeon. The Flight into Egypt. The Annunciation. The Martyrdom of St. Stephen. Strong, rocky, desert landscapes full of caves and little stunted trees and serpents.

But after a time, in a remote room which few of the Sunday crowds had penetrated, Leila Watson stopped. The walls were magnificent with cardinals and popes.

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Not here.’

At once, Flora felt herself close like some mollusc retreating into its shell when touched. She would not be followed there. For Leila had seen through her perfectly well.

‘Not in this place. Whatever has been alive for you, whatever you could show me, is not here.’

‘No.’

‘Well then, I understand.’ She looked round in sudden amusement at the draped prelates with proud, sharp faces, thin lips, cold eyes, mean mouths. ‘Would it be here for anyone do you suppose? And if so whatever kind of a person would they be!’

They left quickly, pushing their way through the crowds, to walk, arms linked, through the Sunday streets of London, and Flora felt both relieved of her burden and of any need to speak about it to Leila Watson again.

Children were playing with kites that rose, sailed, soared about in a hundred colours, and the children ran with them laughing, faces upturned, pushing into the wind. Flora saw them as a picture, the habit she could not lose, and from where she sat, at the top of the Hill, London lay at her feet and the air between was blue as smoke. A great happiness seized her, making her want to run in the wind, soar up and dance with the kites. It had happened so often before, that life seemed to be waiting for her, at any moment she would be borne away on it.

But it had happened, too, that she had been deceived before. She had asked, ‘Life – what is “life” to be?’

Life is this. Kites swooping crazily in the wind and the upturned faces of the children.

Their cries were blown back to her across the heath. She saw the old picture then, the boy Hugh, sloe-eyed and solemn in the back of the Lagonda car.

Life, she said.

Death.

The tail of a kite snaked to and fro, streaming its little coloured bows.

On the previous day she had visited the magazine offices, at the request of the proprietor, whom she had thought of as her
benefactor. He had stood, huge, dome-headed, blocking out the little light from the street behind him, and looked at her with interest, benignly – yet she had been made uncomfortable by his stare. ‘And I am not a child. I am not even so very young now,’ she had thought. For it was only the truth. (Yet she felt herself a small, scrubby thing, nevertheless, in this great mahogany room.) There were piles of books on the table, volumes of his magazines and journals bound up in green leather. Solid things.

‘The pictures are dead.’ But she could not have said it.

He would pay for her to visit Venice and Florence and Rome, and later Bruges and Ghent. He had said as much before, she thought, watching a pigeon strut about, cooing fatly, on the blackened ledge; and before him Miss Pinkney – there had been so many plans, so much excited talk.

The sky was opalescent between the chimneys and she had a sudden picture of sunlight gilding stone, of carved Renaissance faces, warmth like peach flesh, high-ceilinged galleries and domed churches, and for a few seconds went spinning into it, seized and caught.

‘I could not go,’ she said aloud. (For the pictures were dead.)

‘It is not charity.’

She was silent.

‘You would be going to work, on my behalf, at my commission.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I believe that you have a talent.’

‘But I am no one. I am almost untrained.’