The Service Of Clouds (21 page)

‘You have what is worth everything.’

(But the pictures are dead.)

‘An instinct, an eye … without those …’ His hand fluttered and then fell.

Flora had not answered. Tea was brought. He had talked to her of Vermeer and van Eyck, the cool, dim cathedrals of the Low Countries, his own particular passion.

‘I long to have it re-created by you, seen as if for the first time, seen afresh. That too is worth everything.’

She had felt sudden gratitude, and sadness for him, too, that she was to let him down, and to be a disappointment. The mahogany room and the heavy curtains, the soft cooing pigeon on the window ledge, the blade of sky, oppressed her as she had sat on, mutely, watching the gold signet ring on his thick finger as he stirred the tea around and around.

The kite swooped and dived madly down, then was stayed again, then snaked back up, and all around it the others bobbed like boats with the little white clouds behind. And as she had dived down into a numb misery, so now she soared suddenly into happiness, as if she too were being blown about lightly, freely, on the same breeze. The Hill was crowded. It was Saturday afternoon. But only the children’s faces were open and eager. How dull, how fretful the adults, how strained and worn and drawn and grey, she thought, how the light fades and the life seeps away, how quickly, it seems it is all soured.

The children ran about anyhow, their kites and their laughter streaming behind them in the bright air.

Looking up, she saw him. He stood with his back to her a dozen yards away. The bones of his neck stood out with the same fragility and bareness as she had once seen in the boy Hugh.

He wore the uniform of some foreign country, with an odd stand-up collar.

Afterwards it remained quite untarnished, unaltered, the momentary picture before he turned and looked towards her. No one else ever saw it and she told no one. The picture was hers only, of the young man standing with kites and clouds and children patterned behind.

And then the kaleidoscope was shaken.

His name was Henrjyk Tadeusz. He was on sick leave, he told her, to see some specialist in London and waiting to be
pronounced fit or unfit, to be recalled or else discharged. He had bowed a quick little, stiff bow from the neck.

‘I like to walk here. To be in the air.’

‘Yes.’

‘To see …’ He looked up, gesturing to the kites, making the shape of them with his hands.

‘The kites.’

‘Kites. Kites. Kites.’ He had laughed, perhaps at the word, at the kites themselves, at the scene around them, she could not tell.

‘Kites,’ and they had watched one that was higher than the rest, tugging on its string to get away. A small boy clung to it. His face as he looked at it soaring above him was rapturous.

‘Oh, it must not go,’ Flora said. ‘It must not break.’

‘It will not.’

She believed it, as a word from God.

‘It will not.’

He asked permission to sit beside her on the bench and they watched in silence as the kite flew, and, gradually, others were watching, other kites were ignored, and only this kite was the focus. She could not have told how long the time lasted. (Though in the end, the kite dipped as the wind veered. Others overtook it. People began to drift away.)

The afternoon was mild. They walked slowly to the other side of the Hill where they could look down on the great Ponds and the spring-fresh trees hazed green. She had had no thought of a companion, solitude was her natural state, and satisfying. But she neither resented his presence nor found it strange.

He was twenty-three and had been almost two years a soldier, under the usual State obligation. He neither liked nor disliked it. ‘You must do it,’ he shrugged.

The small town from which he came bordered hundreds of miles of woods. He hunted there with his brothers.

They stood quietly together at the top of the slope. ‘No hunting.’ He looked to where the elegant, civilised trees were
grouped in their parkland. Yet he liked London, he said, the river, the bridges, the buildings, liked the churches and squares and the faces of the people, he had walked for miles from the barracks where he was lodged, quite alone. As she did.

Leila Watson was with her dead husband’s family in Surrey, to which she went more and more now, and each time for longer, returning, perhaps, to familiar safety.

She must go, she said, at the gates where the Heath ran down to the ordinary street. (The kites and the children running were in her head, pictured forever.) He had bowed again, the odd quick little bow from the neck, and turned away.

His father had only one good leg – the other he dragged behind him, a dead weight, useless, after a wild boar had gored him. Henrjyk had been six years old – he had been sent home for help. His eyes had blazed in remembering the terror of it, as he told the story to her. (For of course they met again, on the following day, it had been all arranged, hastily, in a second just on parting.)

She had returned to the flat, running, and sat for the rest of the afternoon and into the dark, going over the meeting with Tadeusz carefully apart in her mind, and scrutinising each fragment, piecing the whole together again.

She had never talked so to any stranger, yet he was not a stranger and nothing about it was in any way surprising. She closed her eyes, and saw the trees that stood together at the bottom of the slope below them, saw their individual trunks and branches, dusted pale green, and the shadows below.

His family were all farmers, his father managed the whole of a great estate. His mother’s family had been professional and ‘higher-born’, he said. But they lived well, their house was good, he and his brothers had been to a good school in the university city.

‘What happened to the boar?’

‘Oh, my brother shot it of course. And I have never run too fast again!’

‘So fast.’

‘So fast. So fast,’ he repeated obediently.

They sat again on the Hill high above the trees, high above London. But there was cloud and a haze, little was visible. There were no children.

‘No kites.’

He spoke in great detail about his family so that she learned everything, names, animals, the ways of this or that neighbour, their daily routine, though he saw quickly that she did not like to be told of hunting.

It seemed to Flora, listening, that he came from a fairy story, a world of deep forests and wild boar and huntsmen and, it might be, witches and talking cats and gingerbread houses.

Tadeusz laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘perhaps. Those tales come out of these lives, these countries.’

Once or twice he asked about her own family, but she deflected the questions immediately with one of her own, so that in the end he looked at her with concern, his eyes grave upon her. But her life, and everything that had filled it until now, had no substance, no interest, she turned from it impatiently and towards him.

One day they did not meet because he had to spend it on temporary duty at the barracks, another because he was being seen by the specialist at the hospital, and those days were a blank landscape to her, and endless.

If there was nothing at all she wished him to know about her own past, her home, her family, she delighted in showing London and her knowledge of it off to him, telling what she knew, of martyrs at Tyburn and Princes in the Tower, of Kings crowned and statesmen and prelates and great soldiers on plinths, and ancient surrounding walls and pigeons wheeling; the river, the wharves, the dark alleyways and handsome squares, parks, playgrounds. The High Heath.

It rained and then they went to the galleries; she showed him
the pictures. They stood before the mighty Turner canvas of boiling spray and whirling cloud and brilliant light that streamed out towards them, and she saw with what respect he looked at it, his face absorbing the power and energy of the painting as he clenched and unclenched his fist.

When they came out, it was into sunshine. They sat on a bench and ate oranges he bought from a barrow. And she began to speak to him of the Rotunda Gallery, the white rooms, the picture of the woman on the couch before the open window. It was like the opening of a door, back into a place that had been closed to her.

She told him everything then.

Leila Watson mended stockings, the needle flicking neatly, evenly, in and out, in and out. The air beyond the open window was soft with spring. Men had mown the grass in the square.

‘It is new to you,’ she said, looking up. ‘It is all new.’

Flora turned.

‘Your face has changed. Everything shows in the face does it not? Love … grief.’ She smiled.

They had not met, Leila Watson and Henrjyk Tadeusz, Flora had not yet seen a way of bringing them together. But, suddenly, it seemed urgent, because life would change. Leila was returning to live in Surrey. She had a teaching post near her husband’s family, sisters and brothers-in-law, their little children. But being away alone in London had been very necessary, she said, she had been lost and needing to find herself again in her own way.

‘But now …’

It would have been a blow to her, a disaster, the thought of struggling all over again would not have been bearable.

‘But now …’

Leila Watson rolled up a stocking deftly. ‘Now you should go to Italy, and then to Bruges and Ghent. You owe it that.’

‘It?’

‘The past. Your commitment to those things. For the pictures have come to life again, have they not?’

Flora tried to imagine then how she might indeed go, saw herself in cobbled streets and vaulted churches, saw altar panels glowing, gilded, and yearned briefly to be amongst them, to drink from what they had to offer her. The past was a state infinitely to be desired then, because she had been alone in it, expectant and entirely free. ‘Life,’ she had thought, ‘what is it?’ But had not yet known. Life had still waited for her, somewhere safely in the far distance.

From this time, the past and that state of being were irrecoverable; she recognised that she was changed utterly, and the future was forever altered and, in some strange way, the thought was terrifying to her and gave her no joy. When she walked about among the pictures Tadeusz walked with her. His not doing so was unimaginable now.

There had not been such a spring for forty years, everyone said so, when the blossom came crowding in, profligate, hard upon the daffodils, and the hedgerows were like snow.

Sitting on the Hill, on the top of the world, looking up at the spinning sky, he began to teach her his language. ‘So that you will be a little ready.’

And so it was settled and natural and inevitable as her next breath, that she would be with him. There was so little likelihood of anything else that they scarcely needed to speak of it.

The world was shot through with a beauty and a translucence that dazzled her and, in her head, she composed the letter to her mother. But the writing of it was postponed day after day because, every minute, they must be together. They left London, and ate a picnic, resting on the flat slabs of tombstones in a churchyard, and the grass and the creamy heads of the cow parsley drowned them. The sky was pierced by spiralling larks.

He talked more and more about his country, his village, his house, the city in which he had gone to school, but she could not begin to picture them as real, as existing, solidly, now, at this hour, and merely not here but ‘there’. She must simply go there to discover it.

She would settle there. That was what her life would be. None of it was in question. He had written his letter, he said, and it was posted.

She looked at him, shocked with love. And then, turning from him, looked at the waves of blossom like the surf of a tide out of which the grey stones rose, and the tower of the church soaring to heaven. She thought, it is decided then. And went on looking, to seal the memory of tower, tombs, foaming blossom, this picture, along with those others that were hers forever.

‘There was nothing at all,’ she said later to Leila Watson, ‘and now there is everything. But how can that be?’

‘It cannot.’ She spoke gravely.

‘Everything, everything is changed.’

A pigeon pecked with little hard, darting pecks at the crumbs they had scattered on the ground around them. It was cooler with steel grey cloud. They were sitting in the square.

‘You are changed.’

‘Were you? You never speak of it.’ She looked into her friend’s calm, thoughtful face.

‘I think it was not – the same. You are overtaken by it. Yes, it is a sort of possession.’

‘It is all I know now. Nothing else exists. He is what I think of. He is what I am.’

‘No! You are Flora and not lost.’

Flora laughed, startling the pigeon with clapping wings into the air.

‘Lost. Oh, yes.’

‘A marriage is a very different thing.’

‘So solemn!’

Leila Watson smiled, a smile of something recalled. ‘No.’ She pulled her coat closer around her neck, and, in doing so, reminded Flora of a much older woman.