The Service Of Clouds (24 page)

She must remain one night, then, for there was no further train, and return to London the following day. But return to where? And she would not go to Surrey, to Leila Watson – she would not give in to that easy, comfortable solution.

She was tired. Her head ached. The boy had carried her trunk to The Ship Private Hotel.

That evening, the sky over the sea had been silken and pale. Flora had walked beside it along the path and then climbed the wall and jumped down on to the deep shingle and walked there, her face to the sea and sky until the light left it and there was only a
soft, still, violet dark on the surface of the water. Then, she had turned and looked back to the lights that shone from the huddle of houses that marked out the town. Here then, she had said. For why not? Where else? Whatever had brought her, what chance, what accident, what betrayal (as she thought of things then) was not relevant. Here.

And all the pieces fell into place.

That night she slept as she had not slept for weeks, and in the course of it she seemed to travel, travel a thousand miles for a thousand years, for when she woke, she was another person, and the rest of her life, the old life, was over and half-forgotten. She could scarcely remember the faces of Leila Watson and even of Tadeusz. The people she had known, the places in which she had lived, seemed to have fragmented and blown away in pieces on the wind that came from the sea.

The sensation of having no past, or constraints, and of the infinite possibility and reassurance of this present, made her light-headed. She went out early, to walk again along the sea’s edge, seeing the gulls wheel and turn and drop suddenly through the pale clouds, and even her own name, Flora Hennessy, seemed strange and unrelated to her.

Later that same day she had taken her job, fallen upon the work, the place, the people, with the rapture of a new discovery, and of a solution to her emptiness, and had remained there, through her mother’s death, through her own move to the cottage, through day after orderly settled day, for years. Until now. Until now.

It was the shop that she had fallen in love with. Later, even her son understood that.

On the first morning, she had come into the back room of the hotel from her walk along the shingle and asked, knowing quite certainly that she wanted to stay here, about the possibility of work. The woman behind the counter and the woman polishing the tables had stood, looking at her, looking at one another. Looking.

‘There’s Desmond’s,’ one said at last, ‘Miss Desmond has been wanting.’

And so it came about.

The shop was the only double-fronted one, on the south side of the street; there were blinds to be drawn down on many afternoons, against the sun, but the shop itself was set back, dark and cool within.

It was the orderliness and the pattern of it that so pleased her, the way things were arranged. The materials were on rolls laid beside one another in order of type, of weight, of colour, patterned, plaid, plain, linings and outers, the silks and cottons in glass-fronted drawers that rattled as they were pulled, the balls of wool fitted into triangular spaces. Below the counters were the buttons, the pins, the needles, the fasteners and hooks, and those drawers were lifted up and set on top of the counter for their contents to be displayed. On the other side of the shop, the drawers contained gloves, collars and cuffs, belts, tray cloths, and, in the cardboard boxes discreetly racked beneath them, underwear. Further back, in an ante-room, were the furs and the millinery, with which only Miss Desmond herself had to do.

‘You have a good sense of colour,’ Miss Desmond said, after only a single day, and then, ‘You have a tidy mind.’

There were Miss Desmond and Miss Lea, one tall, one very short, both thin, spare, colourless, immaculate, deferential to customers, and yet retaining a pride and a dignity which was pleasing to Flora. She loved the place and her work there from the moment she began and might have been there forever and the old life lived by another person whose memory she had by chance inherited. But she did not look back. She had decided something, and quietly closed the door.

She arrived at the shop at five minutes to nine and left at five past six. They closed for lunch between one and two fifteen.

Sometimes during the day she would look out of the long windows on to the triangle of sky and see a gull sail and wheel around and sometimes, opening the door for a customer, she caught, behind the sounds of the street, beyond the to-ings and
fro-ings and everyday life of it, the smell or boom of the sea, and was happy.

‘We knew Miss Judaker,’ Miss Desmond had said. ‘You would scarcely have been happy there.’

The house had been pointed out to her, red brick, heavy, ugly, on the hill past the church.

They asked no impertinent questions. She suited them. They told her little about themselves. (At six fifteen, Miss Lea caught the bus to a village four miles inland and her infirm mother. Miss Desmond walked along the high street and turned left and out of sight, to a narrow, tall house pressed between two much larger ones, in a thin dark street.)

They were the only store of its kind, and had a reputation – people travelled miles to them, orders were despatched. There was a boy, Lennie Cheat, who worked in the back room, packing, and taught Flora how to tie the string in a little handle around a brown paper parcel.

After a month she felt that she had been here forever, and lived in her dim room in the hotel, and walked over the shingle and down to the edge of the water, and took down the heavy fabrics, the silks and the cottons and the tweeds, and unrolled them skilfully across the counter just so far, and slit them with the points of sharp shears, and re-arranged the reels of thread in exact order in the shallow drawers. Recognising her worth, Miss Desmond improved her starting wage within three months, so that she could afford to rent the tiny cottage and believed that she would indeed live here forever. For in this life she felt safe; things were ordered, within her control and predictable. Her ambitions had left her. It seemed she had no need, now, for the wild dreams and hopes, for the longings that the paintings had stirred in her; she was wary of friendships or involvements, anything at all outside the boundaries of the ordinary day. For a long time she did not even take the bus out into the countryside around the town to discover what it might be like there. Sometimes, visiting the lending library for books, she looked at the little museum attached to the reading room, with its relics from ships and fossils
and shells, stones and preserved sea-creatures and dark, varnished pictures of terrible sea-wrecks and bearded mariners. The wood-panelled room with its high schoolroom windows and wooden floor, its oak tables and chairs and the cupola up to which she could look to see the sky above, reminded her just sufficiently of the Rotunda Gallery to comfort her in the knowledge that, should she need it, the past was still there, still in place.

There were glass cases containing papers and charts and maps, complicated weather instruments and tide tables, and she learned from them slowly, as if she were learning a foreign language and came gradually to love it. No one troubled her there. Only from time to time some old man came in to read a newspaper, or simply to sit, and peer at her oddly.

Summer went, and autumn, in soft golden light off the sea, before winter came raging in with storms and gales. The gulls were tossed about the sky like paper scraps and the cold air and spray lashed her skin, the booming of the wind and the sea at night were terrifying. The shop smelled of the oil stove, as well as of its silks and tweeds and wool and threads.

In November, the telegram came from Olga, about her mother’s stroke.

She would travel, Miss Desmond gave her leave at once, she was to stay until matters were resolved one way or another. She dreaded it. The thought of the journey back into the past and her childhood, the old life, froze her heart. But before she could even set out the second telegram came. Without opening it, she knew, and knew that she should weep, feel grief, pain, regret, shock, but she could not, only relief. She must still go but the journey would not be terrible now, and she would be free to return at once, without ties or duties.

She left wearily on the first morning train and the countryside was scoured and raw and colourless, with a thin, mean, bitter rain that stung her as she waited on the platform beneath the scalloped shelter of the roof, where the sparrows had once squabbled in the warm dust.

When the telegram came, she had known without opening it that May Hennessy was either dying or dead but as she held it in her hand her first thought was that she had kept the shame to herself – for that she worked behind the counter of a draper’s shop would have been shame to her mother, who had believed even the position of private governess to be a humiliation. But a tutor, the teacher of a child, although still a domestic servant in her eyes, was one of a superior kind. There was no superiority that could be claimed for any form of shop work.

But she had never known. The few letters Flora wrote to her had been at first full of careful lies about Miss Judaker and the position she held as her companion, and later, merely evasive. She had wanted to protect her mother from the truth, protect the last of her dignity and her sense of their standing and importance, perhaps out of guilt, because she was so distant from her, and had gone her own chosen way so wilfully, without any regret or a single glance backwards.

As she arrived the rain greeted her, the old familiar, sodden, billowing clouds and wind, the waterlogged fields, the dull, poor, dark little villages, their roofs shining with rain. Her childhood had been lived under these skies, in this greyness, this rain.

To return was terrible because she so disliked her home, but more, because of her dread, dread at what she would find, and at the memories which would rise up within her, dread at being
trapped and sucked back into the confinement and narrowness of the old life.

There was nothing for her here. There had never been anything. She knew it, riding on the bus out of town and down the endless, dull country road. Only her past awaited her and she was done with that and wanted none of it. (But in her dreams the previous night she had walked down Lord’s Parade and gazed and gazed in joy into the glittering shop windows, until she saw that out of the window of every one she herself gazed back.)

She walked into the dark, damp-smelling, frowsty back parlour of the house.

‘I’ll go up,’ she said to Olga, who was so much older, was adult now, and yet still the spoilt-faced, ringleted child to her. ‘When I’ve had tea. If there’s tea?’

‘Yes. Oh, of course there is tea. There’s anything you want.’

‘Upstairs?’

‘Oh, no. No, she’s not here. Not upstairs. She’s at Flynn’s, the undertaker, you know? And later this evening to the church. The body rests all night in the church, you know. It’s usual. She went back to it all you see, Flora, did you not know? Did she not tell you? She was very religious these last years. It was all she’d left to her.’

For you left too, Flora thought, looking at her sister, you could not bear to stay here any more than I.

The kitchen was cold and smelled fungoid, of damp wooden sills and draining board and stale food. Beyond the window the road, the flickering light of a single car. Then darkness again. Rain.

Olga had gone to the city to work in a dancing school. Soon now, she might try for America, she said. Why not? She had a pouting, old-young face, the same bland eyes, the same willingness to sing and dance and perform her way through life and into favour.

‘Should you want to go down later? To Flynn’s?’

‘Yes.’ Though she did not wish it.

‘Yes, I said so. I asked Macey’s car to come for us at seven o’clock.’

‘Yes.’

At the window of her old room she stood and stared at the darkness and was cold and the house seemed to put out tendrils that wound around her and suckers that clung to her, threatened to absorb her and drain her new life from her, and succeeded for a while, so that she could not remember it, could not picture the sea, the cottage, the inside of the shop, but instead, only had before her a picture of the garden of the house called Carbery, on the day they buried the boy Hugh. Her new life had ceased to exist, then, the place was not there, or else, worse, it was there but had no knowledge of her, and she did not belong there and could not reach it.

Olga came to the door. She wore the short jacket with the beaver collar. Flora felt awkward, foolish, beside her. Younger.

‘Macey’s is here.’ Olga’s lipstick was dark and thick as blood.

But she took Flora’s arm out of the front door and down the path and held it even in the taxi on the dark journey to Flynn’s.

The undertaker’s had frosted windows, lettered in gold like a saloon bar, and leather benches in a cold front parlour, and the whey-faced, ingratiating Mr Flynn. A terrible place, it seemed to her.

Only the sight of May Hennessy was not terrible at all.

‘She is young,’ Flora said, and felt her eyes swim. ‘She is …’

Not soured, puckered, yellowed, shrivelled, as she had looked in life, not disappointed and thin, with all the life and hope and pleasure, such as there had ever been, gone out of her. Not old and stained and lonely, as she had become. Not a dead-looking thing. Seeing her now, Flora saw death and that it was nothing but a healing and a great mercy. She was young, her brow smooth as a girl’s, her hair brushed freshly back from her face. Then, guilt and remorse and shame drained from her, for whatever had gone before, for all was resolved.