The Service Of Clouds (28 page)

The sight of them together filled Lawrence Molloy with fear. His banishment was absolute so that he knew it would only be a short time before, her protection having been withdrawn, the demons would crowd in upon him again. He escaped to the world outside, driving through the snow-filled lanes as the voices began to whisper, goading him on. He must concentrate fiercely on his counting, trees, fence posts, mile posts, crows, to placate and silence them. Only sitting in the room of the cottage with her and their son on the edge of the charmed circle of blinding light was he at ease and for the time being held by their force for good.

There was no unkindness about her, simply an absence from him, her withdrawal as she was caught up and held fast in the radiance of the child. He looked on, bemused, awed, fearful, and did not intrude, but fetched her things she wanted, spoke little, respected her state of possession.

She wanted this time never to end, the snow never to melt, the year never to move on, the child to remain as bound up with her as this, coiled away from the world. She lay awake as he slept to hold to the time, to feel its every moment of passing, and prayed for him never to leave her.

He did not. In the town it was always remarked upon, and with disapproval, that never had there been such a mother and son, never any so close, so inseparable. Unhealthy they said, unnatural. She held herself aloof, uninterested in what was said or in those who said it, and kept him aloof also. The truth was that they were inexpressibly happy, that the joy they had in one another’s company strengthened each day, that they were all in all to one another; and she saw nothing but good, it was as though her life had been a progress only towards this.

Her horizons had been closing in and her world had shrunk, but now, for all that she was in the same place, the same closed circle, all things seemed hers and all to be marvelled and wondered at, with him and through his eyes.

He was a quiet, steady child, alert and aware from birth, and yet, like her, quite contained. Everything interested him, everything he saw, learned, touched, tasted, fascinated him, he was eager for life, but if he felt any excitement or impulsiveness, restrained it. He was easy and even tempered, slept, ate, played, walked, talked with her or at the least in her company, scarcely cried or expressed impatience or frustration.

The bubble in which they were held during the days after his birth never burst, it sheltered them, sealing them off from the rest of life. Often, years afterwards, she was transported back to that time in dreams and recollections. In her last weeks the memory sustained her, as a balm to all pain, all distress. She forgot
nothing, every detail was hers, to return to freely and dwell upon. Closing her eyes, night or day, she was back in her bedroom overlooking the sea in the brilliant light, surrounded by the softly falling snow, and he beside her. Every hair on his head was numbered. It was in those first days, too, that at last she understood May Hennessy and, in understanding, forgave. With her son’s birth she had crossed a one-way bridge and on the other side of it now was knowledge of the love and concern and anxiety her mother had had for her. There was nothing sentimental about her new-found knowledge. She had no longing for her mother, felt no further grief and scarcely ever spoke to her son about that time, that place; nor did she ever regret her own independence. Only now, in place of resentment and bitterness, there was healing and an understanding of the truth about the way things had been. If she had been haunted, the ghosts now had been laid to rest by his birth. If there were anxiety, guilt, fear, it was her husband who was at the heart of them, for she saw clearly that he was absorbed in some inner turmoil, withdrawn from her, preoccupied. He returned home less and less, and always without warning, but on seeing her, sitting with the child in her arms or sleeping close beside her, he seemed momentarily quieted. He would eat and talk a little and, always, he brought a gift for her pleasure, some scrap of colour, and brightness.

Once, he brought a silk-lined lidded basket in which she might keep every ribbon and piece of silk, and he felt that he had brought her a delight which was only his to give.

He continued to be nervous of the boy, and distant from him out of anxiety, as if, it seemed, he feared that he might damage him by his very presence and the proximity of the things that troubled him.

If Flora did not love him, had no love to spare for any other living thing, she was nevertheless intensely protective towards him, and always kind, perhaps out of a feeling of guilt (though no guilt attached to her, for in truth in marrying Lawrence Molloy she had granted him a reprieve, had held back the voices and the madness, so that he had known for the first time in his life an
absence of fear, before the tide rose up again and came racing to drown him).

The rest of her life, lived out in absolute love, absolute peace and pleasure with her son, might have been eternity, so slow, so crammed, so intense were the days, and yet it was the blinking of an eye, there, now, gone. Everything progressed, as it would, as life does, and all was orderly and nothing disturbed the even surface (save for her husband’s distress and illness and final terror, lost to the voices and their punishments).

After his death, when Hugh was four years old, the final, never-ending battle was simply to survive, for there was no money, quite plainly no money at all. She faced that sitting alone one autumn night after the funeral, with the boy asleep in the room above. She must support them, and they must remain here, this was her final resting place, where all things had come together. She took pen and paper and made a list of work she might do and the list was only a few lines long. She would not go back to Miss Desmond’s shop, even if a place were available, because she needed to be with the boy so much of the time, even after he began to attend school. There was no one she might teach, and any work she might once have found writing for journals of art she would have no confidence or authority to attempt now. She had been different then. For the rest, there might be housekeeping jobs, in private homes or at the hotels. Well, she must do those, anything at all to provide for him, she would have
counted the stones on the shingle beach, if it had contributed to his welfare and growth and happiness.

Then, walking slowly with him one day past Desmond’s, she saw a hat on a stand in the window, trimmed with braid, and at once, in her mind’s eye, saw a better, the trim more elaborate and fine, the colours iridescent.

She returned home and made it, almost to her satisfaction, from an old plain straw of her own that was little worn, sitting over it until the early hours of the morning, the basket of coloured silks spilling out over the table, on to the floor, pinning, turning, cutting, folding, re-working, until what she had imagined was before her. Then, looking at the pillaged heap of ribbon, tumbled anyhow, she remembered the evening her husband had brought the first scraps of it home for her, saw him as he had been then, white-skinned, with the luxuriant red-brown hair, anxious to please her. He had passed through her life and scarcely belonged in it, scarcely made a mark and yet she owed him everything because she owed him her son, the brief marriage had been because of him, but she saw now that perhaps it had been for other reasons, too, that she had, for a short time, been able to hold back the tide of voices and give him a steadiness and an ordinary calm in this bright room, to which he had always returned for shelter and safety. She had not understood. The voices and the terrible shadows had been there from the beginning, disguised and concealed from her, but there none the less. They had claimed him; there had never been any possibility of his escape. They had crowded finally into his head, to overwhelm him and he could neither turn aside from nor silence them. In the end, she had been powerless to save him. But sitting before the silks and skeins of colour in the quiet of the night, she was touched by love for him, and a tenderness, more than at any time during their marriage or in his living presence, so that when she went upstairs to lie beside her sleeping son, looking at him she saw for the first time the image of his dead father imprinted on his features, and in the paleness of his skin and the red-brown hair, and was glad of it.

A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,

And loving favour rather than silver or gold.

Rain beaded the windows of the car, blurring his view of the church. It was a dull church, the stone spire weather-darkened. But Elizabeth found comfort there, had friends.

To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heavens.

He waited at home and then here, reading. His mother had read the Bible to him, the Psalms and from the Prayer Book. It was all in her head, she had said, she read the words until she knew them by heart and then turned them over in her mind, like pebbles. Sometimes, coming upon a particular phrase, he heard her voice so clearly that he turned towards her.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills

From whence cometh my help.

But now the doors of the church were opened and they were running down the steps, rapping urgently on the window. Molloy got out of the car and the wind took their voices from him,
scattering them, they were mouthing and he could not understand them, standing there in the gale and the pouring rain, but only followed them, as they directed, back into the church.

They had made her comfortable, lain her on a pew with her head on a prayer hassock wrapped in someone’s coat, with another strange coat to cover her. Molloy knelt. The stones beneath him were cold as graves.

She could neither move nor speak. Only her eyes were open and looked into his, wide with fear. Her face was puckered oddly, her mouth twisted.

He put his hand over hers, as it lay on top of the stranger’s coat.

‘Elizabeth.’

But she made no response.

Most of them left, quickly, out of tact. But a few stayed, a little knot of them in the aisle a yard away.

‘Elizabeth.’

Ahead of him, he saw the great candles guttering on the altar in the wind that blew in from the open door. The smell was pungent to his nostrils.

Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.

Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.

There was nothing he could do for her here. He waited with his hand remaining on hers, and the gale battered at the high windows.

She would not live, they said, not this time (but he was one of them, after all, and knew, they did not need to speak to him of it).

He sat beside her in the dim cubicle.

‘Elizabeth.’ Perhaps she heard him say her own name over and over again. Perhaps she heard.

Perhaps, when he began to speak about the rest, she heard. For he told her everything, over the days and weeks, and as he told more, more was remembered, scenes, places, pictures, their talk, the smallest details crowded, pushing one another in their urgency, into his mind.

He described their house, took her from room to room, into the parlour with the lamp, and the front bedroom facing the sea, in which for years he had slept close beside his mother: as the sun rose it shone into their faces. The room in which she had pinned and stitched the hats, turning them slowly round in her hands against the light so that she could judge them precisely and he could admire. He remembered them now, when he closed his eyes they were before him and he described them to her. Straw, golden straw, and a straw so pale it seemed bleached as bone, black gleaming felt. Braids and ribbons. Feathers, silk roses and violets, with intricate, soft petals. She had a wooden stand shaped like a head and she moulded and trimmed the hats on that. They had been dampened and then steamed, with the hot iron held close but not touching the straw and felt. He could hear the hiss of it, smell the strange, yeasty smell and another, sharper, like varnish, see the ribbons coiled and stretched, tied and folded.

‘She would make one to perfection, just the one, no two were ever the same, and it would stand there, on the table, on the ledge, as if she wanted it to herself for a day, just hers – ours – to admire, before it went off and another was begun.’

He had loved to watch her, to see the slow, careful transformation of this plain shape of grey or black or blonde into a wonderful thing, an adornment, unique. Every evening he sat looking up now and then from his books, or with his head resting on his hands at the table, his eyes following the deft, intricate movements of her fingers, seeing the concentration tautening her face.

It amazed him that he remembered so much, that there was so much left to tell. The days they had taken the bus out and walked through the reed-beds beside the snaking, inland river that ran across the flat marshes, the shoals of little pale blue butterflies, the sound of the bittern and the curlew and the larks, the immensity of the sky and the pale land stretching away to the sea, the heat of the sun on his head and neck, the pine forest, its dark, cool, curious smell. The bristles on the undulating back of a caterpillar he had let trail across his hand. He told her. He went back, taking her with him. They had climbed up the steps of a castle to the
tower and he had felt the world turn beneath them, seen the bright heavens spin. He had thought that he might easily leap and fly.

He told her of the rock pools and the suck of the fronded waving sea anemone gripping his finger. He smelled the pungent salt-brine. There had been seaweed, he remembered, thick as leather beneath the pads of his fingers pressing the blisters, and weed like green silken tresses laid over the jutting rocks, slippery, treacherous. Beautiful. Day after day, in this place or that, walking beside his mother, talking to her, listening, looking up into her face, holding her hand, hearing her speak the lines of the Bible, the stories, all of it he remembered now, and told Elizabeth. All.