The Service Of Clouds (4 page)

But the worst of it, after all, was not the death but the birth, not the absence but the new presence. The change begun by her father’s dying was made absolute the day her sister was born.

They had taken her away. She had been driven in the trap, very early in the morning, wrapped in a thick rug against the cold and sleet that blew off the hill all day, to the house of a girl she hardly knew, Leila McKinnon, and her questions had been unanswered, except by a curt: ‘Your mother is not well.’

The day was one that scarcely seemed to come light; even at noon, the lamps were lit and the sky lowered down on them, blotting out the view. The McKinnons lived in a house with a gravel drive that swept up to the door. She never understood why she had to be here, rather than at the home of some friend she could have chosen for herself. But her mother had always felt the equal of the McKinnons. Flora understood that perfectly, recognising May Hennessy’s pride as a formidable force.

No one had told her anything. The rooms were large, high-ceilinged, formal. She had walked in and out of them, touching things gently, running her fingers along the cold marble of a fireplace, standing at the tall windows of the library looking out at a cedar tree, perfectly set in place upon a bare lawn. Leila McKinnon had followed her in silence, told to be kind, told to allow Flora to do as she pleased, and mildly resentful of it. They had trailed about the house for an hour, scarcely speaking, unable to find a common interest. Lunch had been eaten at either end of a dark refectory table. A maid had served them, and a dog had been lying sprawled beside the hearth, a wolf-hound, like some creature out of a fairy-tale.

‘When am I to go home?’

‘Your mother is unwell. It’s better that you are here. You will go back just as soon as it is time.’

‘When will it be time?’

‘She needs a rest, you see, Flora. There is the doll’s house in the attic now. Why not go up to see that?’

They had climbed the stairs, as they were bid, to take the chairs and beds and sideboards out of the doll’s house and re-arrange
them desultorily, never looking at one another. Beyond the attic windows, the sky gathered in to rain.

The maid brought up tea and scones and soda bread with jam, and iced biscuits. Flora felt oddly light-headed, as if she were in a dream, or else catapulted into some foreign country where they spoke a language that was like her own and yet incomprehensible to her. She could not get her bearings, did not know what she ought to feel, all her points of reference seemed to have been jumbled together and set back wrongly, like signposts you could no longer trust to show you the way.

It was night when she was returned home. She had felt anxious, pierced all over with unhappiness and profoundly alone. Perhaps it had shown, for on the doorstep, Leila McKinnon had come forward and embraced her awkwardly, and thanked her for coming, as if there had been a party, and Flora had held on to her for comfort, smelling the starched smell of her collar, and then she had understood that she was an object of pity, someone to be treated carefully, and that the death of her father had set her apart.

She held herself stiffly, as if on a set of strings that kept her together not merely bodily but in support of all her feelings and thoughts too. She tried not to let herself be jolted about, and clenched her hands together tightly under the rug. Only a small part of her was allowed free, and that part needed protection from the unfamiliar present, the unknown future.

The lamp shone in an upstairs window, and she went towards it, as to the source of all strength and reassurance. She was afraid, climbing the stairs. Her father was dead. Might not her mother be, too? The memory of the thick silence in the front parlour, and of her father’s hand, as cold as wax, bobbed about within her.

And then the door of the bedroom was opened to her, and, standing on the threshold, outside the circle of light and warmth and quite set apart from it, she looked in upon them, her mother upright against high pillows, her hair disarranged and
damp-looking, a stranger to her. And the little shrivelled baby, on the cover beside her.

In the new life – for that was what she felt it to be – she could have loved her sister, and indeed, began by doing so willingly and easily, and in spite of the shock of her presence. But it was clear that her love was neither wanted nor returned, because Olga had no need of it, claiming as she did all love, all attentive devotion, from their mother.

She was an ugly baby, with thin, scrawny limbs and peeling skin, and discontented and unsettled too, ceaselessly crying, a grizzling, mewling little cry. But as she grew she became pretty, in a complacent, doll-like way, and then she commanded devotion and was petulant when not receiving it. Flora felt neither jealousy nor resentment. The effect of her sister’s presence upon her was far more penetrating and painful. She felt herself to be in some way guilty, because inadequate. Even her own physical being seemed wrong and distressing to her, her hands and feet were elephantine and clumsy, her height and paleness and plainness were like blemishes, outer symptoms of her unsatisfactoriness. But, more than anything, she felt a pit open up within her which nothing could fill. When she woke, it was like the ache of hunger. Sadness accompanied it, a pure core of sadness that she learned to accept as an inevitable part of her present life, though she did not attribute the sadness to any one cause, not her father’s death, the birth of her sister, or the child’s dislike of her.

Her salvation was her own inner detachment, a clear-eyed resolution and strength of character and a steeliness which was not harsh or cold, merely utterly reliable.

She watched May Hennessy and Olga, saw their mutual adoration and interdependence, and recognised that she had no part in it, and looked on her sister’s porcelain beauty and outward charm without envy. She knew that she no longer belonged here – perhaps, indeed, had never done so, and was merely marking time until she could leave, though the business of growing up seemed infinitely slow, infinitely tedious.

As she grew, what crystallised within her was not only the desire to be away and make her life elsewhere, but also an intense pride, inherited from her mother, a sense of her own status which was related to May Hennessy’s passionate defence of their position in society. Flora did not care for that, yet nevertheless she felt, in some way she could not yet define, superior to and set apart from others. It was as though she were marked out. It did not cause her to behave badly, to sneer or to be in any other way disagreeable – she was outwardly unchanged. Others liked her well enough and were happy to have her company, while sensing a permanent reserve, almost amounting to an aloofness, which was not unattractive. They respected it.

Eighteen months after her father’s death, Flora could barely remember him. It was as though he had never been wholly with them, never been physically strong enough nor sufficiently dominant in character to make a lasting impression, and so he had faded, as a photograph exposed to the light, his features became hard to recall. There was only a lingering atmosphere in the front parlour, which Flora sensed acutely, something about its coldness and silence that reminded her of the evening of his death and his thin, empty body propped in the chair, so that she went there as rarely as she could and never lingered.

May Hennessy did not speak of him. What he had thought of the coming child – even if he had known of it at all – how much interest or concern he might have felt, were also never mentioned, and, although intelligent and perceptive about their situation in general, and aware of all the nuances of her mother’s nature,
Flora did not choose to unsettle the fragile equilibrium between them by asking questions. That this was a relief to May Hennessy she was certain. They were amicable together, living parallel rather than intermeshed daily lives. Flora became more than ever an intensely private person, needing no close confidante nor any outlet for her innermost thoughts and feelings. She read a great deal, choosing her books with much care and going through them slowly and methodically, seeming to exert control over them, as over everything else in her life, and never allowing herself to be taken by surprise, or to be out of control.

The child Olga kept away from her, until she was old enough to be inquisitive, when she would pry into Flora’s things, question and tease, before running back to her mother’s protection. But Flora dealt with her mildly enough and was never roused to ill temper. She looked into her sister’s pretty, spoilt face and staring blue eyes, and felt mild affection and a certain scorn, because of Olga’s total dependence upon others for admiration and approval. Olga could not be alone for even a few moments and, when in company, could not be silent or concentrate on anything except her own chatter and the reaction it provoked. Observing that, Flora was only grateful for her own inner resources. Life had dealt its blows. She thought that she had defences and to spare now, against those that would come.

Molloy did not go home yet. To leave would mean one more bead told, of the last few.

He turned, out of the cubicle in which he had left the body of the dead woman, Annie Hare, out of the ward.

The girl, running back up the dark stone steps from the stores below, saw his back and stopped to watch him go away.

‘Why would he go down into the old part, Sister? Why would anyone have business there, that’s all shut up and empty? What interest is there left in it?’ She would not have gone, not for anyone, and besides, could see no reason. The building was dying, wasn’t it, and almost dead? It would be bulldozers and then rubble, within the year, and good riddance.

She quickened her own step, going past the abandoned blocks and doors leading to wings that had been cleared, hollow stairwells.

‘He’s like a spirit. He’ll haunt the place. He can’t leave it, can he?’

‘He cannot.’

‘Funny that. Doesn’t it seem funny to you? Don’t you think?’

‘It is not my business or yours to think anything about it at all.’ The Sister pinched her lips and would not say anything more, out of some slight sense of loyalty to the doctor, the natural respect
she had been trained up to, as well as wanting to put the younger woman down.

Molloy walked. Away from the occupied wards and from the pools of quiet light, away from people to whom he could not have spoken about any of it.

Molloy walked.

It was as if a tide had turned and run out, leaving what bit of life remained in the old buildings washed up in one corner, and the people huddled together in the last of the light and warmth. They talked, and went about their vestiges of business; occasionally there was crying or laughter and the smell of meat stewing. Beyond, emptiness and darkness. Long high wards, curtainless windows. Echoes. Cold, dead air, stirred by no one in their breathing of it, any more.

Only tonight, the wind blew in through the cracks and shifted it about, and, when the clouds parted, moonlight shone down the abandoned rooms and through the dirty window glass at the end of the tiled corridor, lighting his way (though he did not need it, knowing every step).

No one followed him. He had walked through the empty buildings often enough in the last months, recording everything, touching his hand to the flaking walls, running it along the cold tiles, standing to stare ahead into the empty spaces, as if he wanted to imprint his own presence here, while it existed at all. Remembering.

Since childhood, he had been haunted by places. He dreamed not of people but of rooms, of hallways, porches, attics, of the curve of a pillar, the moulding of a ceiling, the grain of a wooden beam. Of banisters, steps, window-frames. By day, some part of a building he had known would be thrown upon the inner screen of his mind, and he would gaze at it. Time and again he would find himself walking, in his imagination, up some particular staircase and through a once-familiar door. He carried imprinted within him a plan of every house in which he had lived or worked, and of others too. There had been a convent, set up a
dark path behind trees, not far from his secondary school. He had hung about there, looking through the bars of the gates. Now, he could recall every detail, of the chimneys and the roofs, the pattern of the bricks, the lie of the tiles. He never wanted to go inside, but preferred to guess how it was, to walk about the rooms in his imagination only.

When he was six, from the bus windows he had seen a small castle beyond a dry moat and, later, a black hovel in a field with smoke coming from a hole in the roof. The cottage of a witch, his mother had said. ‘Look. Go on. Look.’ And he had looked. For it had come from her, this fascination with mysterious buildings. She had told him about the empty school, one night before he went to sleep, sitting beside him in the dark, and he had taken it into himself, and dreamed of it straight away, and afterwards asked her again and again, ‘Tell me about the school. Tell me about the school.’

It was when she had been a governess in Kilmoyne. There were so many smart houses on the road that led to the sea, new houses, and brash, not the real, grand places of the old families, like Carbery, where she worked. She had enjoyed looking, she said, watching people drive out between the stone pillars, proud in their shining motors. Everything there had been new.

(Though now, he thought, those are the old houses, and that is the solid, old-fashioned part of the town, which is so changed, so grown. Now those houses have old, old people struggling on in too many big rooms, behind overgrown, unmanageable gardens. There is nothing brash and new there any more, only decay, and sadness for that bright past.)