The Service Of Clouds (5 page)

She told him how she had walked up a grassy track, thinking that it was a short cut to the coast road, but instead, behind some rough fence and barbed wire, she had seen the soft grey buildings, the courtyard and broken steps and entrance of what had been a school. ‘St. Teresa’s Convent School for Girls.’ The board, with flaking gold letters, was still there, but pasted across with strips of tape. ‘Private. Keep out. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’

It had been spring. The hedgerow was a tangle of guelder rose
and quickthorn, the old cracked paving stones sprouted daisies and groundsel. The grass was high as her waist. She had found a gap in the wire and climbed through, and, after that day, she had gone back several times, found a way inside through a door that had blown open and was left swinging.

In his dreams, he went where she had gone, into the classrooms of the empty school. Into the hall. Up the stairs to the dormitories, where swallows had got in and were nesting, and mice ran about over the broken floorboards. It had been frightening, and dangerous, perhaps, and, at any rate, forbidden. He had heard the old excitement still in her voice as she told him about it. ‘I can’t forget it,’ she had said. ‘It’s there. I go round it in my mind. I shall never forget.’

It had come to him, as everything that had value or meaning in his life had come to him, from her, so that now, walking the empty hospital corridors, it was of her that he thought. But although he could trace every inch of every building in the past, his mother’s face he could never see at all. He had not been able to do so, since the day he had heard of her death. He had only her voice, very occasionally, like a scrap of music played in the distance, before being broken off abruptly. He would hear something she had once said to him, a fragment of a sentence spoken without warning in his ear. The photographs he had of her did not help him. There were four, and she gazed out of them, but not at him. She would not come to life for him.

What he had of her was not a memory, not a face recalled. It was his past, and it was rootedness, and a place to which he went in order to feel safe. A sanctuary. But it was also an anguish. Desolation. Unhappiness, and the purest pain.

But the places, the buildings and her feelings for them, he knew as well as he knew his own places. She had given them to him.

He went on, through every corridor, into every room. Walking. (‘Like a spirit,’ the girl had said.)

But after an hour, his spirit came to rest, as it so often did, in the one place to which he was always drawn. He took the back stairs,
and then went outside, across the yard. A single, blue-white light above the door lit his way, and then he felt his restlessness ease, and strain and all anxiety leave him. He was quieted. In the deserted corridors there had been silence, but a silence that was uneasy. He had felt oppressed by it, and made melancholy. He went there but wished that he had not.

Here, the silence was of a different kind, and a balm to him.

He pushed open the inner door.

The mortuary was lit only at the far end, where the attendant sat beside the trolley. They had brought her down already. She lay like the skeleton of a bird, scarcely heaped up, lightly and softly beneath the sheet. Annie Hare.

The man glanced up. Nodded to him. He was used to Molloy coming here, to sit for minutes, or for an hour, recognised that the place seemed to serve as church or chapel to him. Sometimes they spoke a word or two.

Molloy went to stand beside her but did not lift the sheet to look beneath, did not disturb her. Then he turned, pulling out a stool to sit on.

‘Quiet,’ he said.

‘Just this one, and two from yesterday.’

The man went on writing in the file of Annie Hare, and the desk lamp shone on to his hands, huge and thick, with tufts of black hair over the backs, like the pelts of a small animal. He was younger than Molloy, but he would be leaving at the same time. He was not going to the new hospital. He was moving away, north to where his sons were. ‘Time for a bit of new life.’ He did the job because it was a job, and thought little of it, a cheerful man, easy with the living, untroubled by the dead.

‘“The Gateway,”’ someone had said to Molloy, the first time he had gone there, as a student. ‘We call it “The Gateway”.’ Though
the mortuary was called other things too; they had to make light of it to be able to deal with it, as with the horrors they saw. They had to get used to things quickly, and never brood. Molloy brooded. It would be his failing, his tutors said, it would break him. A doctor could not brood. A brooding temperament would not see him through.

They were right to believe it, but not right about Molloy. Only by taking things deep down into himself and brooding upon them there in silence, until he somehow transmuted them and was able to feel easy, could he do his work, and retain a sense of balance and sanity. He could not make crude jokes, as his fellows did, and never ducked nor swerved away from the worst there was to know. And the worst was not death. For him, death was often the best of it, a right and fitting conclusion. Death led here, to this cool, white place, into this quietness and stillness and solitude. ‘The Gateway’.

He did not believe any of the customary creeds that he had recited at school. She had not. ‘No one knows,’ she had said. ‘They’ll pretend to you. They will all claim the truth. None of them knows it, and we do not either, and you will not. Only never close your mind. That’s all. Never.’

She had always spoken to him, as to an adult, in this way. There had never been baby talk between them. In the conversations he remembered still, word for word, so that he could hear them over in his head, there had never been any sense that he was too young to hear about this or that, not ready to understand. What she had wanted him to know, she had told him, what she had wondered about and needed to discuss openly, she had talked to him about.

As, death.

‘We do not know. No one does. Nor ever has.’

He would not have doubted her, in this as in anything else. No one knew. Yet she was all-knowing to him, he was certain of it, as well as all-powerful and all-providing. He needed no one else.

‘The Gateway.’ He thought the word now, looking towards the outline beneath the heavy sheet. In all the years since his mother’s
own dying, he had come to it time after time. This far. If there was a farther, he could not follow. It was the best he could ever do. It had to satisfy.

The first time he had entered a mortuary, in the teaching hospital, he had been sick with dread. They had had to give him leave, for two days after. He had been sweating and grey in his terror. He would have to leave then, he had been sure. Blood was nothing to him, incised flesh or protruding bone, the stench in the open gut, pus in a wound. But his imagination had shied away from the place where silence and finality would confront him with the things that were in him. That he could not bear. He had begun to strip his bed and to empty his things out of the drawers, for he would be asked to leave, there would be no other way. He had shown his weakness, a fatal flaw.

Instead, they had frog-marched him back there, propelled him through the doors, saying nothing, the pressure brutal, of a knuckle between his shoulder blades. He had smelled the cold and the formaldehyde. The silence had rushed into his ears like a wave, to drown him. The world had dissolved like water beneath his feet.

They had ordered him to open his eyes. After a moment, he had done so, and found himself alone with the attendant, who sat on a stool beside the waxen body of a man. He had looked at Molloy, with understanding and absolute kindness. ‘It’s nothing,’ he had said. ‘Do you see? Nothing at all.’

But it had been everything. The realisation had crept towards him and overtaken him, like the dawn of understanding. In this functional place of death, and later, at bedside after bedside, Molloy had reached the only destination of any importance to him.

He had borne their amusement, knowing that he made them uneasy. ‘Mortuary Molloy’ they had shouted after him then. It had not troubled him. Something had cleared in his mind, some log-jam of dread and uncertainty and confusion, as he had realised his own calm and strength, in the face of the dead, and his sense of rightness when he witnessed the moment of dying. It
had been utterly sure, at once, and had never left him, and his life as a doctor had been transformed by it.

Nothing touched him, nothing threatened his certainty, ever again. He did not speak of it, nor answer questions about it, except with a shrug. There was nothing he could have said, no words with which he could have conveyed his feelings to the others, so that, after a time, they withdrew. They did not isolate or ostracise him, and he shared his days with them amicably enough. But he did not need them.

Beside those who were dying, and with them after death, his loss of her, the desolation of it and his absolute sense of abandonment, were eased. Nowhere else. For the rest of time, he suffered her absence unrelievedly, and the accompanying absence of the feeling of all love and all sweetness.

Now, sitting quietly in this basement room, within this place of safety, he suddenly felt a sense of his mother’s person, so entire and vivid that it was giddying. He smelled her smell. Her body was as close to him as his own breath. He saw her face and almost cried out, with the reality and then, at once, the searing unreality of it, so that he swayed on the stool and caught his breath. The other man glanced up.

But it was over, as it had come. It had taken a second, and pressed him down in that second with the weight of forty years, and then was nothing. The man looked away again, and so, after a time, Molloy got up, and went to stand briefly beside the hidden body, to put his hand up to it, touching the dry cotton of the covering sheet, as if it were sacred cloth.

Flora built her plans calmly, and in an orderly way, as others might accumulate savings little by little. At school, she worked methodically, never trying to impress, never asking too many bright questions in the class, and so the others neither scorned nor resented her. She maintained her cool, pleasant manner with them, walking round the school grounds after lunch, or playing tennis.

Towards her teachers, she was polite, neat, pleasant. None of them could find fault with her. None of them knew her. She was not secretive nor furtive, merely quite separate. Her real life went on somewhere within herself.

She liked to walk in the lanes and fields near her home, and as she grew older, through the streets of the town too, and, in her walking, discovered for herself the things that were of value – the castle, churches, gates leading to small, elegant houses tucked away. She grew to distinguish the façades of buildings, to see what was beautiful and elegantly proportioned, what cheaply built, cluttered and ugly. Her own taste was austere. She liked clean, straight lines, spare detail, plain handsome shapes, was irritated by over-elaboration.

In summer she went into the public parks and gardens, but although she found them pleasant enough, and shady on the hot afternoons at the end of the school day, they did not move or
excite her as the buildings did. She thought of them as unsatisfactory, being neither town nor open country.

Then she went into the largest of them, Maclayne Park, one Saturday in December. She had taken the bus to town with her mother and Olga, and later would meet them in Maud’s, after they had walked, as she and May Hennessy had once used to walk, solemnly down Lord’s Parade, looking into the shops. Shops, and their window displays, were not interesting to her now, but Olga made up for her, in over-excited acquisitiveness.

It had been cold, with a pale, bright sky, and the sun had been setting in a damson-coloured band, at the same time as a wire of bright moon emerged slowly, like an outline impregnated on some magic paper. Flora had wandered in through the park gates half absently. But, as she looked up, she saw the lake in the hollow ahead as the sun was striking the surface, flaring and copper-coloured before it sank. Then, the lake had gone black. Behind it were the trees, bare and austere, some skeletal, with an intricate mesh of smaller branches, others dense, solid and erect. Everything had been tidied, everything was cleared of the softening mass of foliage and flowers. She had walked slowly around the darkening paths and seen shapes revealed, the open spaces between setting them apart from one another. There had been a cold, bitter smell of bare damp earth and holly berries. And she had stood, taut with the excitement of this place, and her own intense pleasure in it. In that moment, the point of the gardens was revealed to her.

If she did no more academic work than was usual for an intelligent and diligent girl, she read a very great deal, and her reading, like everything else, became disciplined and steady. She read as soon as she woke and for an hour or more before sleeping. On the light mornings of spring and summer, she would come downstairs long before her mother and Olga, and read sitting on the back doorstep and, in her reading, she allowed herself to be led from one book, one subject to another, gradually enlarging her taste. The public library educated her, she would say afterwards. She went there several times a week, enjoying the
smell of the place and the soft sound of turning pages, the muffled coughs, the oblong reflections from the windows on to the polished floor. She liked its calm and orderliness, and the sense of concentration that was pressed into it, like the sense of reverence in a church, and the way both places seemed to exist outside of ordinary time.