The Service Of Clouds (6 page)

Until she was seventeen, the library, certain handsome streets, and the parks and gardens in winter, fed and enriched her, supplementing the plain fare of her school lessons. Otherwise, she had a little companionship, much solitude and, for the rest, the everyday routine of her life with her mother and sister.

She did not spend time in analysing her own feelings, though on her plans and ambitions for the future she dwelt a good deal. She would have said that she was contented, and, for the time being, had what she wanted, secure in the knowledge that the rest would come. May Hennessy did not understand her. There were no quarrels between them, because they had few points of contact, and she knew nothing of Flora’s plans. She herself never looked ahead. The strain of surviving in the present was all-absorbing to her, though of this Flora was for some time quite unaware.

She had had little interest in the drawing and painting classes at school which were dull, and seemed to have no connection with her own growing visual awareness. Bowls of fruit, vases of tulips, arrangements of uninteresting objects, were set on small tables and trays for them to sketch, and the periods, although quiet and rather soothing, were tedious.

Revelation came at the Rotunda Museum. They were to draw what they chose, and Flora wandered off by herself through room after dusty room full of fossils and stones and bones, helmets and coins, shards and broken pots and dark old furniture, searching for something of interest. No one missed her. She climbed an iron staircase that spiralled to the domed roof, and went slowly around the balconies, into rooms that led off a gallery. Up here, where the light came in clear and bright through beautiful windows, were pictures, portraits of pompous men and bland-faced women,
artificially posed dogs and horses, religious scenes and brown varnished landscapes full of mountains and cataracts and ravines in which Flora thought no one would surely ever wish to walk.

The rooms led out of one another like a series of Chinese boxes, and they were quite empty. It gave her a quiet pleasure to go through them alone, in silence. And then she turned, into a long, white gallery, filled with north light. The walls of the other rooms had been crammed with pictures. Here were only a few, and at once she was drawn to one at the far end of the room, and stood in astonishment before it.

A young woman reclined on a couch beside an open window. She was dressed in soft folds of cream and white and ivory and pale grey, and her arm hung over the edge of the couch. A hat dangled loosely between her fingers. Her face was turned away. Beyond the windows ran a thin, glittering line of sea. Otherwise, clouds trailed across the sky, and the clouds seemed to billow in through the spaces in the room in which the young woman sat and to be part of her dress, and of the very air. There was no colour, save for a ribbon in her hat, which was red, the red of flames, geraniums, poppies.

On the other walls, other pictures, in which skies and clouds both reflected and gave back an inner light, as well as the light within the room. And here and there was the same small patch of red, or else a single dense block of vivid blue. The rest was light and air and scudding movement.

But it was the girl at the window who compelled her, and, then, as she emerged from her concentration upon the picture, the vision of the whole room in which she stood. She felt the shock of discovery like an electric charge.

Hazel catkins came out overnight. The bare cherry boughs were hazed with pink. Hawthorn hedges pricked green. An early spring burst, in warmth and birdsong. And each day, because of the pale pictures in the Rotunda, Flora opened her eyes on a new world and felt changed by it. But the change was not merely in outward things and in ways of looking. In the part of herself deep below the surface, she considered new questions, and answers occurred to her which were sometimes shocking in their strangeness.

Her plans became clearer. She took book after book on art from the public library and when she had exhausted their supply asked for the loan of more from other, distant libraries, and was flushed with gratification and a sense of power at the ease with which they were all obtained for her. Many were rare and she was not allowed to take them out. She spent more and more hours at a table in the reading room, before returning again and again to the pictures themselves on the gallery walls. But although she never tired of looking at the young woman in her pale clothes seated before the window, and at the landscapes of clouds, she became frustrated that they were all she had and greedy for other, quite different pictures.

The new idea came to her like a bubble rising to the surface, one afternoon as she sat at her classroom desk, and the
wallflowers were thick and heady and pungent in the flowerbeds beneath the open windows.

She would go to a college, in London, or even in Italy – Florence or Rome. She would study there and live among pictures. She felt quite calm, in her immediate certainty that it would be, and so did not trouble to consider details. The strength of her ambition, and a hard fixity of purpose, would be all-powerful. She had no doubts, saw no obstacles. There were colleges, and teachers, and places in which young women might live. She had read of them. She would go. She had only to concentrate on getting a place, through her intelligence and application. Flora knew herself.

And now that her plans were formed, in the summer of that year, she began to feel a terrible sense of restriction and restlessness, and walked through the streets and in the fields, as if trying to walk out her frustration at the present, and the irritating slowness of passing time. The days were rich and heavy and slow with scents, the grass high and thickly green. The house, in which she spent as little time as possible, seemed to shrink. The rooms were dim and brown and stale, the windows let in too little, too dingy a light. Outside streams dried, soil baked and cracked. The birds fell silent. Flora’s skin seemed to teem just below the surface, as though something within her needed to burst the bounds of it and leap away. She walked and read and thought, and lay awake through the sticky, airless nights. But each morning, she was surprised again by the promise of the year ahead of her, a last, short, steep hill which she must climb.

Olga went to parties, dressed in frilled dresses and satin shoes, hair be-ribboned, ringlets bouncing about her bland forehead. Olga considered herself silently in mirrors and pirouetted for approval. Olga was popular and fluttered about the house, never able to settle to anything, never happy to be alone. Olga was a bright, pretty thing to have about the sour dark place, and her mother was mesmerised by her, as if amazed by the child’s very presence in her world.

They will be perfectly happy together, Flora thought, at least
for a few more years. They will be attentive to one another, dance round one another in admiring little circles, before Olga outgrows it all, and flounces away, leaving a terrible silence behind.

By then, she herself would be long gone, and she knew that her own slipping away would scarcely be noticed, her absence leave no gap. She was happy, relieved that it would be so, and behaved indulgently towards her sister, out of gratitude. They had nothing in common at all, no meeting ground. But she was oddly fond of the vain, attractive, ephemeral little creature, because she saw her vulnerability, and that she was fragile and insubstantial, and her power of commanding attention and admiration would not last. And when it failed, Olga would disappear and be nothing.

Summer shrivelled and burned and was tossed away by the first gales of autumn. Flora revealed her plans to the headmistress. Colleges in London, and also in Edinburgh, were discussed – Italy, it was thought, would come later. There must be an order in these matters, Miss Pinkney said. (Though the girl’s self-possession and coolness unnerved her. She could not get the picture from her mind, as she sat in her spinster lodgings that night, of Flora’s grave and meticulous control.)

‘It is to be hoped that the future will meet your expectations,’ she had said, wanting – what? To warn? To chasten?

The girl’s eyes had been steady on hers, her face shadowed by the faintest of frowns.

‘Why should it not?’

Miss Pinkney had been unable to answer.

‘Why should it not?’

The crab apples were eggs of gold and blood red, the branches bowed under the weight of them. The front path was lined with blowsy, rinsed-out hollyhocks. At night, hedgehogs snuffled and snorted for grubs, in grassy corners.

Why should it not?

Olga had been prinked and petted to bed, her ringlets screwed up in papers. She had stared at her own self in the glass, and been reassured.

And, then, the house was quiet. No wind blew tonight. The trees were still. Nothing went by along the road.

They sat in the old balloon-backed chairs, on either side of the kitchen hearth. Flora read. In a little while, she would speak the sentences she had prepared, in their exact order.

But suddenly, disconcertingly, she remembered her father, in a few seconds of absolute clarity, saw his crumpled body inside the clothes that were too large, the ill-fitting grey cardigan, the stiff collar that gaped away from his neck, and with the recollection of him came a piercing realisation of what she had never until now understood – that he had been unhappy and lonely, in some profound way, and quite unreachable in his sadness. She was bewildered by the uprush of grief and dreadful longing that came to her then. It was as though she were crying hot, urgent tears. But no tears fell.

‘Why should it not?’

She turned her mind away from the recollection and, in doing so, looked up, and across the space between them at her mother. As so often now, May Hennessy was doing nothing, not reading, nor even fidgeting with something of Olga’s that the child wanted to be altered or embellished. Her hands were still, folded in her lap, and she was leaning forwards slightly, staring, staring into the coals. Her face was old, furrowed and bleak and infinitely disappointed. Looking at her, Flora felt a shaft of pure, detached sorrow. Thought: Her life is over. And what has it been? There was my father, always unwell. Then dead. There is Olga, and Olga has been everything to her, her treasure, her delight, her investment in the future. But Olga will go. There is no future for her in Olga.

And she herself was about to tell of another separation, though she did not think that it was one May Hennessy would care about, for there was only incomprehension between them now. She might be envied, but Flora knew that she would not be missed.

Several times, the words were in her mouth, waiting to be spoken, and yet she held them back, feeling this stillness and silence lying between them to be important.

She would not break it.

And as she had been struck by a truth about her father, now she understood her mother’s profound disappointment in life also. May Hennessy had been happy in childhood. Flora had always heard her speak with joy and respect and longing of it, though she was clear-eyed enough to see that her mother’s memories were selective, and that any unhappiness or tedium had been forgotten, and all pleasures highlighted, gilded and smoothed.

Marriage had appeared as an opportunity, not so much for personal happiness as for self-establishment and social advantage. The Hennessys had standing, money, land and prospects. Reality had been cruel. At times, Flora had caught her mother looking, in distaste and bewilderment, around this small back room, as if unable to understand how she came, on the brink of old age, to find herself here. She seemed to have become smaller in her disappointment, as he had in illness, to have no colour, no brightness of eye or lightness of step. Her pride had been chastened. The things that counted to her in life she had either lost early, or never attained.

What is there? What has she? What future can there be for her, Flora thought now.

Her mother’s hands were working together, thumb rubbing against thumb. Her life had no compensation, so far as the girl could see, no interest or expectation. Her own determination quickened in her. For she had a future. This life, here, would not be hers.

But the words she spoke then startled her. She had not known they were in her head. They were not the words she had prepared.

‘Why did you marry my father?’

She heard her own voice speaking confidently into the silent room.

May Hennessy turned her head slowly and stared, her face
open and unmasked, before distress and some bewilderment clouded and darkened it.

Flora could not have predicted her mother’s reply, but now, in this new and very different silence, she realised that she expected honesty, and that the honesty would prompt words like, ‘Security.’ ‘Money.’ ‘Esteem.’ ‘Position.’ Those were what May Hennessy cared about; for those she had felt it worth risking her happy childhood. ‘Betterment.’ ‘Advancement.’ And Flora would have understood, for to a large extent, though in quite another way, those were her own ambitions. Hers were private and intellectual, her mother’s had been social. That was all. Marriage would not be Flora’s means of achievement, but she recognised that her mother had no other option.

‘Why did you marry my father?’

The question was suspended between them, each word still somehow heard, hearable. May Hennessy’s hands, which had been twisting together, her mouth, which had been working, were still, and the stillness was adamantine and dreadful. Flora shrank away from it, back into her chair. But she could not drop her gaze, could not avoid her mother’s eyes upon her. She was afraid of bitter anger and reproach, of having her question, and the presumption of it, repulsed, afraid of what she would hear. But her mother’s words, when they came, were spoken very quietly, and with infinite tenderness, and the truth was in them unmistakable, complete.