by Susan Hill
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.
‘I loved him. I loved him as well as a person can love. Did you never know that? There was no avoiding it – such love.’
Flora wanted to shy away from the words. They were too much for her. She could not cope with their meaning.
But hearing them spoken, nakedly, without pretence, she knew, in some shadowy way she also could not fully comprehend, that they marked a rite of passage. On hearing them, she had taken a step forward and broken altogether from her own childhood.
Ten
The old moon, shadowed, held the new moon in her arms, a woman dying at childbirth.
Molloy walked quickly to the car. He did not look back. He wanted to be away from here; the urgency of it made his heart pound. But as he turned out of the grounds on to the main road, he told off the visit automatically, slipping it like a rosary bead through his fingers.
So he supposed that he might feel as a condemned man, counting the last days to execution. It was not a death, but to him it felt like one, and he could not make out the life beyond. It was there, a fact, yet unimaginable.
He drove on through the shuttered town and then took the coast road which curved around the bay for four miles, bungalows straggling beside. His headlights caught a blue painted gate, a run of white fence, a slinking cat, amber-eyed. Then the cliffs began, the road running between them and the sea.
He had emptied his mind of the day. What happened happened, and for the time he immersed himself in it, then walked away. He would not think of Annie Hare again. As a young man, he had woken and slept with his head full of the images of pale faces and still, cold limbs, the absolute contrast between the living and the dead dominating him. But he had taught himself to step back from his preoccupation, set it aside.
He would not go home yet.
Just before the point, the road divided. To the left, it led inland, towards his own village, but the main road went on, following the bay. Molloy stopped. He would walk. His limbs felt huge, cramped and restless inside the confines of the car. All the frustrations and dissatisfactions, mute and undefined, seemed suddenly to have transferred themselves to his body.
When he stepped on to the grass, he was aware first of the stillness of the night. The wind had dropped and the clouds moved away in a mass, leaving the stars and the two moons. The tide was far out. He took the overgrown track that led through the marram grass down to the shingle and then on, until he reached the hard, wet sand at the rim of the water, where the tiny waves rolled over and back upon themselves with a soft, lapping sound. He had been holding on to his breath, clenching it within his chest so that his lungs and muscles ached. Now, in releasing it all, something else was released too, leaving him oddly exhilarated.
The bay was small. It was not far to the point, awkward to reach and quickly filled by the tide. Few came here, summer or winter. He began to follow the line of the water and then for a moment or two, as if opening a door and peering through the narrowest crack, he allowed himself to think glancingly of the future. But it was impenetrable to him, and bewildering. It was the utter change that would change him so that he would no longer know himself. His life had been defined by his work in that place, and his own place in it, and, before it, by the other hospitals, other patients’ lives and deaths. He had had no other reason or being since the day that the news of his mother’s death had come to him.
He had been married. His wife lay at home now, in the bed at the other side of the room from his own empty bed. He had made a careful decision to marry her, needing a solid background to his life. He had liked her and she had loved him and so would be entirely content with what he was able to offer – a situation, a home, a measure of company. Fairness. Openness over money. And nothing whatsoever of himself. He remained inner, private and inviolate, and never within the reach of another person. For the woman asleep, quietly alone, it had not been a bad bargain, though perhaps now she felt the colder winds of age she would have welcomed the warmth and protection of a greater closeness. But nothing was said, nor would it be. There was simply an understanding.
He liked to feel the firmness of the sand, yet with the slight yielding when he lifted his foot. As he walked towards the point in the silken darkness, his body fell into a rhythm, and then his anxieties quieted and dropped away. And into the stillness and silence that were left to him came other thoughts, which flowed through him like a slow-moving river through caves. They came not formed into words, but as images only. He saw the permanence of rocks and the earth’s strata, and sensed sudden, huge molten upheavals that happened withou
t warning, and faults and cracks. Then there was the sky and the shiftingness of clouds, and the sea, turning, turning, endlessly renewing itself. The pebbles dragged back, mumbling at the seething water’s edge. The whole world seemed to be within his head and he viewed it there. He thought of flesh and blood and bone, atoms forming and re-forming, saw human bodies, the same from birth to death, and yet not the same in any way, changed utterly as the atoms reassembled.
When it was like this, he seemed to be on the brink of some simple, vivid comprehension of things, as in a dream when all is explained, all made clear, only to dissolve into paleness and confusion with the return of consciousness. Such times contented him. The fact that there were no answers to his questions, no resolutions to the workings of his thoughts, had long ceased to trouble him. Rocks. Sea. Stones. Atoms. Flesh. The flicker of brightness that was intelligent life. Raw, relentless misery. The stone-like state of death, that permanence that became in itself the final dissolution. He turned to them, as others would to invisible holy things, for sustenance and strength, reassurance and a kind of comfort.
He reached the point and rounded it, and then, the darkness of the whole wide shore beyond was huge as a mouth, to consume him if he stepped into it. He did not. He turned and began to walk calmly back, contained within the circle of cliff, and the moon rode, beautiful above him.
Eleven
The smell in the cold hall was the smell of a childless house, and the silence was the same and oppressed him. Dust never settled. When anything was put down on the polished chest, it remained exactly so.
The air was deathly still, and his own feet made no sound on the thick pile of the carpet. It was a woman’s house. They were a woman’s rooms. He felt too large, too clumsy in them.
In the kitchen, lit by a white strip of light, the surfaces were clear, a dish covered. The table wore a cloth. The calendar was set straight, lined precisely below the clock. He went into the living room, and stood, among coffee tables and cushions and lamps and china baskets, and the odd sensation returned, of being a giant with swollen limbs, a huge, ungainly thing.
Home.
It was hers, and he had never once begrudged it to her, having other things. Now he could not breathe here. The fawn-coloured curtains and tapestry sofa, the rugs like the matted backs of sheep, seemed to be stuffed into his lungs, choking him. He tasted cloth and wadding and dryness.
In the future, he would be here at times he had never known the house. At noon, and two o’clock and five. He would carry trays of small china cups and embroidered cloths into the scone-smelling kitchen. He would have nowhere else to go.
The blood roared like the tide through his ears, seething to be released.
He let the water run from the kitchen tap until it ran free of any staleness, and drank a glass of it, and the coldness on the back of his throat soothed him. He had thought of taking a little whisky, but after all had no need.
In the bedroom, there was a sweetness of powder and scented things. He did not switch on the light, considerate towards her. But she slept silently through his return, as always, after years of practice in it. At breakfast, she might remark, ask a quiet question. He would say just enough. He had never talked of things, his concerns, the other life. Those like Annie Hare. That was well understood.
It had not been unhappy. It was a solution, a way of everyday living that suited him – and suited her, or so it had always seemed. He had never regretted it. It took up so little of him. Now, he lay in his bed in the cottony darkness and it seemed that he was strapped to some toboggan or train that was hurtling downhill towards an unavoidable tunnel in which it would stop, never to move thereafter, and that would be his future and the end of things.
He slept little, five hours at most. That had been so since the first years as a doctor. It had served him well. He could be out half the night, and still be awake and alert at dawn, and until now had thought nothing of it.
But now, he thought. The light fell on to his face. He lay hearing birds break the silence into fine fragments, like cracks running over the glaze of china. Today would be as days had long been. Today, he would leave at seven-thirty, to walk up the steps of the hospital before eight. Today. Tomorrow. The day after. But after that, the beads would slip further through his fingers, and could not be caught and held; he could feel how far ahead the last was placed, and it was not far.
Then, he would lie, as the light filled out the satined and quilted bedroom, catching the bevels on the glass of powder bowl and decorated mirror, and she stirred, and still it would be early, still there would be a day as long as a lifetime ahead.
Annie Hare, he thought, hearing the young blackbirds. Did Annie Hare, whose ears were stopped against the song, and eyes against the light, have the best of it now? He did not know. He had never before been so uncertain of himself, and his own ordering of the future.
The cleanness of the kitchen was like that of the mortuary, or the operating theatre, the air as cold. But the sun fell, lemon-coloured on to the sill, and he looked out to the old stone wall and the pear tree at the edge of the garden, with sudden pleasure and a spurt of hope.
‘I’ll go,’ he said in the hall, as he always said, the moment before he left the house.
‘I’ll go,’ not knowing whether she heard him.
He had taken the kettle off the hob and left it with the water warm, the tea tray laid ready, fed crumbs to the birds and put away the board. His own cup and cutlery were washed and put away. The kitchen, flooded with sunlight, settled again after his brief presence, and there was no disturbance there, no mark.
If he had ever longed for warmth and grease and the clutter of old things discarded in corners, or for some animal, yeasty smell, he did not acknowledge it. He was conditioned to order and the cleanliness of things; silt and disarray troubled him. Yet in some cell of the honeycomb memory was a different way of living, richly, densely coloured, heaped up, a cave for him to return to, huddled together with the Florence Hennessy who had become his mother, Flora Molloy, and that was home.
Twelve
The coals shifted and slipped, sending up a little puff of ash. Time passed. May Hennessy had not spoken again, and had not moved, only sat forward still, staring into the core of the fire.
She is seeing the past there, Flora thought. And then, I will not love.
For where had it led? The sad, grey man who had been her father had withered the love and the passion away. It had failed as his own health had failed – could never have been sustained. She had been born. He had died. (Olga did not come into it, Olga, born afterwards, and being the child she was, did not belong to the old life in any way at all.)
I will not love.
Flora looked round the room. The walls felt darker and pressed in upon her, the air was thick, with age and neglect. There seemed to be no energy here; the effort of living used it up and there was none to spare.
Her mother’s confession had discomforted her, hinting as it did of experiences from which she was excluded. She had not existed then, and the idea of her own non-existence was terrifying, for she needed all the confidence and sense of purpose, the full assurance, that her own self-awareness could give her. She had come to know, very early on, that she would have no one and nothing else to rely on. Now, seeing her mother bent forwards over the fire, she thought she saw the reason not to indulge in the weakness of love, for it had led May Hennessy here, to this state of defeated unhappiness. And what guarantee would there ever be that it would not let her down too, in some similar way? She could not have borne that, and the thought made her sit up suddenly, as if to shake off any possibility of it. As she moved, the picture came to her mind, of the young woman before the open window, the cool paleness of her clothing, the airiness of clouds, and it steadied her, and excited her too, symbolising and containing as it did her own visions of the future.
What she had to say was said then. The words had been arranged ready for so long, it was easy, and soon done. She told of her
plans and the cities she might go to, the colleges and where she might live, repeating Miss Pinkney’s words exactly. The speech lay as if unrolled between them for her mother to examine.
The fire needed coal. It was dark and shrivelling into itself, and the cold crept in towards them from the edges of the room. Flora had not imagined anything beyond her own words, her confident statement of her intentions. There had seemed no need. She presumed that the arrangements would simply be discussed, and the details picked over; things would dispose themselves, if not now, then before very long.
Otherwise, for the moment, the milk pan would be filled and the worn green tin of cocoa taken from the shelf. The maid Eileen had seen to the dishes, as she would see to the hearth early the next morning, before any of them woke. The maid was an invisible part of life, and unregarded. (But Olga loved her. With Olga, the girl shared laughter and furtive giggling conversations. Only Olga had been to the cottage in which her large family lived, close and foetid as a litter of puppies.)
Flora would offer to make the drinks, and then, they would sit companionably. The fire would be pulled together and stirred into life again. There would be talk of London, Paris, Rome. She would tell May Hennessy what she had found out, the nearness of her absolute freedom warming her to openness and generosity.