The Service of Clouds

by Susan Hill

  They spent a large part of every day together, in the house full of airy space and light in which their voices and footsteps echoed, or else sitting out on the grass under the great trees. She had nothing to do with the business of his eating and sleeping and dressing, there was a nursery nurse for that, and so their time together was not spoiled with domestic irritations or conflicts. She was surprised how much the company of the boy pleased and interested her, and what satisfaction she achieved in teaching him. He was alert and quick and their interests and dislikes coincided. In teaching him, she continued to lean.

  Any other life had ceased to exist. She scarcely thought of her home at all and had closed the doors of her mind on the farther future. She neither dreamed nor yearned nor allowed herself to regret, but for the first time since very young childhood lived wholly in the present, and in those imaginary places which she and the boy inhabited.

  Carbery itself gave her great satisfaction. The parents were often away and the other servants kept to their own quarters. She always ate her evening meal alone, after the boy had gone to bed, and later, sat in the library, or a small upstairs sitting room which had a view of the sea from its windows. Sometimes, when it was still warm in September, she went out, to walk in the garden or the fields beyond the house, and on to the cliff path beyond. She was given one day off, and very often part of Saturday and Sunday, when visitors came or they took the boy out, and at first she went out too, almost dutifully, walked or took the bus into the town, and went again to the gallery, and walked through the streets of familiar houses, and sat beside the lake in the park.

  Once, she met Miss Pinkney, and went at her invitation to have tea in Maud’s. The place seemed strange, as if she was seeing it from the other side of a looking-glass. She drank tea, which she had never done here, and ate an ice, which was the same and served in the same tall glass, with a long spoon, and yet which tasted quite new, and unfamiliar.

  But it was at this meeting, sitting straight-backed and composed at the table in Maud’s, that she felt her composure weaken, too, and her iron self-restraint fail her, so that she was suddenly giddy and uncertain. One moment, she was sipping her tea, intrigued at the idea of things being as they had always been, and, the next, she felt a peculiar frightening sense of unreality, as if she had forgotten who she was, and why she was in this place. For after all, who was she? She was Flora Hennessy, who would never again be Florence. She was tutor to Hugh MacManus, of Carbery. At the turn of the year, she would be eighteen. But her limbs felt strangely elongated, her fingers tingled and would not grip the cup, and when she glanced around, the walls shifted as if they were clouds which might at any moment dissolve.

  ‘Are you quite well?’

  Who was this woman, with the brown mole on the side of her mouth and hair like wire? Where did she belong? Her own back ached with the effort of keeping taut and stiff, the muscles of her stomach were sore, because she was constantly tightening them, as if, in relaxing, she might collapse to a soft, confused heap upon the ground.

  ‘Would you like some more tea? I will ask them to make it stronger.’

  The voice came and receded, ballooned out and grew horribly, like some aural fungus. Who was the woman?

  ‘Florence?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Flora.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you like some more tea?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Who am I? Where am I? Who is she? What has happened to me?

  The tea came.

  ‘Use both hands. It will be steadier.’

  She obeyed like a child. No. She struggled then. Not a child.

  ‘Do you eat properly? Are you given enough time to yourself? The company of a young child can be exhausting. Are you able to meet your own friends?’

  Gradually, the ordinary questions calmed her and she was able to reply. The room settled, solidified and became Maud’s again, and comforting.

  ‘Teaching is tiring. When one is conscientious. You will need to replenish your own stores of energy.’

  Hearing the assured words, the sense, the anxious tone, she felt touched by something she had not realised that she lacked, affection, concern, the caring of another person, and in the light of Miss Pinkney’s kindness, she felt herself open, there and then, and grow, in an instinctive and immediate maturity.

  Sixteen

  Nobody tended the gardens now. Dandelion and ragwort came up through the broken paving stones and were left to blow to seed in a sudden wind, and the great horse chestnut split up the side, making a heavy branch unstable. But nobody sat there now. (Though they sent a man two or three times that summer to mow the grass, and, because he liked to make the best of the job, he planted wallflowers in the earth beneath the windows of the wards. It was hot, and the smell of them, coming faintly to their nostrils, sent the old men and the old women in their narrow bedsteads sailing back to childhood past, and cast them up on its beach, to lie there.)

  And the emptiness crept up and up, like a slow tide, to where they were left huddled together. Vans came, to be filled with the contents of wards and offices, and then the doors of the rooms were closed and padlocked, and the high ceilings seethed with the dust, as it settled back in the sun. (For winter went out one night and spring came in the next day, and, it seemed, summer the next, the blossom flared briefly and was over.)

  The whispering began, broken sentences drifting by like smoke or clouds, shredding away, half-heard, and those words that were heard troubled them, the talk of closing, leaving, going away. Where? Where? They dropped suddenly down a black hole of sleep, and dreamed of abandonment, forgotten in the high ward alone, after the doors were closed and locked and the last van had driven away. Where? The blackness lightened to grey, and, in the cloudiness, they wandered again about the rooms of childhood homes and married homes, finding odd brown pots carefully filled with pennies, and a calendar ringed in red, a geranium bright on the window-sill, and the insurance book tucked behind the clock. Familiar beds and chairs and shoes, and handles that fitted familiarly into the hand.

  But the wheels of a trolley that no one would bother to oil screeched at the corridor corner. A bell rang. Those who remained raised their voices, and, waking, the old people were startled by the sunlight through squares of high windows, by brightness and the green bed rails, and the smell of warm meat and vegetable water blotted out the scent of the wallflowers. They grasped in a panic at the sheets, trying to grasp this present, this place in which they found themselves (for they could not hold the wallflower-filled past from which they had woken). They reached out hands, to clutch at the hand of the nurse. The last blossom fell on to the grass like stars.

  Another death, and then another, on the same day, disturbing them. Would there be no one left? Was this the way they would all go?

  Molloy came and sat with them in the white mortuary, and walked the deserted corridors and in among the beds, huddled together at the end of the long rooms, saw bleeding gums, and eczema that scaled feet and between fingers, and sores where sticks of bone pressed up to the skin. Their eyes were filmy, sight veiled, ears muffled, there was a blurring and felting and silting over of each sense. Yet, within, flames flickered and leaped up behind their eyes, quick, bright, darting movements of perception, understanding, fear, before they retreated back, into the safe carapace of memory.

  The hands of the clock scarcely moved. An hour was a dreadful shuffle of nothingness and tedium. (Yet Molloy’s days raced crazily away from him, and he careered downhill with them, powerless.)

  The leaves of the chestnut tree spread, and fanned out like fingers. The candles had never been so many, or so bright.

  (They would fell the tree. The trunk was a danger, and in any case, it was old. An obstruction.)

  The doors were open, on to the broken paving of the terrace. One or two of them sat outside, in basket chairs. An old man shuffled on to the grass and stood, feeling the dryness of it, against the dryness of bare feet.


  Swifts screamed about the clock tower, and dived and sped like skaters around the blue rink of the sky. And after a last morning of babel and hurtling, reckless flying, left, and the silence after them was absolute and terrible.

  Seventeen

  The back of the house got all the sun, afternoon and evening, and the living room had doors on to the garden. (In May, the pear tree was clotted with blossom, like paper snow along the branches. The leaves were thick, and darker now, the little hard fruits already showing.) In sunlight, the house gleamed in its cleanness. The rows of books were tight, edge exactly to edge along the shelf. The clock ticked with a very precise tick into the ordered kitchen.

  Sometimes, during these days, his mind would be full of it. It was as though he had suddenly walked in through the door and stood there, huge, bringing in dust from the road and the smell of antiseptic, something alien. He felt that he was set down in his own house without use or purpose, and blundered from room to small room among the ornaments and objects, in a panic, like some cornered animal.

  He never saw her. Whichever rooms entered his mind, she was always in the next, and he did not disturb or intrude upon her. The way of the house, and her life when he was away from it, were mysteries to him. He knew at what times the woman came in to assist her and when she left, and, sometimes, if there had been a visitor. Nothing else. He did not know how she spent her days. When he returned in the evening, the house seemed untouched, as empty of life or even the after-echo of life, as when he had left that morning.

  Soon, he would not leave.

  On fine days, she sat at the open window, looking at the birds on the bird table and flitting in the branches of the pear tree. But she did not go out there. She felt the cold too easily now. Or the heat.

  Walking the corridors, pushing open the swing doors, listening to the odd, disconnected cries and mumblings of the old men and the old women, he felt his heart lurch as he remembered, as if he were waking from oblivious sleep to the dreadful reminder of some tragedy. He turned his mind away. He would not face the future. He preferred to go into it blindly, and unprepared.

  He did not speak to her about it, nor know her feelings, whether she dreaded the thought of him filling up her solitary days and the neat silent spaces, pressing the smoothness out of cushions, dirtying crockery at the wrong times, breaking the tight clean pattern of her routine, and fraying it. When they spoke, it was of the insignificant, the time of this, the news in the village of that. Radio. Weather. Household necessities. They did not talk of her physical state. It never changed, and so there was nothing to say, and of course, he was not her doctor.

  (Though he saw that she moved less now, and was slower, shuffling on the sticks from chair to table. She went to bed an hour before him and the routine was stumbling, awkward, painful.)

  She smiled. Her smile was a fixed thing on her soft, powdery mouth. She had determined some years before on her role, which was to be sweet acceptance, meekness, patience. A refusal to refer to her condition, or ever to complain.

  Smile.

  The sun moved around the house from front to back, lightening the opposite wall. In the kitchen, the clock ticked.

  No one entered the silence. No one broke into her days, once the woman who helped her had left. Only the birds hopped on brittle legs about the terrace.

  In the bathroom, mirrors and white enamel surfaces flashed, as the sun struck them through a chink in the frosted glass. The bedroom was dim and peachy, blinds half-drawn. A china ballerina held the lamp up in her arms.

  The afternoon slipped imperceptibly down. The light hazed and reddened. The dead grate held fir-cones, piled together in a little, dry, careful pyramid.

  No one came.

  There was ham and tomato and potato salad, cold plum tart, ready under the plates. The milk was covered by a weighted muslin cloth.

  It seemed that there would be another death. Molloy would not leave the ward yet.

  From high in the pear tree, a blackbird sang and sang to her, for some sort of company.

  Eighteen

  That time of Flora’s life was like a clear bubble, in which she was perfectly happy and perfectly suspended, quite separate and detached from the rest. She would sometimes look back on herself there, in surprise and curiosity, as though upon a young woman in a picture, another person, in another life, unconnected to her own later self except by the thin thread of memory.

  In the three years at Carbery, she learned the moods of the sea, and those moods defined her days and nights. The house was like a ship, sailing by itself high above the bay. She knew when she awoke to a strange dullness of the air that the sea fog rubbed its back against the windows. The gauzy mornings of early spring, and the black nights out of which the wind gathered itself, to come marauding over the garden, delighted her. She spent hours sitting on the window ledge of the empty attic rooms, looking towards the sea.

  They were excellent companions, she and the boy. He had a sharp, inquisitive mind, flashing a sudden question like a blade that cut to the heart of a thing. His face was always pale, the skin delicate and transparent as petals beneath his eyes, and, on his stalk-like neck, the bones infinitely slender.

  He had sudden silence, periods when he withdrew into himself as she withdrew, so that there was a complete understanding between them. At other times, he did not belong to her at all but went away, across some invisible line, and then he was theirs, and withdrew wholly into their world, excluding her.

  He had his seventh birthday. He wore a sailor suit. He became formal to her, his eyes guarding private thoughts.

  She went home dutifully once a month, for a day and a night, and dreaded the time, and could bear the visits back to the old world only in the knowledge that she would leave again and return to Carbery. She would not talk of her life there and in any case her mother was not interested. She looked inward, or back to the life she now saw as entirely happy, satisfied, fulfilled, when John Joseph Hennessy had been alive. Her only other concern, in a possessive, cloying, anxious way, was for Olga. She lived her own life through the child, busying herself with her activities, her friendships, and so Flora could feel detached, freed from her mother’s interest and curiosity by her younger sister.

  She would not yet think of her own future. She would stay at Carbery until the boy went away to school, when he was eleven. She spent no money, but saved her salary in the Post Office bank, and at times, seeing the steadily increasing figures entered in the columns of the account book, felt a flare of excitement, and in the light and brightness of it, saw the promise of the life she had once planned, briefly illuminated again and possible.

  In the library at Carbery she read widely, as she chose, and looked at books of paintings, learned to love areas of literature and the work of certain artists with an instinctive and acute response. Others were puzzling and impenetrable to her. She learned not to struggle for long, but to drop them like a mouthful of some unappealing food, discarded on to her plate.

  The year turned. She was twenty. But, still, she watched the sea, and the bubble held, and the rest of her life was far away.

  Nineteen

  It was May. It was a perfect day, as warm as high summer, the air still, the sea brilliant, stuck over with little white boats.

  They had gone out, the boy with his father and mother in the large car, visiting on the other side of the county.

  She was reading about lost cities – Troy, Atlantis, Lyonnesse, and from time to time looked up and out to sea, from her high point on the grassy cliff, and imagined them there; if she half-closed her eyes, they rose up and glittered again in all their beauty before her.

  She thought of the hedgerows of bridal hawthorn, wreathing the fields around her home, saw the buttercups and dandelions, gold everywhere upon the grass.

  At four, she walked slowly, contentedly up the sloping lawn towards the cedar tree and the tea that would be set there.

  Except that the tea was not set, and she saw the maid come running o
ut of the house, a scrap of white hurtled as if by a sudden wind towards her, arms outstretched wildly, eyes black and huge in her stricken face.

  The boy was dead.

  The words came over and over again as she ran, incoherent, garbled, from the mouth that was so mis-shaped in shock and grief.

  *

  Flora had watched them leave, from her window. He had been sitting with boot-button eyes in his pale face in the high, open back of the Lagonda car, stiff, serious, expectant.

  There had been an accident then, and he was dead.

  She stood, very calm and absolutely still, after the girl had shuddered into silence and the sea and the sky had hardened and glazed over, and become dead, for all that the sun shone down on them. They were frozen things in a picture. But she looked on it from the outside now, as if already she had no place here.