by Susan Hill
She had turned her back on the sea and followed the maid into the house, and inside the air had smelled different and unfamiliar, as though the rooms were already a part of the past.
It was the first grief of her adult life, and she had no idea how to bear it. For there was only a short time of numbness, and the odd sensation of distance, and then the pain of it began. She felt it in her body, and crumpled up, bending and holding her arms tightly around herself. She could tell no one of it. When they returned, and she saw them, she could not speak.
The silence of the house and the dimness of the room behind the drawn blinds was no longer a peaceful welcome and altogether soothing to her, it was the airless, choking silence of death, in which she was taut and alone. Frightened.
‘It was the worst of all,’ she said to her own son (who had been named Hugh), ‘nothing else was ever so.’
She had not explained, nor said more.
Later, he had stared into the mirror at his own face, trying to match it to what she had told him of the other boy. The worst. Nothing was ever so. (Though there had been the one other thing, but of that she never spoke to him at all.)
He had not dared to ask if anything might ever be worse; if his own death would affect her, in some mightier, more important way. But that night, looking up at her as she sat on his bed, he saw the absoluteness and strength of her love for him, and for no other one, and the dead boy withered back into that remote past of hers which did not concern or trouble him.
May had never been so hot. Things came crowding out together, lilac and laburnum and the great smoky plumes of the wistaria hanging from the wall.
But on the day of the funeral, the fog came up from the sea, stuffing itself into the rooms, like soft, damp pillows, greying the garden. The house was muted. She could not believe that anyone would be alive there again. They were stiff, waxen things. She was invisible. For them, she had simply ceased to exist.
They had brought him home the day before. The coffin stood beneath the tall blind windows of the long room, on a pedestal. It was taken for granted that she would go in, at the time set for all of the servants, and so, unable to refuse, she did so, but kept to the last and, when she came up to him, closed her eyes, so that she never saw him again, in any way. (And for the rest of her life regretted it, and never ceased to be haunted in her dreams by a hollowness, as of something unfinished, unknown. There was no resolution, and so in the dreams, she continued to search; she followed after and almost glimpsed the boy. But never caught him, never did see. Rooms were empty, blinds snapped abruptly up, and then, in the sudden flooding in of summer light, were bare and echoing. She ran down lanes and over the grass to the cliff edge, and even, sometimes, flew off it and fell, into waking consciousness before she could discover him. It was years before she spoke to her own son of it, though after she did so there was an easing and blurring of the dreams, which then came rarely until, in the last few days of her life, they returned, vivid, as if freshly painted, before her.)
She had followed the black funeral figures, out of the house to the waiting cars, but, just at the door, turned back, and retreated unnoticed by any of them.
Her steps had terrified her, sounding through the empty house.
An hour later she had walked away, alone, down the long drive between the trees, in clinging fog which had nuzzled her, like some dead, vaporous creature, and crept in through the sides of her mouth, tasting peculiar and metallic there.
She had not looked back, nor seen the house, Carbery, or any of those belonging to it, again.
But to return home was unthinkable. She had gone to Miss Pinkney and asked, white-faced, pinch-mouthed, for a room, and one had been given to her, a room and infinite, quiet, tactful kindness. There had not been prying questions, nothing was expected of her beyond the formal, bleak words of explanation she had given.
She had lain in a high bed among dark furniture and lace curtains, lace coverings, and worked, as at a difficult but finally not impossible exercise, at turning her thoughts and imaginings away from the place she had left, and from what had happened there. She felt old, in some exhausted way, enervated by shock, and the knowledge of grief. It was as though her childhood, indeed, her whole youth, had not ended, but been taken from her, like limbs in some dreadful amputation.
It occurred to her that she had loved the boy purely and unconditionally, in a way she had loved no one else save her father – and how much of that love had come later, with hindsight and his absence, and her vague sense of guilt at the loneliness of his death? As she thought of the man and his life and his illness, so her love had blossomed. But he was not there to receive it and so, inevitably, it had shrivelled too. But her love for the boy Hugh had been a fresh, alive, springing thing, called up by the keenness of the understanding between them, by his nature, his perceptiveness and quick intelligence, and by the simple liking they had had for one another’s company.
She spent a week, bruised and exhausted by grief, and by the shock of the abrupt ending to a part of her life, sheltered unquestioningly by Miss Pinkney, eating and drinking little, but sleeping, in great, deep draughts of sleep, from which she woke suddenly, aching and unrefreshed. Then, the thoughts and memories and visions of the past were like flares lit and burning in her brain. She wanted to climb out of herself, or close some door in her own head to escape from them, and could not; she was imprisoned with them in a sealed room, and they were insistent, unrelenting. She went out sometimes, to walk about the streets in a frenzy of restlessness that was like an eczema on her skin which was intolerable when she stayed still, and indoors, but was scarcely eased by walking – except that there were distractions then, the sight of trees, the calm, unchanged façades of the old buildings.
After a week, she roused herself, as if at the end of some feverish illness.
She made her plans.
‘You should see your mother,’ Miss Pinkney said.
But she would not. She was too proud, and too afraid, also, of being sucked back into the dark, claustrophobic, stale little house. Her mother’s drawn face, sunken in its folds of disappointment and bitterness, would make her falter, out of guilt. She would lose her nerve, and it was frail enough already, she was aware of that.
She went to London without seeing them.
Twenty
No one was there on Fridays. She exulted in the silence.
Only the sun came, clean as a knife on to her pillow, and then fanned out across the wall, milky white. There was no one she had to smile for, though sometimes she caught herself smiling, out of habit.
‘I’ll go then.’
She never replied, always pretended to be asleep, and undisturbed by his morning movements.
‘I’ll go then.’
After the door closed, and the car went away, the house settled back upon itself, and then she heard the birds, vociferous in the bushes in spring, the robin and blackbird through the winter. She hated the dead, silent garden of high summer.
He had set the tray of tea beside the bed, with boiling water in a flask. It scalded her mouth, but then seemed to burn down into her joints, and, in burning, to ease and loosen them.
She would read then, the same books her mother had read, genteel old-fashioned novels which resembled one another, and from time to time took up Pride and Prejudice again, or Jane Eyre and Anna of the Five Towns. From childhood she had had the knack of immersing herself so deeply in a book that her lungs seemed to fill with it. But surfacing into the pale, cushioned bedroom was the greatest pleasure of all.
On Mondays, she was taken for physiotherapy – like laundry, she thought, collected and delivered back to the door. On other days Mrs Hoyle came. But on Fridays, she was alone.
She dared not look into the future.
They were not unhappy, or ill-suited. They did as well as many, she thought. But the house, its emptiness and silence, were hers, she was greedy to be alone in it, restless and nervous when she was away. As a child, journeys had terrif
ied her, and she never liked to be in any strange town. The idea of foreign countries was unimaginable.
The sun slipped down the wall and splashed on to the white stool.
It took an hour to get up, to dress. It was worse in the cold of winter, when her joints set hard as posts in concrete. But when it was over, she could sit at the window, and feel the house around her, for reassurance.
Her name had been Elizabeth Connor, and her father had kept the pharmacy, which was where Molloy had seen her, the first week of his work in the town practice. He had been twenty-eight, but a qualified doctor and so had seemed even older, and on the same level as her father. Set apart. He had come in to introduce himself – though word had gone round, they had known all about his coming, his history. He had wanted a special prescription made up, for Miss Gogarty of Chapel Finn, and even began to go into the exact detail, before she had blushed, hurrying to stop him.
‘Oh, that is not for me. My father will see to it. I’ll call him down.’
She could not even handle the medicines. The tablets and powders and jewel-coloured liquids had fascinated her, since she had been lifted up on to the counter as a small child. But she was only allowed to sell hairbrushes and shaving brushes, toothbrushes and pastes and vanishing cream in opaque white pots. She had never thought of doing any other job. Her life was securely bounded by their home, which was the adjoining house, and by the shop.
*
The next afternoon, he had come back. They were only five minutes off closing for the day.
‘Oh, I’ll just fetch Father.’
But she was the one he wanted, he had said.
The blackbird hopped suddenly from nowhere, on to the terrace, and froze, sensing change, the open door, her figure in the chair. She exulted in the thought of the day ahead, divided into its small, individual portions of pleasure.
The clock struck.
Twenty-One
When the door closed behind the woman, whose name was Miss Marchesa, and her footsteps had gone away down the bare-boarded stairs, there was absolute silence, for all that this was a house in London, and then Flora felt such acute and sudden loneliness that she caught her breath, as though she had been slapped stingingly across the face, and wrapped her arms about herself, for comfort and for protection. But it was not only a momentary feeling she must bear. This was the fact. She was alone in London and of no interest or concern to anyone.
The room was small and narrow, partitioned out of the corner of another larger room, so that the window was only half a window, and oddly placed to one side. It was early afternoon. Eventually, she became used to the deadness of the house at this time, when those who did not go out slept, as she would also begin to know the small creakings and stirrings of five o’clock, and then the early evening noises of women returned from work, when doors banged and water flushed and drained away down basins.
There was a border of Greek keys around the top of the walls, and then dirty white space up to a high ceiling, and a radiator with rust marks, squat and serpentine.
When at last she crossed to the window, she saw that she was above the tops of the plane trees, as well as the roofs of the houses opposite, and that the weather vane on the spire of a church glittered, white-gold, against the insubstantial summer sky.
Miss Marchesa was known to a friend of Miss Pinkney’s. Together, they had tried to do the best for her. The house, in Kensington, was perfectly respectable. Unmarried women who worked as confidential secretaries lived there, and widows with older daughters, thin, quavering, blameless women, with a little money that would never be quite enough.
Flora was too young, Miss Marchesa had written in reply to the enquiry, she had never had a girl alone in the house at such a young age; she could not be responsible. But Miss Pinkney’s friend had replied that supervision would not be expected, and only an inexpensive room, with breakfast and supper, were required.
It was the first week of September. The streets were dusty, the grass in the parks worn brown and threadbare. But the air shimmered with warmth that lasted from dawn until dusk, as London hung suspended, between high summer and a gilded, roseate autumn that ran on and on into everyone’s memories.
Flora left her things still packed and the grainy towel untouched beside the washbasin, and went out of the silent, soup-smelling house into the hazy streets.
For the rest of her life, she was to feed off the glory of the next few weeks, when London lay at her feet, open and friendly towards her, and she walked it, as over some richly patterned, vibrantly coloured carpet, exploring every pathway of the intricate design. For this time only there was no loneliness, but simply the state of being alone, and this was entirely satisfying. She would not have been able to absorb and respond to everything so fully; the impact of the buildings, pictures, open spaces, and of the golden autumn days and soft nights, would have lessened, if she had had private company to distract her.
Public company she had, and it delighted her. She sat on city steps and park benches and seats beside the river, looking, questioning, so that, in sleep, her mind still seethed with images, like some crowded picture by Hogarth or Brueghel.
She went to classes, in art history, Italian and French, both language and literature, at the Institute at which Miss Pinkney had obtained a place for her (and to the fees of which she contributed more than half – though Flora was not to discover it until years after). Apart from these, and the hours she spent in galleries or simply walking about London, she worked as a tutor to two fat, bland Belgian girls living with their father in Wimpole Street, who were uninterested in anything but staying dully at home, between trips to Ghent and Bruges. The hours Flora spent with them were a form of torment, because they passed so slowly, and were so infinitely tedious, and unrelieved by any lightness, any humour or liveliness or affection. Money was earned from them, that was all. Within their heavy, gloomy house, and inside Miss Marchesa’s in Kensington, Flora felt suffocated, as if her chest were stuffed with dry woollen cloth. The lack of light in the rooms oppressed her, so that only when she was outside or else in the great airy galleries and marble spaces of the museums could she breathe freely and feel a lightness of body and liberation of her thoughts and imaginings. She became two separate people who did not relate to one another, but the one who returned, like the shorthand typing women and the widows, to Miss Marchesa’s lodgings, and who went dutifully, four times a week, to Wimpole Street, was not the real, the living Flora Hennessy.
She came to love London intimately, and allowed it to absorb her, using it to block out all thought of her years at home, and of the house Carbery overlooking the sea. The boy, Hugh. She would never think of that. It was like an open sore which she must not touch or disturb in any way. But somewhere, at the back of her mind, floating and pale, he sat, as she had last seen him, very upright, button-eyed in the back of the open Lagonda car, hours before his death.
Home, her mother and Olga, lay somewhere else, unregarded, and without interest.
The classes at the Institute were enjoyable, and she was well taught. To the staff, she was an enigma but, because she seemed entirely self-contained, self-reliant, after a time they simply accepted that it was so. She impressed them with her application and the doggedness she showed, which she never allowed to become muddied or diverted by other concerns. She had a good eye and a talent for detail, she remembered things conscientiously, she was too detached, too serious for her age. Yet it seemed that she did not fully belong, did not allow herself to become wholly absorbed or committed, and never for a moment lost or forgot herself. To the other students, she offered friendliness but never friendship. They did not know her. To them, this was at first a tease, a challenge, but later, as they failed with her, it became merely an irritant, so that after a few weeks of probing, and attempts at discovery, they simply left her alone. Most of them, in any case, were young women in the charge of chaperones, aunts and older married sisters, marking time, and only mildly interested in the lectures an
d classes and outings. Flora, for whom life in London in these early weeks was miraculous, a gift and her salvation, could not understand or sympathise with them. She felt infinitely older, in experience and in understanding. Life mattered. She had been given this chance, and seized it, drank from it greedily, as from a beaker of intoxicating liquid.
London began to fill again. There were grand cars in the streets, and the evening pavements were bright with men and women in dinner dress. Flora watched, listened, enjoyed, but never envied, in the same way as she noted, and pitied, the bundled old women asleep on churchyard slabs and the wild-eyed beggars with bare, broken feet – pitied, but did not weep. To her, they were a warning. Otherwise, they did not touch her own life.
That was not true of the other women in Miss Marchesa’s lodgings. She was afraid of them, because they tried to intrude upon her, to know her. But, in allowing them any intimacy at all, she felt that she might somehow grow to be like them, and she recognised the women as failures, sexless, genteel, faded creatures in retreat from life, whose rooms she pictured as sterile places, with a staring doll set on the counterpane and little china animals dotted along the shelf.
On her first evening, mistaking the time by fifteen minutes, Flora had come late into the dining room, and opened the door on to a roomful of women eating soup. They had frozen, spoons half way to their mouths, silent, staring. She had not known where to sit. Her face burned. Miss Marchesa had come self-importantly out of the swing doors that led to the kitchen, and scolded her, and put her at a table with others, a Mrs Vigo and her daughter, with a secretary, Miss Braise-Compton, just beside. Flora had tightened her elbows into her sides, for fear of touching any of them, and barely replied to their questions, but set a ring of aloof silence round herself, while the vegetable broth congealed on her plate. There had been neck of lamb and then plums and custard, and her throat had seemed to constrict, and an impenetrable barrier to form there, so that she could not swallow.