by Susan Hill
November dragged into December. She supposed that she must go home for Christmas. She was worried about money, and no longer ate in the café with Leila Watson, but bought a bruised apple or a few plums from the street barrow, at the end of the afternoon when they were cheap, and ate them for lunch the following day. Her shoes needed repairing, she had walked so much through London. But the fat sisters went back to Belgium for good and there was no other demand for her teaching. No money. She read more and more, lying for hours on her bed, or else simply sat at her window looking into the fog. She felt neither happy nor unhappy, but detached from all feeling, as from all other people. It occurred to her sometimes that this ought not to be so, that her solitary life was abnormal in a young woman and would make her strange.
‘What will you do?’
But there was nothing.
It was colder. A bitter wind blew exhaustingly all day, and at night roared into her dreams and banged doors about there. She felt deranged by it.
Turner’s wild stormscapes billowed by her head.
She ate too little. Miss Marchesa remarked several times in the kitchen on her scarcely touched plates.
The term ended at the Institute. She had taken her preliminary examination, shivering in the hall in spite of being at a desk close to a radiator. From time to time she pressed her hand on to it, trying to get the heat to penetrate through to her bones. But it would not. The questions were not difficult, she had everything ready to set down and yet the words would not come, or else they appeared, jumbled together. When she looked at them, they were little black spiky insects crawling about the paper. That night, her sheets turned to water, and she drowned in them. In the morning, the walls of her room collapsed softly in upon her, when she tried to get out of bed.
Twenty-Seven
The world woke to winter, day after day. A new ice age, people said. A comet had been seen in the sky, or so the talk went.
The earth hardened, nights were black with frost. A tongue of ice inched up the river.
Miss Pinkney left everything – a letter, half-written, the ink-bottle all uncapped – and came at once when the news reached her, travelling to London through hours of the bitterest cold.
Braziers burned holes here and there in the freezing fog.
Never such a winter, never such cold, they said.
(But so people always do, so they will fifty years later, when temperatures drop down hard again, and cold creeps along the corridors of the hospital, which is empty now. Icicles pierce down through holes in the roof and cracks in the ceilings.)
Never such cold, as they blunder clumsily about, wrapped and muffled through the freezing streets.
Out in the countryside, the fields are ghost white.
May Hennessy does not eat for a week, from anxiety, she says, but then eats and eats too much, sitting about, hollow-eyed. But Olga has recovered and is bright and becoming insolent, makes unsuitable friends. Of course, she is too young to be left. May Hennessy cannot come to London. Besides, her back has ached all winter.
Never such cold. Cats freeze to death, along with small rabbits in hutches, and little frail birds everywhere.
Miss Pinkney sits beside a shrouded lamp all day, all night. It does not matter that the mother has not come – for Flora is too ill to recognise anybody.
Twenty-Eight
There is a camp bed which Miss Marchesa has put up, grudgingly, in the room. None of this is convenient. She does not like to have illness in the house. But Flora cannot be moved, and must not be left. Miss Pinkney is quite adamant.
Ferns of ice thicken on the inside of the window panes each morning.
They are skating on the river, lit by flares. It is tremendous pleasure.
But the old die alone, or else merely suffer swollen, stiffened joints and cracking skin and sores; every day brings some new misery. Bundles of rag and paper lie heaped in doorways, and are turned over, and found to be tramps, or old women, frozen to the step.
Miss Pinkney reads, which has always been her salvation, Swift and Sterne and Smollett, Dryden and Pope, for she is still in love with the calm, cool eighteenth century, after all these years. But it is hard to concentrate.
She wipes Flora’s face and hands with a damp flannel, smoothes her hair, and, needing a little more warmth and rich, teeming, comforting life, turns to Trollope and Dickens, and some historical romances found on the landing here.
And then, in a night, without warning, the fog evaporates, and the sky is pricked all over with stars, fever bright. The moon hangs, a great lantern above the silver river. At dawn, the sun blazes up out of a hard, pale, brilliant sky.
Never such a winter, people say. Look, how extraordinary! How beautiful.
Miss Pinkney embroiders a table runner, badly. She has asked for her food to be brought up to the bedroom but, after the first day, this is not convenient. She must go to sit in the brown dining room with the secretaries, the mothers and daughters, and when she does so, looking round, cries out silently for Flora, stiff and proud and young, alone in the midst of them.
Upstairs, later, she stands, looking out of the window at the transparent sky and the branches of the bare trees outlined with ice, that cracks sharply under the little warmth of the sun. But it will harden and freeze again, there is no easing of this cold. The washbasin is plugged with ice.
*
[The sinks and basins in the old hospital are empty and the water drained, the sewerage pipes disconnected and hanging bare from the walls. But still, here and there, a tap drips, and the drips are seized and held by the cold roof. Slates slip and cracks run across the tiles of the mortuary.
The rooms are completely empty. There is not a scrap of paper or cloth left in any corner, everything was swept away. The bolts and padlocks freeze to the doors.
But Molloy still walks the empty corridors in his mind, sleeping or waking, hears the moaning and stirring and sudden little cries of the old men and the old women (dead now) and the rush of wind up the basement stairs, the hushing sound of the ward door as it closes.
But this is more than fifty years away.]
*
In the late afternoon, the sun glows, and the light stains the frozen snow and the fronts of the houses rose red, and splashes on to the white wall opposite Flora’s bed. Children race home, arms whirling, still gleeful in the snow.
Never such a winter.
But Flora knows nothing of it, neither the darkness nor this new, bright, glittering beauty, she is lost down labyrinthine corridors and passageways, where mists blind and confuse her, and bats cling to the walls of her head. Her skin is raw and her eyes burn in harsh, dry sockets. Or else there is cold water running between her sheets, and she shivers, her body is cold as the ice in the frozen water trough. She stumbles and falls down into a deep pit, and the pit hollows out to a cave in which sudden lights flare, and there are booming, terrifying echoes, and then, blank, thick dark. She breathes through a mesh of rusting wire that grates, making her cough, and her mouth is full of nails, foul, sour, metallic.
An old doctor came once. But now, there is a different, much younger one, sent and paid for by Miss Pinkney.
He touches Flora’s forehead very tenderly, with the back of his hand, fearing for her.
Twenty-Nine
The house emptied. The basins in the rooms above were silent. Even these women had people to welcome them for Christmas, friends, aunts, and married cousins. Miss Marchesa’s family, a sister and a widowed brother in Putney, would be together, though she would return to the lodging house each night, preferring her own bed, she said (and sometimes they found each other’s company a strain).
Miss Pinkney was given the use of the house and kitchen (and it was helpful to have someone there, in the event of emergency, Miss Marchesa had decided. Though she would have liked the whole thing over, and the girl well enough to travel. She regretted having accommodated her at all. ‘Kindness never pays,’ her mother had so regularly said).
Fo
r almost the first time in her life, Miss Pinkney felt of use and needed by one other person – not merely in general by a whole school. She was content to have had no family. Her life and interests satisfied her. But, now, her devotion to Flora Hennessy, who might die, was absolute.
Spending Christmas here alone did not trouble her. She had her books, and ate plainly. But hearing the bells at midnight ring out through the freezing air, she felt a moment of bleakness and disorientation – and of anger, too, that the girl’s mother had only written in greeting (and in complaint), sent a plaid wrap in a parcel, and would not come.
The days passed, and Flora was never aware of them. She swam below the surface of consciousness in a half-light and turbulent dreams, out of reach, out of touch with her own self.
The bells rang out the old year to a world bound in iron cold.
Miss Pinkney wrote letters to explain that she must be absent as long as necessary, into the new term, appointing her deputy and making detailed arrangements. Flora was more important than school or her own immediate future now.
Snow fell for two days and nights. Miss Pinkney was disturbed from her sleep by the immense silence. And perhaps it was the same silence that woke Flora to some awareness, for the first time, of her surroundings and of Miss Pinkney’s presence with her, and she struggled and flailed weakly, trying to sit up. Her eyes were wild, bright and staring. She took a sip of water and then lay back, and there seemed nothing to her but frailty and exhaustion.
But it is a beginning, Miss Pinkney thought.
The following afternoon, Leila Watson arrived, come from Surrey and across London through the snow and cold, with some books once borrowed from Flora. (Which were an excuse, for Christmas had been hard, without her husband, but among his family, to whom she belonged and yet, now, somehow did not. She had longed for talk, an outing, companionship with Flora, who was so reserved and self-sufficient, clever, aware, and undemanding.)
She stood, horrified, just inside the room.
‘You are Miss Pinkney?’
‘And you are Leila Watson,’ Miss Pinkney said, before they both turned, to look with love and distress and infinite concern, at Flora.
Thirty
They were married three months after the day Molloy had first come into the shop. It could have been sooner, except that too short a time would not have been seemly, Elizabeth’s mother had said. There would be talk.
The church was the one in which she had been christened, but she had never been there since, and so it was quite strange, and added to the whole strangeness of the day. There were steep steps up to the porch, and she had tripped and almost fallen in the unfamiliar shoes.
It had been decided from the beginning that things were to be very quiet and she had not disagreed, because in some odd way the decision seemed to have nothing to do with her. It was only years later, after her illness and the change in everything, that she would change. Now, they agreed things between them, her father and mother and Molloy, and she had not minded, not wanting a grand occasion herself, or any sort of show. (But sometimes, in a fantasy, she saw herself arriving at the Cathedral in a great splendour of organza and flowers and attendants.)
None of it had been important because she was quite happy, as she had been since he had returned to the chemist’s shop and said that it was her, and not her father, that he was there to see. The happiness was contained and cautious, but none the less clear to her.
They had ridden out on bicycles to the Greel Lake, where there were wild swans nesting, he had told her, and other beautiful birds whose names she did not know wading about the shore. It had been a cool, steely bright day, the lake very still. They had eaten a picnic sitting on the low dunes beside the water, and watching the scurrying movements of the birds in the gleaming shallows. She had never spent time alone with such a person, who listened to her, and paid attention to her for herself.
Calmly and privately, each of them had made their decision.
Molloy had arrived at his quite easily. Elizabeth did not in the least resemble his mother. There would never be any possibility of her disturbing or obscuring that memory. (Though perhaps there was a similar reserve, and a self-knowledge about them both which he failed to identify.) They did not look alike. She had been tall and very fair. Elizabeth was small, her hair dark, her colour high.
They settled at once into a companionable way of things which to Molloy was right and satisfying, and touched no depth in him. He guarded himself, held what mattered to him as closely private as before, and yet was a good enough husband, considerate and amiable, and if his slight distance from her was puzzling and even a disappointment, Elizabeth came to terms with it, and settled herself to make the best of their daily life.
But of all things it was her new home which gave her pleasure.
He had found it, and the particulars of another house, in the evening paper. It had seemed right to offer her a choice. They had visited the tall house first.
It had stood on a corner, with a sitting room looking up the street from two windows. There was a bright wallpaper and varnished doors, and she had walked in and out of the empty rooms after him in something like despair. Perhaps it was that she was not happy after all, she thought, and, with this viewing of a house, feared to do the wrong thing by marrying.
But it was not that.
‘It’s a good size.’
‘Yes.’
‘The rooms airy.’
‘Yes.’
‘All suitable.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you not care for it, Elizabeth?’
How could she have said that there was a sadness, as well as something makeshift and false about the house? That it smelled wrong to her. That she felt threatened by the houses opposite that jutted towards it. That the colour of the red bricks made her feel unsafe. She did not have words to phrase and express such feelings in any way that she thought might make sense or be acceptable to him.
‘There is another house.’
He knew, then. There was no need for her to say anything. She felt she might cry, with gratitude.
‘There is another house.’
She did not have to go in or walk around. She knew, without any question, as they turned into the street. She would not have been able to say anything about her longings and imagining beforehand, because she had none. They would be married, and, so, live somewhere, in a house together. She had thought no further.
It was a short terrace with identical, small, plain-fronted houses on either side.
Their house was the last of the row.
‘I shall live here,’ she thought, and, at once, a latch dropped down, with a click, resolving things.
She had stood at the window of the small back bedroom in a patch of sunlight that slanted across the bare floorboards, and had looked down the long strip of grass and nettles and brambles high as a man that was the garden, and led to a gate in the fence and, beyond that, to the embankment. The hawthorn blossom was clotted all along the hedgerow. In the kitchen, a tap dripped into the stone sink. There was no other sound.
But, opening the window, she heard a multitude of birds.
Thirty-One
She remembered. Remembering became easier all the time. She sat at the window, watching the blackbird in the pear tree, and the pleasure of her days here, in the calm, still, silent house, brought back the happiness of the first years, the first house.
She had left at eight each morning, and cycled along the canal path, to the chemist’s shop, and nothing at all had changed there, and yet, since her marriage, everything was different. She sensed a power that she had not had. They took notice of her. She made changes in the arrangement of the shop, and her father allowed them, and said nothing, though in the past when she had made suggestions he had always rejected them. It was as if the status of being the doctor’s wife had made her altogether more important in their eyes. Until now, she had had the feeling that they were not very interested in her. They had been kind en
ough, and yet as a couple they had been self-sufficient, so absorbed in one another, that she had felt superfluous, an intruder. Now, with her own home, her own life, she was their equal at last and no longer any threat to them.
But it was in the house and garden at Linney Street that she was happiest. She would never have left it if that had been possible. He had remarked about it, but did not seem to mind. It had not troubled him.
She remembered that, on her slow, stiff, painful way to the sunlit kitchen, to make tea. That quietness had been the same, and her own contentment in it.
Because of it she had quickly come to terms with his reserve and separateness from her in certain respects. He scarcely spoke of his childhood, and she learned, from a hardness and wariness that came over him, not to question. If she did, his eyes changed, his face seeming to stiffen and close. He drew back behind a shutter. She neither understood nor referred to his passion for attending upon a death. He would return late, or go out in the middle of the night, to sit with the dying. ‘I must be there,’ and that, too, had been a withdrawal from her. Gradually, she had learned to absorb herself in other things.
The house was small and, when they moved into it, neglected and dirty, and so she had cleaned it, scrubbing out each room, washing down each wall and window and, having cleaned, painted, whitewashing with a wide brush, out of an old bucket she had found half-buried in the weeds of the garden. She loved the slap of paint against the plaster, the soft rasp of the bristles up and down, up and down the wall. Slowly the house had been transfigured, to reflect the light that came into it, at the front in the morning, the back through the afternoon and evening.