by Susan Hill
She did not ask him to help her. He worked hard, she said, she would make their home. But the truth was that from the very beginning, she had preferred to be alone there.
The spring and summer were hot, the year of their marriage. She cycled through snowfalls of blossom and fresh, pricking green. The leaves of every tree seemed transparent, dancing in the sunlight, and the door of the chemist’s shop stood open all day, though inside it was dark and cool and antiseptic, beyond the barricade of counter and cash till and shelves.
‘Good morning to you, Mrs Molloy.’
Even those who had known her since childhood accorded her this respect now when they came into the shop. She was not only a married woman, she was the wife of a doctor. She could not get used to it. She felt spied upon, an object of interest to them in a way she had never been, and, sometimes, she hid in the dispensary, finding some job among the shelves or at the sink, so that her father was obliged to serve them. And even then, she would hear.
‘Is Mrs Molloy not in today? Is she quite well?’
At the end of the afternoon, the streets were dusty. But the house in Linney Street was flooded with sunlight, and welcoming to her. She sat on the back doorstep and drank tea and revelled in the quietness and the possession of her own walls and doors and floors and windows. Her own rooms, and the garden.
When Molloy returned she greeted him very gladly. She was happy to have him with her because in some curious way they were quite detached from one another and gathered their individual privacy like cloaks around them. They were suited.
Spring opened out into high summer, the days drifting down. Blackbirds and thrushes and tits of all kinds hatched in the tangle of old trees and rubbish at the end of the garden and, at dawn and every evening, sang and sang. Hearing them, she wanted nothing at all to change and was entirely content.
Once, rooting about in the broken-down greenhouse that leaned against the privy wall, she broke off the stem of a red geranium by accident, and stuck the dry twiggy remnant in a pot of soil. When she returned, weeks later, the plant had struck, thrown out shoots and begun to grow, all unregarded.
In a year she had a line of geraniums, bright along the window-sill, and brought the garden to life again, a place of order and fruitfulness and beauty – though, at the bottom, by the gate to the embankment, the order gave way to a tumbling wilderness, for birds.
Now, this garden she looked at from her window, beyond the terrace and the stone wall and the pear tree, had only birds to enliven it.
No one would have understood how he and she had been happy, living such separate lives, together, for so many years.
They had been suited. It was only lately that fear had come to each of them, fear of age and change, and of being thrown too much together, strangers, still, as they were. She feared her own weakness and dependence, and, then, she longed more than ever for the days at Linney Street, when the house and garden had been hers and his presence only occasional and, as such, welcome.
The house would no longer be empty and tranquil and silent, day after day.
No one else would have understood.
She sensed his profound unhappiness, his fear. He was losing his life and she wondered how he would bear it, but could not ask, as neither of them had ever asked such questions.
There were chaffinches, walking prissily on the grass. The branches of the bushes and tree were full of little hanging things to hold crumbs and crusts and nuts. On the kitchen window-sill, there were red geraniums.
But she had not been able to do anything to this garden. It was small and neat, there was grass and paving, and a man came to attend to the tidying of it once a week. But it was still hers, she thought, in a sudden spurt of anger, and longing and possessiveness. Hers, as the house was hers, though both were shells now and yielded no love or delight, no companionship or consolation. Her own, hollow places.
But the blackbird pinked and scuttled, bright-eyed, beneath the pear tree, and the robin was expectant for crumbs. She had her tea tray and the sun was on her face and the dust motes danced up and down its bright ladder, the clock ticked to soothe her and she was again content.
No one would have understood.
PART TWO
One
The room was quiet. But there were birds singing beneath the open window and somewhere, faintly, the soft rasp of the sea.
Flora woke, untroubled, no longer in the grip of the terrible dreams in which she had suffocated underground among squat shapes.
A patch of sunlight was falling like dappled water on to the white wall, and a pale curtain blew a little now and then gently towards her.
She was alone, and the room was strange, and in her odd state, half-detached from her body, it seemed to her that she might not be part of real life at all. But the hand that lay on the coverlet was her own hand. The skin was almost transparent over the blue veins, the pale bones gleaming just below.
She moved her fingers a little.
‘Flora Hennessy.’ She spoke her own name, aloud into the room, and knew her own voice.
She had come back from death and knew it and felt utterly changed by it. She had no fear, nor even apprehension. She would survive now. Her body was weak as vapour, her thoughts unfocused, fluttering and light, but that would pass, and then she would walk about again strongly, among people, anywhere, think and talk and make preparations for the future.
But now, like a revenant, she drifted on the tide that was floating her back, and fragments of the journey floated alongside her, and she recognised them.
They had come here over roads that had jarred through her body, and her bones had ground together between broken glass. Miss Pinkney had pulled the blanket closely around her, her face soft with concern, and given her sips of water and sweetened milk out of a flask. She had slept, a tense, restless sleep, and woken, sore from the car’s movement, sick and damp with sweat and her own weakness.
But it had been safe for her to travel; the young doctor had been firm, and reassuring. She would rest, and begin to recover.
Miss Marchesa had shovelled them with obvious relief out of her house.
‘You will never go back,’ Miss Pinkney had said.
But the sound of the washbasins draining above, and the footsteps of the women morning and evening, the cracks at the ceiling corners, were impressed on her forever.
The house she was to go to belonged to people known to the doctor. Miss Pinkney had travelled down alone first to see it, and then it had all been decided.
‘You will be healed there,’ she had said.
The fever and nightmares returned; for a week after the journey from London, she had been ill. But it was the last skeins of the illness that threaded around her and they were unravelling, and losing their strength, they could not grip her.
They had travelled for the whole of a day, from early morning, stopping often so that Flora could have rest from the motion. She was coughing again, and the cough grated painfully in her chest.
She had a recollection of their arrival, of the hiss of water over pebbles, and the clear coolness of the night air on her face, and the way in which those things had eased her, and softened and soothed her sleeping.
Miss Pinkney had been with her sometimes, and others, too, coming and going quietly. A dog had barked, there had been the cry of some night animal in the distance, and, in the silver dawn, of seagulls. Days and nights had passed calmly, her fever had evaporated, her cough lessened. She had sat up, propped on her pillows, to drink soup from a cup held by Miss Pinkney because her own hands were unsteady again. But the next day, she had been able to walk across her room and sit in a chair beside the window, and eat potatoes whipped up with milk and butter.
‘Healing,’ Miss Pinkney said. And Flora had felt sudden pure happiness burst like a shower of sparks from coals that had been dead and black for months within her.
Two
‘If you have a child of your own you will know,’ May Hennessy wrote. ‘The childl
ess cannot understand.’
It was raining, soft spring rain, sifting through the tree-tops, and the sound was a relief and a balm for the feelings that her mother’s words aroused.
‘I have nothing but worry, and no means of doing what I would wish, to come and be a mother to you there. It is left to strangers, and you do not understand how distressing that is to me, how much worry it has caused. Your Miss Pinkney has been very good. Yet it seems peculiar. She is not family.
‘You were always a hard child, and closed against me. There has not been any understanding. If you have children, it will be clearer to you.
‘It would be better if you came home now. Olga needs the right companion. She is so quick and bright, and very popular, but headstrong, and causes worry to me.
‘Being ill among strangers cannot be good for you.’
Yet strangers love me, as I have not been loved, Flora thought, letting the letter rest on the plaid rug that covered her knees.
(But the picture of the boy Hugh came to her then, sitting pale and eager, in the back of the Lagonda car – for there had been love.)
She was not angry at the letter – anger had just flared momentarily, and been extinguished, perhaps by the rain. She was puzzled. It was true, as May Hennessy said, that she did not understand. Was it only worry and distress, then, that tied mothers and their children? Had there been no delight or softness or understanding? She remembered none, but did not know how far she was herself to blame for it. She felt no warmth towards her mother, no desire to touch or to be held by her, no affinity at all between their bodies.
(But when the boy Hugh had crept on to her knees or raced across the grass, to fling himself up at her, she had felt the joy of it, and an intense delight in his small limbs, and the particular smell of his skin.)
The rain fell and she closed her eyes and let the sound of it rinse over her. She felt brittle and frail; when she walked, she wondered how she remained on the ground, her body seemed so moth-like and insubstantial. The surface of her brain was made raw and painful by too much depth or intensity of thought or feeling.
She would not go home – for what was ‘home’? There was no such place. And she needed none. Only, for now, there was this house, in which she sat at a wide bay window, down which the rain softly ran. It would serve; there was kindness here, infinite, patient kindness and a sort of love, if love was concern, the answering of need, an absence of questioning.
They were nuns. (Whom Flora had been brought up to fear and to suspect. Girls from families they ‘did not know’ had sometimes become nuns and, in doing so, entered at once, May Hennessy said, into prisons of superstition and false belief.)
Within a few days, Flora had lost any fear or mistrust, in response to the peace and the gentleness, to the laughter, the rain in the trees and the sound of the sea below. The acceptance.
She had been allowed downstairs for three days, and now the letter had come and she felt pierced by the outside world, by reality, and the reminder of her old self, her past life. But she had shed those, she thought, walked away from them long ago, they lay at her feet, transparent, colourless, ghostly as a chrysalis.
Of course it was the house, she knew that perfectly well. But why, she asked a dozen times a day. Why do houses tie our hearts, in a way people do not? What are ‘houses’?
It was because of Carbery. She knew that, too, and this light, in the early mornings; because they both faced the sea, and were close to the sounds the sea made. So was this merely a reflection of that happiness, then, a reminder, at high tide and low tide, dawn and dusk, and no more?
‘Why are we at ease in one place and not in another?’ she asked Leila Watson, who was with her.
‘We feel secure.’
‘Yes.’
‘With me it always has to do with the light.’
‘Yes.’
‘And airiness.’
‘Yes.’
‘Otherwise …’
‘Quietness. Some places have a friendliness.’
‘Yes, those things too.’
They looked at one another.
‘You are much better.’
‘But I am afraid.’
(For she realised suddenly that she could say anything to Leila Watson, in a way she was unused to.)
‘I am afraid of everything. Of noises and suddenness. I startle at anything – the leaves shifting about … the cat racing suddenly across the grass.’
‘Because you have been so very ill – everything is shocking.’
‘Yes.’
‘That will ease, I think. You will be quite calm again.’
It was comforting, to be told definitely.
They sat in the sunken garden, in a shelter plaited from willow that grew like a living roof over their heads. The air was as clear as a glass dome around them, as brittle-seeming, but blurred, and paler, over the sea.
And abruptly, the boy Hugh was there, running towards her, arms outstretched, bright-faced.
‘Do you see ghosts?’
‘I used to see Edwin. He was always there. When I turned round, or at the corner of a street. Then – he was nowhere.’ Her voice was clear and bleak and desolate, so that Flora reached out a hand, and the day was held for them, saved, in friendship, and this unspoken understanding; and the ghosts retreated from the garden.
But there was no calm, because of the sudden, terrible cry, that came again, as it came through the day, always without warning, sometimes once, sometimes a dozen times, so that Flora started recoiling, as if the sound had flayed her bare skin. ‘He is not mad,’ she said to herself, ‘he is suffering.’ But she turned to Leila Watson for reassurance, as the cries came again.
‘He suffers so much. It is all in his poor head still.’
He had been almost burned alive they had been told. His ship had exploded, and the surface of the sea had caught fire and blazed all around him. He had drifted, half-dead, for days and nights on a life-raft crammed with others. They had been found, but all corpses, save for him.
The cry came again, rose to a scream and then died, quite suddenly.
Flora saw him every day, walking round the garden, and along the beach, head bent, and sometimes with his hands clutched to either side of it, embedded deep in his own fear, unreachable. But at other times, he sat, reading or working a tapestry on a frame, beside the lily pool, and smiled at her gently as she went by. The skin was stretched thinly, taut and shining over the bones of his nose and cheeks and jaw.
‘You should not stay here too long,’ Leila Watson had said, ‘once you are stronger.’
They had gone into the sitting room to collect her book, where the old woman, Miss Feeney, peered at them out of her bundle of shawls and rugs, like a pupa, with tallow transparent hair and skin, as though there were neither flesh on her bones nor blood in her veins. ‘As if she were not alive at all,’ Leila had said, half-laughing. But then again, ‘It will not be good for you to stay here very long.’
She put out her arm to help Flora up the staircase. Tiredness came on her suddenly, a total, deadening exhaustion of body and brain, confusing her speech, crumbling her thoughts.
‘But you are so much better – so much stronger. I never thought to see it.’
‘No.’ Flora steadied herself, resting against the rail.
‘I am only afraid of how much the others may distress you.’
‘Yes.’
But they do not touch me, Flora would have said, for nothing touches me. I am miles away.
In her room, Leila held the bowl for her to wash her hands and face.
‘You need to be looked after, and have the comfort of it all … until you are perfectly strong. Only then …’
‘Then.’
Flora lay back on the pillows, her head light enough to float from her shoulders. Then where will I go? There is nowhere, because I do not dare. I cannot imagine the world beyond this house. I am safe. I hear the sound of the sea. This is far enough.
It did not matter
to her that she was among damaged people and the near-dead.
‘A healing place,’ Miss Pinkney had said.
(Miss Pinkney had returned home quite abruptly, to her own life, and, in time, Flora would question the fact, piece together an answer to her questions, and be angry. But her letters came regularly, full of good reasons and of her unchanged concern.)
‘When you are stronger,’ Leila Watson drew the curtains softly against the late evening sun, ‘we will talk about it all. Not now. Not yet.’
She would have answered, but could not make the words come together, and then the Sister came rustling into the calm and shaded room.
Flora slept.
And the song of a late thrush poured into the garden from the lilac tree, to soothe the poor, burned, half-crazed man sitting beneath it, and the tide sighed up and back over the shingle; and the sounds rinsed Flora’s sleep. (And in her sleep, she cried out: Where would I go. Where would I go? But silently, disturbing no one, and, in the morning, did not remember.)
Three
‘The last time … last … last … last.’
His footsteps sounded down the hollow corridor, in and out of the abandoned rooms.
‘Last … last, last … last …’
There was a hole in the corner of a ceiling showing through to the sky. Clouds. He had a key to the padlocks. He came again and again. Walked through these corridors, trying to come to terms with the emptiness.
He knew what would be said of him. ‘A madman now, that Dr Molloy, going in there still, walking about.’
One afternoon, with the frail winter sunlight finding a way somehow through the smeared and shuttered windows, he found himself weeping alone there. His face when he touched it was wet with tears.
‘Then I am mad,’ he said, and struggled to remember the textbooks. ‘Mad. Insane. Deranged. Crazed.’
He wiped his face, but the tears were like a spring spouting, or blood from a wound that would not be staunched, flowing down his face.
The building was full of echoes. Voices. Ghosts.