by Susan Hill
He should see someone. Visit a doctor?
‘Doctor Molloy?’
Voices. Ghosts.
But she was real. Her cardigan had a slight egg stain, beside the top button.
‘I saw your car turn in. I was on my way shopping.’
She looked up and around her. What did she remember?
‘But it is done with,’ she said. Her voice was gentle to him. ‘It is nothing now. Not to me, not to you. The old place.’
He felt like a child with the tears running down. He was surprised not to feel any shame, in front of her.
‘Don’t come again. It isn’t good. Not on your own, wandering about. No one knowing.’
He let her lead him, holding his arm, as if he were an old, blind man, out of the doors. ‘The last time,’ she said. The padlock clicked.
But I am not an old man, he thought, not blind.
‘Then what am I?’
‘We must both make new lives for ourselves. That has to be the way of it.’
He turned, and looking back, saw at last only a half-derelict building, the window panes broken here and there and weeds growing up out of cracks between the paving stones. Nothing to him. But he searched his mind for another place, another time, for he had mislaid them.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Not now.’
He saw a woman with a square jaw, heavy, plain. Generous to him. What would she do after this? He did not know. He realised that he knew nothing about any of them, and had not cared, absorbed in himself. He put a hand briefly on her shoulder. What did she feel? Where was her life to be?
‘Goodnight, Sister.’
She watched him go slowly to his car, saw him safely away, out of concern, before looking once behind her, at the grey barracks of a place, with the clouds gathering and darkening around it.
Molloy went straight to the shore, and walked there, close to the water’s edge, as the small waves pleated over and over, and felt a great relief as at the lightening of a burden, and a sudden astonishing exhilaration, so that he wanted to shout to the expanse of sky and sea. But only walked on to the headland, turned, and walked back, as the rain fell out of banked clouds, softly, on to the sea.
Four
The blow did not fall in the expected way. She had prepared for the blow of illness. Life dealt that often enough; she was familiar with it from her work in her father’s shop, for people told things to the chemist, fearing to go to the doctor, hoping to have their fears dismissed by someone who was, after all, medical. And then she had married Molloy.
She thought about it sometimes, sitting on the back step looking down the garden on fine evenings. Tumours. Tremors. Paralysis. Parkinson’s disease. Strokes. The long catalogue of Latin names. She was prepared, not being confident or trusting of life.
They had been married and at the house in Linney Street for almost five years and the garden had come into itself, the new hedge growing up, borders and bushes plumped out. The birds had their hiding places.
The blow came from behind; and even as it felled her, she felt betrayed, cheated by it because it was different.
He walked in the front door and through the house, to find her. It was the first week of May. She had noticed that the swifts were back, soaring above the market clock.
‘You like the sea, Elizabeth,’ he said. His shadow fell across her book. ‘The sea and the country quietness.’
She did not understand him. In a moment, she would take a colander and pick the early gooseberries.
‘You would like a bigger garden.’
‘Oh, I’ve as much as I can do with. There isn’t a deal of time, after work.’
‘But you’d not have to work there.’
There?
‘Unless it suited you. I’d never stand in your way, if you wanted.’
‘I’ll make tea.’
She would make tea to give herself time, trying to sort out his meaning. But he followed her, standing in the doorway, blocking out the sun.
‘St. Andrew’s. It’s a fine, small hospital. I’m to be the Consultant. To specialise there.’
She stared.
‘Gowan Bay.’
‘That’s a hundred miles away. To the west.’
‘A hundred and thirty miles.’
She could not imagine it.
‘The hospital is on the edge of the little town and the sea is ten minutes only.’
‘I don’t know the sea.’
The Greel Lakes had been her watering places.
‘You’ll come to know it.’
‘We’re to move? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It’s a very good place, a very good chance – the best. The best chance for me, to do what’s important, and give up the rest.’ He made a movement of his hand and she followed it, and saw the young and the infectious, those who were only ill in passing, fly from him, and the shadows of the old and dying gather round him close as a cloak.
But this small house was everything. She looked out desperately to the garden and had a crazy, panicking thought of somehow taking it with her there. There.
‘Is it decided then?’
‘You wouldn’t prevent me, Elizabeth? You would surely not want ever to do that?’
She looked up into his face then, and saw his purpose, and saw, too, that there was no unkindness.
‘The sea,’ she said, trying out the word.
As so often, he ate quickly, and went back, to a patient. And after he had gone, there was the space, in which she could stay quietly.
The blow, falling as it did, had confused her, so that now she did feel ill, as if it had been that that had come to her after all; her limbs were heavy and oddly weak, when she walked to the bottom of the garden and the little wild patch beside the fence, she felt as if she had never done this thing, put one foot in front of the other and moved behind them. The whole place looked strange, altered, the light and the shadows fell in a different way, troubling her. It was as if the garden and house were distorted, dream images of their real selves.
The swifts were high in the sky, swerving madly. On the ground, beside a pockmarked stone, a snail lumbered for a moment within its shell, before gliding forwards down the smooth path.
It was cool. She should go in and make a fire to sit beside.
Her childhood rooted her in the town, but something else clove her to this house and garden. She was not certain what, or why it should be so powerful.
She must sever it then. If she let her thoughts burrow down like worms they would destroy her. She would accept, and experience the pain as terrible, once, and be done.
When he came back, at first light, as the birdsong filled the garden, she was awake, waiting.
‘What month would we leave?’
August. And so there was the whole summer to get through, the soft pale mornings and evenings when the shadows lay long on the grass.
She tended the garden still, most carefully, keeping the flowerbeds neat, tidying and clipping, setting every blade and leaf in place, in a sort of frenzy. And it was hard, there was rain throughout June, billowing and heavy, blurring the line of everything, weighing the bushes down, and making the growth lax and soft. She simply worked harder in the face of it.
The house was soon emptied and cleaned, and no longer hers.
‘Here’s a toast to your brand new life, Elizabeth,’ her father said, lifting his sherry glass, at the end of her last day. They seemed glad to have her go, bustling her away into her future, anxious to settle back in contentment with one another.
August, and the sky had dried out, hardened and brightened, the grass was brittle and bleached as hay. The harvest moon rose, huge and melon ripe. In the light of it, she took a flame-torch to the garden.
Five
The blankets had writing across them, and the sheets, the pillowcases and towels too: ‘Property of St. Andrew’s Hospital’ in bold, bright blue.
So they were a part of the hospital, in a hospital flat, in a hospita
l building. It was as if they had no life, no independent existence at all. She might have been given, or sold to it. ‘Property of St. Andrew’s Hospital.’
He had watched her, for weeks after coming here, after the fire, though he had said little, and asked no questions. She knew only that he had understood, at last, the power of her feelings.
‘Would you want to go away somewhere for a while?’
‘Away?’
‘On a holiday. I’ve time owed to me. We could go …’
‘Where?’
‘Wherever you would like. The mountains. Or to Paris.’
‘We’ve a move to make.’
‘You’ve not been in an aeroplane.’
‘There’s the sea to get used to.’
‘Well …’
But she knew that he would give up easily enough, and with relief, anxious to begin his work, and was glad of that, never finding it easy to go against him or to argue; she could not muster thoughts and words sufficiently well for argument.
They would not go on a holiday. There was enough strangeness already, enough change and difficulty and difference, and lack of ease.
‘We’ll take on the flat until we find a house you like.’
‘You.’
‘I know how it is, Elizabeth.’ There was a softness then in his way of speaking.
He had come in very late and seen the smouldering garden, smelled the paraffin and scorched grass, and doused it with cans of water, until the smoke blackened and the smell turned to a stench, sickening her. In the morning, the sight had been terrible, the bushes dripping and blackened, plants twisted in death, and all the birds frantic.
The hospital flat was above a canteen and offices, in a building set behind the main building. There was no garden, nor even any grass to be seen, though a few trees grew beyond the perimeter fence, and an old hedge of blackthorn and quickthorn and elder. She felt released from the past and from her old self, and suspended here, in a time that was out of the real stream of her life. It was very quiet, but there were people to watch going about along the asphalt paths below. The windows were large and cloud-filled, as autumn blew in from the sea.
To her surprise, she was not unhappy. Sometimes she went down to the wards and helped them serve lunch, or change water jugs and arrange vases of flowers and they treated her very politely, and cautiously; there was an invisible space between them, but no unfriendliness.
They said: ‘He is a wonderful man,’ almost every day to her, and she believed it. He belonged to them, though they, like her, could not know him.
Someone had scratched across the base of all the saucepans ‘St. A. H.’ and marked every piece of china, with nail varnish.
There was an old black bicycle which the handyman spruced up for her to use, and that was marked too, in white letters along the mudguard. But she was grateful, and went out on it for hours alone across the scoured countryside, where the bushes were bent low, grown that way from flattening themselves against the wind. She liked the sand dunes and the little mounds of gleaming rock, and the smell of the seaweed at low water. But by October, it was wet and the wind blew too strongly for her to ride against it, and she retreated to the flat, and the hospital wards, and felt very safe there, and quite useful, and the old life was safe, too, sealed off and protected in her memory. She rarely thought about it. But in dreams sometimes, she wandered around the old garden at Linney Street, and sat on the step in the darkness, smelling the grass and the damp night air, before the fire took them.
The stiffness began that winter, with the endless days of seeping damp and cold, the wind that always blew. She felt it in her joints and her limbs each morning on waking; a stiffness at first, and lack of ease, but not pain. She spent longer in the wards, reading to old men and women from the newspaper, giving help in the pharmacy. She found that she was very happy indeed here, sheltered and safe. It was as if no harm could come to her there, nothing touch her at all. She ate with them at lunch time and if there was nothing at all for her to do, and even the cupboards had been tidied beyond tidiness, she simply sat in a corner reading.
And it was a great help, they said, she was very useful, there was always room, wasn’t there, for an extra pair of hands? Though they often looked at her questioningly, uncertain of her, not quite relaxed when she was among them.
January was clamped in iron cold, the wind pierced every crack, fog and damp wreathed about outside the windows trying to insinuate themselves.
There was a morning when the stiffness burned into her like a brand, and he prescribed tablets. She remained in bed. But the pain scarcely eased, and the stiffness paralysed her a little more each day, she could barely move from one room to the other. He sent for a colleague and, later, for a specialist from St. Edmund’s Hospital, in the city. One of the nurses brought up flowers, and later, lunches and dinners came on trays from the canteen.
The branches of the trees beside the perimeter fence were bare and twisted. As she looked out of the window at them, hour after hour, they seemed like her own limbs, sapless and blackened.
Nevertheless a strange peace came to her, in the grey hours, and a contentment like that she had known sitting on the back step looking down her garden at Linney Street, and she gathered it gratefully around her. But those other mornings and evenings might have been a hundred years ago, and certainly in her youth – for she felt old now.
He drove her to the city, for another consultation, with another doctor, for X-rays and examinations and tests. She saw him conferring with them, at the end of a corridor, or in an empty cubicle, but she felt quite detached and calm, unafraid of anything they might know or discover about her.
But they knew nothing, and nothing was discovered.
He drove her back in silence, and on the way she felt the stiffness tightening, as if something that until now had still been warm, pliable, fluid, was setting hard, turning to steel or stone. She could barely shuffle from the car.
They must move then, he said, the stairs were quite impossible now, and there were no other hospital flats. He took a day off, and another. On the third, he found the old, single-storey, clapboard house, facing the sea. Someone had made a small garden, of shells and stones and bits of bleached driftwood, bone-pale, whitened by the wind and the sea-salt, not dark, as the tree trunks were dark. Steely blue, globular thistles and sea-peas grew like bristles.
He had chosen it for the wide windows, he said. Living room and dining room and bedroom faced the sea.
‘The sea is everywhere.’
‘It is.’
‘Look at the sky, at the light changing. And the little garden.’
‘Yes.’
He got all the help to move, unpacked everything and set it out. She had to do nothing.
‘In summer, you will have the beach and the dunes to walk on.’
He was anxious to get back to the wards.
*
It did not feel right to have the old things from Linney Street around her here, familiar and yet belonging entirely to that other place, the other life. The blankets were her own; there were no scratch marks and letterings on the pans and the china.
From every window, she saw the huge sea, moving heavily about within itself, pressing forwards, cutting off her escape.
Six
‘This!’
Leila Watson said, letting the door swing open, and standing back, as if in triumph.
And so they paused for a moment on the threshold, looking, at the sunshine splashed on to the bare boards from the skylight – looking, but not yet going in, and Flora felt the moment to be important, and the start of something. And then they stepped into the flat, and that was the end of something else, her past, she thought, her youth, even.
The rooms were at the top of one of the tall, plain-fronted houses in a Bloomsbury square, with iron railings and two steps to the front door.
‘This!’
The ceilings sloped. They were on a level with the clouds. London sailed, far below.
(Leila Watson’s house in Surrey had been let very advantageously, so that she had been able to take the lease. She wanted to live in London, she said. ‘Surrey was the past. This is now, and the future.’)
Flora stood looking out, as she had looked out of the window at Miss Marchesa’s; but that looking had not been in happiness. The houses on the opposite side of the square matched this house exactly. Pigeons were settled in the groin of the roof. She felt as if she were floating, suspended so high. But the roots of the house ran down firmly into the ground, and she was rooted with them, in touch with the life of the square, and the surrounding streets, the whole of London.
She turned, smiling, to Leila Watson.
The arrangement was this. That Leila was to teach at a small school in Cavendish Street, from which pupils would also come at times, individually, to be coached by Flora, who had infinite patience; and she would continue her own study of art, but privately. She could not have faced returning to the Institute.
‘We shall manage quite nicely,’ Leila Watson said. And when Flora had written to tell about it all in one of her letters to Miss Pinkney, there had been a reply at once, containing a considerable amount of money, by cheque. ‘I have savings,’ she had written. ‘Quite enough for my needs and the rest are of no use to me. It is what I long intended to do for you.’
She had wanted to return the money, at once.
‘But you cannot,’ Leila Watson had said. ‘You must not.’
‘You think that it would offend her?’
‘I know that it would hurt her.’
Now, Flora went about the rooms, picturing them furnished, lamp- and fire-lit. It was September. She had completely recovered. But the illness had cut her off from something, some place, as well as changed her, and she could not go back.
She opened the window, and a street seller’s cry came up from the corner of the square.
‘We shall make new friends, and have them in. We shall have suppers and discussions. Life will begin properly again.’