The Service of Clouds

by Susan Hill

  Sitting beside Elizabeth now, he knew her smell, it was familiar, antiseptic, inhuman, masking the other smell of her illness, the bodily, orifice smell. And this room had its smell, cold and sickly, of perfumed air, linen, pillows, an inanimate smell. But close to her, through it, he smelled Elizabeth.

  ‘We’ll go for a walk.’ (For he spoke to her, now that she could neither move nor speak, now that he had nowhere else to go, for hour after hour, told her everything, or as much of it as he could bear to remember, dare to speak.)

  The room was full of a soft, diffused light coming through the half-drawn curtains. He had fed her, spoon by careful spoon. It was the middle of the afternoon. No voices. No sound.

  Elizabeth lay, eyes open, silent, motionless on the high bed.

  ‘We’ll walk, up the hill, away from the town. Past the Baptist chapel. The gulls are crying. We’ll stop here. There’s the smoke from a train. Look back. There’s the sea, you know that, over the rooftops. Our rooftop. You know that. There’s a woman with a dog. We don’t know her. She doesn’t look at us.

  ‘Past the church and out on to the straight road. There, you can see the forest. Daft, isn’t it, to call it a forest? Only we do call it that. She does.’

  They had walked this way before, from the town towards the crossroads and the forest, rather than along the shingle beach to the next bay, and then further, to the cliff and the cave and the rock pools. He would take her there, tell how it felt to have the sea anemone suck his finger into its soft mouth, feel the bright, satin weed, smell the salt fish stench deep inside the cave.

  Tomorrow, perhaps, or the next week.

  But she had seen inside the cottage in the evening when the lamp was flaring, seen the hats on their stands and the beautiful embroidery, heard the hiss of steam from the iron. Seen him, as he sat at his books. Seen his mother at work. Seen how it was between them. He had shown her everything in the room, the furniture, piece by piece every ornament, every scrap of ribbon and trim. The shining steel scissors lying in the centre of the table.

  After so long, she knew.

  ‘We’ll go back then, Elizabeth. You’ll be tired. It’s a good stretch.’

  Perhaps she heard.

  He reached over and held the beaker to her lips, pressing the corner of her mouth so that the water dribbled in, massaging it down her throat with his finger, wiped what ran away into her neck, which was most of it. He took the ivory-backed brush and brushed the front of her hair where it had flopped forward out of place. Moved one arm, then the other, set her hands in new positions.

  The room was still. He did not speak again. She had had enough of walking, enough pictures put into her head for this day.

  ‘Elizabeth.’ He bent and touched his lips to the paper-dry skin. Smelled her smell.

  ‘Elizabeth.’ Drew the curtains.

  Left her.

  Perhaps she heard.

  Fourteen

  Behind the medical school, a park led to playing fields but beyond that rose the violet-blue hills. When he had first seen them, even in the midst of his despair his heart had leaped, for they seemed to be a horizon that was utterly private to him, the hills beckoned and promised. The buildings would house him, in them he would learn his skill, they were merely necessary, but the hills reassured him with the promise of an escape.

  He was afraid of everything he saw, though he must keep the fear hidden; he seemed to stand outside things even as he was in the midst of them. He was alarmed and intimidated. He would work here. The rest was an alien landscape full of strange faces and voices loud with confidence. He kept back in the shadows that fell from the huge building across the grass.

  But he wanted the hills. He was inland here, and glad of that, tired for now of the sea and the everlasting sound of it dragging up, dragging back, the coldness of it and the seagulls’ cry. He could not have said so, fearing to betray and afraid of his own disloyalty. Longing to leave meant a rejection of her and of his home and he could not admit that. But the thought of the violet-blue hills filled his mind now, in the dusk, as he leaned out of the window of his room on the evening before his departure. He longed for the space there, now, even for the corridors and high ceilings and echoes of the hospital buildings. He was tall, he felt stifled in the cottage, his arms and legs might at any moment have protruded through a window, a door, as they extended beyond his cuffs and the hems of his trousers, his head might have pushed through the fragile ceiling to the sky. She had to look up to him now.

  Everything was ready for him, everything clean, mended, ironed, folded, labelled, packed into the canvas bag. His room was already empty of him.

  The sea soughed softly, creaming on to the shingle.

  He had worked, driving himself forward, for only this, that she could be proud. He would fulfil her wishes for him.

  When he was ten, he had taken up a wounded bird from where it lay broken-backed on the shingle, and tended it, keeping it in a box in the scullery and, when it died, he had dissected it meticulously, studying the way it was made, its wings, frame, skull. It had been a thing of great beauty to him in death just as in soaring raucous life; and coming upon him, she had said, ‘You should think of doing that. Tending things.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not birds. Don’t waste yourself.’

  And so he had turned his attention to people, looked at them, studied their bodies, their shape, their movements, noting deformities made by age or disease, the tell-tale signs of illness. He read them. It was always clear to him. It was the old he studied the most, and there were many of them in these streets, shuffling, deaf, awkward, hump-backed, thinning, struggling against time and the forward surge of the rest of life. He recognised their fear and their loneliness, answered to them as he watched them, he warmed to their frailty and their simple power of endurance, as he felt alien from the others, vibrant, assured ones thrusting forwards into life full of heedless, casual strength, milling round him. He had no friends, as she had not, longed for none, shunned company. What he needed of human closeness, influence, presence, he took from her, as he had taken everything else, his breath, it seemed. He saw the world through her eyes and what he knew of those other worlds he had learned from her. He was in time with her ambitions and desires for him, liked their quiet, steady, close way of life together. It was as though the same blood flowed in and through and round them both, as if he fed from her breast and they had never been separated.

  Yet in his head now, he saw the line of violet hills and from them he took something quite new, some strength or life or inspiration, some hope and sustenance, and as he took it, concealed it.

  He had told her everything. She had been with him as he had first gone into the hospital buildings, saw them as he described them, every ceiling and moulding, every archway and doorway, the interview room, the lecture halls, the laboratories and dissecting rooms, the covered walkway that led to the hospital, the smell, the echoes. As he had looked, listened, spoken, written, judged, she had followed him, as he told it to her afterwards. As he had done so, it had been the same as on the day he had first gone to the infant school, when he had gripped her hand, eyes closed, describing, remembering and struggling to tell of his bewilderment, the sense of strangeness he had felt as he had sat at the low table, with a plate of mashed potato and gravy before him, and, for a few seconds, had stood outside himself, looking on, had thought, ‘I am. I am. I am. Here. Here. This is me. I am eating potato. I am. Here.’ But he had never been able to convey that. He had carried the particular potato and gravy smell with him forever. As he had looked down at the plate of meat and fried potato in the hospital, he had known it again, in exactly that way, the sense of standing outside his body looking down, saying, ‘I am. I am. Here. Now. Eating. I am.’ But the person who sat among the others at the refectory table staring at the plate, at the plate of fried potato, the meat, had not looked up, had not been aware of him, had not heard. ‘I am. I am. Here. Now. I am here. This is.’

  She h
ad asked, ‘Did you eat?’

  ‘Yes. Fried potato. Meat. Fruit pie. You queue up.’

  ‘So it was cold?’

  ‘Yes. When I got a place at a table. Yes, it was cold.’

  The first of years of cold, snatched, hospital food, the smell of the potato forever in his nostrils.

  But then there had been the line of hills. Those he had not spoken of. She did not know of their existence. When he thought of them now, his stomach flared with the excitement of something he did not understand, some secret, clutched to him, for in truth they were simply hills in the distance, and of no possible relevance to him, or to the life he would live now.

  The other flare was of fear, and that too he had pushed down and out of reach, out of consciousness. Because he knew, as he had looked at her that morning, every morning for weeks, saw again the infinitesimal changes, in the skin beneath her eyes, in the eyes themselves, and in the slight cautiousness in her movements as if she feared not so much pain as some falling apart and dissolution. There was no acknowledgment between them, of her illness or of his watchfulness, but that she was ill was something quite certain and known to him, inside her some terrible thing, some flaw, long dormant, was beginning to work like yeast, in stealth and darkness. If he had closed his eyes he thought that he might have seen it, like a stain spreading and seeping through her veins.

  But nothing was said, nothing could be said, she went about life as before, self-contained, purposeful, working or walking, or sitting quietly in the chair, by the window or beneath the lamp reading, or else staring ahead of her, hands resting on her book.

  She was proud, she said, and determined for him, hungry for his future. They had achieved this together and he was to go away. That was all. But would come back, in a few weeks, and then, regularly, time after time, until he came back to her forever. It was only, she thought, a temporary absence.

  Fifteen

  ‘I am not old. I am young. Nothing changes.’ But her own face looking back at her from the oval mirror was changed. She saw her young face overlaid by this unfamiliar, older one, not lined but curiously fallen, the skin bleached as cotton cloth.

  ‘I was Florence Hennessy who became Flora Molloy.’

  And then the tide of memory rose up and drowned her.

  When she woke from her drowning it was three o’clock in the morning. She sat at the open window, seeing the moon play upon the shifting surface of the water, bathing the shingle.

  What confused her was the inconsistency of time, and its unreliability. She could no longer depend upon it, for this day had lasted a hundred years, moving forward as indetectably as growth, and the previous eighteen years had lasted less than a moment. That much she knew, yet the shock of it was still great to her and terrible. She remembered the falling snow that had surrounded them, could have stretched out of the window and felt it soft as a cold feather in the cup of her hand. She saw the infant’s eggshell skull in the pale eerie snowlight.

  The sea slipped up over the shingle, lost its footing, slipped back again.

  The house was light and empty as a paper house. There was no life in it, nothing stirred in the air around her. She felt transparent and brittle as a chrysalis discarded.

  When he had walked away she had thought that he might have drained her life out of her and taken it, trailing behind him like an invisible cord, but she saw that he had not, that he was separate, whole and entire, and that the cord had shrivelled and crumbled away into nothing at last.

  She regretted nothing. Her life here with him had been her absolute fulfilment; everything had led to it. Yet now her lack of discontent, the satisfaction she had had for so long from so little, seemed strange to her. She remembered her early passion for her independence and to make her mark upon life, away from her mother and Olga and the dark house, the excitement at what she saw all around her, her fervour of hoping.

  Over the next days and weeks alone it was the pictures that came back to her, slowly at first, a recollection now and then, a reminder in the way the light fell and the pattern of clouds, but soon, with urgency, crowding into her mind. Instead of other memories, which seemed to recede, she had these. It delighted her that they were not lost, but imprinted still, clear, fresh, detailed. She needed no other reminders. She had only to sit at these windows and almost unbidden they could come quietly back to her with a clarity and vividness that the faces of people did not have, and she rested in them and was sustained by them day and night.

  Sixteen

  She slept the day that he left and for hours of every day after, great draughts of sleep, and, when she was not sleeping, floated through time, unthinking, unfeeling, as it grew dark and light and dark again around her, as the tide rose and fell.

  And when finally she woke, coming to herself again, for a few minutes it was as if he had never existed and the years with her son had never been, that she was alone, as she had always been alone, in some strange place – the house called Carbery, Miss Pinkney’s house, the room in the lodging house of Miss Marchesa, the convalescent home, the Bloomsbury flat. She had moved on from one to the next until she had ended here, and settled at last. Yet now, the purpose of it gone, she felt detached, as if she might simply move on and away yet again, and then again, in an eternity of hopeless change.

  But she was ill and for that reason, as well as to await his return, must stay.

  She felt intermittently feverish, and drained of all energy. She did not want food, only had a craving for cold water, which she drank from the scullery tap, cupped in her bare hands.

  On the second evening, she took the lidded basket and a linen bag, in which the scraps of fabric, the ribbons and braids were stored, and emptied them out carefully, and arranged them on the table, shading the spectrum of colours precisely, until they began to form a picture. The scraps held their life here, his childhood and the years of his growing up and all of her work and purpose with them. Looking at them, Flora looked at every day, every month, every season, in darkness and in light. She began to cut them into even pieces, to piece the picture meticulously together, arranged and re-arranged until her eye was satisfied, then began, little by little, to sew. The stitches were minute and exact. She had time, she thought, to finish.

  She walked less now, and never far, and paused for breath, standing on the shingle beneath a steely sky, watching the gulls soar and the boats come sweeping in. No one paid attention to her, no one came.

  When she was not sewing, she slept, or sat at the window, getting up now and then to drink the water which alone seemed to sustain her.

  He wrote, twice, sometimes three times each week, and his letters were life to her, joy, interest and satisfaction. Yet, reading them over and over again, she felt apart and that already the ending was embarked upon. But he thought of her, he said, in everything.

  That he was profoundly unhappy in everything he did not say. Only the work, the excitement of learning, steadied him, so that the moment he woke he turned his mind to it in anticipation, and to hold back the demons of fear and uncertainty.

  He went about his daily routine, from lecture room to laboratories to hospital ward, easily for all his unease.

  Only the idea of staring into the face of death disturbed him, only the corridors leading to the mortuary held terror during the early days, so that he lay awake, anticipating that journey, steeling his nerve, plunging violently in and out of dreams in which the dead floated like corks on the surface of the water.

  He had his studies and his ambition, he had the time in which he wrote the letters, and in which he read his mother’s letters to him; he had the picture, which he carried within him, of the cottage, and the view from his room of the wide seashore. He had the line of hills.

  He did not go to them, knowing that in reaching them they would lose all interest for him, all power to enchant. When he had free time he walked or cycled out in other directions, alone or with anyone who cared for his company. He told them nothing of himself. That he had learned the ha
bit of closeness and self-containment from her over the whole of his childhood he perfectly understood, and occasionally, looking around him, listening to the others, he was disturbed by it, felt awkward, uncertain where or how he might find his place in their world. They had an ease and a sureness which he lacked and sometimes envied. Then, the hills would hold out hope for him, and he did not mock himself for the power he invested in them.

  For the rest, he studied the working and the healing of bodies and minds, and longed and at the same time did not long, to return to her. And the small, hard stone of terrifying knowledge, that his mother was ill and would never be well again, lodged like a bitter kernel within him.

  Seventeen

  The sea roared in to drown her and the gulls swooped to gorge on her flesh. The pale slabs of sky were dead and staring as fish-eyes, framed in the cottage windows and the walls of the cottage pressed inwards until she could not breathe. The silence boomed in her ears but when she cried out, there was only emptiness to hear.

  Her pride was no longer of use to her.

  The ghosts slipped in then. Turning her head quickly, standing in the shadows of the stairwell, she might have glimpsed them – but whether they were the ghosts of the dead or of the living she could not have discovered.

  (Leila Watson’s address, torn up and discarded. Olga’s letters left unanswered, and in the end, unopened.)

  She dreamed of her mother and saw in the mirror that her own face was become like her, though years too soon. She understood well enough that it was her punishment. Rejection bred rejection from one generation to another and her pride turned in upon her.

  She was thin and hollow as a straw.

  But now and then a little shard of memory broke off and floated back to her like a feather on the outgoing tide, to nourish her. A glimpse of a picture came into her mind, a fragment of Miss Pinkney’s voice, comforting.