The Service Of Clouds (14 page)

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).

For 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.

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.

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 enough, 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.

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.