The Service Of Clouds (3 page)

But her own state was not something she considered very deeply; she was as she was. Otherwise, her life was even and unremarkable, and she would not, until the distant attainment of adulthood, have expected it to change, as children do not.

Within a month of her eighth birthday, her father had died and, two weeks afterwards, her mother had given birth to another child, a shrivelled, sallow-skinned premature daughter, whom she named Olga, because May Hennessy had an inclination towards the romantic, the exotic and the foreign-seeming, as an antidote to the reality of her own life and diminished horizons.

Flora had not been told about the coming child and, afterwards, had wondered at what point her mother would have brought herself to speak of it – for surely she had never meant the whole, momentous business to have been unprepared for, surely there must have been some plan for a careful disclosure. (Though she found the thought of any such talk between them unimaginable, and later came to realise that in any case none had been planned. May Hennessy had been too shocked herself, and thrown into emotional disarray, to know how to tell anyone at all of her pregnancy. She had only prayed that Florence would not notice it and question her, for the girl was perceptive enough, with an intelligence her mother was afraid of.)

But Flora had noticed nothing.

And then, before the time of birth, the death had come.

Saturdays were for longing. That was their point.

They took the bus to the town shops, not to buy from them, but to gaze into their windows, at fur stoles and mahogany furniture, shiny black gramophones and underwear fancy with lace and appliqué, china candelabra and fruits in syrup, packed into elaborate jars. It was tacitly understood between them, though never openly stated, that they were here to admire, to compare and to covet only, as though these objects, resplendent upon their stands and counters, were crown jewels or rare artefacts in a museum and quite unattainable.

They walked slowly down one side of Lord’s Parade and up the other, looking, and, having looked, felt quite satisfied, and then went into Maud’s for tea and lemonade, cakes and an ice.

It was understood, too, that acquaintances would barely be acknowledged. These outings were private occasions, separate from the rest of life and undertaken to appease some desire of May Hennessy’s for ritual. Flora thought that, though they shared nothing else, her mother would still have preferred not to be with her, but to enjoy the outings entirely alone. They scarcely spoke unless, once they were installed at a window table in Maud’s, a memory of something just seen and admired might float before May Hennessy’s eyes and so be singled out, set, as if on a pedestal and turned this way and that between them, and commented upon.

The child had always felt cool and detached, never restless with the desire to take home and own anything they saw, partly because nothing in the shop windows ever seemed to have much to do with her; she could have had no possible relation to black velour coats or crystal vases. But she had inherited a certain dispassionateness, and was able to hold herself aloof and see the slow walk down Lord’s Parade in the same light as a visit to a series of dull tableaux. Only at Christmas did a spark of something like excitement or happiness leap up in her at the sight of the glowing coloured caverns hollowed out behind the glass.

At Maud’s, Flora liked the atmosphere, the bustle of waitresses and the chink of china on trays, long spoons in tall glasses, the pastel ices with cochineal syrup running like rivulets of lava down the sides. Then she sat and held her spoon poised above the glass, looking around at the women in hats, and longed to reach out and hold this bright, chattering place, carry it about within her. It satisfied very easily any craving for change or interest in her otherwise grey, plain days.

She had not learned peevishness or dissatisfaction. Her life was as it was, and she accepted it, as children will, and if she recognised that the Saturdays had a different or disturbing effect upon her mother, she did not question that either. What May Hennessy thought, felt or wanted was her own affair.

It was February, cold and bitter and black as a burned-out coal. They had made their way more quickly than usual down Lord’s Parade, seeing no one they knew, and eaten tea-cakes, not ices, in Maud’s, which shrivelled the usual pleasure of the day a little. The place had been quiet – there was influenza about. Flurries of hail blew like pips on to the windows. May Hennessy’s face was drawn, with puffiness around the eyes.

‘Well, perhaps it would have been better not to have come,’ she said.

Flora did not reply. But she was conscious of the difference in things, of a disappointment, and, afterwards, would remember, and mark the day out as the beginning of the change in their lives, and the end of everything familiar.

After supper was eaten and cleared, the maid Eileen went out, walking two miles to the village to stay one night with her own family.

It was the only night of the week they were left alone, and, occasionally, they would play cards at the table in the back parlour next to the kitchen. They had a fire there, as well as in the front room where John Joseph Hennessy sat, and because it was the weekend the oil cloth was taken off and they played directly on to the polished wood, which was another thing that helped to set the day apart.

It was difficult to know afterwards how much she had really sensed of the change in things. But, after the card game, her mother had simply sat in her chair, looking down at the table, seeming tired, and Flora had sat too, and, then, something happened to time which slowed and stopped, and hung there, like a heavy, still object, a weight suspended on a chain. She felt it pressing in upon her. The house was quiet. The wind and rain had died down, the coals in the hearth did not shift or stir, so that after a time she became a little frightened by the silence, and fidgeted, wanting to bring everything back to life, nudge the clock to make it go again. But her mother sat and did not notice, went on with her thinking, and then the girl slipped off her chair and out of the room, and was quiet in closing the door.

In the hall, the silence was greater, like a thick cloud, a substance through which she could move forward only slowly.

She put her hand on the knob of the sitting room door. Her father’s room. But for a moment she did not go in, only stayed frozen there, as if fearing that, once she had opened the door, she might find herself in some strange other place, where she would not know herself, and the arrangement of things would be quite unfamiliar.

For the rest of her life, she remembered everything about the room and her next few moments in it, alone with her father, though for years she did not speak of it but kept the memory stored away, untouched and perfectly preserved. She was able to close her eyes and smell again the smell in the parlour, to hear the
pressure of the silence there, and to recreate her own feelings as she sensed its different and disturbing quality. It was not until she was no longer Florence Hennessy but Flora Molloy, and her own son was five years old that, for no apparent reason, she began to tell him of it, as she might tell a story, and after that he would ask to hear it sometimes, as if it were indeed
Rumpelstiltskin, The Pied Piper
or
The Little Matchgirl
, all of which she told him in the same way and the same voice. (For her favourite stories became his, they liked exactly the same ones for the same reasons. Their delight in this, as in so much else, was mutual and perfectly matched.)

She had gone on slippered feet that made no sound into the soundless room.

The fire had burned low, though the coals still glowed at their heart. The lamp had burned down too, the light was tallow and flickering.

She stopped. She had been about to say his name, but then did not, only stifled the life out of the words as they rose into her mouth. She looked at him, waiting, and then after a few seconds made her way not directly to him but by edging round the room, holding on to pieces of the furniture, afraid to let them go and be somehow stranded, without support.

‘I knew,’ she said, all those years later. ‘I knew when I opened the door, only without knowing that I knew.’

She had reached him at last, but then could not bring herself to look, had stared at the hearth and the pattern of the green tiles around it, and the shape of the lilies that were printed on the tiles. There had been no smoke rising from the nuggets of coal, only the strange, dim, staring redness.

She saw his hand first, the handkerchief held in the palm and trailing down between his fingers that hung loose over the chair arm, and the hand was like a wax candle. She knew at once and quite certainly that there was no life in it.

Then, inch by inch, she had let her gaze travel up his arm, up the grey woollen sleeve, to his shoulder, to the shirt collar, then
above that to his thin neck. His head was back, resting on the small cushion. She followed the line from neck to jaw, as she had felt her way around the edge of the room. She stared at the bristle of hair, thin, colourless, at his temple and wisping back behind his ear, examined the coil of the ear, intricately.

The silence in the room tensed itself, tight as a coil about to spring; an absolute silence, such as she had never known before, but which penetrated her now and wove itself into the innermost recesses of her being, and settled there, bound itself in and around like a mesh, knotted, inextricable.

She was holding her breath, her throat and chest hurt, wanting to explode, she heard her heartbeat, as though she were trapped with it inside the skin of a drum.

She looked suddenly, quickly, right into his face, before she had decided that she would do it, or was able to prevent herself.

His eyes were not closed, they were open, and they were eyes she knew, yet they were not, they were different, a stranger’s eyes, staring, staring back at her but not seeing, nor able to let any light or life out. They were dead eyes, cold, glazed, opaque.

The silence gathered itself and rushed towards her, she was engulfed in it, and then from far away, as at the end of a black tunnel, she heard herself begin to scream.

The year that followed was the worst of her life save only for one, that came after. Of that she remained certain.

The time before her father’s death, right up to the moment of walking into the front parlour and feeling the terrible different silence, became not merely the past but a complete, finished piece of the past, which was not joined on to the present or the future at any point, save by the thread of her memory. It was an island, forever inaccessible, inhabited by people she had once known but knew no longer, and to which the causeway had been sealed off. It floated there on its own, separate sea.

At first, her insecurity was total. She was unsure of her own surroundings, and people behaved oddly towards her. Children who had never seemed to like her, or to want her company, sidled up and hung about her, as if she were an object of fascination. Those she had regarded as enemies offered her sweets, yet friends remained aloof and stared at her across the classroom, as if she had become another person. At these times she would go into the cloakroom and look at her face in the pockmarked bit of mirror behind the door, half expecting it to be unfamiliar. But, apart from a wariness in her eyes, which she recognised as an accurate reflection of her inner feelings, it was her own face that confronted her.

What she remembered always and most clearly, afterwards, were not merely individual days and events – the day of his funeral, or of the birth of her sister, though these were seared on her memory. It was the disarray and displacement she felt, the way days were ordered quite differently now, so that even sounds were changed, everything felt temporary and time was a mire to be waded through on weighted feet. The rooms looked odd. The front parlour belonged to no one and was without a purpose, they did not go into it, but huddled together beside a poor fire at the back of the house. Strangers called at odd times, relatives, whose existence she had scarcely known of came, and sat awkwardly about the house, uncertain how to talk to her.

Her feelings about her father were the most confusing of all. She had enough to do, all day and far into the nights, to make her way to the heart of them, to sort them one from another and range them to her satisfaction.

When she had realised that he was dead, she had felt cold and afraid, urgently hysterically afraid, but that had lasted only a short time, until people came and took her away. Then, she was lost and bewildered, not knowing what her role should be. She felt anxious about the future, and at odd times was filled with desire simply to run away, to separate herself altogether from her mother, the house and what had happened. But she felt no real sadness. She had loved her father, yet that love had been a dutiful, subdued thing, not vital or rewarding. She had not known him or felt close to him, for all his vague kindness and affection towards her. He had been too distracted by illness, too wrapped up in the simple, daily struggle with his body and its malfunctions and weaknesses to spare energy for emotion or any relationship that might have been a further drain upon him. He had had nothing left over from the business of keeping himself alive.

It was wrong, she thought, not to feel pain and grief or the need to cry passionate tears. She felt unnatural and guilty at her own coldness and detachment, at the same time understanding that this was her greatest source of strength.