by Susan Hill
He did not believe any of the customary creeds that he had recited at school. She had not. ‘No one knows,’ she had said. ‘They’ll pretend to you. They will all claim the truth. None of them knows it, and we do not either, and you will not. Only never close your mind. That’s all. Never.’
She had always spoken to him, as to an adult, in this way. There had never been baby talk between them. In the conversations he remembered still, word for word, so that he could hear them over in his head, there had never been any sense that he was too young to hear about this or that, not ready to understand. What she had wanted him to know, she had told him, what she had wondered about and needed to discuss openly, she had talked to him about.
As, death.
‘We do not know. No one does. Nor ever has.’
He would not have doubted her, in this as in anything else. No one knew. Yet she was all-knowing to him, he was certain of it, as well as all-powerful and all-providing. He needed no one else.
‘The Gateway.’ He thought the word now, looking towards the outline beneath the heavy sheet. In all the years since his mother’s own dying, he had come to it time after time. This far. If there was a farther, he could not follow. It was the best he could ever do. It had to satisfy.
The first time he had entered a mortuary, in the teaching hospital, he had been sick with dread. They had had to give him leave, for two days after. He had been sweating and grey in his terror. He would have to leave then, he had been sure. Blood was nothing to him, incised flesh or protruding bone, the stench in the open gut, pus in a wound. But his imagination had shied away from the place where silence and finality would confront him with the things that were in him. That he could not bear. He had begun to strip his bed and to empty his things out of the drawers, for he would be asked to leave, there would be no other way. He had shown his weakness, a fatal flaw.
Instead, they had frog-marched him back there, propelled him through the doors, saying nothing, the pressure brutal, of a knuckle between his shoulder blades. He had smelled the cold and the formaldehyde. The silence had rushed into his ears like a wave, to drown him. The world had dissolved like water beneath his feet.
They had ordered him to open his eyes. After a moment, he had done so, and found himself alone with the attendant, who sat on a stool beside the waxen body of a man. He had looked at Molloy, with understanding and absolute kindness. ‘It’s nothing,’ he had said. ‘Do you see? Nothing at all.’
But it had been everything. The realisation had crept towards him and overtaken him, like the dawn of understanding. In this functional place of death, and later, at bedside after bedside, Molloy had reached the only destination of any importance to him.
He had borne their amusement, knowing that he made them uneasy. ‘Mortuary Molloy’ they had shouted after him then. It had not troubled him. Something had cleared in his mind, some log-jam of dread and uncertainty and confusion, as he had realised his own calm and strength, in the face of the dead, and his sense of rightness when he witnessed the moment of dying. It had been utterly sure, at once, and had never left him, and his life as a doctor had been transformed by it.
Nothing touched him, nothing threatened his certainty, ever again. He did not speak of it, nor answer questions about it, except with a shrug. There was nothing he could have said, no words with which he could have conveyed his feelings to the others, so that, after a time, they withdrew. They did not isolate or ostracise him, and he shared his days with them amicably enough. But he did not need them.
Beside those who were dying, and with them after death, his loss of her, the desolation of it and his absolute sense of abandonment, were eased. Nowhere else. For the rest of time, he suffered her absence unrelievedly, and the accompanying absence of the feeling of all love and all sweetness.
Now, sitting quietly in this basement room, within this place of safety, he suddenly felt a sense of his mother’s person, so entire and vivid that it was giddying. He smelled her smell. Her body was as close to him as his own breath. He saw her face and almost cried out, with the reality and then, at once, the searing unreality of it, so that he swayed on the stool and caught his breath. The other man glanced up.
But it was over, as it had come. It had taken a second, and pressed him down in that second with the weight of forty years, and then was nothing. The man looked away again, and so, after a time, Molloy got up, and went to stand briefly beside the hidden body, to put his hand up to it, touching the dry cotton of the covering sheet, as if it were sacred cloth.
Eight
Flora built her plans calmly, and in an orderly way, as others might accumulate savings little by little. At school, she worked methodically, never trying to impress, never asking too many bright questions in the class, and so the others neither scorned nor resented her. She maintained her cool, pleasant manner with them, walking round the school grounds after lunch, or playing tennis.
Towards her teachers, she was polite, neat, pleasant. None of them could find fault with her. None of them knew her. She was not secretive nor furtive, merely quite separate. Her real life went on somewhere within herself.
She liked to walk in the lanes and fields near her home, and as she grew older, through the streets of the town too, and, in her walking, discovered for herself the things that were of value – the castle, churches, gates leading to small, elegant houses tucked away. She grew to distinguish the façades of buildings, to see what was beautiful and elegantly proportioned, what cheaply built, cluttered and ugly. Her own taste was austere. She liked clean, straight lines, spare detail, plain handsome shapes, was irritated by over-elaboration.
In summer she went into the public parks and gardens, but although she found them pleasant enough, and shady on the hot afternoons at the end of the school day, they did not move or excite her as the buildings did. She thought of them as unsatisfactory, being neither town nor open country.
Then she went into the largest of them, Maclayne Park, one Saturday in December. She had taken the bus to town with her mother and Olga, and later would meet them in Maud’s, after they had walked, as she and May Hennessy had once used to walk, solemnly down Lord’s Parade, looking into the shops. Shops, and their window displays, were not interesting to her now, but Olga made up for her, in over-excited acquisitiveness.
It had been cold, with a pale, bright sky, and the sun had been setting in a damson-coloured band, at the same time as a wire of bright moon emerged slowly, like an outline impregnated on some magic paper. Flora had wandered in through the park gates half absently. But, as she looked up, she saw the lake in the hollow ahead as the sun was striking the surface, flaring and copper-coloured before it sank. Then, the lake had gone black. Behind it were the trees, bare and austere, some skeletal, with an intricate mesh of smaller branches, others dense, solid and erect. Everything had been tidied, everything was cleared of the softening mass of foliage and flowers. She had walked slowly around the darkening paths and seen shapes revealed, the open spaces between setting them apart from one another. There had been a cold, bitter smell of bare damp earth and holly berries. And she had stood, taut with the excitement of this place, and her own intense pleasure in it. In that moment, the point of the gardens was revealed to her.
If she did no more academic work than was usual for an intelligent and diligent girl, she read a very great deal, and her reading, like everything else, became disciplined and steady. She read as soon as she woke and for an hour or more before sleeping. On the light mornings of spring and summer, she would come downstairs long before her mother and Olga, and read sitting on the back doorstep and, in her reading, she allowed herself to be led from one book, one subject to another, gradually enlarging her taste. The public library educated her, she would say afterwards. She went there several times a week, enjoying the smell of the place and the soft sound of turning pages, the muffled coughs, the oblong reflections from the windows on to the polished floor. She liked its calm and orderliness, and the sense of concentration that
was pressed into it, like the sense of reverence in a church, and the way both places seemed to exist outside of ordinary time.
Until she was seventeen, the library, certain handsome streets, and the parks and gardens in winter, fed and enriched her, supplementing the plain fare of her school lessons. Otherwise, she had a little companionship, much solitude and, for the rest, the everyday routine of her life with her mother and sister.
She did not spend time in analysing her own feelings, though on her plans and ambitions for the future she dwelt a good deal. She would have said that she was contented, and, for the time being, had what she wanted, secure in the knowledge that the rest would come. May Hennessy did not understand her. There were no quarrels between them, because they had few points of contact, and she knew nothing of Flora’s plans. She herself never looked ahead. The strain of surviving in the present was all-absorbing to her, though of this Flora was for some time quite unaware.
She had had little interest in the drawing and painting classes at school which were dull, and seemed to have no connection with her own growing visual awareness. Bowls of fruit, vases of tulips, arrangements of uninteresting objects, were set on small tables and trays for them to sketch, and the periods, although quiet and rather soothing, were tedious.
Revelation came at the Rotunda Museum. They were to draw what they chose, and Flora wandered off by herself through room after dusty room full of fossils and stones and bones, helmets and coins, shards and broken pots and dark old furniture, searching for something of interest. No one missed her. She climbed an iron staircase that spiralled to the domed roof, and went slowly around the balconies, into rooms that led off a gallery. Up here, where the light came in clear and bright through beautiful windows, were pictures, portraits of pompous men and bland-faced women, artificially posed dogs and horses, religious scenes and brown varnished landscapes full of mountains and cataracts and ravines in which Flora thought no one would surely ever wish to walk.
The rooms led out of one another like a series of Chinese boxes, and they were quite empty. It gave her a quiet pleasure to go through them alone, in silence. And then she turned, into a long, white gallery, filled with north light. The walls of the other rooms had been crammed with pictures. Here were only a few, and at once she was drawn to one at the far end of the room, and stood in astonishment before it.
A young woman reclined on a couch beside an open window. She was dressed in soft folds of cream and white and ivory and pale grey, and her arm hung over the edge of the couch. A hat dangled loosely between her fingers. Her face was turned away. Beyond the windows ran a thin, glittering line of sea. Otherwise, clouds trailed across the sky, and the clouds seemed to billow in through the spaces in the room in which the young woman sat and to be part of her dress, and of the very air. There was no colour, save for a ribbon in her hat, which was red, the red of flames, geraniums, poppies.
On the other walls, other pictures, in which skies and clouds both reflected and gave back an inner light, as well as the light within the room. And here and there was the same small patch of red, or else a single dense block of vivid blue. The rest was light and air and scudding movement.
But it was the girl at the window who compelled her, and, then, as she emerged from her concentration upon the picture, the vision of the whole room in which she stood. She felt the shock of discovery like an electric charge.
Nine
Hazel catkins came out overnight. The bare cherry boughs were hazed with pink. Hawthorn hedges pricked green. An early spring burst, in warmth and birdsong. And each day, because of the pale pictures in the Rotunda, Flora opened her eyes on a new world and felt changed by it. But the change was not merely in outward things and in ways of looking. In the part of herself deep below the surface, she considered new questions, and answers occurred to her which were sometimes shocking in their strangeness.
Her plans became clearer. She took book after book on art from the public library and when she had exhausted their supply asked for the loan of more from other, distant libraries, and was flushed with gratification and a sense of power at the ease with which they were all obtained for her. Many were rare and she was not allowed to take them out. She spent more and more hours at a table in the reading room, before returning again and again to the pictures themselves on the gallery walls. But although she never tired of looking at the young woman in her pale clothes seated before the window, and at the landscapes of clouds, she became frustrated that they were all she had and greedy for other, quite different pictures.
The new idea came to her like a bubble rising to the surface, one afternoon as she sat at her classroom desk, and the wallflowers were thick and heady and pungent in the flowerbeds beneath the open windows.
She would go to a college, in London, or even in Italy – Florence or Rome. She would study there and live among pictures. She felt quite calm, in her immediate certainty that it would be, and so did not trouble to consider details. The strength of her ambition, and a hard fixity of purpose, would be all-powerful. She had no doubts, saw no obstacles. There were colleges, and teachers, and places in which young women might live. She had read of them. She would go. She had only to concentrate on getting a place, through her intelligence and application. Flora knew herself.
And now that her plans were formed, in the summer of that year, she began to feel a terrible sense of restriction and restlessness, and walked through the streets and in the fields, as if trying to walk out her frustration at the present, and the irritating slowness of passing time. The days were rich and heavy and slow with scents, the grass high and thickly green. The house, in which she spent as little time as possible, seemed to shrink. The rooms were dim and brown and stale, the windows let in too little, too dingy a light. Outside streams dried, soil baked and cracked. The birds fell silent. Flora’s skin seemed to teem just below the surface, as though something within her needed to burst the bounds of it and leap away. She walked and read and thought, and lay awake through the sticky, airless nights. But each morning, she was surprised again by the promise of the year ahead of her, a last, short, steep hill which she must climb.
Olga went to parties, dressed in frilled dresses and satin shoes, hair be-ribboned, ringlets bouncing about her bland forehead. Olga considered herself silently in mirrors and pirouetted for approval. Olga was popular and fluttered about the house, never able to settle to anything, never happy to be alone. Olga was a bright, pretty thing to have about the sour dark place, and her mother was mesmerised by her, as if amazed by the child’s very presence in her world.
They will be perfectly happy together, Flora thought, at least for a few more years. They will be attentive to one another, dance round one another in admiring little circles, before Olga outgrows it all, and flounces away, leaving a terrible silence behind.
By then, she herself would be long gone, and she knew that her own slipping away would scarcely be noticed, her absence leave no gap. She was happy, relieved that it would be so, and behaved indulgently towards her sister, out of gratitude. They had nothing in common at all, no meeting ground. But she was oddly fond of the vain, attractive, ephemeral little creature, because she saw her vulnerability, and that she was fragile and insubstantial, and her power of commanding attention and admiration would not last. And when it failed, Olga would disappear and be nothing.
Summer shrivelled and burned and was tossed away by the first gales of autumn. Flora revealed her plans to the headmistress. Colleges in London, and also in Edinburgh, were discussed – Italy, it was thought, would come later. There must be an order in these matters, Miss Pinkney said. (Though the girl’s self-possession and coolness unnerved her. She could not get the picture from her mind, as she sat in her spinster lodgings that night, of Flora’s grave and meticulous control.)
‘It is to be hoped that the future will meet your expectations,’ she had said, wanting – what? To warn? To chasten?
The girl’s eyes had been steady on hers, her face shadowed by the fa
intest of frowns.
‘Why should it not?’
Miss Pinkney had been unable to answer.
‘Why should it not?’
The crab apples were eggs of gold and blood red, the branches bowed under the weight of them. The front path was lined with blowsy, rinsed-out hollyhocks. At night, hedgehogs snuffled and snorted for grubs, in grassy corners.
Why should it not?
*
Olga had been prinked and petted to bed, her ringlets screwed up in papers. She had stared at her own self in the glass, and been reassured.
And, then, the house was quiet. No wind blew tonight. The trees were still. Nothing went by along the road.
They sat in the old balloon-backed chairs, on either side of the kitchen hearth. Flora read. In a little while, she would speak the sentences she had prepared, in their exact order.
But suddenly, disconcertingly, she remembered her father, in a few seconds of absolute clarity, saw his crumpled body inside the clothes that were too large, the ill-fitting grey cardigan, the stiff collar that gaped away from his neck, and with the recollection of him came a piercing realisation of what she had never until now understood – that he had been unhappy and lonely, in some profound way, and quite unreachable in his sadness. She was bewildered by the uprush of grief and dreadful longing that came to her then. It was as though she were crying hot, urgent tears. But no tears fell.
‘Why should it not?’
She turned her mind away from the recollection and, in doing so, looked up, and across the space between them at her mother. As so often now, May Hennessy was doing nothing, not reading, nor even fidgeting with something of Olga’s that the child wanted to be altered or embellished. Her hands were still, folded in her lap, and she was leaning forwards slightly, staring, staring into the coals. Her face was old, furrowed and bleak and infinitely disappointed. Looking at her, Flora felt a shaft of pure, detached sorrow. Thought: Her life is over. And what has it been? There was my father, always unwell. Then dead. There is Olga, and Olga has been everything to her, her treasure, her delight, her investment in the future. But Olga will go. There is no future for her in Olga.
