by Susan Hill
*
But her mother sat like stone, and, after a long time, Flora felt herself begin to turn to stone also.
The words of her little speech were fading from the room, as the warmth of the fire faded, and in the coldness could no longer be imagined. A panic flared up briefly within her, but she would not acknowledge it, for fear. Then, there was nothing. The world outside seemed a dead and silent place, secret within itself, impenetrable. It seemed to Flora that they were people in some fairy-tale, frozen in sleep for a thousand years and caught in mid-thought as they sat, and that, until they were touched again from without, nothing could progress or change, and they were powerless. But, also, it seemed to her that the helplessness was not the worst of it. The worst was the consciousness.
‘You are seventeen years old.’
The words, dropping into the silent room, did not startle her, but merely seemed infinitely strange, as if heard from far away. Flora’s limbs were numb, heavy things, her tongue thick as felt.
‘You are seventeen years old.’
May Hennessy had not looked at her, but only dumbly into the dying fire. Now, she turned her head slightly, and Flora saw that she was staring, as she had stared at the question about her marriage, and on her face was only bewilderment. I do not know you, her face said. I have never known you, and never understood. Where did you come from? How? Whose child are you? What kind of child? You are a stranger. I do not know how I am to speak to you.
But in the past few moments, before the speaking did begin, after all, Flora felt a sudden understanding, and the possibility of closeness between them, just because they were strangers, without the obligations, the muddiness, of any ties of blood, or long familiarity. In the silent look, there seemed infinite possibilities. She might have said anything of her own feelings. Confidences could have been proffered, without embarrassment, as between those who meet in the interlude of some journey, and then move apart, the truth having been absolute between them. Her childhood, her mother’s own pride and scorn, might not exist.
*
And then, the truth-telling began, and it was harsh, raw truth, coarse and grainy as rough bread, not refined so as to be made palatable, but truth, complete, matter of fact and, to Flora, terrible.
The truth was this. That she had been indulged, and it must end. School, education, the heady days of personal freedom, of walking about the town alone, of the gardens and the gallery, all these had been allowed to her as a privilege. Others did not remain carefree and irresponsible for so long. Others, when they were the unlucky working girls, left school at fourteen, and came to be maids, like Eileen. Those from their own class might stay one more year, and after that they would be at home, and gradually, in local society, until their own marriages. (And if not marriage, then the living death of being bound to parents as they grew older.)
Other girls.
Flora had been allowed to drift on a little longer in the pleasantness of girlhood, because it was what her father had wished for her. She was to have longer as a child, longer without anxieties. But that had not been easy for the rest of them. For her mother, it had been hard because of her loneliness and her widowhood. But most, because of money. There was no money. No money to educate Olga in the way she deserved. No money for the keeping up of appearances (and it was inconceivable that they should not be kept up). No money for the best cuts of meat, or clothes, or outings, for coffee and ices at Maud’s. For years there had not been the money May Hennessy felt was their right, because of her husband’s illness. Instead, there had been scrimping and concealing, worry and shabby sacrifice and a meanness about everything, borrowing and debt.
No money.
‘You should know it. You have to know it. Why not? You are old enough. I have borne it alone, because he wanted you spared. But you are seventeen years old, and I can tell you that there is no question of it – colleges and learning for years to come. None, and there is an end of it. Can you not see that?’
She saw. She understood at once, and her future plummeted to earth like a stone until it struck the ground below and was obliterated. She did not bother to look down after it, for where would be the use?
‘You should have known.’
‘Yes.’
‘Plans. Dreams. Going away. How was that ever to come about? Whoever gave you the idea that it might?’
‘No one. It was my own idea.’
‘You are to leave in July.’
‘Yes.’
‘Seventeen! I was taught at home. We were. We had no opportunities.’
‘No.’
‘I married.’
‘Yes.’
‘It was not his fault. Never think it.’ Her voice was suddenly loud, angry.
Flora pressed herself back in her chair, not wanting any talk of her father, any intimacies or emotion. Mention of him now could not be allowed. She wanted him to be ringed by an impenetrable fence, and private to her.
‘You could not even go to Portmayes. There is not even money enough for that.’
Portmayes House, off the Doyne Road, where the Misses Clanfy taught needlework and simple cookery. She despised Portmayes more than she could have said.
‘No.’
And then her mother stood up, and took a step towards her, half-raised her arms in a curiously pathetic, vulnerable gesture, offering or asking for – forgiveness? Understanding? Love? Flora looked up at her in dread. Her mother’s hair was grey, thin and dry, her face crumpled in disappointment, and a terrible, colourless exhaustion which Flora could not bear to see, but she simply turned away from any feelings, knowing that, once expressed and admitted, they would rise up and overwhelm her.
Her mother went heavily, stiffly to the door. Nothing else was said. The drinks were not made, and the fire was left untouched, the ashes to go cold, anyhow in the grate.
*
Flora sat absolutely still until after she had heard May Hennessy’s last tread on the stairs and the closing of her door. Then she got up carefully and went to bed, keeping her mind quite blank as she did so, locked against all thought or feeling, and, there, lay on her back, hands clenched to her sides, quite sleepless, until the first light of morning, when she dressed and left the house and did not pause until she was far out of sight of it. Then, off the path, she began to run, ran and ran stumbling across fields, making for the open country, and there let loose her anger and hopelessness and the pain of devastation, bellowing like a calf taken from the cow to slaughter.
Thirteen
She raged about the fields and woods for the whole of that day, which was beautiful, mellow and soft, with a purple mist on the far hills, and slanting light lying over the corn. She saw no one, kept away from the village and the farms. She did not eat, only once or twice dipped her hands into a stream and after drinking let the water run over them, silky, cold, but not in the least comforting. She would not be comforted. She had only this day in which to give vent to her feelings, and they must be allowed to spill over violently and run their course, before she clamped them down, buried them and made them impotent forever. Only, for now, there should be nothing to soothe her, nothing to smooth the jagged edge of bitter disappointment.
She scrambled down ditches, and sat in the rough spiky grass, crying and never troubling to wipe the tears from her face. She saw the future she would have had, the streets she would have walked through in her new life, felt the weight of the books she would have carried on her arm, went quietly into the galleries and libraries of her mind and felt the grave and serious stillness of the air within them, crammed with words and colours and thoughts. People did not enter here. She supposed that friends would have come in time, when she had needed them.
She would not go over the real life as it was to be now, in the house with her mother and Olga. It would be. She would deal with everything. This day was not for any of that, this day was for wild grief over what she had lost, for mourning, and self-pity, and hate.
She went to sleep in the warmth of
the early afternoon, lying on dry leaves and bracken in some woodland, and, when she woke from the dark turbulence of her dreams, lay looking up at the sun that pricked here and there through the dense tent of leaves above her, and gradually reined in each feeling, one by one, and took it under her control again. The place seethed with the secret life of birds and insects, tiny unnamed creatures, furtive within the undergrowth and the boles of trees. Flora felt strength and decisiveness and calm seeping back into her as if through the pores of her skin, from the air around, and the earth on which she lay. Her head, which had felt hot and painful, cooled and cleared.
It occurred to her that if she were simply to remain here, she might not be found, and that she would eventually, perhaps painfully, die. But she had no false sense of romanticism. She was realistic, without any wish to make useless gestures. She would take charge. Get what satisfaction she might. Yield nothing.
After a time, as the sun slipped round and the wood darkened, she got up and brushed her skirt carefully, wetted her hands in the pool and smoothed them over her hair to neaten it.
She had thought earlier that she would simply never return to school, not even to collect her things, for those things were of no use or interest to her now. But she saw that such a response was petulant and resentful and so, childish, and she had done with childhood.
The following morning, she went on the bus and into class as usual, read from the usual books, made the familiar, reserved responses and gave away nothing, as she had given nothing to her mother and Olga on her return from the fields. They should not know anything of what she thought or had felt. She had those things locked jealously within her. They were her strength, and altogether private.
Fourteen
It had been May when the truth had been told her. Now, it was the end of August. But between that day and this, a thousand years might have passed.
Her mother would have said that she could not possibly arrive at the house, which was called Carbery, on foot, for what impression would that give of her? But she had not asked her mother. Her mother knew nothing about it. When it was settled – for it would be, Flora had a grave and absolute certainty of it – then would be the time not to ask, but simply to tell.
She left the bus a mile before the stop she had been given, because she wanted to approach the house gradually, to get the measure of it for herself. She trusted to her own instinct completely. But she had taken some trouble over what she wore. She had not many clothes and was untroubled by it. Money for those went to Olga, to whom such things mattered greatly. But some impressions counted, she understood that perfectly well, and so she had tied her hair back in a careful knot, which made her look older, and carried a straw hat, to put on before she arrived at the house.
The sun shone, and the air was thick, dusty and grain-smelling, until she reached the top of the long lane that was cut between high banks, dense with undergrowth, and came suddenly out into the open, and there was the glitter of sea a little way off, and the air was fresh and smelled of it.
There were wrought-iron gates to the house, which was stern-faced, of bare, plain stone. The symmetry of the windows pleased her. There was nothing dark or concealed. She stopped. Looked. Would come here, she thought.
A cedar tree, and a great Wellingtonia. A peach house set against the west wall. The blinds were half drawn down. There was no movement. But anyone might have been looking at her. And so, she began to walk there, holding her hat against the dark blue skirt, and felt herself to be tall, an adult, and equal to this house.
It was cool and immaculate, pale and light, in the way all the other houses she knew were not. Sunlight filtered into the long hall. Beyond the windows of the ground floor, she saw the shadows of the trees, dark upon the grass. There were no flowerbeds, no colours nor distractions. Only, in the distance, the thin steel line of sea.
For the rest of her life, which was to promise her more than it ever paid, and in this, hatefully to resemble her own mother’s, Florence Hennessy, who became the woman Flora Molloy, remembered every detail of this day.
The house called Carbery in the dusty afternoon sun of late summer became an inner vision, important, as the picture of the woman in drapes and cloudiness was important. It was never to blur or fade nor become confused with anything that came later to muddy and clutter the simple outlines of her life, so that when she talked to her son of it, it was vivid to him too from the beginning, and he understood at once the absolute importance of it to her. It marked the transition between the home of her childhood, and those more mundane and unremarkable houses of the rest of her adult life, between her hopeful youth and the later, patchy compromises, accidents and shrinking horizons. For all of this it was important. But also in itself, for its seriousness and plainness and air of absolute and settled calm. Carbery mattered to her, together with the picture, and the lake in the park, in some permanent and symbolic way, filling and feeding her mind, and her imagination and memory, until the day of her death.
She had set about finding the situation alone, and with caution, rejecting other possibilities in favour of this one, and replying to an advertisement placed in the daily newspaper, and which she consulted in the library – for no papers came to the house.
‘You are very young.’
‘I am seventeen.’
‘That is very young!’
‘I shall be eighteen at the turn of the year.’
‘We had thought of a mature person.’
But he looked at her sharply, as if considering her afresh.
‘My wife is resting,’ he said. ‘She will be here presently.’
Beyond the tall windows, the lawn, the shadows flat on the grass. Stillness.
He was a pale man with fair, flat hair and small features. But his voice was pleasing. Tiny, transparent specks of dust jazzed inside a beam of sunlight. The house was silent.
‘You have been to a good school. You have an excellent report.’
‘Flora is a conscientious girl, though she is not altogether easy to know. We had hoped for her to go on to some form of higher education, but family circumstances have not permitted this. Her father died recently. She will make a good and thoughtful tutor.’
Miss Pinkney had sat alone at her desk, hesitating with her pen, struggling to find the words that would convey the essence of Flora Hennessy. ‘Reserve.’ ‘Self-possession.’ ‘Determination.’ No. When the girl had come to tell her of the cancellation of any plans for college, she had looked out of defiant blue eyes and Miss Pinkney, faced with the look, had been unable to offer help or sympathy. Do not pity me, the eyes had said. Do not dare to question, to suggest any word of affection or warmth, or any regret for me.
The girl’s pride was absolute and, seeing that, Miss Pinkney had said nothing at all, merely inclined her head and made a note upon her pad.
She had supposed that Flora would simply sit at home with her mother, be a companion in the house and hope for a husband to provide for her future. When the letter had come from the MacManuses of Carbery, asking for a reference for the girl as a tutor to their son, she had been surprised, but also admiring. She had wanted to be of some help, though she thought that she would not see the girl again, that she was part of a past that had somehow failed her.
‘She presents herself well, is sensible and mature. I am confident that she would take her place properly within the household.’
Flora sat quite still on the straight-backed chair, hands crossed together in her lap. She would come to this house. It seemed to her to have been arranged a long time ago. The interview was superfluous. She saw herself moving about in these high, light rooms. Flora Hennessy. (For Florence was quite dead. Florence might never have been. Florence belonged to her home, and to the years with her father and mother and Olga, years which she had already consigned to the past.)
She continued to look out of the windows, at the cedar tree and the Wellingtonia, and the silver haze which was the sea. Then, after a moment, she heard the footste
ps of a child. But she took a little time before she turned her head slowly, and then stood, to face her future at the moment it began.
Fifteen
‘Are you a woman?’
‘I am not a man!’
‘I don’t mean that.’
‘You should say what you mean.’
His face paled, with the effort of concentrating. She would not help him.
‘Or a girl. Are you just a girl?’
‘No one is “just” anything.’
He looked at her in despair.
‘I am neither then,’ she said. ‘Not old enough for the one, but past the other. Neither.’
‘Like a unicorn,’ he said quickly. And then, as she burst into laughter at him, laughed too, in relief.
His name was Hugh. He was six, and his graveness and oldness sorted with hers. They kept an invisible, formal barrier between them which suited them both, teacher and pupil, girl and child. They respected one another. There was liking and, gradually, complete understanding. Yet he too had a reserve, a privacy, to match hers. She looked at him and did not have any idea what was going on in his head, what places he inhabited. They shared a love of stories of a rare kind, fairy-tales and grim dark fables, curious legends. Their lessons revolved around mythical creatures, crones who lived in caves, impenetrable forests and magic plants, stones by which the future could be told. The emotions and deeds that filled their talk were strong as black tea. Thirst after revenge, passion for power, tyrannical rage, the jealousy and plotting of evil stepmothers, crusts to eat and rags for clothes and beasts that spoke and consoled, and trees with spying eyes.
She planned their timetable of lessons with the help of books, and followed it exactly. Spelling. Mathematics. French. Scripture. Natural History. Art. Conversation. But within the lessons, they roved about as free as wild, parentless, naked children in the mythical wastelands, plucking nuts and fruit from trees and berries from bushes, and drinking asses’ milk. They read the books in the long library, and made the stories fit the timetabled subjects, as they chose, learned poetry and turned stories into plays and painted the plays into pictures, and went down the garden, on to the cliffs and out to the rocks on the beach, to gather whatever was there in season – seedpods and grasses, limpets and crabs and shells, cones, skeletal leaves, wild poppies and chalk-blue scabious and the chrysalises that clung to stalks. In the schoolroom they labelled everything, and decorated the labels elaborately, like the letters of illuminated manuscripts. Scripture was stories. Moses in the Bulrushes. Daniel in the Lion’s Den. David and Goliath. The Parable of the Seed and the Sower or the Labourers in the Vineyard. And then there was their mutual discovery of other, stranger gods, and more exotic legends. But there was no catechism and no morals were drawn or preached, and when these were doled out to them on Sundays, in the musty church, like so many portions of cold gruel, both of them, quite instinctively, set them aside untouched.
