by Susan Hill
Life. Flora looked around her in a moment’s panic, wondering what life was.
Seven
It was now.
For there came a time of great happiness, a settled time, fulfilled, expansive, serene. Life promised and life paid, so that, looking back, she saw it as vibrantly coloured, like the Bloomsbury sitting room, plum-dark, glowing, rich, intense, with a ruby and earth-brown rug and Turkish cushions bought from a junk stall, and two silk shawls with glittering threads woven here and there, that caught the light of the gas fire. The room became the heart of their lives.
Yet they saw little of one another. Leila was all day at the school, Flora at lectures, in the galleries, or teaching and studying at home. They worked. The new friends and the discussion groups did not materialise, were never missed.
Flora had begun to set down her analyses of certain paintings, in short paragraphs, and then, her confidence increasing as the ideas came together, at greater length, until finally, meticulously, she copied out the ten pages she had written, in a storm of excited recollection, on the pictures in the Rotunda gallery. She had no need to see them again, for she carried them vividly with her; it was her own passion, first aroused, that she was desperate to convey.
After more than a month, the letter came.
‘Your article interests me greatly. You write with delightful freshness and conviction. The paintings brought to life and recreated, in your words …’
She held the sheet of paper, engraved with the letterhead of the journal, shaking in her hand.
There are moments, pure as fire, which we experience and which we do not forget, and sometimes, when they come, we know them for what they are, as Flora knew, standing in the small Bloomsbury sitting room with the letter in her hand. ‘I shall remember this,’ she said. And was to do so, through everything that came later, for it was lit as brightly as any of her other beacons, and would light her to her grave. But before she had time to savour the joy of the letter, there was another, telling her that Miss Pinkney was dead, and she was plunged into the middle of the journey home, giddy with the swiftness of it all, knowing there must be her mother and Olga to visit, to stand before, and to placate.
Leila would remain, to preserve their daily contentment and industriousness, their room, and the circles of light within it, the books and papers, and pleasant, quiet exchanges about this and that, until her return. Flora thought that the satisfaction of the past weeks might, surely, sustain her through those to come.
She felt sadness at the death of Miss Pinkney, bound up confusedly with regret for those things that had never been spoken between them, knowing the strength of the kindness and the affection she had received. She owed Miss Pinkney everything, and knew it – owed her education, her escape, her present life. Life itself even.
Death. She held the word in her head, in her mouth, to taste and make sense of.
But after the funeral, she walked away, and found herself, out of past habit, taking her old route through the streets of the town towards the park, and the streets had not changed, so that she felt confused, as if she had stepped back into a dream world. She had changed. She had been a child then. Staring at the tall, cream-painted houses, the pillars, the flights of shallow steps, the half-moon fans above each door and the lace of wrought-iron railings and balconies, she felt that she was looking into the past through a mirror.
It was cold, a brilliant day, the trees pricked clear against the sky. She walked on, and sometimes looked down in amazement at the paving stones beneath her feet, and they were the same stones, rubbed and scored in the same way, she remembered the marks upon each one, from time after time of stepping, looking down. The park gates were wide, as if the place waited for her.
At the funeral, there had been faces she knew, and which recognised and wanted to know her, but she had sat apart and not acknowledged anyone. They had been changed, as the brick and stone were not, strangers, now as then; but she could not be concerned about them, not out of aloofness, or even the simple difficulty of knowing in what way she might relate to them again. She was aware of nothing but grief.
The news of Miss Pinkney’s death had shaken her; on the journey, she had thought of her, remembered her words, her kindnesses, her presence – though, strangely, without being able to bring her face to mind. She had, she thought, been mourning, been moved, affected, distressed.
But, in truth, she had felt nothing. But, sitting in the hard, dark pew, seeing the coffin brought in and carried past her so closely that the arm of a bearer brushed her shoulder, a wave of realisation, and pain, had surged through her, knocking the breath from her body. She saw Miss Pinkney, her face, the set of the hair on her head, the odd way she often held out her hand as she spoke, all was as clear as day. But the woman she saw was here, on the stone step before her, she saw the face, the hair, the hands, tallow, stiff, still, cold, shrouded, lidded. Dead.
The words of the service came to her as though distorted, from deep under water, down a tunnel, or spoken in some obscure language. Her mouth was puckered and dry, so that she could neither pray nor sing.
She had not loved Miss Pinkney, in any sense she could make of that word, but she understood now that Miss Pinkney had loved her, unreservedly, generously, but almost impersonally, without desire, or thought of response or reward, and that the love had been all-knowing, all-seeing; she had been able to rely upon it, without heed.
No one else, perhaps, would love her in such a way again.
As she walked from the church she wept and her weeping was for the death and for herself, and the terrible realisation.
She went through the gates of the park, and walked on, more slowly now, down the path, between grass and flowerbeds, under the formal trees, towards the water. A nurse pushed a pram. A grey woman sat hunched on a bench. In a lance of sunlight, a little wet dog stood, shivering, and they were apart, each contained within a bubble, separate, and separating.
The last section of the path bent round between great, dense laurel and holly bushes, so that the water was not visible, might not have been there, and coming upon it was always a surprise, every time she had always anticipated her own start of pleasure at the sudden reflection of the lake, curving so beautifully away.
Then, as with the rush of grief, so came the next thing, a devastating, split-second of presence, and awareness.
She was between the high, dark shrubs, out of the sunlight. A blackbird scuttled in the soil at the holly root, after fallen berries. The sky was bright, above her head. Somewhere, on the other side of the water perhaps, a child laughed. And in that second, Miss Pinkney was beside her, or just ahead, or at her shoulder, was all around, was close enough to touch, enveloping her, unseen but sensed and so absolutely that mere sight was quite unnecessary. The sense of her, the simple presence, made Flora stop dead, her hand flying to her mouth, made her say aloud, ‘Oh. Oh, so you are …’ And then, for a time out of time, they stood together, speaking what was not spoken. The vividness, the certainty and clarity of the moment which was less than a moment and was a lifetime, was absolute and imprinted on her heart and mind and memory forever, so that she never questioned or doubted it afterwards – nor spoke of it, save once. She did not look for meaning, reason, explanation, and neither understood nor tried to understand. That it had been was sufficient, then, and later.
After that, she stepped out of the shadow of the bushes and there was the lake before her, brimming with light, its water reflecting the clouds that sailed across the surface of the sky, its beauty piercing her heart …
Eight
… strengthening her when she most needed it. For her mother had aged a hundred years, it seemed, aged beyond age, and shrunken down into herself. Her hair was sparser, the skin of her hands taut over the bones. Her face seemed dingier, dotted with tiny blackheads, as if she did not always wash. She was clean and now she is dirty, Flora thought, she was genteel and fastidious and now she has given up hope; she is an old woman.
She
was repelled by the sight, and at the same time burned with shame at herself, rage and guilt and distress turbulent within her.
The house seemed shrunken, and dimmer, smaller, shabbier. There was a smell of something coldly rancid in the kitchen. But it was not the house that mattered.
She stood, looking at May Hennessy, who held on to the chairback, as if to steady herself, and all was unspoken between them, too, there were things thought, palpable on the air, that could never be said.
As, you are old. You are strange. You are not very clean. You have lost all heart, all courage, all hope. I am ashamed. It is my fault. I cannot bear to be here.
You are a young woman, and stranger than you ever were. I do not know you. I cannot love you. You are tall and cold. I need you. I am afraid of you.
*
‘Your room is just as you left it. But I daresay it will not suit. Things are very different for you now.’
‘Oh, no.’
‘In London.’
‘Olga ought to have had the room.’
‘Olga …’
‘It has the view over to the hill and it is so much larger.’
‘If she is here, Olga likes to look out on to the road. To see who is coming. To see life.’
Life?
‘She spends so much of her time with others. Friends who live at East Side, and Tillcool. They are what matter to her. And the dancing.’
Yes. Smartness. Houses with maids and gates and gravel drives. She knew it.
‘It was in the paper. Your Miss Pinkney.’
‘Yes.’
‘You would come back for that.’
‘Miss Pinkney was my friend.’
‘For a stranger.’
The grate was cold, the cinders and ashes of an old fire scattered there.
‘You’ve known nothing of how it has been here.’
The words were the old words, but the spirit had gone out of them, her voice was merely querulous.
‘When you were ill, I could not have come to you, it was too difficult. It was not possible. Strangers came. I had Olga, and you have gone too far away. I still blame myself.’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps it has changed you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Such illness.’
‘Yes.’
She looked into her mother’s eyes, and saw tears there, and the tears were the most terrible of all.
‘I shall die here.’
She wanted to run from the room, and from everything said and unsaid, everything that was meant, and from her own guilt pressing so hard upon her. May Hennessy was old and perhaps ill, and alone and in need of her, without spirit to find friends, courage to live, or any purpose in living. Flora could scarcely breathe, for dread of what might be demanded of her. She could not stay, and when she went, she must bear the shame of having betrayed them.
They heard the sound of the car from miles away down the quiet road, and the wheels turning in the grit, the brief voices, so that there were moments of silence in which they waited for Olga to come in, banging through the doors, and stand, bright, pert-faced, plumply fresh, and defiant, before them, and Olga’s presence shifted the balance in the room so that, briefly, Flora and May Hennessy seemed ranked together against her, and the shabbiness and dinginess were merely background to the girl’s boldness and hard-paintedness and noise.
But then she saw her mother’s face, turned to Olga as if to the sun, soft with indulgence and uncritical pride and the old, besotted love, which had begun on the night that Flora had been brought home from the house of strangers to find them there together in the wide bed.
She felt no envy, as she had not then. Then, there had merely been a sense of her own exclusion from the charmed circle, and bewilderment at her mother’s displeasure, her own apparent unsatisfactoriness. She had grown aloof, and come to rely entirely upon herself and her own steely determination. They had served her. Now, seeing her mother and sister again, and the truth of everything, their whole future together in this place, she felt a clean, simple, final severing of the thread attaching the weight of guilt and duty to her. It lightened and lifted, and then soared from her, so that, in the close, cold, dismal little back parlour, she almost lifted her head to look up and see it vanish into the high, high clouds above her.
One thing was left to do before she began the journey back to London and the anticipation of it was so intense that she scarcely slept and, when she slept, dreamed of it.
She sat at the top of the flight of steps that led up to the Rotunda before the doors were opened, glad of the time, for the early morning sun was up, shining into her face, and there was still warmth in it. She looked down over the leafy square and the morning streets, and the anticipation of pleasure was part of pleasure itself.
There had been no meaning left for her in her old bedroom. She had looked around it without either delight or distaste. It was the front parlour in which the uprush of memory had come to her. She had stood holding the china door handle, looking ahead, as she had done that other time, and the chair in which her father had been dead might never have been moved or disturbed in all the years since. She saw him there still, his arm hanging down, the sallow skin of his long fingers, and the silence was as dense, as absolute now as then. There had been love, she thought, and understanding. If he had lived, what would I be? But it occurred to her then that because Olga had not known him in any way at all, her father was hers only, and she held the realisation to her, and gained warmth and purpose and pride from it.
Above the rooftops and the trees, in the distance she saw the line of the hills, violet against the pale sky, and an unexpected love of this place, and an understanding of its beauty filled her. The days since the news of Miss Pinkney’s death had been powerful, with new thoughts and feelings, memories and realisations. She felt herself changing again, starting forward into new awareness.
And then the bolts were being drawn back and the key turned in the lock, and the heavy doors of the Rotunda were opened to admit her.
She did not run. The cases of flints and fossils were delightful to her now, as she passed between them. She stopped here and there, to look at them, strange, gnarled, coiled, and at the rocks in which seams of precious metal and chips and fragments of crystal glinted, and their strange, solemn, satisfying beauty touched her.
But it was not for their own sake that they were delightful, but as pointers and she began to walk more and more swiftly along the empty, tiled corridors, towards the beautiful round hall, and up the staircase that spiralled from it to the dome above, and she began to climb towards it, and towards the sky, the daylight. All was as before, as she had remembered and so often dreamed. She had climbed this staircase, her hand felt familiar on the cold, slender rail, the frieze against the white plasterwork was miraculously the same. The last curve of the staircase threw a line of shadows elegantly on to the white wall.
She reached the top. The upper landing was set evenly about with the doors through which she would go, into the long, high, clear space of the gallery. Her heart was racing, but lightly, pattering like rain, and for a few seconds she felt faint. This building, these rooms, and her first sight of the painting, of the woman beside the open window, had changed her life, directed it and given it purpose, had formed her. What she was now and would become seemed to have begun from here, and the rest, the prelude of home and childhood, had been irrelevant. She was almost afraid of going on into the empty, airy rooms and coming face to face with the reality of the picture again, for perhaps it could not bear the weight of meaning and importance she had attached to it and would wither before them.
And then, she walked quickly through the open doorway, and into the room. Her body felt light, as if it floated an inch above the ground. The sunlight was piercing through the rooflights in long slim shafts before breaking softly to spill out on to the floor, and in the beams the dust motes danced. And suddenly, the dead were all around her again, her father, the boy Hugh, Miss Pinkney, and clo
ser to her than they had ever been in life. There was a brilliant, intense, eternal present in which all was luminous and rapture, and, in that moment, she saw that the gallery was quite empty and the white walls bare, the pictures gone, there was only light and space and silence. She went on carefully, as if she might break it open, shatter and fragment this new beauty, and as she did so, the momentary shock and sense of loss dissolved into the air around her, into nothing. The picture was not here. Yet it was everywhere, it was hers, she carried it within her, nothing could destroy or remove or change it. It had been her vision, and would be.
Her joy, standing in a lance of the sunlight, facing the white wall, was inexpressible.
Nine
It had a rhythm of its own. Some days, she was barely able to creep from her bed to her chair at the window and the bones of her hips and ankles were riven with rusted nails, and grated together. There were half a dozen bottles of tablets, fat as bolsters, to be swallowed.
Then, waking one morning with the sun slanting on to her pillow, she would realise that the stiffness and pain binding her had been loosened, softened, eased and smoothed, so that she walked freely.
For weeks, during the first winter and late, bitter spring she had sat in the bay window looking out across the scrubby gardens to the sea; and after a time, those who passed by, striding in the teeth of the wind for health, or with dogs, or to break the winter boredom, grew accustomed to the sight of her and would nod, and raise a hand. Nurses came sometimes, cycling out on a half-day, carrying cards and messages, flowers and fruit. But they treated her differently now, brightly, as if she were one of their patients, one of the very old.
‘You’re looking fine, you’re getting well now, mind, you’re to come back soon and give us a hand. We’ve all the little jobs you used to do just lying waiting. We tell the Doctor so.’
She did not know how to deal with them, who she should pretend to be.
