by Susan Hill
Flora is beautiful. The illness has done that for her, carved out her bones and tautened the flesh, paled and refined her.
Flora, one Sunday afternoon, suddenly, bewilderingly, blindingly dissatisfied, made angry by the pictures, as though she were starving and they were mirages of food that dissolved to an airy nothingness before her.
[She had gone restlessly, hungrily about the galleries, frantic, feverish, snatching at this one or that, a red, a stroke of white on white, a blue, a shadow, a cloud, a shape, a reflection, a line, longing to be fed, to cram this beauty, this treasure into her for sustenance until she should be satisfied. But they remained as pictures only, hard and inanimate upon the grey walls, giving her nothing, leaving her ravenous.]
Flora running, shocked and full of fear, down the steps and along the pavements and across the wide road to lean on the wall looking down at the black water, the river flowing away from her.
Thirteen
‘Something has happened,’ Leila Watson said. They had not yet lit the lamp. The setting sun splashed scarlet across the sky above the roofs of the square and the room was briefly on fire around them.
They sat opposite one another at the table, books spread. Flora did not speak, could not have told what had happened. That day was packed tight painfully within her: she did not understand it, was unable to clear her thoughts, but only sat mute and pale in the small sitting room among the drapes and cushions. She had returned to find Leila working quietly at marking her pupils’ books and the sight of her and her stillness had calmed her and taken the edge off her fear. They had had tea. She had made a show of working.
‘Something has happened.’
Leila Watson seemed suddenly older and infinitely wise, knowing her own mind calmly, seeing her own way ahead.
The sky darkened and the walls of the room closed in upon them. There were clouds, gunmetal grey, bramble black, where the sun had been and, for a moment, desperately, Flora looked at the sky as on a picture in the frame of the window. But it was not a picture, the flaring beauty had left no trace and panic filled her.
‘The pictures are dead,’ she said, and turned to Leila at last, her face white and streaming now with tears.
Leila did not move to comfort her or speak bland and easy words, but only sat gravely waiting for Flora to ask for what she might need. But she needed nothing; Leila’s calm and quiet acceptance were sufficient to steady her, so that at last she was able simply to set the thing aside until she could bear to face it again.
Something has happened.
The pictures are dead.
The facts were like small hard stones in some bleak and sunless landscape.
And so they sat as the room grew quite dark except for the faint lightness of Leila Watson’s pale grey dress and the whiteness of Flora’s face, turned towards the window. But after a time Leila got up and turned on the lamp and the pools of dim light seemed in some way to unite them and re-kindle their first intimacy. The books were cleared, the table laid for supper. The curtains were left undrawn, so that the half-moon, when it rose, was clear in the sky over the rooftops on the far side of the square.
‘How confident you are,’ Flora said suddenly, ‘how surely you move. As if you had the answers to things. As if you knew.’
Leila Watson looked up with amusement from laying out segments and quarters of fruit in a pattern on her plate.
‘Knew?’
‘Knew everything. What life is. Death. Yes – knew everything.’
Flora watched the meticulous peeling of the apple, heard the soft moist sound as the blade moved through the flesh.
‘Perhaps you have come up against a terrible truth. Is it terrible? That what you had nailed your colours to is not enough, after all.’
‘That the pictures are dead?’
‘Or if not dead, at any rate no substitute for life.’
‘But you,’ Flora said urgently, ‘what do you have? What is enough for you? What is your secret?’
‘Oh, it is no secret.’
‘Then what? Whatever it is, I envy you.’
‘I learned,’ Leila Watson said at last, ‘to settle for just enough. It gets me through the days sufficiently well.’
Flora looked into her broad-browed face with the hair plaited around it, and the heavy-lidded eyes, and realised with shame then how little she had cared to know of her, for fear of disturbing the equilibrium of their friendship, provoking confessions, emotions, revealing some chasm of need and longing and loss and distress.
‘How bleak then,’ she said.
‘Not at all bleak. But what has happened – what is happening – to you is important. Or at any rate to be taken as –’ She held up a segment of orange but did not eat it.
‘As?’
‘Oh …’ Leila Watson shrugged.
‘You must say.’
‘Well then, as a sign. A message. At any rate, something with meaning.’
‘What meaning? To have taken away what has been – everything. Yes, yes, it has been everything, that is the simple truth. To have all certainty and assurance thrown about anyhow. To have lost all meaning. What “meaning” has that?’
She felt passionately, ragingly angry.
‘What is left? What is there now for me?’
‘Everything, still,’ Leila Watson said quietly after a moment. ‘Yes. I think – everything.’
The moon was curved and bright as a blade in the sky beyond the window and they remained in silence for a long time, looking out at it.
Fourteen
‘We will go together – or rather, you will take me and show me through your eyes. I am going to learn everything from you.’
Leila Watson wore her brown hat and the coat with the seal collar and an expression, Flora thought, altogether middle-aged, as a governess, a nanny, an aunt. But they were going to one of the galleries – she herself was to choose which – and there, she would be the guide and the teacher, Leila the pupil. But she could not shake off the feeling of a great disparity between them in age and assurance. Leila Watson knew her place in the world.
‘But you,’ she said, ‘know pictures. Your eyes are open. Mine have never been.’
Flora dared not say again, ‘The pictures are dead.’ She knew that she should be grateful for the chance Leila wanted to give to her, and her optimism. But, instead, she felt both nervous and in some odd way patronised.
She chose what she knew would distress her least, a gallery she rarely visited because nothing at all within it had ever pierced her heart; yet about everything there would be plenty to say, narrative and substance and history, myths and legends that could be explained very satisfactorily and interpreted, stories retold. There were formal, heavy, solemn, dark pictures, grave and distant pictures, about which she could be didactic and towards which she felt simply dutiful. She could shelter behind them. It was crowded, with other dutiful people. They walked slowly and in silence from room to room before the gilded frames.
Dido’s Lament before Carthage. The Muse Apollo. Sisyphus. Eurydice. Actaeon. The Flight into Egypt. The Annunciation. The Martyrdom of St. Stephen. Strong, rocky, desert landscapes full of caves and little stunted trees and serpents.
But after a time, in a remote room which few of the Sunday crowds had penetrated, Leila Watson stopped. The walls were magnificent with cardinals and popes.
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Not here.’
At once, Flora felt herself close like some mollusc retreating into its shell when touched. She would not be followed there. For Leila had seen through her perfectly well.
‘Not in this place. Whatever has been alive for you, whatever you could show me, is not here.’
‘No.’
‘Well then, I understand.’ She looked round in sudden amusement at the draped prelates with proud, sharp faces, thin lips, cold eyes, mean mouths. ‘Would it be here for anyone do you suppose? And if so whatever kind of a person would they be!’
They left quickly, pushing th
eir way through the crowds, to walk, arms linked, through the Sunday streets of London, and Flora felt both relieved of her burden and of any need to speak about it to Leila Watson again.
Fifteen
Children were playing with kites that rose, sailed, soared about in a hundred colours, and the children ran with them laughing, faces upturned, pushing into the wind. Flora saw them as a picture, the habit she could not lose, and from where she sat, at the top of the Hill, London lay at her feet and the air between was blue as smoke. A great happiness seized her, making her want to run in the wind, soar up and dance with the kites. It had happened so often before, that life seemed to be waiting for her, at any moment she would be borne away on it.
But it had happened, too, that she had been deceived before. She had asked, ‘Life – what is “life” to be?’
Life is this. Kites swooping crazily in the wind and the upturned faces of the children.
Their cries were blown back to her across the heath. She saw the old picture then, the boy Hugh, sloe-eyed and solemn in the back of the Lagonda car.
Life, she said.
Death.
The tail of a kite snaked to and fro, streaming its little coloured bows.
On the previous day she had visited the magazine offices, at the request of the proprietor, whom she had thought of as her benefactor. He had stood, huge, dome-headed, blocking out the little light from the street behind him, and looked at her with interest, benignly – yet she had been made uncomfortable by his stare. ‘And I am not a child. I am not even so very young now,’ she had thought. For it was only the truth. (Yet she felt herself a small, scrubby thing, nevertheless, in this great mahogany room.) There were piles of books on the table, volumes of his magazines and journals bound up in green leather. Solid things.
‘The pictures are dead.’ But she could not have said it.
He would pay for her to visit Venice and Florence and Rome, and later Bruges and Ghent. He had said as much before, she thought, watching a pigeon strut about, cooing fatly, on the blackened ledge; and before him Miss Pinkney – there had been so many plans, so much excited talk.
The sky was opalescent between the chimneys and she had a sudden picture of sunlight gilding stone, of carved Renaissance faces, warmth like peach flesh, high-ceilinged galleries and domed churches, and for a few seconds went spinning into it, seized and caught.
‘I could not go,’ she said aloud. (For the pictures were dead.)
‘It is not charity.’
She was silent.
‘You would be going to work, on my behalf, at my commission.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I believe that you have a talent.’
‘But I am no one. I am almost untrained.’
‘You have what is worth everything.’
(But the pictures are dead.)
‘An instinct, an eye … without those …’ His hand fluttered and then fell.
Flora had not answered. Tea was brought. He had talked to her of Vermeer and van Eyck, the cool, dim cathedrals of the Low Countries, his own particular passion.
‘I long to have it re-created by you, seen as if for the first time, seen afresh. That too is worth everything.’
She had felt sudden gratitude, and sadness for him, too, that she was to let him down, and to be a disappointment. The mahogany room and the heavy curtains, the soft cooing pigeon on the window ledge, the blade of sky, oppressed her as she had sat on, mutely, watching the gold signet ring on his thick finger as he stirred the tea around and around.
The kite swooped and dived madly down, then was stayed again, then snaked back up, and all around it the others bobbed like boats with the little white clouds behind. And as she had dived down into a numb misery, so now she soared suddenly into happiness, as if she too were being blown about lightly, freely, on the same breeze. The Hill was crowded. It was Saturday afternoon. But only the children’s faces were open and eager. How dull, how fretful the adults, how strained and worn and drawn and grey, she thought, how the light fades and the life seeps away, how quickly, it seems it is all soured.
The children ran about anyhow, their kites and their laughter streaming behind them in the bright air.
Looking up, she saw him. He stood with his back to her a dozen yards away. The bones of his neck stood out with the same fragility and bareness as she had once seen in the boy Hugh.
He wore the uniform of some foreign country, with an odd stand-up collar.
Afterwards it remained quite untarnished, unaltered, the momentary picture before he turned and looked towards her. No one else ever saw it and she told no one. The picture was hers only, of the young man standing with kites and clouds and children patterned behind.
And then the kaleidoscope was shaken.
His name was Henrjyk Tadeusz. He was on sick leave, he told her, to see some specialist in London and waiting to be pronounced fit or unfit, to be recalled or else discharged. He had bowed a quick little, stiff bow from the neck.
‘I like to walk here. To be in the air.’
‘Yes.’
‘To see …’ He looked up, gesturing to the kites, making the shape of them with his hands.
‘The kites.’
‘Kites. Kites. Kites.’ He had laughed, perhaps at the word, at the kites themselves, at the scene around them, she could not tell.
‘Kites,’ and they had watched one that was higher than the rest, tugging on its string to get away. A small boy clung to it. His face as he looked at it soaring above him was rapturous.
‘Oh, it must not go,’ Flora said. ‘It must not break.’
‘It will not.’
She believed it, as a word from God.
‘It will not.’
He asked permission to sit beside her on the bench and they watched in silence as the kite flew, and, gradually, others were watching, other kites were ignored, and only this kite was the focus. She could not have told how long the time lasted. (Though in the end, the kite dipped as the wind veered. Others overtook it. People began to drift away.)
The afternoon was mild. They walked slowly to the other side of the Hill where they could look down on the great Ponds and the spring-fresh trees hazed green. She had had no thought of a companion, solitude was her natural state, and satisfying. But she neither resented his presence nor found it strange.
He was twenty-three and had been almost two years a soldier, under the usual State obligation. He neither liked nor disliked it. ‘You must do it,’ he shrugged.
The small town from which he came bordered hundreds of miles of woods. He hunted there with his brothers.
They stood quietly together at the top of the slope. ‘No hunting.’ He looked to where the elegant, civilised trees were grouped in their parkland. Yet he liked London, he said, the river, the bridges, the buildings, liked the churches and squares and the faces of the people, he had walked for miles from the barracks where he was lodged, quite alone. As she did.
Leila Watson was with her dead husband’s family in Surrey, to which she went more and more now, and each time for longer, returning, perhaps, to familiar safety.
She must go, she said, at the gates where the Heath ran down to the ordinary street. (The kites and the children running were in her head, pictured forever.) He had bowed again, the odd quick little bow from the neck, and turned away.
Sixteen
His father had only one good leg – the other he dragged behind him, a dead weight, useless, after a wild boar had gored him. Henrjyk had been six years old – he had been sent home for help. His eyes had blazed in remembering the terror of it, as he told the story to her. (For of course they met again, on the following day, it had been all arranged, hastily, in a second just on parting.)
She had returned to the flat, running, and sat for the rest of the afternoon and into the dark, going over the meeting with Tadeusz carefully apart in her mind, and scrutinising each fragment, piecing the whole together again.
She had never talked so to any s
tranger, yet he was not a stranger and nothing about it was in any way surprising. She closed her eyes, and saw the trees that stood together at the bottom of the slope below them, saw their individual trunks and branches, dusted pale green, and the shadows below.
His family were all farmers, his father managed the whole of a great estate. His mother’s family had been professional and ‘higher-born’, he said. But they lived well, their house was good, he and his brothers had been to a good school in the university city.
‘What happened to the boar?’
‘Oh, my brother shot it of course. And I have never run too fast again!’
‘So fast.’
‘So fast. So fast,’ he repeated obediently.
They sat again on the Hill high above the trees, high above London. But there was cloud and a haze, little was visible. There were no children.
‘No kites.’
He spoke in great detail about his family so that she learned everything, names, animals, the ways of this or that neighbour, their daily routine, though he saw quickly that she did not like to be told of hunting.
It seemed to Flora, listening, that he came from a fairy story, a world of deep forests and wild boar and huntsmen and, it might be, witches and talking cats and gingerbread houses.
Tadeusz laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘perhaps. Those tales come out of these lives, these countries.’
Once or twice he asked about her own family, but she deflected the questions immediately with one of her own, so that in the end he looked at her with concern, his eyes grave upon her. But her life, and everything that had filled it until now, had no substance, no interest, she turned from it impatiently and towards him.
One day they did not meet because he had to spend it on temporary duty at the barracks, another because he was being seen by the specialist at the hospital, and those days were a blank landscape to her, and endless.
