by Susan Hill
If there was nothing at all she wished him to know about her own past, her home, her family, she delighted in showing London and her knowledge of it off to him, telling what she knew, of martyrs at Tyburn and Princes in the Tower, of Kings crowned and statesmen and prelates and great soldiers on plinths, and ancient surrounding walls and pigeons wheeling; the river, the wharves, the dark alleyways and handsome squares, parks, playgrounds. The High Heath.
It rained and then they went to the galleries; she showed him the pictures. They stood before the mighty Turner canvas of boiling spray and whirling cloud and brilliant light that streamed out towards them, and she saw with what respect he looked at it, his face absorbing the power and energy of the painting as he clenched and unclenched his fist.
When they came out, it was into sunshine. They sat on a bench and ate oranges he bought from a barrow. And she began to speak to him of the Rotunda Gallery, the white rooms, the picture of the woman on the couch before the open window. It was like the opening of a door, back into a place that had been closed to her.
She told him everything then.
Seventeen
Leila Watson mended stockings, the needle flicking neatly, evenly, in and out, in and out. The air beyond the open window was soft with spring. Men had mown the grass in the square.
‘It is new to you,’ she said, looking up. ‘It is all new.’
Flora turned.
‘Your face has changed. Everything shows in the face does it not? Love … grief.’ She smiled.
They had not met, Leila Watson and Henrjyk Tadeusz, Flora had not yet seen a way of bringing them together. But, suddenly, it seemed urgent, because life would change. Leila was returning to live in Surrey. She had a teaching post near her husband’s family, sisters and brothers-in-law, their little children. But being away alone in London had been very necessary, she said, she had been lost and needing to find herself again in her own way.
‘But now …’
It would have been a blow to her, a disaster, the thought of struggling all over again would not have been bearable.
‘But now …’
Leila Watson rolled up a stocking deftly. ‘Now you should go to Italy, and then to Bruges and Ghent. You owe it that.’
‘It?’
‘The past. Your commitment to those things. For the pictures have come to life again, have they not?’
*
Flora tried to imagine then how she might indeed go, saw herself in cobbled streets and vaulted churches, saw altar panels glowing, gilded, and yearned briefly to be amongst them, to drink from what they had to offer her. The past was a state infinitely to be desired then, because she had been alone in it, expectant and entirely free. ‘Life,’ she had thought, ‘what is it?’ But had not yet known. Life had still waited for her, somewhere safely in the far distance.
From this time, the past and that state of being were irrecoverable; she recognised that she was changed utterly, and the future was forever altered and, in some strange way, the thought was terrifying to her and gave her no joy. When she walked about among the pictures Tadeusz walked with her. His not doing so was unimaginable now.
There had not been such a spring for forty years, everyone said so, when the blossom came crowding in, profligate, hard upon the daffodils, and the hedgerows were like snow.
Sitting on the Hill, on the top of the world, looking up at the spinning sky, he began to teach her his language. ‘So that you will be a little ready.’
And so it was settled and natural and inevitable as her next breath, that she would be with him. There was so little likelihood of anything else that they scarcely needed to speak of it.
The world was shot through with a beauty and a translucence that dazzled her and, in her head, she composed the letter to her mother. But the writing of it was postponed day after day because, every minute, they must be together. They left London, and ate a picnic, resting on the flat slabs of tombstones in a churchyard, and the grass and the creamy heads of the cow parsley drowned them. The sky was pierced by spiralling larks.
He talked more and more about his country, his village, his house, the city in which he had gone to school, but she could not begin to picture them as real, as existing, solidly, now, at this hour, and merely not here but ‘there’. She must simply go there to discover it.
She would settle there. That was what her life would be. None of it was in question. He had written his letter, he said, and it was posted.
She looked at him, shocked with love. And then, turning from him, looked at the waves of blossom like the surf of a tide out of which the grey stones rose, and the tower of the church soaring to heaven. She thought, it is decided then. And went on looking, to seal the memory of tower, tombs, foaming blossom, this picture, along with those others that were hers forever.
‘There was nothing at all,’ she said later to Leila Watson, ‘and now there is everything. But how can that be?’
‘It cannot.’ She spoke gravely.
‘Everything, everything is changed.’
A pigeon pecked with little hard, darting pecks at the crumbs they had scattered on the ground around them. It was cooler with steel grey cloud. They were sitting in the square.
‘You are changed.’
‘Were you? You never speak of it.’ She looked into her friend’s calm, thoughtful face.
‘I think it was not – the same. You are overtaken by it. Yes, it is a sort of possession.’
‘It is all I know now. Nothing else exists. He is what I think of. He is what I am.’
‘No! You are Flora and not lost.’
Flora laughed, startling the pigeon with clapping wings into the air.
‘Lost. Oh, yes.’
‘A marriage is a very different thing.’
‘So solemn!’
Leila Watson smiled, a smile of something recalled. ‘No.’ She pulled her coat closer around her neck, and, in doing so, reminded Flora of a much older woman.
‘When Edwin died I thought that I would die. Would have preferred to die. But you see, one does not.’
‘If …’ The sky lurched sickeningly for a split second. ‘I would die.’
‘No.’
‘I shall belong to another country, another family, another language, another past. Everything.’ And she saw it all ahead of her. But the strangeness was not strange and she was quite unafraid of it.
They were to leave the flat. They had one more week only of this life. Already the rooms had begun to draw back into themselves, to revert to strangeness, and anonymity.
‘I am afraid for you,’ Leila Watson said. ‘I must say this. I could not forgive myself.’ She reached out and took Flora’s hand between her own. ‘I am so happy that you have this, that you have known love. It is not all, I have never been able to believe that. There is so much else. But it is at the heart of things. Yet you cannot know – how can you? How can you take all this on trust?’
‘I do.’
‘Then keep something back.’
‘No. It is a new life. It is everything.’
So that, after a moment, Leila Watson let her hand go.
They sat, still together, still in friendship, until it was too cold to sit longer and they left the square. But the ease and the amity had gone from between them, and when they reached the flat again it was merely poky, dark, and the cushions and drapes and lamps dusty, lacking the old glow their sense of brave conspiracy had lent to them.
She had tossed everything on to the pile, to be disposed of anyhow.
Her father’s death. The house called Carbery and the boy Hugh. His life. His death. Miss Pinkney’s hopes for her. Her life. Her death. The Rotunda Gallery and the streets and squares through which she had walked and walked, learning the beauty of the buildings. And the terrible things. The cold and her own absolute loneliness in the boarding house of Miss Marchesa, which had defined her then. The illness, from which she had nearly died and the miracle of her recovery into a world prepared for her so loving
ly by Miss Pinkney and by Leila Watson. The pictures. The old future. She dismissed them. Tadeusz obliterated everything.
He was to be seen at the hospital once more, and any treatment decided upon. But it seemed probable that he would be discharged the army.
‘Then?’
‘Home then. We shall be at home. That is all.’
But the all was unimaginable.
‘And now they will have read the letter. Now they know of Flora.’
She looked into his face and saw everything she might need there.
‘They know of me.’
‘Yet you love London I think.’
‘London does not matter.’
‘I love London. We will come back, I think?’
But she was impatient to leap ahead, could not imagine returning and had no interest in the suggestion of it.
She held both her hands to his face, carving his expression at this moment into her memory.
He had given her a book, small, bound in rough grey cloth. When he had taught her more of his language, she would understand it and she would like it, he said (and already they could talk a little together, several sentences to and fro).
It was called The Lady with the White Hat.
‘Write in it.’
He held the pen for a long time over the page, but in the end wrote only her name and his own in black, with the thick nib, the letters striking out boldly across the page.
She slept with the book on her pillow, touching her face.
Eighteen
There was something wrong. He had smelled it, like a fear, as he opened the door.
‘Elizabeth?’
She was crouched against the wall in the living room. Her back was to him. (They had left the house facing the sea, the sound and sight of it troubled her, she said, she felt trapped behind the grey wall of it. They had come here, to the small, clean, silent bungalow, with the pear tree beyond the kitchen window, and her invalid life.)
‘Elizabeth.’
It was always the same. He had called her name from the first, coming into the little house in Linney Street, to find her on the back step or at the bottom of the garden there, and to the hospital flat, and the house facing the sea. And so, now.
‘Elizabeth.’
But then there had always been a going away from her and a return, his life elsewhere and their life together, a reason to call her name on returning.
Now there seemed none. He had no longer any other life. The grass and thistles and nettles grew up around the hospital and the doors banged loose in the wind. There was barbed wire and a dangerous chimney waiting to topple. Even the ghosts were gone. He had this, now, here.
‘Elizabeth.’
There had been a dreadful heaviness about the way she had fallen and a greyness to her skin. He had been able neither to rouse nor lift her but in the end knelt beside her, chafing her hands and speaking her name again and again. ‘Elizabeth. Elizabeth.’ But he knew that she heard him.
The room was bitterly cold.
‘Elizabeth.’
And perhaps for the first time, kneeling there, he felt love for her, though it was a dilute and pitying love and soured by fear.
Once she would have been taken to his hospital. Now it was to the City General thirty miles away, where he was scarcely known and not at all regarded. The ward was full. He sat on the chair beside her and felt out of place.
The stroke had twisted her mouth oddly and deadened the left side of her face so that she looked strange to him, a distortion of herself.
There was no one he should tell. Her parents were dead. They had been found together in the flat over the chemist’s shop, side by side of the fire in a room filled with gas. Downstairs, everything had been neatly arranged, the shelves in the pharmacy tidied, the sink cleaned. The door had been locked and the CLOSED sign swung across, and there was a letter to Elizabeth on the sideboard. It had been about old age, she had said, and illness and pain and the impossibility of separation. She had read it and burned it and afterwards retreated into herself, dry-eyed and far from him.
(But he himself had always been similarly alone and both of them knew it.)
‘Elizabeth.’
And then her eyes had opened and she saw him and for a few seconds everything was clear and revealed between them, the whole of their marriage and the past seemed balanced on this steady eye-beam, and everything forgiven.
That was all. Elizabeth slept. He took the first bus home in the early light of the morning, not trusting himself to the car, and sat at the table in the white kitchen listening to the ticking clock, his limbs heavy, and prepared himself for the future here, whatever life was left. But later, through the afternoon, he slept, and dreamed vividly of his mother, so that he woke bathed in bliss at the sight of her and the sound of her voice and at the evening light filling the room.
All that he thought, with a passion he might have felt if he had been drowning and clinging on to a spar, was that he must cling to the dream and not surface from it, not wake, and for a moment he succeeded. But then the dream fragmented and pieces broke away like a cobweb torn open by a probing finger, which was his consciousness.
He had never until now been given sight of her face but in his dream it had been as clear as his own in a mirror would be to him, and every feature distinct. She had wild hair that sprang anyhow away from her head when she loosed it from the restraining plait and comb, and in the frame of it her face was a young girl’s face. She had been speaking to him, saying something, though of no consequence, turning towards him as he sat over his schoolbooks at the parlour table. The oil cloth was as he remembered it, green and cream check, and the lamp was lit. The corners of the room flickered in shadow.
The skeins of the dream drifted from him, as he snatched at them they dissolved. He woke, to the powdery bedroom in the evening light, hearing his own voice calling out.
But did not catch the word.
He had never wept and would not now.
In the garden the late blackbird in the pear tree suddenly burst out singing.
It was the dream that sustained him. He fed off it for the rest of his life, though it never returned to him; for all his craving, he never saw his mother in such a way again, waking or sleeping.
He sat beside Elizabeth on the flimsy hospital chair as it seemed he had sat for a thousand days and nights and at first he held himself in readiness. He waited, because she was dying. Her skin was soft and silken as a child’s skin and faintly damp, not the moth-dry skin of the old. (She was not old.)
They were not concerned that he was a doctor, the fact was simply brushed aside, irrelevant to them. He had no status here. He was next-of-kin of the patient Elizabeth Molloy, and the rest counted for nothing. He counted for nothing. They came to attend to her and chivvied him out of the way. He went down a white-lit corridor towards a waiting room where old cigarette smoke was stale upon the air. It was square as a stamp, and windowless. The place was noisy with lifts and doors and the scraping trolley wheels, the familiar noises, and no one thought to hush their voices. He wandered out and down other corridors and no one paid him heed. He lost his bearings almost at once but, at last, came to a sluice room with a window and opened it wide.
It was raining, evenly, steadily, softly on to the roof and falling into the yard below and the sound steadied him, when he returned to her, he felt quieted.
‘Elizabeth.’
Her eyes opened at once, but then fluttered anxiously about the cubicle like bright moths caught in the still, pale, heaviness of her flesh. But when at last they did rest on him, it was blankly, with fear but without any recognition.
All night it rained, until the pattering drops seemed to fall inside his head, as he sat beside her.
That morning, he drove to the sea, and walked, as he had so often walked, following the whole curve of the bay as far as the point over the rasping shingle. It was still and empty and cold. The seagulls rawked and wheeled above him in the silver sky. He tr
ied over and over again by some means to reach his dream, or else the waking memory of it, but there was no trace of it given to him. Instead, he saw Elizabeth crumpled against the wall, and heavy and motionless on the hospital bed. But she too was far away from him, and quite unreachable.
Nineteen
After a time, there was nothing left but the silence, which seemed to creep out from them over the room in which they sat, over the whole house and out into the air beyond, to fall like a spell upon the square, the street, the whole of London. It was an absolute silence and terrible at first, but after a time they were soothed by it.
They had waited for footsteps and none had come, for a voice but no one had called out to them, a knock but there had been no knock. So that, in the end, they simply sat on in the midst of the spell of silence, frozen, like figures caught in the instant in sleep for a hundred years. One lamp was lit. The wine on the small table glowed ruby red in the light of it. The plates gleamed white as bone. The soup bowls and the fruit dishes were hollow, empty.
There was to have been a chilled soup, delicately pale with cream and cucumber, a dish of hot lamb, a pyramid of fruit, an ice, a Stilton cheese.
Unhappiness Flora had known and the chill of sadness, shock, loneliness and fear, but a disappointment such as this she had not known. It was disappointment and it was betrayal of all expectations, all hope, and she felt it as a physical pain, sharp at first but soon gnawing, dull, relentless. It affected the passage of her thoughts, paralysed her speech and her movement, froze her brain, so that she could not have told the time or the day of the week, scarcely even her own name, could not have fled from a fire or the violence of an assailant. She had gone down the stairs three times and out of the house, to pace along the street, looking, looking, and to return in distress and agitation, yet, strangely, she had not in her heart ever believed that there might have been some plausible reason for his absence. Once the moment had gone beyond which mere lateness was possible she had known absolutely that Tadeusz would not come. She might have screamed and cried, flailed out in anger and in disappointment, but she did not, her response was, as it had always been, to shrink back into a cold, stony place within herself and into which Leila Watson could not reach.
