by Susan Hill
A cat yowled suddenly from the rooftops on the other side of the square, yowled again and the noise should have startled them into movement or words but strangely it did not, they merely heard it and sat on, frozen to stone. But after a time Leila Watson realised that she herself was crying, slow, silent tears of distress and misery for her friend. But the tears fell unnoticed and so in the end they stopped and because there were no words and could be none, she broke free of the spell, stood and began to clear the untouched, unsoiled dishes and uneaten food from the table. After a while, automatically, Flora helped her and when things were dull and usual again and every sign of the evening’s expectation gone she left the room and went into her own and lay on her bed in the darkness, fully dressed, eyes open, still as death.
But at three in the morning, with the cold moonlight to see by, Leila Watson came from her own bed, weeping to her, and lay on the covers beside her, wanting to give her comfort, find words that might explain or reassure. But there was no comfort, no explanation, no reassurance, and they both knew it, and so merely lay in silence, and the moon slid off their faces, over the floor, watered the mirror, before gliding away, leaving them in the still darkness.
The dawn was hours in coming. But at last, fitfully, both of them slept.
Why Tadeusz did not come she never discovered. That was something she learned from the experience of those weeks; that to some questions there are no answers, to some puzzles no solutions. Ends may remain loose and matters unresolved, forever.
He did not come then, or ever. He did not write.
Flora wrote to him, a single, anguished, raging letter of remembrance and love and bitter blame that concealed nothing.
His face was between her and the paper as she wrote.
But after a time she realised that, as much as Tadeusz himself, she missed the future that he was to have given her, the new country, the farmhouse in the village close to the woods, another language, the strangers who would have become her family. She dreamed of them and of their horses and dogs and forests, she smelled that life as she would have lived it, smelled woodsmoke and pine needles trampled underfoot; she knew how the mattresses would have felt to her body when she lay on them, coarse and uneven and thick, saw the grain of the scrubbed surface of the wood tables. That new life had been a story, begun but abandoned. The book was closed and thrown away, the ending of it denied to her, along with the life.
Of Tadeusz she dared not think because he carried so much of her away with him into the silence and emptiness that had closed round him like the sea, because of the trust and the confidences he held. Tough in waking she could exclude all thought of him by a simple act of will, but her dreams she could not control and he came to her in dreams, until she woke in bitter, furious tears and beat her fists against her skull to drive him away.
In the dreams he was his true self; there was nothing strange or surreal about them, no distortion. They were ordinary dreams, in which over and over again they walked away from the Hill and down the sloping path towards the clustered trees below and behind and above them in the sky trailed a multitude of kites. In the dreams, she spoke his language fluently. But once he got up from the bench on which they sat and walked away. She called to him and he turned and looked back, but in looking, he was not Henrjyk Tadeusz but the boy, Hugh.
*
The book he had given to her lay on the bedcover, beneath her hand.
In the last days, knowing that this life was quite over and that it was the end of their friendship, she and Leila Watson talked, swam in streams of talk, of questions and recollection, of revelations, as if talk were to be used up now or never allowed to either of them again. Which in a sense, was so.
She had told Tadeusz everything of herself and might have wondered if there were anything left to tell, that somehow the well might be dry and the bucket light and empty as it rose. But these were different wells, it seemed, there was more in them of detail and of feeling, that she had not remembered before. What she had shared with him remained his, given freely away, but what she and Leila Watson told made a quite different telling.
She wanted to weep but could not, there was only a dry pain burning in her stomach and in her throat. What she felt was a confusion of something like shame, for that she was in some way to blame for her situation and her own abandonment she had no doubt, though she could not properly decipher nor at all understand it. He had betrayed and punished her because he had found her wanting, though in what ways she did not know.
No one else had been told anything, no one but Leila Watson knew. But she thought, once or twice, about the letter he had written home. His plans, her coming to them, their future, had been in the pages of the letter; she imagined the black strokes of his curious handwriting, upon the white paper.
If there had ever been such a letter. If they had known of her existence, after all.
Twenty
‘No.’
Leila Watson had turned, in the very moment of leaving. She had on her coat with the fur collar, her hat and gloves. She was a middle-aged young woman. But still she turned, her arms out to Flora, and her face poured tears. She was the one to need comfort.
‘No. No.’
And so Flora comforted her, as if she were a child being torn away from her.
‘This is wrong. You should not be staying here, you should not.’
‘I will not be here.’
For she was to go to her new life the following day.
‘Come with me. They will welcome you, there is a place for you with us. It is so good, so sheltering there. You need shelter.’
For a moment, she saw it as it would be, the small house Leila was to go to, next to that of her sister-in-law and in the same village as almost all the rest of her husband’s family. Everyone was related to her or knew her, there were the nephews and nieces, she would be the Aunt. The village sat in the shelter of the Downs among trees and pastureland and comfortable farms, protection, welcome, shelter – the words she had used – calm, an ordered life. Matins on Sunday morning, tea on Sunday afternoon. It held its arms out to her, this life, she might retreat into them. The fields would be greener than any fields, the skies softer, the birdsong sweeter, the contentment absolute.
‘There is time to send a telegram, change the labels on the cases. It is quite easy.’ Leila Watson clicked her fingers. ‘It would be done. I cannot bear you to go to strangers.’
But looking into her friend’s face, gentle, tender, infinitely loving, Flora saw to the heart of the matter: that such a life would cloy and suffocate, might ease for a time but could never satisfy. She did not know what there would be for her, she only trusted in herself, in her own inner strength and in the place where she was quite alone and infinitely self-reliant, the place she must nurture, not muffle and soften and stifle with the kindness and company of others.
She kissed Leila Watson on both cheeks and turned her round by the shoulders, gently, towards the waiting cab.
And then, in the midst of her own desolation, there came to her a new sense of infinite possibility. It blew into her face with the breeze that came across the square. It was a moment in which she felt that life was being breathed into her anew, and without condition, and that she must seize it.
She had not gone with Leila Watson to Surrey. (And indeed, she was never to see Leila Watson again.)
The pain of Tadeusz’s betrayal had probed below the surface and into her bones and settled deeply there, and like a parasite would grow, fed by the silence and darkness, she would never dislodge it. Yet still, with the breeze blowing into her face, she felt this hope and turned to it, joyfully and in gratitude.
Twenty-One
Thistles grew tall as trees beside the railway track and, now and then, the seed heads blew and floated down on the air like tiny ghostly parasols. There was a mustard-coloured weed and bone-dry grasses that keened in the wind.
The train had stopped, she did not know where, nor how much further she had to travel.
The journey seemed long. It was also very beautiful, the train riding high over the open country that had become bleaker and barer as they went. Now and again, it had curved, following the line of the coast, so that she had looked back from the open window of her compartment to see the coaches like segments of a caterpillar, curving round.
She had left London without looking back – and not just London, it seemed, but that part of her life and of herself which had belonged there. They had snapped and broken away from the Flora who now travelled on and she felt light without them, as if, when she stood, she might leave the ground. Leila Watson, the flat in the Bloomsbury square, the few weeks with Tadeusz, might not have been.
A cloud of little sky-blue butterflies fluttered up from the dry grasses beside the train. She had replied to an advertisement for a companion. She would be required to read aloud, to have conversation, and to take dictation for the writing of a memoir. Nothing more. The house, the town, this part of the country, were entirely strange to her.
‘Write often,’ Leila Watson had said, ‘and of course I shall write, and if things are not right for you, you are to leave and come to Surrey. Do not even bother to tell us in advance. Come.’
But you will be settled, Flora had thought, into the comforting shelter of that place, that family, you will take root and put out first shoots and then strong branches there, you will grow old among them. She had an image of rich foliage parting briefly to let in Leila Watson, and falling back at once, a curtain to envelop and conceal her. She would grow moss, like the slates on her cottage roof.
‘Write often.’
Her bones felt scraped bare, but infinitely strong and able to support her without need of any other. She believed passionately now that there was no hope or salvation for her save from her own self.
Creaking, the train began to move and, all along the track, the butterflies fluttered up again in panic and for a second unnerved her, too, so that her heart pattered in her breast.
Where am I, she thought, and why, and what will happen to me? To be lonely again among strangers might be both unbearable and inescapable. Pride had made her refuse to go to Surrey, and comfortable shelter. Pride and her own aloof independence were hard and bitter food.
But the station roof had an elaborate canopy, scalloped at the edge, and the railings were freshly painted and, most pleasing of all to her, the air smelled of the sea. She was to be met. But once the platform was empty of people again, once the train had gone, she was glad to be left for a time to herself, to sit on the green bench beside her suitcases in the sun, and the old feeling of being suspended in time and space came back to her; she might have rested there for five minutes or five hours, it did not matter, she needed nothing, nothing troubled her.
There were dozens of sparrows in the iron guttering above her head. Somewhere in the distance was a sense of the ending of land and the beginning of water, a pale brightness.
The signal clanged down, but still, for a long time, the hour hung heavy, nothing moved, no one came to her.
The sparrows went on squabbling and chattering in the dust.
PART THREE
One
Once, she said that she had been led to the place, by a star or an angel, and for all that she was so ill by then, weakened and with an intermittent fever that laid waste her body and confused her mind, for all that, she believed it to be so. In her last months, she had taken to reading the Bible, seeing its stories not in terms of their message, or indeed, of their words at all, but as a series of pictures, tableaux, which she was able to look at in her mind’s eyes. There, in pictures of angels and stars, prophetic messengers, she had found her confirmation.
‘For how else,’ she had said, ‘would I have come here?’
From the beginning, on the station platform, the first realisation that she was indeed completely alone, she had felt a sense of home-coming deeper than any in her life. She loved the small town as she might have loved a person, and better than she had loved any save that one. (If there were another, it was not Henrjyk Tadeusz, after all, but the other boy, the first boy Hugh. She did not speak of the brief, flaring up of love with Henrjyk Tadeusz, and the ending, in betrayal.)
The town, set behind the long shingle beach and then the sea, was perfect to her, then, and ever afterwards, and she left it once only, to travel to her mother’s funeral. She did not believe that such settled happiness, such a sense of an ending, and of a lightness, could have come about by chance, the casual finding of an advertisement in a newspaper for a lady’s companion, and so the idea of the angel or the star, her fate and destiny, grew in significance with her, the only superstition and irrationality she had ever entertained.
It was laid out in regular lines of houses running from the hill down to the sea. The high street was surprisingly broad, with the back of the shops and houses on its east side to the sea and the winds that blew off it for most of the year. Every few yards, between the buildings, a narrow lane ran up to the seafront road.
Flora spent her days at work in the shelter of the high street and her nights in the cottage that faced the sea. But at the beginning, she had been obliged to take a room in The Ship Private Hotel, a genteel, cheerless place. She had been panic-stricken, feeling like a bark at first cut adrift from its moorings and then cast up on this unfamiliar shore. (Though even in the midst of her panic and bewilderment on the empty station platform, waiting, waiting, she had felt a curious happiness, and the relief that comes on arriving home after a long journey.)
She had sat and waited on the bench at the railway station and no one had come to meet her, as had been arranged; then, someone, a boy, red-faced, straw-haired, with a scribbled message. Miss Judaker had died the previous night, so that, until just now, Flora’s arrival had been forgotten, overlooked, scarcely known or thought of. She must return. She would have no employment here after all. (And the house and its domestics were in confusion, Miss Judaker having had no family, perhaps not a single relative.)
She must remain one night, then, for there was no further train, and return to London the following day. But return to where? And she would not go to Surrey, to Leila Watson – she would not give in to that easy, comfortable solution.
She was tired. Her head ached. The boy had carried her trunk to The Ship Private Hotel.
That evening, the sky over the sea had been silken and pale. Flora had walked beside it along the path and then climbed the wall and jumped down on to the deep shingle and walked there, her face to the sea and sky until the light left it and there was only a soft, still, violet dark on the surface of the water. Then, she had turned and looked back to the lights that shone from the huddle of houses that marked out the town. Here then, she had said. For why not? Where else? Whatever had brought her, what chance, what accident, what betrayal (as she thought of things then) was not relevant. Here.
And all the pieces fell into place.
That night she slept as she had not slept for weeks, and in the course of it she seemed to travel, travel a thousand miles for a thousand years, for when she woke, she was another person, and the rest of her life, the old life, was over and half-forgotten. She could scarcely remember the faces of Leila Watson and even of Tadeusz. The people she had known, the places in which she had lived, seemed to have fragmented and blown away in pieces on the wind that came from the sea.
The sensation of having no past, or constraints, and of the infinite possibility and reassurance of this present, made her light-headed. She went out early, to walk again along the sea’s edge, seeing the gulls wheel and turn and drop suddenly through the pale clouds, and even her own name, Flora Hennessy, seemed strange and unrelated to her.
Later that same day she had taken her job, fallen upon the work, the place, the people, with the rapture of a new discovery, and of a solution to her emptiness, and had remained there, through her mother’s death, through her own move to the cottage, through day after orderly settled day, for years. Until now. Until now.
It
was the shop that she had fallen in love with. Later, even her son understood that.
On the first morning, she had come into the back room of the hotel from her walk along the shingle and asked, knowing quite certainly that she wanted to stay here, about the possibility of work. The woman behind the counter and the woman polishing the tables had stood, looking at her, looking at one another. Looking.
‘There’s Desmond’s,’ one said at last, ‘Miss Desmond has been wanting.’
And so it came about.
The shop was the only double-fronted one, on the south side of the street; there were blinds to be drawn down on many afternoons, against the sun, but the shop itself was set back, dark and cool within.
It was the orderliness and the pattern of it that so pleased her, the way things were arranged. The materials were on rolls laid beside one another in order of type, of weight, of colour, patterned, plaid, plain, linings and outers, the silks and cottons in glass-fronted drawers that rattled as they were pulled, the balls of wool fitted into triangular spaces. Below the counters were the buttons, the pins, the needles, the fasteners and hooks, and those drawers were lifted up and set on top of the counter for their contents to be displayed. On the other side of the shop, the drawers contained gloves, collars and cuffs, belts, tray cloths, and, in the cardboard boxes discreetly racked beneath them, underwear. Further back, in an ante-room, were the furs and the millinery, with which only Miss Desmond herself had to do.
