by Susan Hill
‘You have a good sense of colour,’ Miss Desmond said, after only a single day, and then, ‘You have a tidy mind.’
There were Miss Desmond and Miss Lea, one tall, one very short, both thin, spare, colourless, immaculate, deferential to customers, and yet retaining a pride and a dignity which was pleasing to Flora. She loved the place and her work there from the moment she began and might have been there forever and the old life lived by another person whose memory she had by chance inherited. But she did not look back. She had decided something, and quietly closed the door.
She arrived at the shop at five minutes to nine and left at five past six. They closed for lunch between one and two fifteen.
Sometimes during the day she would look out of the long windows on to the triangle of sky and see a gull sail and wheel around and sometimes, opening the door for a customer, she caught, behind the sounds of the street, beyond the to-ings and fro-ings and everyday life of it, the smell or boom of the sea, and was happy.
‘We knew Miss Judaker,’ Miss Desmond had said. ‘You would scarcely have been happy there.’
The house had been pointed out to her, red brick, heavy, ugly, on the hill past the church.
They asked no impertinent questions. She suited them. They told her little about themselves. (At six fifteen, Miss Lea caught the bus to a village four miles inland and her infirm mother. Miss Desmond walked along the high street and turned left and out of sight, to a narrow, tall house pressed between two much larger ones, in a thin dark street.)
They were the only store of its kind, and had a reputation – people travelled miles to them, orders were despatched. There was a boy, Lennie Cheat, who worked in the back room, packing, and taught Flora how to tie the string in a little handle around a brown paper parcel.
After a month she felt that she had been here forever, and lived in her dim room in the hotel, and walked over the shingle and down to the edge of the water, and took down the heavy fabrics, the silks and the cottons and the tweeds, and unrolled them skilfully across the counter just so far, and slit them with the points of sharp shears, and re-arranged the reels of thread in exact order in the shallow drawers. Recognising her worth, Miss Desmond improved her starting wage within three months, so that she could afford to rent the tiny cottage and believed that she would indeed live here forever. For in this life she felt safe; things were ordered, within her control and predictable. Her ambitions had left her. It seemed she had no need, now, for the wild dreams and hopes, for the longings that the paintings had stirred in her; she was wary of friendships or involvements, anything at all outside the boundaries of the ordinary day. For a long time she did not even take the bus out into the countryside around the town to discover what it might be like there. Sometimes, visiting the lending library for books, she looked at the little museum attached to the reading room, with its relics from ships and fossils and shells, stones and preserved sea-creatures and dark, varnished pictures of terrible sea-wrecks and bearded mariners. The wood-panelled room with its high schoolroom windows and wooden floor, its oak tables and chairs and the cupola up to which she could look to see the sky above, reminded her just sufficiently of the Rotunda Gallery to comfort her in the knowledge that, should she need it, the past was still there, still in place.
There were glass cases containing papers and charts and maps, complicated weather instruments and tide tables, and she learned from them slowly, as if she were learning a foreign language and came gradually to love it. No one troubled her there. Only from time to time some old man came in to read a newspaper, or simply to sit, and peer at her oddly.
Summer went, and autumn, in soft golden light off the sea, before winter came raging in with storms and gales. The gulls were tossed about the sky like paper scraps and the cold air and spray lashed her skin, the booming of the wind and the sea at night were terrifying. The shop smelled of the oil stove, as well as of its silks and tweeds and wool and threads.
In November, the telegram came from Olga, about her mother’s stroke.
She would travel, Miss Desmond gave her leave at once, she was to stay until matters were resolved one way or another. She dreaded it. The thought of the journey back into the past and her childhood, the old life, froze her heart. But before she could even set out the second telegram came. Without opening it, she knew, and knew that she should weep, feel grief, pain, regret, shock, but she could not, only relief. She must still go but the journey would not be terrible now, and she would be free to return at once, without ties or duties.
She left wearily on the first morning train and the countryside was scoured and raw and colourless, with a thin, mean, bitter rain that stung her as she waited on the platform beneath the scalloped shelter of the roof, where the sparrows had once squabbled in the warm dust.
Two
When the telegram came, she had known without opening it that May Hennessy was either dying or dead but as she held it in her hand her first thought was that she had kept the shame to herself – for that she worked behind the counter of a draper’s shop would have been shame to her mother, who had believed even the position of private governess to be a humiliation. But a tutor, the teacher of a child, although still a domestic servant in her eyes, was one of a superior kind. There was no superiority that could be claimed for any form of shop work.
But she had never known. The few letters Flora wrote to her had been at first full of careful lies about Miss Judaker and the position she held as her companion, and later, merely evasive. She had wanted to protect her mother from the truth, protect the last of her dignity and her sense of their standing and importance, perhaps out of guilt, because she was so distant from her, and had gone her own chosen way so wilfully, without any regret or a single glance backwards.
As she arrived the rain greeted her, the old familiar, sodden, billowing clouds and wind, the waterlogged fields, the dull, poor, dark little villages, their roofs shining with rain. Her childhood had been lived under these skies, in this greyness, this rain.
To return was terrible because she so disliked her home, but more, because of her dread, dread at what she would find, and at the memories which would rise up within her, dread at being trapped and sucked back into the confinement and narrowness of the old life.
There was nothing for her here. There had never been anything. She knew it, riding on the bus out of town and down the endless, dull country road. Only her past awaited her and she was done with that and wanted none of it. (But in her dreams the previous night she had walked down Lord’s Parade and gazed and gazed in joy into the glittering shop windows, until she saw that out of the window of every one she herself gazed back.)
She walked into the dark, damp-smelling, frowsty back parlour of the house.
‘I’ll go up,’ she said to Olga, who was so much older, was adult now, and yet still the spoilt-faced, ringleted child to her. ‘When I’ve had tea. If there’s tea?’
‘Yes. Oh, of course there is tea. There’s anything you want.’
‘Upstairs?’
‘Oh, no. No, she’s not here. Not upstairs. She’s at Flynn’s, the undertaker, you know? And later this evening to the church. The body rests all night in the church, you know. It’s usual. She went back to it all you see, Flora, did you not know? Did she not tell you? She was very religious these last years. It was all she’d left to her.’
For you left too, Flora thought, looking at her sister, you could not bear to stay here any more than I.
The kitchen was cold and smelled fungoid, of damp wooden sills and draining board and stale food. Beyond the window the road, the flickering light of a single car. Then darkness again. Rain.
Olga had gone to the city to work in a dancing school. Soon now, she might try for America, she said. Why not? She had a pouting, old-young face, the same bland eyes, the same willingness to sing and dance and perform her way through life and into favour.
‘Should you want to go down later? To Flynn’s?’
‘Yes.’ Though she di
d not wish it.
‘Yes, I said so. I asked Macey’s car to come for us at seven o’clock.’
‘Yes.’
At the window of her old room she stood and stared at the darkness and was cold and the house seemed to put out tendrils that wound around her and suckers that clung to her, threatened to absorb her and drain her new life from her, and succeeded for a while, so that she could not remember it, could not picture the sea, the cottage, the inside of the shop, but instead, only had before her a picture of the garden of the house called Carbery, on the day they buried the boy Hugh. Her new life had ceased to exist, then, the place was not there, or else, worse, it was there but had no knowledge of her, and she did not belong there and could not reach it.
Olga came to the door. She wore the short jacket with the beaver collar. Flora felt awkward, foolish, beside her. Younger.
‘Macey’s is here.’ Olga’s lipstick was dark and thick as blood.
But she took Flora’s arm out of the front door and down the path and held it even in the taxi on the dark journey to Flynn’s.
The undertaker’s had frosted windows, lettered in gold like a saloon bar, and leather benches in a cold front parlour, and the whey-faced, ingratiating Mr Flynn. A terrible place, it seemed to her.
Only the sight of May Hennessy was not terrible at all.
‘She is young,’ Flora said, and felt her eyes swim. ‘She is …’
Not soured, puckered, yellowed, shrivelled, as she had looked in life, not disappointed and thin, with all the life and hope and pleasure, such as there had ever been, gone out of her. Not old and stained and lonely, as she had become. Not a dead-looking thing. Seeing her now, Flora saw death and that it was nothing but a healing and a great mercy. She was young, her brow smooth as a girl’s, her hair brushed freshly back from her face. Then, guilt and remorse and shame drained from her, for whatever had gone before, for all was resolved.
They stood for a long time, side by side, and she smelled the sweet sicky smell of Olga’s perfume mingling with the heavy, perfumed smell of death, and reached suddenly for her sister’s hand and pressed it to her. Then, they went out together, over the polished linoleum floor, out of the polished parlour, into the evening rain and, on an impulse, she directed Macey’s taxi not back to the house but on into the town, to Brom’s Hotel. They drank gin, and then ate in the dining room, a good meal, mussels and lamb chops, and had wine, and for the first time in their lives, it seemed, were friends, and strangely close, though of her new life, as of so much that belonged only to her own past, Flora did not talk, for those things were buried and private to her and never to be shared. She let Olga talk, laugh, tell, confide, for Olga had no inner life, and nothing hidden about her at all. So that, in the warmth of the soft red-shaded lamp that was set on their table, and of the food, and the wine they had drunk, Flora looked into her sister’s bright, open face, and envied her.
The house was sold and the contents easily, quickly disposed of. What little money would come from it they were to share. Flora felt no flicker of affection for it all, nothing but relief and freedom, after the clearing up, after the bleak funeral. They worked together but spoke little, the brief time of closeness over, as they accepted, though they felt the effects of it still and so were gentle and friendly towards one another. For moments on end, Flora would stop still to look at her sister, watch her, study her, as though this time between them had to be learned like a lesson and stored away in memory, to be fed off for the rest of her life – as indeed was the truth. She will succeed, Flora thought, she will blossom, and her energy and openness will be rewarded, she will attract love and friendship and success and the generosity of others. She will win.
The thought pleased her, not for her own sake, nor even for Olga’s, but for May Hennessy’s, as some sort of a recompense.
Three
She had returned expecting to be content. And she was, content with the shop and her work there, the pleasing daily routine, the calm and orderliness, content with the sky, the sea, the neatness of the houses, her own cottage, her walks beside the sea, morning and evening.
Yet in walking, a week after her return, she knew suddenly, in a moment of absolute revelation, that content was not enough; and knowing it, remembered Olga, vibrant, confident, easy with life, and eager for it. I am young, Flora said, whatever youth is I have it now. Content should not be enough. Must not be. What I must have is … she looked about her, searching. Rapture. And recognising that, within minutes she recognised more, as if she had opened a flood-gate within herself, and swirling, seething waters had poured in, overwhelming her.
Her reaction to the betrayal of Tadeusz, which she also thought of now as in some part a betrayal of herself by her own feelings and impulses, had been to close those gates, to drop down a portcullis against all feeling, all life, anything from the world outside which might disturb her. She had believed in Tadeusz and her responses to him, surrendered to them, loved, hoped, and given herself up to that hope, of the new life to which she believed he would take her. She had only allowed her defences to be lowered once before in such a way, in her love for the boy Hugh. Twice, she had been dealt the worst of all blows.
She had not allowed herself to wonder about Tadeusz’s betrayal, to speculate as to its possible cause or whose fault it might be – if indeed there was fault and not another terrible accident. She had frozen, some time during that night following his absence, frozen all feeling, all reaction, all thought, and only acted, calmly, coldly, decisively, to distance herself from him and what he had done, and from all memory of it.
But her mother’s death and the sight of her body, the visit to the dismal house and the disposal of their old life, above all, Olga, had thawed her, and she felt the upsurge of a warmth and a confused return of feeling.
She sat on a breakwater in the weak sunlight.
She was content. That was sure. That would not change. She loved this small strange town full of unknown people, and the glory of this setting, day after day. She would not leave it, partly just because of the content, but more because she saw that she must not run away again, as she had run before; from where she had run had always been clear – but to what? She had run here, and this must suffice.
Except that she felt the lack of something which she had seen for the first time in her younger sister, a vibrancy, an urgency, a carelessness, an openness to feeling. She lacked Olga’s courage for life, she thought now. And, thinking it, turned her face instinctively to the sun. But it did not warm her.
She would not run again. She must make her life, embrace everything it might offer her, out of what she found to hand. It was only that she did not yet know how. But having been granted this revelation, she did not doubt that she would succeed, knew, quite surely, that something, some way, some solution, lay ahead, and that she would reach it and recognise it.
Then she was able to turn and look back, without trembling, at Henrjyk Tadeusz, and, for the first time, his face came clearly to mind and she looked into it. There had been no change. She had loved him and trusted in him without reservation, and she did so still.
The memory of her time with him was painful, the memory of his betrayal infinitely worse. Above all, she was bewildered. Yet his absence and the suddenness of the change, from hope to despair, were like a death. Their effect upon her was the same as if he had indeed died, as the boy Hugh died, so much so that she wondered if he were indeed dead and she knew it in some subliminal way not open to reason or explanation. She must deal with what had happened, then, in the same way as she must with a death. She had been shocked, and angry in its aftermath, and had acted precipitately, as was her way. But she had not grieved or mourned the loss of love and of hope, nor the absence of his person. She did so now, crystallising the grief into moments of pure sorrow as hard and clear as drops of resin wept from the bark of a tree. Her tears were inner tears and did not moisten her eyes or her face. They were all the more bitterly wrung from her for that. She would not love
in such a way, with such grave openness and trust again, or in such commitment. So she resolved. It did not occur to her that a repetition of such feeling were possible in any one human lifetime. The brief, sharp business of mourning and the acknowledgment of it, was gone through, and followed by forgiveness, though she was unsure what she must forgive. Later, she realised that, with her grief and forgiveness, went a leavetaking.
The process cleansed her, so that in the shop for the rest of the day she felt as if she were somehow beginning her life again, and that another attachment to her past, her old self, had been broken.
She thought of Olga, and when she had a short, bright letter from her, was surprised at the pleasure she felt, and replied at once, in the same open, free tone, revealing both everything and nothing at all. She did not want to see her sister, would never deliberately invite her here, and yet if she had appeared that day might have welcomed her with genuine pleasure and fondness, and without resentment.
But Olga did not visit, nor write again for many months, and so she, like May Hennessy, the old house at Dorne, the rest of her old life and those who had peopled it, receded from her, joining Miss Pinkney, the fat Belgian sisters she had once taught, Leila Watson, Tadeusz even, in some untouchable, distant and strangely perfect place. Only the boy Hugh seemed closer to her, and more real, the boy Hugh and the white picture in the Rotunda Gallery of the woman before the open window.
Thinking of the picture, she began to visit the small library to look for books on art and, then, finding little of interest, to cycle inland or take the bus into the next town.
The town itself was hateful to her, dull, dirty, lying low on either side of a flat river plain with brick chimneys at its heart, and she fled from it with her books, to ride the long straight road towards the sea with joy in her heart at the first thin silver line of it ahead. But the books did not satisfy her as they had once done, and even the beauty of the paintings seemed dead, cold and separate on the pages, the life at their heart sealed up and unreachable, a life that had once been lived but was far remote and over. She respected the pictures dutifully, but they did not excite her; she would have had only formal dead words in which to write of them now.
