by Susan Hill
Once, he brought a silk-lined lidded basket in which she might keep every ribbon and piece of silk, and he felt that he had brought her a delight which was only his to give.
He continued to be nervous of the boy, and distant from him out of anxiety, as if, it seemed, he feared that he might damage him by his very presence and the proximity of the things that troubled him.
If Flora did not love him, had no love to spare for any other living thing, she was nevertheless intensely protective towards him, and always kind, perhaps out of a feeling of guilt (though no guilt attached to her, for in truth in marrying Lawrence Molloy she had granted him a reprieve, had held back the voices and the madness, so that he had known for the first time in his life an absence of fear, before the tide rose up again and came racing to drown him).
Ten
The rest of her life, lived out in absolute love, absolute peace and pleasure with her son, might have been eternity, so slow, so crammed, so intense were the days, and yet it was the blinking of an eye, there, now, gone. Everything progressed, as it would, as life does, and all was orderly and nothing disturbed the even surface (save for her husband’s distress and illness and final terror, lost to the voices and their punishments).
After his death, when Hugh was four years old, the final, never-ending battle was simply to survive, for there was no money, quite plainly no money at all. She faced that sitting alone one autumn night after the funeral, with the boy asleep in the room above. She must support them, and they must remain here, this was her final resting place, where all things had come together. She took pen and paper and made a list of work she might do and the list was only a few lines long. She would not go back to Miss Desmond’s shop, even if a place were available, because she needed to be with the boy so much of the time, even after he began to attend school. There was no one she might teach, and any work she might once have found writing for journals of art she would have no confidence or authority to attempt now. She had been different then. For the rest, there might be housekeeping jobs, in private homes or at the hotels. Well, she must do those, anything at all to provide for him, she would have counted the stones on the shingle beach, if it had contributed to his welfare and growth and happiness.
Then, walking slowly with him one day past Desmond’s, she saw a hat on a stand in the window, trimmed with braid, and at once, in her mind’s eye, saw a better, the trim more elaborate and fine, the colours iridescent.
She returned home and made it, almost to her satisfaction, from an old plain straw of her own that was little worn, sitting over it until the early hours of the morning, the basket of coloured silks spilling out over the table, on to the floor, pinning, turning, cutting, folding, re-working, until what she had imagined was before her. Then, looking at the pillaged heap of ribbon, tumbled anyhow, she remembered the evening her husband had brought the first scraps of it home for her, saw him as he had been then, white-skinned, with the luxuriant red-brown hair, anxious to please her. He had passed through her life and scarcely belonged in it, scarcely made a mark and yet she owed him everything because she owed him her son, the brief marriage had been because of him, but she saw now that perhaps it had been for other reasons, too, that she had, for a short time, been able to hold back the tide of voices and give him a steadiness and an ordinary calm in this bright room, to which he had always returned for shelter and safety. She had not understood. The voices and the terrible shadows had been there from the beginning, disguised and concealed from her, but there none the less. They had claimed him; there had never been any possibility of his escape. They had crowded finally into his head, to overwhelm him and he could neither turn aside from nor silence them. In the end, she had been powerless to save him. But sitting before the silks and skeins of colour in the quiet of the night, she was touched by love for him, and a tenderness, more than at any time during their marriage or in his living presence, so that when she went upstairs to lie beside her sleeping son, looking at him she saw for the first time the image of his dead father imprinted on his features, and in the paleness of his skin and the red-brown hair, and was glad of it.
Eleven
A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,
And loving favour rather than silver or gold.
Rain beaded the windows of the car, blurring his view of the church. It was a dull church, the stone spire weather-darkened. But Elizabeth found comfort there, had friends.
To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heavens.
He waited at home and then here, reading. His mother had read the Bible to him, the Psalms and from the Prayer Book. It was all in her head, she had said, she read the words until she knew them by heart and then turned them over in her mind, like pebbles. Sometimes, coming upon a particular phrase, he heard her voice so clearly that he turned towards her.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills
From whence cometh my help.
But now the doors of the church were opened and they were running down the steps, rapping urgently on the window. Molloy got out of the car and the wind took their voices from him, scattering them, they were mouthing and he could not understand them, standing there in the gale and the pouring rain, but only followed them, as they directed, back into the church.
They had made her comfortable, lain her on a pew with her head on a prayer hassock wrapped in someone’s coat, with another strange coat to cover her. Molloy knelt. The stones beneath him were cold as graves.
She could neither move nor speak. Only her eyes were open and looked into his, wide with fear. Her face was puckered oddly, her mouth twisted.
He put his hand over hers, as it lay on top of the stranger’s coat.
‘Elizabeth.’
But she made no response.
Most of them left, quickly, out of tact. But a few stayed, a little knot of them in the aisle a yard away.
‘Elizabeth.’
Ahead of him, he saw the great candles guttering on the altar in the wind that blew in from the open door. The smell was pungent to his nostrils.
Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.
Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.
There was nothing he could do for her here. He waited with his hand remaining on hers, and the gale battered at the high windows.
She would not live, they said, not this time (but he was one of them, after all, and knew, they did not need to speak to him of it).
He sat beside her in the dim cubicle.
‘Elizabeth.’ Perhaps she heard him say her own name over and over again. Perhaps she heard.
Perhaps, when he began to speak about the rest, she heard. For he told her everything, over the days and weeks, and as he told more, more was remembered, scenes, places, pictures, their talk, the smallest details crowded, pushing one another in their urgency, into his mind.
He described their house, took her from room to room, into the parlour with the lamp, and the front bedroom facing the sea, in which for years he had slept close beside his mother: as the sun rose it shone into their faces. The room in which she had pinned and stitched the hats, turning them slowly round in her hands against the light so that she could judge them precisely and he could admire. He remembered them now, when he closed his eyes they were before him and he described them to her. Straw, golden straw, and a straw so pale it seemed bleached as bone, black gleaming felt. Braids and ribbons. Feathers, silk roses and violets, with intricate, soft petals. She had a wooden stand shaped like a head and she moulded and trimmed the hats on that. They had been dampened and then steamed, with the hot iron held close but not touching the straw and felt. He could hear the hiss of it, smell the strange, yeasty smell and another, sharper, like varnish, see the ribbons coiled and stretched, tied and folded.
‘She would make one to perfection, just the one, no two were ever the same, and it would stand there, on the table, on the ledge, as if she wanted it to herself for a day, just hers – ours – to admire, before it w
ent off and another was begun.’
He had loved to watch her, to see the slow, careful transformation of this plain shape of grey or black or blonde into a wonderful thing, an adornment, unique. Every evening he sat looking up now and then from his books, or with his head resting on his hands at the table, his eyes following the deft, intricate movements of her fingers, seeing the concentration tautening her face.
It amazed him that he remembered so much, that there was so much left to tell. The days they had taken the bus out and walked through the reed-beds beside the snaking, inland river that ran across the flat marshes, the shoals of little pale blue butterflies, the sound of the bittern and the curlew and the larks, the immensity of the sky and the pale land stretching away to the sea, the heat of the sun on his head and neck, the pine forest, its dark, cool, curious smell. The bristles on the undulating back of a caterpillar he had let trail across his hand. He told her. He went back, taking her with him. They had climbed up the steps of a castle to the tower and he had felt the world turn beneath them, seen the bright heavens spin. He had thought that he might easily leap and fly.
He told her of the rock pools and the suck of the fronded waving sea anemone gripping his finger. He smelled the pungent salt-brine. There had been seaweed, he remembered, thick as leather beneath the pads of his fingers pressing the blisters, and weed like green silken tresses laid over the jutting rocks, slippery, treacherous. Beautiful. Day after day, in this place or that, walking beside his mother, talking to her, listening, looking up into her face, holding her hand, hearing her speak the lines of the Bible, the stories, all of it he remembered now, and told Elizabeth. All.
The stories themselves. After the sewing was put away, or when he had gone to bed, or in the pale, sunlit early mornings, lying beside her, she had told or read to him, every story in the world, it seemed. He told them now, the stories of enchantment and transformation and fabulous beasts, of spindles and gingerbread and black lakes out of which naiads came singing, into which swords plunged, of rainbow’s ends and rocks of gold and mice that spun and cats that talked, of dragons slain, tasks set, trials undergone, everlasting sleeps, rewards, banishments, disguises, spells, wonders. He told her the stories, and then what his mother had told him of her own story. Every day, sitting beside her, or else standing at the narrow window looking out on to the rain. He told her and, in telling, gave everything to her, as he had never before given, gave of himself.
‘Elizabeth.’
Perhaps she heard him.
After a month, when she was still alive, defying them, because there was nothing more to be done for her there he took her home. She could neither move nor speak. She would live, or, suddenly, die, they said. He knew. Meanwhile, he must live, in the spotless, silent house, feed her, clean her, move her, dress her, undress, brush her hair, cut her nails. Talk to her. Talk. And at night lie in the narrow bed on the other side of the room, straining to hear her still breathing, even in his own sleep.
When he had help for a few hours he went out, to walk in the air. ‘Have a bit of life,’ the woman said.
He walked along the flat, wet sand, or on the path beside the sea when the tide was high, neither happy nor unhappy, but settled as he had never hoped to be, content enough, giving to her what he had never before given. For now he had everything and the past was wholly returned.
Only at night, in his dreams, he wandered the empty hospital corridors, hearing the tap drip and the window left unfastened bang loosely in the wind, seeing the grass and weeds growing up through the cracks in the paving stones, and he longed then for that life and mourned it all and woke in terror, unable to find his way out of the building, which they had locked against him, and back to Elizabeth.
Only at night, in the dreams, he lay beside the dying, the old woman Annie Hare, Ettie Marshall, the old men, re-claiming each one, restoring them, too, briefly to life, and then consigning them to death again, as he watched with them.
‘Elizabeth,’ he said, waking, anxious. Needing her.
‘Elizabeth.’
Perhaps she heard.
Twelve
‘Will you be there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not late?’
‘No.’
‘Will you ever be late?’
‘No.’
‘Will you always be there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Every day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Until I’m dead?’
She did not laugh at him. She had never laughed. The anxieties, clearly written on his pale-skinned, serious face were too intense, she felt them as he did.
She met him every day at the gates of the school, always arriving there too early, so that when he looked out of the window at the end of the afternoon, he would see her there. Her own anxiety matched his, her own need. She might have asked him, ‘Will you always be there? Until I am dead?’
During the day, when he was not with her, she worked on the hats and at clothes too; she had taught herself to sew children’s gowns, out of silk and lawn, using the smallest of stitches, to smock and tuck and embroider. Word had spread, people sent to her from miles away. Miss Desmond displayed the garments, and they went for grand christenings and outings from the houses of the county rich. She was not happy when he was away from her but she was perfectly at ease, perfectly occupied, the work she did satisfied her. But when he came home, it was put away and then her whole attention and interest was for him.
He was clever. She read to him, borrowed books for him, taught him, talked to him, answered his questions, kept up with him easily until he was eleven. After that his interests narrowed and focused, he gathered speed and left her behind. What remained were the pictures and her stories. Nothing changed that.
‘What will I do? What will happen? How shall I get there?’
‘On the bus, from the crossroads.’
‘Will you come on the bus with me?’
His face tightened, his eyes darting in panic. (He had won a scholarship to the King’s School twenty miles away. She had worked with him, and for him, night after night, though it was never in doubt. His cleverness astonished her. She went in awe of him now.)
‘I shan’t go.’
She sat beside him at the table.
‘Listen …’ She made him face her. ‘I will be here. You will be there, at school. That will make no difference to anything else. Has it ever? Ifs only miles. What are miles?’
‘Away.’
‘You will go. Must go. There is nothing for you here.’
‘I shall be afraid.’
‘For a while, and then you will know what it is like and grow used to it and so not be afraid any longer.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I know.’
‘I want you to come.’
‘No.’
He turned away.
On the first day, she walked with him to the crossroads and waited, but when she saw the bus approaching, down the straight road, left him. Must. He had been too closely in her company, too tied to her love, bound up with her in his every thought and movement, waking and sleeping, breathed as one with her, as though he had not been separated from her body at birth. She sometimes feared that she had obstructed him, for all their happiness, for all their richness of life, for all their love, and that he was marked by it.
At the end of the day, she had waited some distance from the crossroads, not wanting to shame him in front of others. But he had come out, running and stumbling towards her and fallen anyhow into her arms, crying with relief.
‘I thought you might have gone. I thought you wouldn’t be here and I would never see you again.’
‘Why? Why did you think such a thing?’
He could not say. He was silent, pressing her arm to his body.
‘I am here.’
‘Will you always be here? Until I’m dead?’
‘Until you don’t want it.’
He stared at her as if she had spoken
in some strange tongue, for how could they imagine such a thing, that either would not want the other, now, ever?
They had walked entwined together down the hill towards the house and beyond the house the silver sea.
Thirteen
He remembered his mother’s smell. Not a smell of anything. Her smell, the smell of her flesh and her hair, the smell of her clothes. Like a small animal he had sought it out and nuzzled towards it.
The cottage had smelled of cloth and the steam from the hot iron against felt and straw, of the cold flagstones on the scullery floor, of books, of the salt sea. (Though by the time he had left her it was changed, by the shrivelling and wasting of the flesh, desiccation, ageing, the slide into death. For all he had not known it, or refused to know. Things were the same, he said, when he returned from the hospital, nothing would have happened, things would be as they had been, and the cottage, the sight of her, her smell miraculously restored to him. Nothing could change, he would not allow it, he had power. So he said. She is well. Things will not change. So he believed.)
