by Susan Hill
‘Come to us,’ Leila Watson had said. And held out her arms, and the shelter and consolation she had so despised turned on her to mock her.
Once, Tadeusz was in the room, laughing with Lawrence Molloy, before they turned and left together and a tunnel of forest trees and blackened bushes echoed to their fading voices. They had spoken to her in the language of Tadeusz, which she could not understand.
Her skin burned up. Only when his letters came did she get up and struggle to wash and dress and go about the cottage, tidying pointlessly. (The sewing was finished, the cover she had made folded and wrapped and put away, and her life with it.)
Once or twice, a face peered in through the windows, until, mistaking some real living person, some passer-by, for one of the ghosts, and in any case hating the staring slabs of sky now, she drew the curtains across all of the windows save one.
In the town, here and there, people mentioned her. It was noticed that she no longer walked on the beach, no longer collected work from Desmond’s shop.
Once or twice, Miss Desmond herself came and knocked, knocked, knocked on the door of the cottage, out of concern, Miss Desmond, not bent, not frail, not changed in any way save to have become very old.
But Flora had slept and the knocking had sounded only through her dreams, making her afraid but not waking her.
Miss Desmond had gone away (and written a letter to Hugh Molloy, and so, in the end, perhaps, brought about a resolution).
She might have dressed and gone out, walked through the town to the doctor and presented her illness, but she shrank from what would follow, the inevitable, public end to her life, not from pain but from failure and humiliation. She would not relinquish anything now, would not weaken as she had once weakened. She might have written to him. He would have come to her, needed, perhaps, an excuse to do so. She longed for it and in the last days thought of nothing but his voice, his presence, his footstep, his body filling the small room, all of her remaining energy was concentrated upon it. But in her waking dreams and odd bursts of feverish delirium, she saw him not coming to her but running, running away, growing smaller to nothingness in the far distance.
Outside a storm blew, the gale howled for admittance, its breath fouling the window panes. Doors slammed and gates were broken and lay on their sides anyhow. And then, quite suddenly, the sky cleared, the sun shone on to the surface of the calm, exhausted sea, and glanced off it through the thin bedroom curtain and into her face and after a while awakened her.
The room was filled with light and she lay in it and upon the frail, brilliant beam of it, held, caught, suspended. Her skin shone like silk. Her eyes were lit like tiny fires flickering in the sockets. The child lay beside her on the white pillow and the pale curtains were blown about like clouds in the breeze and the silence all around her was dazzling.
*
Coming in exultant from the cold morning, Molloy saw the letter addressed to him in the unfamiliar hand of Miss Desmond, lying, brilliant upon the dark floor.
Eighteen
‘I fear for her,’ Miss Desmond had written in her strong, clear hand. ‘Something is very wrong.’
The paper made a soft sound, shaking in his shaking hand. But for that moment at least he still believed in his own power to save her.
He ran down the hill from the railway station, his canvas bag pounding against his back. Ahead of him, the sea was a painted sea, the waves stiff, varnished things, the sheen on the surface of the water iridescent. A gull hung motionless, white on the white sky.
When he opened the door, the silence roared out to meet him, and in that moment he thought she came to him and touched him and he was caught up and held in her love for him, meshed in its gilded netting as it tightened around him.
He shut the door quietly and then all his powers drained from him, and he knelt, sobbing, his hope lying shattered about him on the floor.
At the end she had felt only relief and gratitude that he had not come to her, had not known of her illness at all; so she had believed.
But finding her in her bed, curled away from him as if in rejection, he was aware only of his own love and need for her and his desolation.
He would bear guilt, if not for the rest of his life at least for the most part of it.
That night, he lay beside her and sent for no one, told no one, wanting her to himself. He had pushed away the knowledge that when he had left she had had her dying upon her. She had said nothing of it. He had been glad of that, and of the freedom it had allowed him.
Now, he wondered how he might so much as draw his next breath without her. He did not touch her that cold, quiet night, and scarcely slept. He was only conscious of the absoluteness of the silence and the stillness within the room.
He begged to have known her dying, to have felt her last warmth, and because what he begged could never be granted, after his distraught, angry questioning, he spoke to her, promised her, asked her forgiveness endlessly. Her death would continue to draw him; in trying to make up for it, for his absence from her, for her aloneness, he would spend a lifetime watching over the dying of all the rest.
The darkness of that night was moonless and starless and impenetrable. But when the light came, it filled this room of birth and death, and the brightness blinded him.
It was later that he found the cover she had sewn, coming upon it at the back of a cupboard, in looking carelessly, hurriedly for some trivial thing, and at first he pushed it aside. But some flash of familiar colour caught his eye and he took it out, and unfolded it, and traced every detail, saw every piece of fabric and ribbon and braid, and that she had sewn up the pieces of their lives and bound them together.
When he left the cottage, walking away up the hill for the last time, he carried it with him.
Nineteen
For there had been precious little else to take. What she had given him had been everything that was invisible, intangible, life, love, ambition. And the things she had told him of what mattered in her past. She had painted the pictures for him so exactly that he knew these things as she had known them, saw them through her eyes, her memories became his. The gallery. The white corridors and high empty spaces filled with light. The picture of the young woman before the open window. The rain falling on London. A pleasure steamer making its slow way back up river in the soft, starlit dark and the sound of an accordion, the sound of singing. The glowing, dim-red cavern of the Bloomsbury flat, the walls hung with rich patterns, lamplight, pigeons cooing on the ledges above the London streets and squares. Children running with kites in the billowing wind on the hill high above the green slopes and the hollows with their clumps of trees. (But of Henrjyk Tadeusz she had never spoken, to anyone in her life again. And who remembered Tadeusz now?)
The brilliant white light and blown steam and spray and speed bursting from the great canvases of Turner, the roaring skies, the service of clouds everywhere.
His own name, given him after the dead boy Hugh, sitting sloe-eyed, solemn-faced and expectant in the back of the open car, for the last time.
The stone stairs that led to the top of the castle tower and the parapet looking out across the flat lands to where he might just make out in the distance the silver line of sea.
Her smell. The sound of her voice. The sight of her. Her warmth as he reached her, arms outstretched, hurtling down the hilly streets of the town. And in a drawer of the chest, beneath clothes which he bundled up to throw away, hardly bearing to touch them, smelling her smell in every scrap, every crevice of cloth, a book in a language he did not recognise, with her name in a handwriting he had never seen.
For days the sea had been immensely still, the sky clean and pale. But after he left, walking away up the hill, the clouds came streaming in and the tide rose and the rain fell, blackening the water.
Twenty
Flora, dead. But no one else. The rest might live on forever.
Miss Marchesa, grown as old now as the old she had made her living from, looked after in her t
urn in one room of the lodging house. Miss Marchesa, who steeled herself on waking each morning for the interminable sameness of another day, listening for the sound of water running in basins above, for footsteps on the stairs, and the slamming of the front door. (But those noises did not come now.)
The boy Hugh, dead for so many years, was not dead for so much as a day in the house called Carbery, but remembered, loved, spoken of, by the very old, to the children and their children, who came after. (The photograph of him, in a silver frame, standing on a table, the pastel portrait hanging on the stairs, a crayoned drawing of Moses in the bulrushes, and another, of a mythical beast trampling on flowers, in the old nursery, quite familiar to them all.)
Though, gradually, the grand houses like Carbery lost their grandeur and the gardens were overgrown and neglected by the old, and, after their deaths, built upon.
Of course Olga did not die. Olga might never die. Olga danced and sang and went to parties sprightly down the years into old age and on, brightly into eternity. And wondered very often about her sister and did write, but the letters went unanswered. Flora might come here, she thought once, might make a life of some sort in this country. But of what sort? The piece was turned this way and that beside the jigsaw, time after time, but would never quite fit, was not, after all, in the right place and so in the end was discarded.
Miss Desmond did not die. Miss Desmond reached the age of one hundred quite comfortably, and Miss Lea the same.
And Leila Watson lived forever, among the sheltering, cocooning hills and woods and green roofs and leafy branches, among the old of her family and the children, and thought without fail of Flora, and prayed for her, every day, and at last ceased to question and be troubled and simply commended her to God. (For God and his church took up a great deal of her life now.)
No one else died then. No one else might ever die. All were immortal.
Only Flora.
(But perhaps Tadeusz, now or then, in this country or that? But it was never known.)
Molloy took all the deaths of the world upon himself after, took on death itself, it seemed, embraced it and made it his own to make up for the guilt of his betrayal of her. Though every death he kept vigil over could not atone for hers, nothing in life at all made up for that.
He had shrivelled to a hard, dry pith within himself and his life blood seemed to have stilled and desiccated within him.
And so it had been. Until now, and Elizabeth, lying motionless, eyes wide, month after month in the bed.
He waited, attending her with endless love, perfect care. He took her everywhere as she lay there, told her everything he had to tell.
Perhaps she heard.
His days, which he had feared would be sterile, empty husks, were crammed full of her needs and the fulfilling of them. His need for her.
The year turned. Spring came in very gently, a pricking of vivid, translucent green.
The blackbirds scuttled under the snow-white pear tree.
The year shifted a little.
The blossom fell.
He woke at dawn and the room seethed with a familiar silence.
She had lain still for months but now her stillness was quite other and absolute.
Beyond the window, the sky was pearl grey and cloudless.
He got up, went to the cupboard and took out the quilt, and laid it on the bed, to cover her.
‘Elizabeth,’ he said.
Perhaps she heard.
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Copyright © Susan Hill 1998
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 1998
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