The Service of Clouds by Susan Hill

Author:Susan Hill [Hill, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781856192798
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1000-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Five

The blankets had writing across them, and the sheets, the pillowcases and towels too: ‘Property of St. Andrew’s Hospital’ in bold, bright blue.

So they were a part of the hospital, in a hospital flat, in a hospital building. It was as if they had no life, no independent existence at all. She might have been given, or sold to it. ‘Property of St. Andrew’s Hospital.’

He had watched her, for weeks after coming here, after the fire, though he had said little, and asked no questions. She knew only that he had understood, at last, the power of her feelings.

‘Would you want to go away somewhere for a while?’

‘Away?’

‘On a holiday. I’ve time owed to me. We could go …’

‘Where?’

‘Wherever you would like. The mountains. Or to Paris.’

‘We’ve a move to make.’

‘You’ve not been in an aeroplane.’

‘There’s the sea to get used to.’

‘Well …’

But she knew that he would give up easily enough, and with relief, anxious to begin his work, and was glad of that, never finding it easy to go against him or to argue; she could not muster thoughts and words sufficiently well for argument.

They would not go on a holiday. There was enough strangeness already, enough change and difficulty and difference, and lack of ease.

‘We’ll take on the flat until we find a house you like.’

‘You.’

‘I know how it is, Elizabeth.’ There was a softness then in his way of speaking.

He had come in very late and seen the smouldering garden, smelled the paraffin and scorched grass, and doused it with cans of water, until the smoke blackened and the smell turned to a stench, sickening her. In the morning, the sight had been terrible, the bushes dripping and blackened, plants twisted in death, and all the birds frantic.

The hospital flat was above a canteen and offices, in a building set behind the main building. There was no garden, nor even any grass to be seen, though a few trees grew beyond the perimeter fence, and an old hedge of blackthorn and quickthorn and elder. She felt released from the past and from her old self, and suspended here, in a time that was out of the real stream of her life. It was very quiet, but there were people to watch going about along the asphalt paths below. The windows were large and cloud-filled, as autumn blew in from the sea.

To her surprise, she was not unhappy. Sometimes she went down to the wards and helped them serve lunch, or change water jugs and arrange vases of flowers and they treated her very politely, and cautiously; there was an invisible space between them, but no unfriendliness.

They said: ‘He is a wonderful man,’ almost every day to her, and she believed it. He belonged to them, though they, like her, could not know him.

Someone had scratched across the base of all the saucepans ‘St. A. H.’ and marked every piece of china, with nail varnish.

There was an old black bicycle which the handyman spruced up for her to use, and that was marked too, in white letters along the mudguard.

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