The Service Of Clouds Read Free

reserved, calm and uneventful. She took little notice of the dramas andemotional atmospheres that eddied from time to time about her parents and their concerns. What she thought about the future, even as a small girl, was that it would mean not only adulthood but freedom and independence, for she had always had an innate sense of not properly belonging to this place, these people. It had nothing to do with unhappiness, nor with love or its lack, it was a simple fact, this sense of otherness and detachment, just as she was a child who played willingly with others and yet, when she turned her back, forgot and did not think of them at all.
    But her own state was not something she considered very deeply; she was as she was. Otherwise, her life was even and unremarkable, and she would not, until the distant attainment of adulthood, have expected it to change, as children do not.
    Within a month of her eighth birthday, her father had died and, two weeks afterwards, her mother had given birth to another child, a shrivelled, sallow-skinned premature daughter, whom she named Olga, because May Hennessy had an inclination towards the romantic, the exotic and the foreign-seeming, as an antidote to the reality of her own life and diminished horizons.
    Flora had not been told about the coming child and, afterwards, had wondered at what point her mother would have brought herself to speak of it – for surely she had never meant the whole, momentous business to have been unprepared for, surely there must have been some plan for a careful disclosure. (Though she found the thought of any such talk between them unimaginable, and later came to realise that in any case none had been planned. May Hennessy had been too shocked herself, and thrown into emotional disarray, to know how to tell anyone at all of her pregnancy. She had only prayed that Florence would not notice it and question her, for the girl was perceptive enough, with an intelligence her mother was afraid of.)
    But Flora had noticed nothing.
    And then, before the time of birth, the death had come.

Three
     
    Saturdays were for longing. That was their point.
    They took the bus to the town shops, not to buy from them, but to gaze into their windows, at fur stoles and mahogany furniture, shiny black gramophones and underwear fancy with lace and appliqué, china candelabra and fruits in syrup, packed into elaborate jars. It was tacitly understood between them, though never openly stated, that they were here to admire, to compare and to covet only, as though these objects, resplendent upon their stands and counters, were crown jewels or rare artefacts in a museum and quite unattainable.
    They walked slowly down one side of Lord’s Parade and up the other, looking, and, having looked, felt quite satisfied, and then went into Maud’s for tea and lemonade, cakes and an ice.
    It was understood, too, that acquaintances would barely be acknowledged. These outings were private occasions, separate from the rest of life and undertaken to appease some desire of May Hennessy’s for ritual. Flora thought that, though they shared nothing else, her mother would still have preferred not to be with her, but to enjoy the outings entirely alone. They scarcely spoke unless, once they were installed at a window table in Maud’s, a memory of something just seen and admired might float before May Hennessy’s eyes and so be singled out, set, as if on a pedestal and turned this way and that between them, and commented upon.
    The child had always felt cool and detached, never restless with the desire to take home and own anything they saw, partly because nothing in the shop windows ever seemed to have much to do with her; she could have had no possible relation to black velour coats or crystal vases. But she had inherited a certain dispassionateness, and was able to hold herself aloof and see the slow walk down Lord’s Parade in the same light as a visit to a series of dull tableaux. Only at Christmas did