The Service Of Clouds Read Free Page A

a spark of something like excitement or happiness leap up in her at the sight of the glowing coloured caverns hollowed out behind the glass.
    At Maud’s, Flora liked the atmosphere, the bustle of waitresses and the chink of china on trays, long spoons in tall glasses, the pastel ices with cochineal syrup running like rivulets of lava down the sides. Then she sat and held her spoon poised above the glass, looking around at the women in hats, and longed to reach out and hold this bright, chattering place, carry it about within her. It satisfied very easily any craving for change or interest in her otherwise grey, plain days.
    She had not learned peevishness or dissatisfaction. Her life was as it was, and she accepted it, as children will, and if she recognised that the Saturdays had a different or disturbing effect upon her mother, she did not question that either. What May Hennessy thought, felt or wanted was her own affair.
    It was February, cold and bitter and black as a burned-out coal. They had made their way more quickly than usual down Lord’s Parade, seeing no one they knew, and eaten tea-cakes, not ices, in Maud’s, which shrivelled the usual pleasure of the day a little. The place had been quiet – there was influenza about. Flurries of hail blew like pips on to the windows. May Hennessy’s face was drawn, with puffiness around the eyes.
    ‘Well, perhaps it would have been better not to have come,’ she said.
    Flora did not reply. But she was conscious of the difference in things, of a disappointment, and, afterwards, would remember, and mark the day out as the beginning of the change in their lives, and the end of everything familiar.
*
    After supper was eaten and cleared, the maid Eileen went out, walking two miles to the village to stay one night with her own family.
    It was the only night of the week they were left alone, and, occasionally, they would play cards at the table in the back parlour next to the kitchen. They had a fire there, as well as in the front room where John Joseph Hennessy sat, and because it was the weekend the oil cloth was taken off and they played directly on to the polished wood, which was another thing that helped to set the day apart.
    It was difficult to know afterwards how much she had really sensed of the change in things. But, after the card game, her mother had simply sat in her chair, looking down at the table, seeming tired, and Flora had sat too, and, then, something happened to time which slowed and stopped, and hung there, like a heavy, still object, a weight suspended on a chain. She felt it pressing in upon her. The house was quiet. The wind and rain had died down, the coals in the hearth did not shift or stir, so that after a time she became a little frightened by the silence, and fidgeted, wanting to bring everything back to life, nudge the clock to make it go again. But her mother sat and did not notice, went on with her thinking, and then the girl slipped off her chair and out of the room, and was quiet in closing the door.
    In the hall, the silence was greater, like a thick cloud, a substance through which she could move forward only slowly.
    She put her hand on the knob of the sitting room door. Her father’s room. But for a moment she did not go in, only stayed frozen there, as if fearing that, once she had opened the door, she might find herself in some strange other place, where she would not know herself, and the arrangement of things would be quite unfamiliar.
    For the rest of her life, she remembered everything about the room and her next few moments in it, alone with her father, though for years she did not speak of it but kept the memory stored away, untouched and perfectly preserved. She was able to close her eyes and smell again the smell in the parlour, to hear thepressure of the silence there, and to recreate her own feelings as she sensed its different and disturbing quality. It was not until she was no longer Florence Hennessy but Flora Molloy, and