The Service Of Clouds Read Free Page B

her own son was five years old that, for no apparent reason, she began to tell him of it, as she might tell a story, and after that he would ask to hear it sometimes, as if it were indeed Rumpelstiltskin, The Pied Piper or The Little Matchgirl , all of which she told him in the same way and the same voice. (For her favourite stories became his, they liked exactly the same ones for the same reasons. Their delight in this, as in so much else, was mutual and perfectly matched.)
    She had gone on slippered feet that made no sound into the soundless room.
    The fire had burned low, though the coals still glowed at their heart. The lamp had burned down too, the light was tallow and flickering.
    She stopped. She had been about to say his name, but then did not, only stifled the life out of the words as they rose into her mouth. She looked at him, waiting, and then after a few seconds made her way not directly to him but by edging round the room, holding on to pieces of the furniture, afraid to let them go and be somehow stranded, without support.
    ‘I knew,’ she said, all those years later. ‘I knew when I opened the door, only without knowing that I knew.’
    She had reached him at last, but then could not bring herself to look, had stared at the hearth and the pattern of the green tiles around it, and the shape of the lilies that were printed on the tiles. There had been no smoke rising from the nuggets of coal, only the strange, dim, staring redness.
    She saw his hand first, the handkerchief held in the palm and trailing down between his fingers that hung loose over the chair arm, and the hand was like a wax candle. She knew at once and quite certainly that there was no life in it.
    Then, inch by inch, she had let her gaze travel up his arm, up the grey woollen sleeve, to his shoulder, to the shirt collar, thenabove that to his thin neck. His head was back, resting on the small cushion. She followed the line from neck to jaw, as she had felt her way around the edge of the room. She stared at the bristle of hair, thin, colourless, at his temple and wisping back behind his ear, examined the coil of the ear, intricately.
    The silence in the room tensed itself, tight as a coil about to spring; an absolute silence, such as she had never known before, but which penetrated her now and wove itself into the innermost recesses of her being, and settled there, bound itself in and around like a mesh, knotted, inextricable.
    She was holding her breath, her throat and chest hurt, wanting to explode, she heard her heartbeat, as though she were trapped with it inside the skin of a drum.
    She looked suddenly, quickly, right into his face, before she had decided that she would do it, or was able to prevent herself.
    His eyes were not closed, they were open, and they were eyes she knew, yet they were not, they were different, a stranger’s eyes, staring, staring back at her but not seeing, nor able to let any light or life out. They were dead eyes, cold, glazed, opaque.
    The silence gathered itself and rushed towards her, she was engulfed in it, and then from far away, as at the end of a black tunnel, she heard herself begin to scream.

Four
     
    The year that followed was the worst of her life save only for one, that came after. Of that she remained certain.
    The time before her father’s death, right up to the moment of walking into the front parlour and feeling the terrible different silence, became not merely the past but a complete, finished piece of the past, which was not joined on to the present or the future at any point, save by the thread of her memory. It was an island, forever inaccessible, inhabited by people she had once known but knew no longer, and to which the causeway had been sealed off. It floated there on its own, separate sea.
    At first, her insecurity was total. She was unsure of her own surroundings, and people behaved oddly towards her. Children who had never seemed to like her, or to want her company, sidled up and