Free The Service Of Clouds by Susan Hill

looking at her. And so, she began to walk there, holding her hat against the dark blue skirt, and felt herself to be tall, an adult, and equal to this house.
    It was cool and immaculate, pale and light, in the way all the other houses she knew were not. Sunlight filtered into the long hall. Beyond the windows of the ground floor, she saw the shadows of the trees, dark upon the grass. There were no flowerbeds, no colours nor distractions. Only, in the distance, the thin steel line of sea.
    For the rest of her life, which was to promise her more than it ever paid, and in this, hatefully to resemble her own mother’s, Florence Hennessy, who became the woman Flora Molloy, remembered every detail of this day.
    The house called Carbery in the dusty afternoon sun of late summer became an inner vision, important, as the picture of the woman in drapes and cloudiness was important. It was never to blur or fade nor become confused with anything that came later to muddy and clutter the simple outlines of her life, so that when she talked to her son of it, it was vivid to him too from the beginning, and he understood at once the absolute importance of it to her. It marked the transition between the home of her childhood, and those more mundane and unremarkable houses of the rest of her adult life, between her hopeful youth and the later, patchy compromises, accidents and shrinking horizons. For all of this it was important. But also in itself, for its seriousness and plainness and air of absolute and settled calm. Carbery mattered to her, together with the picture, and the lake in the park, in somepermanent and symbolic way, filling and feeding her mind, and her imagination and memory, until the day of her death.
    She had set about finding the situation alone, and with caution, rejecting other possibilities in favour of this one, and replying to an advertisement placed in the daily newspaper, and which she consulted in the library – for no papers came to the house.
    ‘You are very young.’
    ‘I am seventeen.’
    ‘That is very young!’
    ‘I shall be eighteen at the turn of the year.’
    ‘We had thought of a mature person.’
    But he looked at her sharply, as if considering her afresh.
    ‘My wife is resting,’ he said. ‘She will be here presently.’
    Beyond the tall windows, the lawn, the shadows flat on the grass. Stillness.
    He was a pale man with fair, flat hair and small features. But his voice was pleasing. Tiny, transparent specks of dust jazzed inside a beam of sunlight. The house was silent.
    ‘You have been to a good school. You have an excellent report.’
    ‘Flora is a conscientious girl, though she is not altogether easy to know. We had hoped for her to go on to some form of higher education, but family circumstances have not permitted this. Her father died recently. She will make a good and thoughtful tutor.’
    Miss Pinkney had sat alone at her desk, hesitating with her pen, struggling to find the words that would convey the essence of Flora Hennessy. ‘Reserve.’ ‘Self-possession.’ ‘Determination.’ No. When the girl had come to tell her of the cancellation of any plans for college, she had looked out of defiant blue eyes and Miss Pinkney, faced with the look, had been unable to offer help or sympathy. Do not pity me, the eyes had said. Do not dare to question, to suggest any word of affection or warmth, or any regret for me.
    The girl’s pride was absolute and, seeing that, Miss Pinkneyhad said nothing at all, merely inclined her head and made a note upon her pad.
    She had supposed that Flora would simply sit at home with her mother, be a companion in the house and hope for a husband to provide for her future. When the letter had come from the MacManuses of Carbery, asking for a reference for the girl as a tutor to their son, she had been surprised, but also admiring. She had wanted to be of some help, though she thought that she would not see the girl again, that she was part of a past that had