Free The Service Of Clouds by Susan Hill Page A

somehow failed her.
    ‘She presents herself well, is sensible and mature. I am confident that she would take her place properly within the household.’
    Flora sat quite still on the straight-backed chair, hands crossed together in her lap. She would come to this house. It seemed to her to have been arranged a long time ago. The interview was superfluous. She saw herself moving about in these high, light rooms. Flora Hennessy. (For Florence was quite dead. Florence might never have been. Florence belonged to her home, and to the years with her father and mother and Olga, years which she had already consigned to the past.)
    She continued to look out of the windows, at the cedar tree and the Wellingtonia, and the silver haze which was the sea. Then, after a moment, she heard the footsteps of a child. But she took a little time before she turned her head slowly, and then stood, to face her future at the moment it began.

Fifteen
     
    ‘Are you a woman?’
    ‘I am not a man!’
    ‘I don’t mean that.’
    ‘You should say what you mean.’
    His face paled, with the effort of concentrating. She would not help him.
    ‘Or a girl. Are you just a girl?’
    ‘No one is “just” anything.’
    He looked at her in despair.
    ‘I am neither then,’ she said. ‘Not old enough for the one, but past the other. Neither.’
    ‘Like a unicorn,’ he said quickly. And then, as she burst into laughter at him, laughed too, in relief.
    His name was Hugh. He was six, and his graveness and oldness sorted with hers. They kept an invisible, formal barrier between them which suited them both, teacher and pupil, girl and child. They respected one another. There was liking and, gradually, complete understanding. Yet he too had a reserve, a privacy, to match hers. She looked at him and did not have any idea what was going on in his head, what places he inhabited. They shared a love of stories of a rare kind, fairy-tales and grim dark fables, curious legends. Their lessons revolved around mythical creatures, crones who lived in caves, impenetrable forests and magicplants, stones by which the future could be told. The emotions and deeds that filled their talk were strong as black tea. Thirst after revenge, passion for power, tyrannical rage, the jealousy and plotting of evil stepmothers, crusts to eat and rags for clothes and beasts that spoke and consoled, and trees with spying eyes.
    She planned their timetable of lessons with the help of books, and followed it exactly. Spelling. Mathematics. French. Scripture. Natural History. Art. Conversation. But within the lessons, they roved about as free as wild, parentless, naked children in the mythical wastelands, plucking nuts and fruit from trees and berries from bushes, and drinking asses’ milk. They read the books in the long library, and made the stories fit the timetabled subjects, as they chose, learned poetry and turned stories into plays and painted the plays into pictures, and went down the garden, on to the cliffs and out to the rocks on the beach, to gather whatever was there in season – seedpods and grasses, limpets and crabs and shells, cones, skeletal leaves, wild poppies and chalk-blue scabious and the chrysalises that clung to stalks. In the schoolroom they labelled everything, and decorated the labels elaborately, like the letters of illuminated manuscripts. Scripture was stories. Moses in the Bulrushes. Daniel in the Lion’s Den. David and Goliath. The Parable of the Seed and the Sower or the Labourers in the Vineyard. And then there was their mutual discovery of other, stranger gods, and more exotic legends. But there was no catechism and no morals were drawn or preached, and when these were doled out to them on Sundays, in the musty church, like so many portions of cold gruel, both of them, quite instinctively, set them aside untouched.
    They spent a large part of every day together, in the house full of airy space and light in which their voices and footsteps echoed, or else