The Service Of Clouds Read Online Free PDF

sleep, sitting beside him in the dark, and he had taken it into himself, and dreamed of it straight away, and afterwards asked her again and again, ‘Tell me about the school. Tell me about the school.’
    It was when she had been a governess in Kilmoyne. There were so many smart houses on the road that led to the sea, new houses, and brash, not the real, grand places of the old families, like Carbery, where she worked. She had enjoyed looking, she said, watching people drive out between the stone pillars, proud in their shining motors. Everything there had been new.
    (Though now, he thought, those are the old houses, and that is the solid, old-fashioned part of the town, which is so changed, so grown. Now those houses have old, old people struggling on in too many big rooms, behind overgrown, unmanageable gardens. There is nothing brash and new there any more, only decay, and sadness for that bright past.)
    She told him how she had walked up a grassy track, thinking that it was a short cut to the coast road, but instead, behind some rough fence and barbed wire, she had seen the soft grey buildings, the courtyard and broken steps and entrance of what had been a school. ‘St. Teresa’s Convent School for Girls.’ The board, with flaking gold letters, was still there, but pasted across with strips of tape. ‘Private. Keep out. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’
    It had been spring. The hedgerow was a tangle of guelder roseand quickthorn, the old cracked paving stones sprouted daisies and groundsel. The grass was high as her waist. She had found a gap in the wire and climbed through, and, after that day, she had gone back several times, found a way inside through a door that had blown open and was left swinging.
    In his dreams, he went where she had gone, into the classrooms of the empty school. Into the hall. Up the stairs to the dormitories, where swallows had got in and were nesting, and mice ran about over the broken floorboards. It had been frightening, and dangerous, perhaps, and, at any rate, forbidden. He had heard the old excitement still in her voice as she told him about it. ‘I can’t forget it,’ she had said. ‘It’s there. I go round it in my mind. I shall never forget.’
    It had come to him, as everything that had value or meaning in his life had come to him, from her, so that now, walking the empty hospital corridors, it was of her that he thought. But although he could trace every inch of every building in the past, his mother’s face he could never see at all. He had not been able to do so, since the day he had heard of her death. He had only her voice, very occasionally, like a scrap of music played in the distance, before being broken off abruptly. He would hear something she had once said to him, a fragment of a sentence spoken without warning in his ear. The photographs he had of her did not help him. There were four, and she gazed out of them, but not at him. She would not come to life for him.
    What he had of her was not a memory, not a face recalled. It was his past, and it was rootedness, and a place to which he went in order to feel safe. A sanctuary. But it was also an anguish. Desolation. Unhappiness, and the purest pain.
    But the places, the buildings and her feelings for them, he knew as well as he knew his own places. She had given them to him.
    He went on, through every corridor, into every room. Walking. (‘Like a spirit,’ the girl had said.)
    But after an hour, his spirit came to rest, as it so often did, in the one place to which he was always drawn. He took the back stairs,and then went outside, across the yard. A single, blue-white light above the door lit his way, and then he felt his restlessness ease, and strain and all anxiety leave him. He was quieted. In the deserted corridors there had been silence, but a silence that was uneasy. He had felt oppressed by it, and made melancholy. He went there but wished that he had not.
    Here, the silence was of a different kind, and a