The Service Of Clouds by Susan Hill

stores of energy.’
    Hearing the assured words, the sense, the anxious tone, she felt touched by something she had not realised that she lacked, affection, concern, the caring of another person, and in the light ofMiss Pinkney’s kindness, she felt herself open, there and then, and grow, in an instinctive and immediate maturity.

Sixteen
     
    Nobody tended the gardens now. Dandelion and ragwort came up through the broken paving stones and were left to blow to seed in a sudden wind, and the great horse chestnut split up the side, making a heavy branch unstable. But nobody sat there now. (Though they sent a man two or three times that summer to mow the grass, and, because he liked to make the best of the job, he planted wallflowers in the earth beneath the windows of the wards. It was hot, and the smell of them, coming faintly to their nostrils, sent the old men and the old women in their narrow bedsteads sailing back to childhood past, and cast them up on its beach, to lie there.)
    And the emptiness crept up and up, like a slow tide, to where they were left huddled together. Vans came, to be filled with the contents of wards and offices, and then the doors of the rooms were closed and padlocked, and the high ceilings seethed with the dust, as it settled back in the sun. (For winter went out one night and spring came in the next day, and, it seemed, summer the next, the blossom flared briefly and was over.)
    The whispering began, broken sentences drifting by like smoke or clouds, shredding away, half-heard, and those words that were heard troubled them, the talk of closing, leaving, going away. Where? Where? They dropped suddenly down a black hole of sleep, and dreamed of abandonment, forgotten in the high ward alone, after the doors were closed and locked and the last van haddriven away. Where? The blackness lightened to grey, and, in the cloudiness, they wandered again about the rooms of childhood homes and married homes, finding odd brown pots carefully filled with pennies, and a calendar ringed in red, a geranium bright on the window-sill, and the insurance book tucked behind the clock. Familiar beds and chairs and shoes, and handles that fitted familiarly into the hand.
    But the wheels of a trolley that no one would bother to oil screeched at the corridor corner. A bell rang. Those who remained raised their voices, and, waking, the old people were startled by the sunlight through squares of high windows, by brightness and the green bed rails, and the smell of warm meat and vegetable water blotted out the scent of the wallflowers. They grasped in a panic at the sheets, trying to grasp this present, this place in which they found themselves (for they could not hold the wallflower-filled past from which they had woken). They reached out hands, to clutch at the hand of the nurse. The last blossom fell on to the grass like stars.
    Another death, and then another, on the same day, disturbing them. Would there be no one left? Was this the way they would all go?
    Molloy came and sat with them in the white mortuary, and walked the deserted corridors and in among the beds, huddled together at the end of the long rooms, saw bleeding gums, and eczema that scaled feet and between fingers, and sores where sticks of bone pressed up to the skin. Their eyes were filmy, sight veiled, ears muffled, there was a blurring and felting and silting over of each sense. Yet, within, flames flickered and leaped up behind their eyes, quick, bright, darting movements of perception, understanding, fear, before they retreated back, into the safe carapace of memory.
    The hands of the clock scarcely moved. An hour was a dreadful shuffle of nothingness and tedium. (Yet Molloy’s days raced crazily away from him, and he careered downhill with them, powerless.)
    The leaves of the chestnut tree spread, and fanned out like fingers. The candles had never been so many, or so bright.
    (They would fell the tree. The trunk was a danger, and in any case, it was