The Service Of Clouds by Susan Hill

that she caught her breath, as though she had been slapped stingingly across the face, and wrapped her arms about herself, for comfort and for protection. But it was not only a momentary feeling she must bear. This was the fact. She was alone in London and of no interest or concern to anyone.
    The room was small and narrow, partitioned out of the corner of another larger room, so that the window was only half a window, and oddly placed to one side. It was early afternoon. Eventually, she became used to the deadness of the house at this time, when those who did not go out slept, as she would also begin to know the small creakings and stirrings of five o’clock, and then the early evening noises of women returned from work, when doors banged and water flushed and drained away down basins.
    There was a border of Greek keys around the top of the walls, and then dirty white space up to a high ceiling, and a radiator with rust marks, squat and serpentine.
    When at last she crossed to the window, she saw that she was above the tops of the plane trees, as well as the roofs of the housesopposite, and that the weather vane on the spire of a church glittered, white-gold, against the insubstantial summer sky.
    Miss Marchesa was known to a friend of Miss Pinkney’s. Together, they had tried to do the best for her. The house, in Kensington, was perfectly respectable. Unmarried women who worked as confidential secretaries lived there, and widows with older daughters, thin, quavering, blameless women, with a little money that would never be quite enough.
    Flora was too young, Miss Marchesa had written in reply to the enquiry, she had never had a girl alone in the house at such a young age; she could not be responsible. But Miss Pinkney’s friend had replied that supervision would not be expected, and only an inexpensive room, with breakfast and supper, were required.
    It was the first week of September. The streets were dusty, the grass in the parks worn brown and threadbare. But the air shimmered with warmth that lasted from dawn until dusk, as London hung suspended, between high summer and a gilded, roseate autumn that ran on and on into everyone’s memories.
    Flora left her things still packed and the grainy towel untouched beside the washbasin, and went out of the silent, soup-smelling house into the hazy streets.
    For the rest of her life, she was to feed off the glory of the next few weeks, when London lay at her feet, open and friendly towards her, and she walked it, as over some richly patterned, vibrantly coloured carpet, exploring every pathway of the intricate design. For this time only there was no loneliness, but simply the state of being alone, and this was entirely satisfying. She would not have been able to absorb and respond to everything so fully; the impact of the buildings, pictures, open spaces, and of the golden autumn days and soft nights, would have lessened, if she had had private company to distract her.
    Public company she had, and it delighted her. She sat on city steps and park benches and seats beside the river, looking, questioning, so that, in sleep, her mind still seethed with images, like some crowded picture by Hogarth or Brueghel.
    She went to classes, in art history, Italian and French, both language and literature, at the Institute at which Miss Pinkney had obtained a place for her (and to the fees of which she contributed more than half – though Flora was not to discover it until years after). Apart from these, and the hours she spent in galleries or simply walking about London, she worked as a tutor to two fat, bland Belgian girls living with their father in Wimpole Street, who were uninterested in anything but staying dully at home, between trips to Ghent and Bruges. The hours Flora spent with them were a form of torment, because they passed so slowly, and were so infinitely tedious, and unrelieved by any lightness, any humour or liveliness or affection. Money was earned from them, that was all.