The Service Of Clouds by Susan Hill Page A

carpet. It was a woman’s house. They were a woman’s rooms. He felt too large, too clumsy in them.
    In the kitchen, lit by a white strip of light, the surfaces were clear, a dish covered. The table wore a cloth. The calendar was set straight, lined precisely below the clock. He went into the living room, and stood, among coffee tables and cushions and lamps and china baskets, and the odd sensation returned, of being a giant with swollen limbs, a huge, ungainly thing.
    Home.
    It was hers, and he had never once begrudged it to her, having other things. Now he could not breathe here. The fawn-coloured curtains and tapestry sofa, the rugs like the matted backs of sheep, seemed to be stuffed into his lungs, choking him. He tasted cloth and wadding and dryness.
    In the future, he would be here at times he had never known the house. At noon, and two o’clock and five. He would carry trays of small china cups and embroidered cloths into the scone-smelling kitchen. He would have nowhere else to go.
    The blood roared like the tide through his ears, seething to be released.
    He let the water run from the kitchen tap until it ran free of any staleness, and drank a glass of it, and the coldness on the back of his throat soothed him. He had thought of taking a little whisky, but after all had no need.
    In the bedroom, there was a sweetness of powder and scented things. He did not switch on the light, considerate towards her. But she slept silently through his return, as always, after years of practice in it. At breakfast, she might remark, ask a quiet question. He would say just enough. He had never talked of things, his concerns, the other life. Those like Annie Hare. That was well understood.
    It had not been unhappy. It was a solution, a way of everyday living that suited him – and suited her, or so it had always seemed. He had never regretted it. It took up so little of him. Now, he lay in his bed in the cottony darkness and it seemed that he was strapped to some toboggan or train that was hurtling downhill towards an unavoidable tunnel in which it would stop, never to move thereafter, and that would be his future and the end of things.
    He slept little, five hours at most. That had been so since the first years as a doctor. It had served him well. He could be out half the night, and still be awake and alert at dawn, and until now had thought nothing of it.
    But now, he thought. The light fell on to his face. He lay hearing birds break the silence into fine fragments, like cracks running over the glaze of china. Today would be as days had long been. Today, he would leave at seven-thirty, to walk up the steps of the hospital before eight. Today. Tomorrow. The day after. But after that, the beads would slip further through his fingers, and could not be caught and held; he could feel how far ahead the last was placed, and it was not far.
    Then, he would lie, as the light filled out the satined and quilted bedroom, catching the bevels on the glass of powder bowland decorated mirror, and she stirred, and still it would be early, still there would be a day as long as a lifetime ahead.
    Annie Hare, he thought, hearing the young blackbirds. Did Annie Hare, whose ears were stopped against the song, and eyes against the light, have the best of it now? He did not know. He had never before been so uncertain of himself, and his own ordering of the future.
    The cleanness of the kitchen was like that of the mortuary, or the operating theatre, the air as cold. But the sun fell, lemon-coloured on to the sill, and he looked out to the old stone wall and the pear tree at the edge of the garden, with sudden pleasure and a spurt of hope.
    ‘I’ll go,’ he said in the hall, as he always said, the moment before he left the house.
    ‘I’ll go,’ not knowing whether she heard him.
    He had taken the kettle off the hob and left it with the water warm, the tea tray laid ready, fed crumbs to the birds and put away the board. His own cup and cutlery were