A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [102]
Gilderson gazed with thoughtful satisfaction out the window. “Good,” he said finally. “Not a single lighthouse in sight.”
“There are several in the vicinity, however,” Annabelle told him. “Two on either side of Kingston and one on Insignificant Island. Did you not see them on your walk?” She had painted all three at one time or another, always under stormy conditions and with a ship, sometimes two, smashing into the nearby rocks. “They can be seen quite clearly from several spots on Timber Island but never from the house itself.”
Gilderson puffed away without comment for several minutes. “I was not looking at the view on my walk,” he said. “I was searching for equipment.” Then he stood and walked to the fire, where he began to remove the remaining ashes from his pipe by knocking it against the grate for what seemed to Annabelle to be an exaggeratedly long time. Eventually he turned to Annabelle and told her he would not be purchasing her property. She did not ask why he had suddenly taken this position, but he told her anyway. “Too many lighthouses in the district,” he said, “and, despite what you may think, lighthouses are dangerous for my ships.”
What nonsense, thought Annabelle, and then, He’s had to sell almost all his ships anyway. “Very well,” she said, gathering the dishes from the table and heading, through the wreaths of smoke left in the air by her guest’s pipe, for the kitchen. Gilderson took his leave and walked off in the twilight toward the guest quarters. When he was gone, Annabelle gathered her camp stool, sketchbook, and brushes and went outside to capture the light.
So she would not be displaced after all. The island would remain in her possession. Whatever possibilities the sale had presented to her—a small house of her own, perhaps some travel—now faded and withdrew. But these had never really taken solid shape, anyway, in her imagination, beyond the images of the deck of an oceangoing vessel and a simple porch unsullied by fretsaw work. She let these pictures disappear from her mind without a great deal of regret and concentrated instead on the ships she could now see swaying in the distance and on the strange colour of the light from which the warmth seemed to be leaking minute by minute. The sky that had been orange was now violet, and the lake, which was quite still, had become not silver exactly but rather pewter-coloured, there being no glitter on its surface.
She felt his hand on her shoulder before she paid any attention to his voice, probably because the quay upon which she sat had always, in the past, been filled with male voices, French and English voices, voices she had very early on learned to ignore. A male hand squeezing her shoulder was an experience so new that it might have been a bolt of lightning judging from the effect it had on her system.
Annabelle stiffened, examined the hand that had so unexpectedly come to rest on her person, and noted with relief that the fingernails were clean. She turned on the stool then and looked up into the not altogether unattractive but very hairy face of Oran Gilderson. His moustache, she realized, was stained yellow as a result of his fondness for tobacco. There were two deep furrows that ran from his cheekbones to the beginning of his lavish, well-kept, but far too long beard, furrows that could only have been gouged by a grimace of some sort visiting his expression over and over. There was a full crop of grey hair in his nostrils, also showing a jaundiced tinge. She decided to concentrate on her painting.
“I like a woman who can do dainty things,” Gilderson said, referring, she supposed, to the watercolour on her lap. “Do you sing as well?”
“No,” said Annabelle. She was mildly offended by his reference to her picture as something dainty. And the man had been into the whisky; she could smell it. Still, there was the extraordinary warmth of his hand on her shoulder and this, like some unlikely force of gravity, bound her to her place.
“A widower is a very lonely man. A widower whose daughter has left him is lonelier still,” said the voice