A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [107]
Branwell spent his time, instead, aimlessly sorting through his wife’s few possessions: her dresses and coats, hairbrush and mirror, odd bits of jewellery, hairpins and nets, pots and pans, and a variety of other cooking utensils, her small collection of pine butter moulds (she had been touchingly vain about the look of her butter that she had churned herself), things he had barely paid attention to until now. He believed that something should be done with all of these abandoned objects, but he had no idea what, and knew, in any event, that the sand would claim everything in the end.
When the winter arrived he was grateful for the heavy snow the season invariably brought with it because at least in winter he didn’t have to spend all his time watching sand and, unlike sand, snow could be kept out of his rooms, his clothing, his bedding, his hair. It could be shovelled, thrown to one side, arranged in piles that, more or less, stayed in place. He could open his door, walk to the lake and back, and an hour later, his footsteps would still be visible, small blue pools filled with shadow. This was strangely comforting in the face of what seemed to be a complete erasure of everything he had worked for and everything he had loved. He found it hard to remember that there had been a time when he had loved the beach and the dunes, the soft feel of sand under his feet, the ribs of sand he could see when he had waded through the shallows to bathe. He had also forgotten that the proximity of this beach, those dunes, had been one of the elements that had made the Ballagh Oisin so popular during the summers of the past. Sand was the enemy, had always been the enemy. He was certain of this. It was as if he was living in the bottom half of an hourglass in which, as the days passed, he was being buried alive.
For the first time in his life he had begun to pray. In the evenings he would pluck Marie’s rosary from the nail in the wall where he had hung it the previous evening, and then he would whisper the words he had learned all those years ago at the orphanage just before his wedding, words he had never voluntarily used since. He liked the repetition of the name Mary, and was moved by the knowledge that his wife’s fingers had travelled over the surface of the beads that his own fingers were touching now. It was one of the ways that he felt he could speak to Marie, but in the end, like all his other attempts to reach her now, this would become unsatisfying, and one winter night he would not remove the rosary from the wall and fall to his knees near their bed. The beads would remain hanging near the wardrobe until the sight of them alone became too painful a reminder. Then he would take them down and place them in the small ivory jewellery box that would itself become too painful a reminder until it was finally consigned to a dresser drawer.
His sister wrote to him often, but he rarely answered—sometimes he didn’t even bother to open the envelopes. His son wrote less often, and these letters, though always opened and read, were never answered. Branwell could tell that Maurice was suffering from the loss of his mother, yet, in spite of this, he found that he was unable to write with words of consolation. He would never be able to accept the idea of his son’s greed, his weakness, his role in the wreckage, and any correspondence between them could only be a reminder of all that.
As it turned out, things would unfold just as Ghost had predicted. Maurice would run successfully as a Tory for the Northumberland County seat and would spend his time travelling back and forth from that County to Ottawa, while his wife presided over the building of another, even larger, brick house