A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [119]
Malcolm was speaking again. “It wasn’t about him,” he was saying, “was it? This inexplicable behaviour wasn’t about him, I hope, because, if it was, I should know.” Malcolm cleared his throat and began to tap the corner of the postcard rhythmically on the glass surface of the desk. “I thought we were all finished with that,” he said.
“We are all finished with that,” said Sylvia. “All finished.”
Malcolm shook his head, then placed the postcard flat on the desk. “Oh, Syl,” he said quietly.
Sylvia gazed at her husband. He looked smaller than he had in the past, diminished, as if he had discarded certain parts of himself in the few days she had been absent from his life. She recalled how certain, how strong he had been the night he had found her staring and rigid at the kitchen table, the newspaper article about Andrew in her hand. “These things happen,” he had told her, after he had read the piece, “these tragedies.”
“Tragedies,” she had repeated. And then she said it. “I loved this man.”
“No,” he had said. “No, that can’t be right. You are confused,” he had said. “You’ve never been able to know anyone. You wouldn’t have been able to …”
“I was able. He didn’t know, you see. He didn’t know about me.”
Malcolm had become very silent, had slowly pulled up a chair beside the one in which she was sitting. She had not looked at him, but had been able to hear the sound of his breathing.
“You’ll forget all about this,” he had said finally. “We won’t speak of it, and with time you’ll start to forget.”
“He forgot,” she had answered. “Andrew forgot.”
“We won’t speak of it,” Malcolm repeated, gently lifting the paper from her hands.
“You didn’t ever believe me,” Sylvia said now, “when I tried to tell you. Everything went wrong because you hadn’t heard, you didn’t believe …”
“Syl,” Malcolm said quite sharply, “listen to me, listen to me now.” He spun the swivel chair suddenly in her direction. “We’ve been over and over this. You know that, Syl, everything, everything was fine. With each passing month you made such progress. And I, I was happy, I was proud of the progress you were making.”
Progress, she thought, pride. She stared at the mirror that faced the end of the bed in this disinterested interior and watched her mouth tremble. When the feeling was at its most critical she stood, picked up a chair, turned it to the wall, sat down, and began to concentrate on the texture of the plaster that had been slapped on the surface in such a casual manner it suggested interiors so foreign that she could not name them. Spanish, perhaps, or Italian, maybe Irish. The stippled effect looked not unlike the bubbling ridges of cold white mountains on one of the tactile maps she had made for Julia, a map of a polar region. She would think about Julia now, instead, how she had liked the idea of the cold, the ice—something in the landscape she could feel. There were scrapes and dents on this wall, a mark here and there that had not been removed by the dust cloth of the anonymous cleaner. Someone might have risen to their feet with such velocity that the chair he had been sitting in struck the wall. Someone else had likely swung a suitcase into the room with such recklessness, a tiny plaster hill had been knocked from the surface as he did so. In the past she would have objected to even this insignificant example of change. In the past the sameness of any room would have been what calmed her. But now she found herself consoled instead by the thought of Julia and by this evidence of human spontaneity. How had she been so utterly altered?
“What are you thinking about?” asked Malcolm. She could sense that he was drawing nearer.
“The wall,” she answered. “I’m thinking about the wall.”
He was standing behind her now, his hand on the back of the chair, near her shoulder blade. “C’mon,” he said, his hand touching the wool of her sweater, not reaching her skin, “let’s go downstairs. Let’s get something to eat. Forget the newspaper, at least for now. We’ll go over all of that again, later, when you are feeling better.”
The wall was