A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [124]
Walking toward the studio Jerome fought off the dark image of the air shaft and attempted to enter the moment, to be a man in the company of a young woman on a Saturday morning in an interesting part of town. But he knew this wasn’t working. Mira was looking at him intently by the time they entered the alley, a number of unspoken questions were in the air, and he could feel resentment rising in him. He wanted to hold on to the privacy of his mood. Her intuition, and her concern about this, was an intrusion.
Still, once they were inside, and before he had arranged himself on the couch again with Mira, he had begun to soften.
“Let me read it this time,” he said to her.
Mira opened the book to the spot where she had placed the piece of wool the night before. Then she handed it to Jerome. He scanned a few lines, then said, “She will probably go, once we’ve read the journals. She only asked for a few days, after all.” The feeling he experienced when saying these words was tinged with something he couldn’t identify. Anxiety. Sadness. Fatigue. Maybe guilt. For a moment he wondered who was leaving whom.
“Summer after summer,” he began, “beyond the bright windows of the Ballaig Oisin …“
Jerome put the notebook on the table and looked at Mira. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about her. I might be about to let her down, somehow.”
Mira moved closer to him. He could feel the slight expansion and contraction of her ribs, the rhythm of her breath. “It will be okay.” she said. “For now just keep reading.”
Jerome leaned forward, picked up the notebook. “Summer after summer,” he began again.
“Andrew always said there were people who were emplaced.” Sylvia was standing now, speaking to Jerome’s back while he was busy at the counter making tea. The green notebooks lay on the crate that served as a coffee table but, as yet, Jerome had made no reference to them. Walking that morning from the hotel to the alley, she had been lit with anticipation, hungry for Jerome’s reaction to Andrew’s words. But once she had entered the studio, she found she couldn’t bring herself to ask the question, to expose the hook in her mind.
“It seems that those who are emplaced are made that way by generations of their people remaining in the same location,” she continued, “eating food grown from the same plot of earth, burying their dead nearby, passing useful objects down from father to son, mother to daughter. He said that I was like that to such a degree I was almost like an anthropological discovery. Or perhaps an archeological discovery; something, more or less preserved, more or less intact. I was so emplaced, you see, that it was an adventure—almost an act of heroism—for me to leave the County, travel thirty miles to his hill. Without him … without the lure of him … I never would have done it.”
Swimmer had jumped up on the crate and draped himself in a casual manner over the notebooks.
“He also told me that there was always a mark left on a landscape by anyone who entered it. Even if it is just a trace—all but invisible—it is there for those willing to look hard enough. He said this elsewhere, of course, not just to me, said it in lectures and wrote it in his books before he retired and became silent and all but forgotten. But what about his own trace?” Sylvia asked suddenly, a hint of anger in her voice. “When he disappeared no one looked for him, looked hard enough, long enough. We knew it would come to this, they likely thought, a huge final disappearance at the end of a series of lesser disappearances.”
“Maybe they did look for him,” said Jerome, “maybe they just didn’t know where to look. Perhaps you were the only person who knew where he might have gone.”
“And yet I didn’t know,” said Sylvia. “I didn’t know where he had gone. But he was walking toward the past, I think. Does that make any sense to you?”
“It makes sense to me now. I … both of us read what he wrote.” Jerome handed Sylvia a steaming mug. “Because I’d been out there on the island