A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [129]
Jerome raised his eyebrows at this and nodded. “But, still,” he said, reconsidering, “after reading Andrew’s journals, I think maybe landscape—place—makes people more knowable. Or it did, in the past. It seems there’s not much of that left now. Everyone’s moving, and the landscape, well, the landscape is disappearing.”
“Have I mentioned that the old cottage was approached by way of a grove of trees?” Sylvia asked. “These were planted a century ago to line the driveway that swung up toward the marvellous entranceway of Maurice Woodman’s old house. Andrew and I would have to walk past the lightning-struck burnt foundations of that house in order to meet.”
In the early days, she’d often had to walk though a herd of staring cows as she moved along the edge of the hill. There was always a soft wind, an echo of the breezes that would have touched the shore of the prehistoric lake, and she had always stopped to look at the view, which included the village below, rolling farmland and woodlots to the west, the charmed surface of the lake in all directions, and the arm of her peninsular County bending around the waters at the eastern horizon. Then, after passing through the dying orchard, and walking farther, she would begin to sense a shift in the land underfoot, as she moved past the scattered fieldstones, and in some spots the vestiges of the walls and crumbling mortar that were the last remains of the foundation of the great burnt house, the grassy basins of its cellars and kitchens. Andrew had done some digging in these basins and had come across a few ceramic marbles, ones he believed that his own father, T.J. Woodman, must have played with as a boy, and a porcelain cup and saucer, miraculously undamaged. But most exciting to her were the large, smooth, oddly shaped pieces of melted glass, which he had come across, evidence that the rumour about the glass ballroom floor was true.
“It was true?” exclaimed Jerome when she told him all this. “The artist Robert Smithson would have been fascinated by that. I keep thinking all the time about a piece he made. It was titled Map of Glass. I’ve never known if he meant a map of the properties of glass, or if he was referring to a glass map, which would then be, of course, breakable. But even he … I don’t think even he would have thought about melted glass. A ballroom with a glass floor, on fire and then melting. That’s just wonderful!”
Sylvia laughed at Jerome’s reaction. “Andrew told me that lightning striking sand can cause glass to form spontaneously. I never knew that, did you?”
“No,” said Jerome. “No, I never knew that.”
“Once, toward the end of that last summer, Andrew said that he wanted me to think about the great cities of Earth, to think about them not being there any more, about them never having been there at all: the forests of Manhattan Island, the untouched riverbanks of the Seine or the Thames, the clear water moving through reeds near the shore, the unspoiled valleys that existed before agriculture, then architecture, then industry changed them.”
They had been looking through the windows of the cabin into the forest as he spoke and occasionally deer would drift by, soft and brownish grey, between the tall trunks of the trees. Andrew once pointed out that the earth colours of their coats echoed a patch of yellow dried grass, or a pale grey log, brown bark, or the rust of fallen pine needles.
As he had told her this, every part of her was touched by his voice. There had been the warmth of his skin against hers, and the delivery of syllables all through the sunny afternoons. Later when the rains came, the sound of water falling through the holes in the roof into the pans they had placed here and there on the floor was like punctuation marking the cadence of his speech.
“You, Jerome, may never know what it is to enter another kind of partnership,