A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [130]
You, she remembered Andrew once saying, playfully bumping his shoulder against hers, all the time you come to this place, climb this hill, simply because I am here. I don’t want to leave you, she had said. But you have to, he had replied. You have to leave me so that you can come back again.
He had begun to seem older, softer in body and in spirit, vague in some ways, and therefore kinder. His moods were no longer as swift and sharp in their arrivals and departures, and his love for her—if that’s what it was—carried with it no unsettling urgency. Yes, he was kinder, and she, for her part, felt a depth of tenderness for him that at times almost overwhelmed her. It was like a long silken banner or a column of smoke drifting in a warm wind, this tenderness she felt, something hovering above them that changed the air. The months would pass, autumn would arrive, and things would become confused, painful between them as he began to become lost. Once, as she walked away she turned to wave and she saw him framed by the open cottage door. There he was, standing quite still on the stoop, as exposed as she had been all those years ago when they had met on the edge of traffic. He raised one arm: a gesture of welcome and warning and farewell. The sun had come out in late afternoon and the surroundings were starkly lit. His eyes were almost closed. He was wincing in the face of the glare.
“There was warmth,” Sylvia said, “and the sense that while we held each other we were, in turn, being held by the rocks and trees we could see from the windows and the creeks and springs we could sometimes hear running through the valley. And then there was the view from the edge of the hill, a view of distant water and far shores, and a few villages positioned like toys around the bay.”
For just a moment it occurred to her that she might actually have died, that she and Andrew might have somehow died together and that all this recounting of facts and legends to Jerome—combined with her life in the hotel—was the fabric of an afterlife that would go on and on like this, day after day, for eternity. Then she remembered Malcolm and how he had now entered this afterlife.
She placed the mug of tea Jerome had given her on the floor. “By early autumn he had begun to say odd things, things I knew he had never said before; at least he had never said them before to me. He began to speak about people I didn’t know as if I knew them. Sometimes he was quite passionately angry with some person or another and he would pour his heart out about this without explaining who the person was, or even what the situation was that caused the anger. I would listen; I would listen without questions because I couldn’t bear to interrupt in any way this miraculous openness: I was so eager for any kind of information that might deepen my knowledge of him. As the autumn progressed, though, the anger was starting to spread, and by November it was beginning to include me. But then it would vanish as soon as it arrived. He would simply stop in midsentence and embrace me. Once or twice he wept at that moment. And,” Sylvia paused here, unsure whether to mention this, but wanting to articulate it so that it would be real, a fact, “often, during those last months, often he wept when we made love.”
Jerome was staring at the wall, embarrassed likely. To him she would have been always a much older woman, one with few rights in the territory of sexual love. She must remember that.
“It wasn’t until then,” Sylvia told him, “that I fully realized that not only had the inside of the cottage deteriorated but the gate that I remembered at the top of the lane was gone altogether and the cows were gone as well. What had been pasture was now scrub bush, almost impassable except for one narrow, winding path. The surviving orchard trees were choked and twisted and the view was visible only in certain empty spots. I barely knew where I was. I couldn’t