A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [131]
Arriving one November morning, she had taken off her coat, had laid it over the back of a wicker chair that was grey with dust. The room had been cool and there was a faint smell of mice beneath the stronger smell of wood smoke. Aftermath was the word that crept into her mind; the windows were foggy, clouds of dust had gathered under the furniture. Cobwebs swung from the beams. This was the territory of aftermath.
Annabelle’s painting was askew on the wall. She had walked across the room to straighten it.
“Annabelle’s painting,” she had said.
He hadn’t replied, had moved instead—just as he always had in the past—slowly across the room toward her.
“In the beginning there was this difference between us, Jerome: I believed that anything that I permitted to happen to me would go on happening … forever. He, being fully engaged with human life, believed, I think, that when something stopped happening, it was over. Not that it wouldn’t happen again, just that this particular session was over, and that there would be something else taking place, something else that was equally worthy of his attention. His view of life was sequential, symphonic. But I could tell this view had changed.”
Near the very end before he had stopped talking altogether, Andrew had spoken about nothing but furniture. These were the only nouns that appeared to interest him. At first Sylvia had thought he was speaking metaphorically, something he had often done in the past. “Look at the … table,” he would say, when they stood near the window, surveying the view of the lake, “look at the mirror.” A table laid out before them. A mirror of the sky. It made some sense to her. She didn’t question it, or him, or the fact that he was not saying the lake was like a mirror, like a table under the sky.
“How did you lose him?” Jerome was asking.
Sylvia sat entirely still, her face averted. “How can I describe those last meetings to you, Jerome? I who had spent years attempting to interpret his most fractional gesture, his most subtle shift of mood, would find him tremendously altered: unshaven, unbathed, sometimes, even after I’d arrived still expecting me, sometimes not, but in either case, utterly unprepared. Once, as I stepped though the door, he said, ‘Can I help you?’ with a kind of cold courtesy, as if I were a salesperson or a pamphleteer. At times he would look at me with longing for minutes at a stretch, then turn away as if in disgust, or he would swiftly take himself to the opposite corner of the room where he would all but growl at me in anger, refuting every sentence that I spoke. Each phrase began with the negative. ‘Don’t talk to me about the trees,’ he would say. ‘You know nothing about the trees.’ Or, ‘It’s not your lake, don’t speak of it.’ Often he said, ‘We can’t go on with this.’ His tone would fill me with fear, but the reference to ‘this’ could cause temporary relief. ‘This’ was the word that made reference to our connection, our communion. ‘This’ meant that we weren’t finished. Not yet.
“I would remind him of the stories he had told me, attempt to bring the lovely talk back into the room, but he would deny that he had ever told me such stories—‘You have invented those,’ he would say—and would refer instead to problems he was having with people I had never heard of. They had stolen his wallet, his life, his soul. They had abandoned him in alleyways or on park benches, cast him adrift in a leaking vessel, denied him food and water.
“He would pace like an animal around the room, then peer at me with great suspicion. ‘I am willing,’ he would say, ‘to resolve this here, now, but … What?’ he would plead. ‘What is it?’
“ ‘Tell me about Annabelle,’ I would say, ‘about Branwell.’ I wanted the family history or, failing that, his