A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [136]
“That’s right, Andrew Woodman. I suppose she told you she was his lover, had been his lover for some time.”
“I don’t think we should talk about this,” said Jerome, his eyes narrowing. “Whatever Sylvia said, she said it to me … in private.”
“Well, he wasn’t,” said Malcolm, “he wasn’t her lover. He would never have known her, never have met her. She read about him, about the discovery of his body, last year at the same time that she read about you. It happened like this once before: she collided with someone on the street, and he was her lover too, though she claims it was the same man—one lover encountered several times.”
Jerome turned away from Malcolm, then looked at him suspiciously from the corner of his eyes. He totally distrusted this man, believed he could sense the anger brimming in him, though his manner was friendly, polite. From the next room he could hear the sound of Mira’s voice, and he wished that she were here with him.
“It’s the condition,” Malcolm continued. “It sometimes manifests itself this way in a kind of hallucinogenic imagination. It’s quite rare, but it does happen. It’s a sort of inversion of the way the symptoms usually appear. Sylvia is particularly interesting for this reason. And she is, has always been, such a reader, she has trouble, you see, separating reality from what happens in books. We avoid films for this reason.” He smiled. “Not that there are many films to avoid where we live.”
Jerome was aware that his heart had begun to pound disturbingly. More than anything he wanted to be apart from this man, away from the things he was telling him. “Would you like to sit down?” he asked, indicating the chair. Sylvia’s chair, he thought.
“No, no … thank you. We’ll have to be going. It takes a couple of hours to get back to the County. And we’ll be wanting to get back early. Sylvia will be quite tired”—Malcolm looked around the studio with what Jerome believed was disapproval—“after all this.”
During the silence that followed, Malcolm walked around the room inspecting the various images tacked on the wall. He stopped when he came to the reproduction of the Flemish painting. “Is this one of yours?” he asked.
Jerome did not move from the place where he was standing. “No,” he said, “that’s a poster of a Patinir, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, sixteenth century, couldn’t possibly be mine.” There was a hint of contempt in his voice. This man knows nothing, he thought, and then, for just a moment, he remembered Branwell’s distant blue landscapes.
“I know so little about art,” said Malcolm, as if sensing the route Jerome’s mind had taken, “but what with Sylvia and my practice I haven’t the time to explore much of anything else.”
Surely this man in the flawless trench coat, the expensive silk scarf, the ridiculous toe rubbers didn’t expect sympathy. The very notion that this might be the case set Jerome’s teeth on edge; he had no time at all for sympathy-seekers. He recalled his father’s whining, his pleading, his uncanny ability to make his mother really believe that everything—the drink, the disappearing money, the unexplained absences, the sudden bouts of abuse—was her fault and, by association, by the mere fact that he was her son, his fault as well. His mother had trained him early on, so early on he had no memory of the training, to step carefully around his father in certain moods and at certain levels of inebriation. As a young child he had feared all this. As a teenager he had hated it. Now, suddenly, he remembered his father baiting his mother across a table filled with the dinner she had cooked to please him, and how, unable to bear one more minute of it, he had sprung to his feet prepared if necessary to beat the weakness and cruelty out of him. But his mother had intervened, had taken his father’s side, and, by the time Jerome had exploded out of the apartment, his mother was holding the sobbing broken man his father had become in her arms, apologizing for her son. “Your son,” was the way his father had always put it when registering a complaint,