A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [141]
When he arrived at the top of the hill the fatal strike had already taken place, the fire had begun and flames were emerging from attic windows. By the light of these flames Ghost was able to see that two or three people were standing out on the lawn dressed in nightclothes—servants, likely, who would have inhabited the attic and who would have felt the strike and fled the house. They had left the magnificent front door open in their flight.
Ghost, seeking Branwell, and seeking also someone close to Branwell, did not dismount but rode his white horse right through the entrance, down the hall past Allegory of Bad Government, and straight up the wide stairs. In Branwell’s bedroom, Ghost leaned down from his horse and lifted his friend out of the bed by his nightshirt. “Get on the horse,” he shouted, “but there is someone else. Who is it? Where is he?”
Branwell was convinced that he was dreaming, and the smoke that was blossoming in the upper air of his room did nothing to dispel this conviction. Nevertheless, he knew the answer to Ghost’s question. “T.J.,” he said. “In the next room.”
And so the child that would become Andrew’s father burst out of the burning house and into the safety of the landscape riding with two white-haired men on a white horse backlit by red and orange flames. And Andrew—the future—was riding that white horse as well, along with his life and what that life would do to my life and all the other lives it would touch.
Andrew told me that if you now asked anyone in the village below the hill about the house they would talk about the lightning strike, the fire, the subsequent loss of life, and the glass ballroom floor. They would talk about the painted hallways, and about a rumour that suggested that someone had once ridden a white horse up the central staircase. They had forgotten all about the subject of the murals, they had forgotten about the rescue, they had forgotten all about the boy who had been raised by two old men in a cottage that was still standing on the property.
Perhaps, Jerome, all of life is an exercise in forgetting. Think of how our childhood fades as we walk into adulthood, how it recedes and diminishes like the view of a coastline from the deck of an oceanliner. First the small details disappear, then the specifics of built spaces, then the hills fall below the horizon one by one. People we have been close to, people who die, are removed from our minds feature by feature until there is only a fragment left behind, a glance, the shine of their hair, a few episodes, sometimes traumatic, sometimes tender. I have not been close to many people, Jerome, but I know that once they leave us they become insubstantial, and no matter how we try we cannot hold them, we cannot reconstruct. The dead don’t answer when we call them. The dead are not our friends.
All of this is terrible, unthinkable. But, it is not as terrible as being forgotten by the man you love while he is breathing the same air, while he is standing in the same room. He has forgotten you and yet some part of him remembers that he should touch you, and he does this, but as he moves against you he no longer speaks your name as he plunges his hands into your hair because he has forgotten your name. When he undresses you he registers surprise that your flesh is imperfect. He has forgotten your age. He has forgotten the many years that have passed since he first desired you, and the suffering during those years that has changed your face, the texture of your skin, the curve of your spine. The accumulated absences, the accumulated distances—he has forgotten all of these. He thinks that it was just yesterday that you collided near the stoplight of a town whose name he can no longer recall. He thinks the smooth legs that took you to the dunes above a buried hotel are the same legs that brought you back, years later, to the meeting place, the room in which you have fallen over and over again onto a bed whose springs are now rusty, whose mattress is now filled with dust. He has forgotten