A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [18]
“He has nightmares,” said the girl. “He might not want to talk about it.” She moved protectively closer to the young man and softly touched the top of his head, his hair. Jerome pulled back slightly from her touch and looked at Sylvia. “No, Mira,” he said, “Leave it. It’s all right.”
Not to be put off, the girl linked her arm through Jerome’s and rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.
An echo of this gesture touched Sylvia’s mind. A room, the warmth of skin, a wet mouth on the inside of an arm, long quiet avenues of intimate speech were permanently webbed across her memory. Into the texture of her mind were woven these inescapable memories of tenderness, memories that now brought her nothing but pain. There was no longer any escape available to her in the comfort of her known world, never mind in disorienting, unfamiliar interiors. The young people’s faces were serious, almost shocked, and she knew how she appeared to them: a middle-aged, well-dressed woman in a brown wool coat, perched on the edge of her chair with her leather handbag balanced on her knee, a silk scarf at her throat, the ridiculous boots with the fake fur circling the ankles.
“Yes, I did find him,” said Jerome. “I was trying to make some drawings so I was quite near the shore, but really it was the cat that led me toward the spot. If I hadn’t been right there at that particular moment, I might not have seen anything. I wanted to photograph the ice, anyway, and because the cat —”
“Let her speak, Jerome,” said the girl softly.
Jerome leaned toward Sylvia. “Sorry,” he said. “Just take your time. There’s no hurry.”
Sylvia found that she was unable to respond, was almost undone by this suggestion of sympathy.
The girl was the first to break the uncomfortable silence. She rose from the couch and disappeared into what must have been a bathroom at the far end of the room, emerging seconds later with a tissue in her hand and a large orange cat at her heels. “Here,” she said, offering the tissue, “take this.” Then, glancing at the suitcase, she asked, “Have you come from far away?”
“I’m a doctor’s wife,” Sylvia replied, “from Prince Edward County. I left there this morning.”
“Eastern Ontario …,” Jerome offered, “not far from —”
“No, not far from Timber Island, not far from there.”
“I was on the island to work,” Jerome explained to Sylvia. “The moment between seasons, nature in transition, full of possibilities …”
Overhead a complicated series of pipes and wires snaked toward each of the four walls. Some of the pipes travelled down to the floor, where they connected with a couple of radiators, which had been painted white. Sylvia’s eyes followed the pipes for a moment or two, then came to rest on several framed diagrams that were on the wall at the opposite end of the room. She thought she could identify a rock face in the drawings, and maybe the leaves and branches of a tree, but most of the surface seemed to be given over to a quantity of measurements scribbled in pencil. For a period as a girl, she herself had been very attached to measurements. She remembered an old metal measuring tape, originally belonging to her grandfather, which, as a child, she had liked to carry around with her from room to room and sometimes even when she ventured out of doors. Eventually she had tabled the measurements of almost everything in and around the house in a series of notebooks not unlike the one she now carried with her. One summer she had measured the yard, the growth of bushes from one week to the next, the diameter of flowers that had appeared overnight. If there was going to be change, change she could not control, she wanted at least to be aware of it, of what shape it was taking. There had been a small brass lever that when turned would retract the inches, in order to stop measuring. When had she last removed that essential object