A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [19]
The cat was sitting in front of Sylvia, regarding her with a fixed but neutral gaze. She hoped it would not try to jump up onto her lap. She could not tell what Jerome might be thinking but, like the cat, he was regarding her quietly.
“I’ve lived,” she said, “all my life in the same house. And my father’s people lived there before me.” An image of the oval table slid across her mind. The late-afternoon light would be on it now, and she not there to see it.
Jerome looked at her with interest. “Really?” he said. “Then you are settled,” he continued, “a settler.” He looked at the girl beside him. “We haven’t lived together two years yet, and we’ve moved three times.”
Sylvia could not imagine these moves, this drifting from one place to another. What, she wondered, had they been leaving behind?
“It’s very hard,” said Mira. “Very hard to find good studio space.” She waved one arm in the direction of the red door Sylvia had noticed earlier. “This was just luck, really, that and word of mouth. When you hear about something, you have to act fast.”
The sound of a siren pierced the room and Sylvia found herself becoming conscious of the vastness of the city, of people talking—word of mouth—of plans being made and carried out, of accidents taking place, of events unfolding while she sat in a white room with two young people she had never met before. Finding it cruel in its arbitrariness and impossible for her to control, the multiplicity of places and relationships connected to other people’s lives was something she tried to avoid thinking about. Now the fact of all this interaction seemed overwhelming, and, for a moment or two, she had to fight back the urge to go back to the station, to board the train that would return her to the place she had come from. “I’ll stay somewhere nearby,” she said, reaching down to touch the handle of the suitcase. “Is there somewhere near … ?”
“The Tilbury,” said Mira, looking briefly at Jerome, “but it’s not posh.”
“I’ll stay there then.” She had removed only eight hundred dollars from the joint account before leaving. And she would need to eat. She didn’t know what the cost of a hotel might be, but couldn’t bring herself to ask.
Jerome had moved away from the girl now and was standing near the door, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He moved his hand through his hair, but said nothing.
“I’d like to be able to talk to you,” Sylvia said again.
“I am involved with my work all day long,” Jerome began, reasonably. “And then at night Mira and I sometimes go out, do things. It’s not that I’m not interested in what you have to say, but I just don’t see what I can do, how I can help. And, anyway, I’m not much good at listening.” He smiled at the girl. “Mira can vouch for that.”
Mira bristled slightly. “That’s not what I said, Jerome, I said that you weren’t much good at talking. There’s a difference.”
The fluorescent light emitted a kind of soft, grinding roar, as if someone in a distant part of the building were using a drill or a sander. Sylvia glanced around the room, searching for an advocate. “I had hoped,” she said.
“I just don’t know,” said Jerome.
Mira had her knees pulled up under her chin, and her arms wrapped around her legs. “Why not let her come back, Jerome? You’re not up to much at the moment. You haven’t got a specific project, or at least not anything I’ve heard about.”
“You found him,” Sylvia said quietly. “You can’t have forgotten that.” She rose from the chair, then bent to lift the suitcase. “And because of that you brought him back to me.”
Jerome was standing with his hands in his pockets now, but his spine was straighter and his expression less ambiguous than before. He looked as though he might be about to take a stand, to bargain. “I just don’t know about the time,” he said with a certain amount of assurance. “I need to concentrate, and I’m not sure that this is what I am supposed to be thinking about.”
As she had many times in the past, Sylvia wondered how it was that other people were