A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [21]
The cutlery she used each day in her house was engraved with the flowing initials of long-dead ancestors, and the plates were ringed with flowers, the names of which she had insisted on knowing as a child. In the centre of some plates, entire landscapes had been painted, the odd shepherdess too, or a herd of cows. At first as a very young child she hadn’t liked these scenes, the animals, the people, and often wouldn’t eat if she knew such things were hidden under the food. Gradually, after she had seen them over and over again, she came to be quite fond of them.
Here in the hotel, when she had eaten everything she could, she stood up and went over to the bed, removed the coverlet and lay down, remembering how hungry she had always been when she was with Andrew, even toward the end when the food he brought was often impossible—a bunch of not very new radishes, taken, she assumed, from his home refrigerator along with a tub of sour cream and a breadstick or two—and then at what would turn out to be their very last meeting when she had asked if there was anything to eat, he had backed away, had looked at her with suspicion, and had asked her exactly what she meant by the question. She had approached him then with the kind of comforting sounds that, in the past, she would have reserved for herself when she lay huddled, alone in a room, and had led him back to the bed where she opened his shirt and placed her ear above the frantic hammering of his heart, one hand on the side of his face, wanting to bring him to a state of rest, a state of calm, wanting to pull his grey head toward her own chest, so that he could weep and ask, out loud, where he was. So she could answer, “With me, love. Where you should be, with me.”
Sometimes in those final weeks, because it had seemed that the only way to bring him back into the room was to escort him toward the sensations of his own body, she’d had to find new ways of giving him pleasure. And even in the midst of this, even when his response was charged with heat or laced with desperation, she would feel him begin to forget her as if the act in which they were engaged were unprecedented and terrifying. There were few words between them by then, and no laughter. His silences were huge, mythical almost, and, to her mind, full of portent. Everything about him, even when they were inches apart, suggested disappearance. When she said that she loved him, he appeared to be confused by the phrase, then embarrassed, then fearful—a man locked in a room with a stranger who was being inappropriately intimate. She loved him harder then for everything they had said and done together. For all the years they had been together, then apart, and then together once more. For everything she knew they were, again, going to lose.
She rose from the bed and moved over to the small desk where she had eaten her meal. She lifted the tray and, after opening the door, slid the object onto the carpeted floor of the hallway, glad to be rid of the clutter it contained. Walking around the room, she touched and then named aloud each piece of furniture several times. “Bed,” she said, “table, table, lamp one, lamp two, chair, another chair.” When she became tired of doing this she approached the bed, folded back the blanket, and lay slowly down on her back with her arms by her sides. Andrew’s voice came into her mind, his gentle voice, the long sentences, the pause of punctuation. Then his broken voice, the quick frightened breath, his awful weeping. She closed her eyes and willed herself back to the bubblelike world of her childhood, a world whose skin had not yet been pierced, broken by the shock of connection, of feeling.
She remembered that when she was very young, before she had learned how to read, a story had been brought to her awareness in an unexpected way. On the bottom shelf of a bookcase in one of the downstairs parlours she had discovered a gift