A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [30]
“Actually, I am not a painter,” offered Jerome. “I’ve never been a painter, really. What I do is more sculptural … involves three-dimensional space.”
Sylvia hesitated at this point. Then, after a few moments of silence, she began to speak again. “Andrew felt that he had been destined to become a historical geographer,” she said. “He told me that the mistakes of his ancestors had made this a kind of dynastic necessity. Unlike his forebears, you see, he paid careful attention to landscape, to its present and to the past embedded in its present.”
Sylvia studied the face of the young man she was speaking to, his smooth wide forehead, full lips, and clean dark hair. He appeared to be thoughtful, serious, and yet somehow benignly detached. She was thankful for this detachment. She smiled at him and continued.
“Andrew never forgot his ancestors: they were always with him. One of the first stories he told me was about the dunes at the end of the peninsula, dunes that were strongly associated with his family. We barely knew each other, yet I had driven out there with him. I had said that I wanted these lovely, soft mountains of sand to remain in place forever. He maintained that these were a mistake, a man-made mistake, that the dunes were not natural, were, instead the result of human carelessness. You see, Branwell Woodman, Andrew’s great-grandfather and the son of old Joseph Woodman, the timber merchant, had bought a hotel near there, a hotel that became entirely engulfed by sand.”
Andrew had been looking across a billow of sand that sloped down to the edge of the water when he spoke of this. Sylvia remembered distinctly now, his light brown, slightly greying hair, the perturbed, almost angry expression of his face in profile. He had lifted his left arm to point in the direction of the long-vanished hotel. There was an ordnance survey map twitching in the wind at the end of his right hand. Abruptly he had turned toward her, his face for the first time collapsing toward softness, tenderness. And then his left hand had moved toward her hair. “Still, some mistakes can be beautiful,” he had said.
Sylvia held this inner picture for as long as she could, but then, as always, it began to dissolve. She could still see the dunes but not Andrew, not his hair, not his hand. “Everything,” she said to Jerome, “almost everything seems to disappear in one way or another.” Emerging slightly from her open handbag, the spines of the two green notebooks shone in the afternoon light. She leaned forward to touch them, then twisted around in her chair, having heard the sound of the door opening. The girl called Mira walked into the space in the company of the cat who was circling around her feet and rubbing up against her legs. “Hello,” she said, placing two bulging plastic bags on the floor. “What’s been going on?”
Sylvia tightened the scarf she was wearing around her throat. “I scarcely know,” she said. “I seem to have just gone on and on. I should probably go now.” She pushed one arm and then another into the sleeves of her coat.
“We were just talking about memory,” Jerome said, “about memory and change. Where did you find Swimmer? He shot out of the door like an arrow, no stopping him.”
“I barely know,” Sylvia continued, “whether I made any sense. I’ve been told that there are often times when I make no sense.”
Mira turned to Jerome. “I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer. I spent the whole afternoon with that client I told you about. The one who takes paintings home on approval, then always brings them back. I wonder if he’ll ever really buy anything. Maybe he secretly hates art.”
“The phone was turned off,” said Jerome. Sylvia could see that the young man had brightened just looking at the girl. The intimacy between them included a kind of electrical awakening, even with the introduction of such an ordinary subject as a cat or a telephone. As she rose to go, both young people turned to look at her as if for the first time.
“Shall I come back tomorrow?” she asked, surprised that she was addressing