A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [32]
Unlike any other guest, Malcolm had put down his knife and fork and had come across the room to stand beside her. “Oh, please continue with your meal,” her mother had said brightly. “Sylvia just likes to get up now and then to look at the horses, don’t you, darling? Nothing to be concerned about.” But Malcolm had been concerned. To Sylvia’s great discomfort, he had stood beside her and lifted one of the china animals from the polished mahogany. “They’re lovely horses,” he said, and then, “Do you have names for them?” He held the blond horse in his fingers as he spoke.
“No,” she had whispered. Then with her hand atop his she gently eased the horse back to the tabletop. “They don’t like to be touched, to be changed,” she had said quietly just before she turned and left the room for the night, her eyes on the floor as she walked silently away. In her room she listened to the murmur of the continuing dinner, though she could not make out the words that were spoken. And later, she heard the door close behind the stranger, the sound of his footsteps moving away, the creak of the old wrought-iron gate at the front of the garden.
She could visualize the path he would take, past the Petersons’ white house with the tower, past the Redners’ brick house with the tall, nodding hollyhocks in the garden. As she had done each time she went to school, he would walk over the one broken sidewalk square and, at the corner, over the square that had the words Brunswick Block 1906 incised into its surface. The drugstore, the five-and-dime store, the Queen’s Hotel, an outdoor bench no one sat on, a tree that was surrounded by a bent iron cage, the war memorial with its steady stone soldier and the names of the dead boys who had made the mistake of leaving home. Several years later she would make a tactile map of all this for Julia. “The curb, the surface of Willow Road, another curb, Church Street,” she would say while her friend’s fingers brushed the surfaces of the textures Sylvia had glued onto a rectangular piece of cardboard. “This is your world,” Julia had said. “How built it is, how different than my farm.” Malcolm would walk up the gravel path to the Morris apartments where he said he was staying. She would not have followed him through the door there. Only her own interior rooms and the cold halls and classrooms of the two schools she had attended were known to her at the time in any intimate sort of way.
The next time Malcolm came for dinner, he brought her a china horse.
For the first six months, the horses were all they spoke about, with Malcolm doing most of the speaking. Then, gradually, she began to show him the rest of the house, the particular objects she had animated in one way or another; her grandfather’s important-looking shaving stand with its shining mirror the exact size of a face, a low footstool crouching near a Morris chair. Malcolm had pretended to be interested in all this, or perhaps he had really been interested. His tone when he talked was unthreatening, pleasing, careful. It was not unlike the tone her father had used to coax her out of bed, down the stairs, off to school in the past, except that, unlike her father, Malcolm seemed to want to enter her own world and to discuss what it might be that intrigued her there.
He did not shut her out of his world either, often describing an appealing child or a colourful adult who had come into the office, or making reference to a picturesque part of the County he had visited when making a housecall. Sometimes, when her parents were in the room, he complained a little about paperwork, how it never seemed to end. There was only one nurse-receptionist in the office: it seemed unfair to expect her to do it all. Maybe, he suggested, Sylvia could come in for a couple of afternoons a week, just to ease the load.
Her father seemed pleased; her mother had