A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [33]
Malcolm had bristled. “She could most certainly maintain a part-time job,” he said, “even after she is married.”
“Good Lord,” her mother had replied briskly. “Who on earth would ever have the patience for that?” She was not referring to the job.
Sylvia stared across the room and into the hall where she could see a painting of Niagara Falls. She concentrated on the white, indistinct cloud of steam at the bottom of the cataract and the way the river opened out from this spot, purposefully, with some other destination in mind.
“I would,” Malcolm had said as he reached across the table for the hand that Sylvia immediately withdrew. “I would have the patience for that.”
Her parents had made a faint attempt to discourage Malcolm, had used words like sacrifice while he had used words of love. Secretly, however, Sylvia knew that they considered the young doctor to be a miraculous blessing, a gift of luck visiting their unlucky home. When it was obvious that he was serious—determined in fact—her father had told her that if she married Malcolm, the young doctor had agreed that he would come to live in the house. “And you’ll never have to leave,” he said, knowing that that would be what she wanted. He was right, that was what she wanted although, until that moment, it had never occurred to her that the house, its objects and corners and stories, might be removed from her life.
After that, as if repeating a line he had been told he would be expected to say, her father asked if she’d thought about whether she wanted to marry Malcolm.
She had said nothing; none of it seemed to have much to do with her.
Her mother had spoken to her harshly one night in the kitchen shortly after Malcolm had left the house. She had spun around angrily from her place at the sink, suds and water dripping from her hands. “You’ll have to let him touch you,” she had hissed in the direction of her daughter. “You’ll have to let him touch you in ways you can’t even imagine. And you have never, never let me, your father, or anyone else touch you. You won’t be able to do it, and he will leave and we’ll all be worse off than before.” But neither the outburst nor what her mother said worried Sylvia. She knew exactly what her mother was talking about. And Malcolm had assured her, had promised her with his hand on the old family Bible. “I will not touch you,” he swore, “until you want me to.” She was never going to want him to; there was never going to be a problem.
There was a story about the four horses: the three horses and the one that had been broken by her mother. There would likely be a story about the new horse that Malcolm had brought into the house, but it had not yet become known to Sylvia at the time of her marriage. In the original story, the four horses had always lived together in the brown field that was the top of the mahogany occasional table that sat under the wall clock. The pendulum was a kind of brass moon to them, swaying in skies that were given to storms punctuated by the thunderous resonance of the gong. Normal weather was just a rhythm, a solemn, steady ticking or sometimes a creaking as if someone were slowly descending a flight of stairs. There was no time at all in the brown pasture, just weather and changing light. The four horses were grouped together because there was a calm love that existed among them, with no variation in it: it neither gained nor faltered in intensity. That and the fact that as long as they were grouped together there could be no arrivals, no departures, no accidents. The horses could prevent things from happening by staying close to one another without ever touching. Touch, Sylvia knew, caused fracture, and horses should never, never fracture. Horses had to be shot if anything about them was broken. Her father had told her that. Her mother, in the story, had shot the one horse, and still, while Sylvia slept, the weather of the clock ticked on and the storms boomed out into the night, and then continued to mark the mornings