A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [36]
The book had been Andrew’s last gift to her at a time when his gifts could take any shape at all—an empty shoebox, an oddly shaped stick, and once a Sears Catalogue from 1976. He would rise in the middle of a conversation, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, cross the room, rummage through the bookshelves or the box near the fire, and return to her with some object or another in his hands. “Please take it,” he would say. “It would mean so much to me if you did.” Once, he had approached her with a loaf of bread in his hands. “Please accept this bouquet,” he had said. And when she had laughed, he had laughed with her, and then had spoken the word joy while removing her blouse. This book, then, was the final offering from his hand, and she had kept it near her in the hope that, when she could bring herself to read it, there might be some message from him encoded in its chapters, though she knew this to be irrational, wishful thinking. Andrew was not the kind of man who sent symbolic messages, not even the younger Andrew, twenty years before. No, all of the messages she had read—in the objects that were near him or in the cloud formations that passed over him, even, sometimes, in the expressions that visited his face—were often, she now acknowledged, envisioned by her alone, invented by her need. She reached for the book, let it fall open to a page near the back, and forced herself to read a thumbnail-marked quotation by a man named York Powell:
The country was to him a living being, developing under his eyes, and the history of its past was to be discovered from the conditions of its present … . He could read much of the palimpsest before him. He was keen to note the survivals that are the key to so much that has now disappeared but that once existed.
She lifted her eyes from the page and stared at a small red light below the television that was beating soundlessly like something alive. She had not heard of the author who had written these lines or the scholar to whom the quotation referred, but the words described Andrew so accurately they stirred her heart and awakened her grief and she turned her face to one side, closed the book, and placed it back on the table.
The next afternoon at two o’clock, as Sylvia approached Jerome’s door, she saw that it was held open by a broken piece of timber. Timber, she thought, no one uses the word any more, a light, musical word, so much better than lumber or wood. As a teenager she had often whispered to herself a sentence that sounded to her like poetry: My house is made of timber and of glass. The sentence had comforted her, especially when she found herself outside the house walking to school. Now as she stepped over the threshold of this interior that was so new to her, Sylvia found that she was in an empty room: no sign of Jerome and no fluorescent light either. “I’m in here,” the young man called from the adjoining space. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” He emerged a few seconds later looking distracted, distant.
“Is something wrong?” Sylvia asked and then, by habit, made a mental note that she had read the expression of another, the way Malcolm had taught her to do.
Jerome glanced in her direction, then lowered his gaze. “No, nothing, I was just looking at some drawings, some things I haven’t finished yet.”
Sylvia wondered if she should ask to see these drawings but decided against making the request.