A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [42]
“Those would have been the workers’ cottages, I suppose.” Sylvia remembered Andrew saying that there had been a row of labourers’ dwellings on the island’s one street, and then, of course, there was the big house at the top. She was silent for a moment or two, lost in the act of removing small woollen balls from the sleeve of her cardigan. “They would be houses for the men who worked in the shipyards. Those who manned the rafts came and went … and only in the months when the river was open and there was no ice.”
“Vikings were pushed out into the icy sea on rafts when they died,” offered Jerome. He paused and his face reddened with embarrassment. “Oh sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s all right,” said Sylvia, not looking up from her sleeve, “it’s with me all the time, his death, the knowledge of it is always with me. It is impossible for anyone, anything to remind me of it.” She was quiet for a moment. “It is a comfort to be able to say that aloud.” Suddenly her gaze shifted to the left and rested on a very old chair, minus one leg, tilting in a corner near Jerome and the couch. “Did you know,” she said, “that in this light you can see the imprint of the stencilling on the back of that chair? Under all that paint! Andrew would have loved that, would have called it evidence of the chair’s history. My friend Julia too. She likes to be able to trace what has happened to things. She told me once that she could feel the difference between new and old knife cuts on a breadboard.”
Jerome looked at the chair. “I’ve never noticed that before,” he said. “A history written in paint, pentimento on a chair back.”
“It seems to me now,” Sylvia said slowly, “that during my own childhood, everything around me was connected to history: a knowable and therefore a safe history. Surely there must have been new toys, new clothes but, if there were, they meant so little to me that I can’t remember these gifts. What I recall instead were the Christmas and birthday gifts given to children long dead; gifts given to my father and his sister, to his father and his father’s father, for everything had been so carefully organized and preserved in the house—stored away in the spare room or in the attic—that it was all quite easily retrievable.”
She had been fairly ambivalent about the dolls, which had been grouped together like a fragile wide-eyed congregation at one end of the large attic. They were still there, but she had covered them some time ago, with sheeting. The cars and tractors and toy trains that had belonged to boy children had interested her more, the fact that they were in no way attempting to be human, were content instead to pretend to be the large machines they were drawn from. Sometimes she had found a faded Christmas tag stuck to one or another of these objects. To Charlie, Xmas 1888, it might read, still existing after the small Charlie had passed through adulthood on his journey toward death. To Charlie from his loving Mama. When she was older, she came to realize that the tag wouldn’t have remained attached to the toy were it not for the way that other children—children not like her—were so easily diverted from the things that surrounded them by the episodic nature of their small, vibrant lives. The world had probably handed them an invitation, and, unlike her, they had been able—joyfully—to accept the offer to participate.
“ When I was small,” she said, “I distrusted the human face and all the changes of expression that the human face invariably brought with it. Animals were somehow less threatening, though I suppose it is possible to read a change of mood or disposition in the face of an animal, particularly if one looks directly into its eyes.”
Both Sylvia and Jerome turned toward Swimmer as if to test this theory. The cat, who was sitting on a high table with his back to them, and who was staring out of the window,