A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [43]
“I came to love the poem called ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin,’ “ Sylvia said.
“I don’t remember many picturebooks from my childhood,” said Jerome. “Not too many poems either. My mother tried to teach me a few songs, though, told me that what she remembered most about being small was that she seemed always to be singing—you know, in class, or in church, or even in the playground. Girls’ skipping songs and all that. But I was embarrassed by singing. I don’t remember any of those songs now.”
Sylvia recalled the imaginary music she had so dreaded during her own childhood. “Your mother’s girlhood must have been lovely if it was filled with singing,” she said to Jerome. “Serene almost … and happy. My husband’s youth was like that as well, but I can’t imagine that Andrew’s was, though he never talked about that. I knew so little about him, really, his parents, his schooldays.”
The expression on the young man’s face tightened. “Serenity and joy are not things I would associate with my mother.” He looked at the floor for a moment or two, then glanced at his wrist.
“Is it time for me to go?” Sylvia asked, then reddened. It occurred to her that she had not said these words since she had been with Andrew.
“No, no, it’s fine, not yet,” said Jerome. He had begun to fiddle with his watch. “It’s old, this watch … belonged to my father. I should probably get a new one.” He rearranged his sleeve, looked up. “You know, I had a tendency to forget about time altogether when I was out there alone on the island. I just worked all day and went back to the sail loft when I felt I had done enough or when the light began to dim. It was quite wonderful, the sail loft.”
“The men who worked with the sails were mostly French, I think.” Sylvia tilted her head to one side, remembering. “Andrew told me that the island was divided—quite amicably—but divided nevertheless between French and English notions of how things should be. Not just because of language: it had a lot to do with waterways. The English knew the lake, you see, and the French, the French would be more familiar with the river.”
“Yes,” said Jerome. “Yes, I like that idea. Geographical allegiances. Allegiances to bodies of water.”
The huge wet shroud of a schooner’s sail moving in lake water and the drowned nineteenth-century boys surfaced in Sylvia’s imagination. “Sometimes human beings are confined by geography,” she said, “and sometimes,” she added, “they are overwhelmed, destroyed by it.”
Jerome told Mira that he was not sure about using the woman’s given name, that he had not yet decided how to address her. The woman had used his own first name on occasion, but still he found it difficult to say the word Sylvia when she was with him in the room. She was so obviously from another generation, he was tempted to call her Mrs. Bradley. But the intimacy of what she had been telling him made the formality of that seem somewhat absurd. “And yes,” he said to Mira, “they were lovers, just as you suspected.”
“I didn’t suspect, as you may remember,” said Mira. “I knew.”
Jerome ignored this clarification and changed the subject. “She told me that no one so far had really determined if that island belonged to the lake or the river. The French said it was a river island, the English maintained it belonged to the lake … and so on.” He pondered this. “I thought about that too,” he said. “ When I was there. I’d like to go back in summer and look at the geography … the geology. Maybe,” he said, “we could answer the question.”
This was the first time he had made reference to the possibility of returning and, quite suddenly, he became aware that, if this were to take place, he would not want to be on his own. He could see himself standing on the shore, alone with the new knowledge of the woman’s grief and, almost before the picture had fully taken shape, he turned his mind away from it.
“She also talked about a poem from her childhood, Cock Robin, of all things,” he said.
“Cock Robin?” Mira did not look up from her knitting. She was making