A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [45]
She stopped knitting, rested her head on the back of the chair, and looked up at him, the wool a pink pool on her lap. It occurred to Jerome that he had no idea whether people knitted in India, a country, he now realized, that was difficult to associate with wool, but he didn’t want to ask her, show his ignorance, and anyway he was more interested in her smooth shoulders, her beautiful arms. He was aware that even after three years of intimacy there was always a moment or two when she hesitated, but he also knew that these moments passed. She would respond once he was able to touch her, to touch her and to use the word love. Then her arms would lift, encircle his neck.
“Probably,” she said, “probably I was a bee. And if so I would have liked peonies best.”
He thought of how she would stand entirely still, mesmerized by the small front gardens in their neighbourhood. Once or twice she had remained long enough that an owner had emerged from inside the house to ask if she needed assistance. Jerome had never seen anyone examine all of the external world with such care. Sometimes she became so absorbed by one thing or another he felt she had completely forgotten he was there. How was it possible, he wondered, that with all the other concerns and interests that fought for space in her mind, work and art and the whole complicated network of family and friends that she attended to, at the end of each day she calmly took the decision to return to the place where he was waiting in order to share his evening meal, his bed? Equally mysterious to him was the fact that he himself was always there when she arrived.
“Please?” he said now.
There it was, that moment of hesitation. Then she stood, placed the wool on the kitchen counter, turned, lowered her eyes, and took his hand.
The man behind the desk always looked up when Sylvia entered but never said anything. She too remained silent, her key, which had been recently removed from her handbag, dangling in her gloved hand, the salt shaker clinking slightly against the loose change in her coat pocket as she crossed the tile floor.
It had been three days since her train had departed from Belleville Station, three days since she had mailed the car keys back to Malcolm, three days since she had left the message on the answering machine at his office. Soon Malcolm would discover where she was and would come to fetch her home. Sometimes, here in the hotel when she closed her eyes just before sleep, she saw him in his study, focused on the texts that might give him a description of this new, this inexplicable dance of disappearance she had undertaken. The protective side of him touched her in an odd way at such moments, and she wondered if what she was feeling might be what someone else might call pity. It was, however, a feeling that she experienced only in relation to his faithful attachment to her disability, if that is what it was, a disability. That and the fact that he had chosen to come so completely into the physical spaces that made up her ancestral history. Her father’s desk, her great-grandmother’s china. The antique marriage bed that would have been, on more than one occasion, a deathbed: all the details that made up what she thought of as her known and knowable place had been fully accepted by him, incorporated into his life’s work. Her in her natural habitat. His life’s work.
Andrew had believed that the cells of humans, like those of birds and animals, were programmed to recognize the smells and sights and sounds of their natural habitat. Even if he had not been born in Italy, for example, a