A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [46]
Whenever she entered the hotel room, she would remove the two green leather journals from her handbag, place them on the desk, then, using the hotel stationery, she would write for an hour or so. Today, however, pulling back to look at the sheet of paper in front of her, she found she was slightly startled by the appearance of her own handwriting, which was tight and dark on the page, and which was coming in and out of focus before her eyes. Knowing she was tired, she rose and walked over to the pristine bed and, without removing the coverlet, she lay down.
Soon she began to go through the inventory of the house she had left behind, an inventory she had made in early childhood and had never forgotten. Even here, even during these uncertain days, it was a comfort to her. Mentally opening the door with the key she had learned to use when she was seven, she walked into the front hall, past the umbrella stand, with its diamond-shaped mirror, and the walnut table whose bird’s-eye maple drawers were filled with flowered calling cards engraved a century ago with the names of neighbours, neighbours whose years of birth and death had since grown indistinct under the rain that had washed over their marble grave markers. On the wall above the table hung a print of the Niagara River rendered downstream from the famous cataract. There is a print of that river on the wall of my house, she would say when Andrew told her, once, that he was going there to record the remnants of a trolley line abandoned since the 1920s. It is a print I know well, she told him as if this knowledge of lines on a piece of paper could connect her more closely with him and his life without her. But she did know it well; each tree, the rocks, and the small, solitary human figure staring into the current, the cliffs on each side.
The hall led into the dining room (the domain of horses) if one walked straight ahead, or into her father’s office (now Malcolm’s study) if one turned to the right, or off to the realm of the vast double parlour if one turned to the left. What huge, multidimensional worlds those parlours had seemed to her when she was a child, and sometimes later as well; Africa and Asia couldn’t have been larger, more filled with changing light and shades of colour, with the sudden rumble of a furnace hidden beneath the boards of oaken floors polished to such a degree the furniture was reflected in them like architecture placed at the edge of vast golden lakes. There were the carpets and the confusing, mesmerizing patterns of the carpets, the different paws and hooves of chair legs lurking near the fringed edges of the carpets. The two round mirrors with the child, and then the girl, and now the mature woman in them, always with the same carved eagle on the frame hovering over her head, benignly some days, and on others hunting, about to unfurl its talons, wanting to carry off her brain.
Sylvia, lying now on the bed in a modern, urban hotel room, ran all these things through her memory. She knew the contents of the drawers: twelve knives, eleven soup spoons, twelve forks, one serving fork, or fourteen folded linen napkins, and the small, silver tongs with tiny hands fashioned like maple leaves. The napkin rings with the names of previous children of the family etched into them in flowing script; Ronnie, Teddy, Addie, the names old-fashioned, tender in the use of the diminutive. Platters depicting the wildflowers of England or France dwelt inside a cumbersome mahogany sideboard beside a set of plates depicting