A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [49]
“Sounds like what we all do,” said Jerome. “I spend half my life daydreaming.”
She couldn’t recall the season because seasons were only important to her when they brought about discomfort and distraction in the form of extreme heat or cold. She’d been aware of neither of these states so it must have been autumn or spring, an unobtrusive climate that would not have caused her to apply or remove a layer of clothing, to unfurl an umbrella, to turn her face from the wind, or to watch her step on a slippery surface. “I would have seemed, to anyone watching, a thin, unremarkable, young woman,” she said, “dressed conservatively, going about my daily tasks, likely about to enter a drugstore or a stationery shop, preoccupied perhaps.
“I had, I suppose, stepped from the curb without looking, without thinking. I almost believed at the time that everything that surrounded me appeared because I was walking through it, and when I had moved on, it withdrew until I had need of it again. I counted on this neutrality; it was the key to my freedom, my singularity, and, as I would later come to understand, it was my charm against sorrow.”
Though she was not looking at him, Sylvia could sense Jerome’s clear, focused gaze.
“He came toward me from somewhere just behind my peripheral vision so that my first impression was that I was being assaulted, my arms pinned to my side, my feet lifted off the ground, that and the blue blur and slight wind of the car that swept by inches in front of my knees. Then I looked down, saw the wool sleeves—tweed, I think—one atop the other across my sweater, the slightly freckled wrists, and felt the elbows—his or mine—digging into my ribs. I didn’t make a sound. Neither did he, at first. Then he spoke some sentences that included the words might have been killed.” Back on the curb they had faced each other and he had laughed. She had thanked him, said that he had saved her life. She was shaken, not by the proximity of death, but by the accident of this sudden, purposeful embrace.
“ A conditioned response,’ he told me when I thanked him for rescuing me. Then he looked at me more closely. ‘I’ve seen you before. You’re the doctor’s wife,’ he said, ‘from Blennerville.’ When the light turned green, he nodded toward the other side of the street. ‘All clear now,’ he said. I began dutifully to cross, my face burning as if I had been slapped out of a shock or out of hysteria though, in the course of my entire life, I had been visited by no emotion powerful enough to cause such a response. I stopped on the opposite side, turned back, and watched him walk away. He was a tall, awkward man, with a slight stoop and light brown hair, greying slightly at the sides, though I had been able to tell by his face that he was still fairly young.”
A conditioned response, a conditioned response. She remembered that the phrase had kept repeating itself at the centre of her mind as she watched him climb the four steps of the County Archives. She saw the shadowed carving of the stone mullions around the arched windows of that building, the reflections in the glass, petunias in the flowerbeds beside the steps, and, even from that distance, the curve of his shoulders, the worn heels of his shoes.
“Well, the truth was he had broken into my calm like a burglar then and, like a burglar, had gone casually on his way. But what had he stolen, apart from my detachment. My heart? No, that would come later. The poor man. He had no idea what he had done.”
“Well, what had he done?” said Jerome. “Other than save you from a speeding car? That seems like a good thing to me.”
“No,” said Sylvia. “You don’t understand. I have an odd mind. There are times when I can’t move it around, can’t take it to a new subject of concentration.