A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [53]
Sylvia began to move the salt shaker around in her lap as if it were a toy and she a child. Then, becoming aware of herself, she stopped, and without looking at her companion, turned and dropped the object back into her coat pocket.
“He left me after years of infrequent meetings,” she said finally. “He met me in a restaurant on the edge of Picton and told me that we had to stop.” Sylvia was silent for some time, revisiting his serious voice and recalling also how passive she had been. She had never fought and would never fight for anything she wanted simply because she did not know which weapons to carry or how to use them. Instead she had turned inward, away, looked out the window at a bird trembling on a branch. Andrew was saying words such as work, commitment, and distraction, and then something about Malcolm. She was looking at a bird and trying to imagine what kind of avian emergency had caused its terror. She believed that Andrew had discovered the flaw in her, that he now knew about the condition. At the very least, he had sensed something missing, something lacking. No, she could not fight.
So this was the heart-torn present, she remembered thinking at the time. This is the collision with pain. She told Jerome that after Andrew had gone from her life, there was a period during which she became convinced that almost everything was poisoned: the colossal dark chambers of rotting barns, the ghosts of vanished forests, polluted water flowing under roads through culverts, sand dunes comprising smashed shells and the bones of deformed fish pushing inland from the lake. “So this was my known, my benign world,” she said. “Everything was in a state of decay.” All of the ancestry she had so carefully learned was under the altered ground, bones turning to powder. There was nothing beautiful about the traces of human endeavour, despite what Andrew believed, all was unravelling as quickly as it was knit. Her own strained face when she examined it in the mirror was a collection of dead cells. The love they had made was barren, had resulted in no quickening, no quickening at all except this newborn capacity of hers to see things the way they really were, that and the ability to feel pain.
“I was grateful for that,” she said aloud. “I still am grateful for that.”
In the silence that followed the orange cat strolled majestically, almost theatrically, across the room, tail high in the air. For several moments he became the centre of attention, as if he had planned it that way.
“What was it,” asked Jerome, “what was it you were grateful for?”
“I don’t think I’d ever really felt anything before … before him.” Sylvia said. She paused. “And then there were the stories he told about his family, his ancestors.” She leaned over and reached into the bag at her feet, running her fingers for a moment over the smooth leather of one of the journals. “They were like a gift, really, those stories, a gift from him to me.”
Jerome nodded. “That’s a lovely thought.”
“You know,” she said suddenly, “there was a picture on the wall of the cottage where we met. It was painted by Andrew’s great-aunt Annabelle and, as Andrew pointed out, it depicted a panorama she could not possibly have seen, one that may have been a compilation of everything she had learned how to draw, how to paint I guess, perhaps partially copied from the kind of steel