A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [63]
Annabelle knocked on Branwell’s door one evening shortly after one of these conversations with her father. Her brother, who had been lying on the counterpane staring at the ceiling, rose from his bed and opened the door. He had let the fire go out and the siblings could see their breath as they spoke.
“I will be here forever,” she told him, “but you can do something. You can get out.”
When he said nothing, she asked, “What did you see in Paris that you still see in your mind?”
The awful miniature cities almost took shape in his memory, but he shook them off. “Frescoes?” he said uncertainly. He didn’t like to mention naked models to his unmarried sister.
“Frescoes,” she said, bending down to nurse a leg rendered almost useless by a childhood bout of tuberculosis, “that’s good. I’ve never seen a fresco. Wall paintings. What else? There must have been something else.”
He thought of the painting that had so impressed him in the Louvre. From the Flemish school of the sixteenth century, it was the only picture he could recall in accurate detail despite days spent walking on squeaky parquet past large-bottomed goddesses, blood-soaked battles, bored or anemic princelings, spoiled dogs, dead rabbits, and rotting fruit, saints suffering under the hands of torturers, Madonnas, Pietàs, baptisms, and the inevitable crucifixions. He had stopped in front of this painting because at first glance it had seemed to be about nothing at all except pure landscape and glorious shades of colour: turquoise and grey and emerald green with a touch, here and there, of rose. All of this was surprising, almost shocking, in the midst of the jaundiced yellows and bog browns that darkening varnish had lent to the other masterpieces in the room. There was light in this painting and it wasn’t candlelight, or firelight, or torchlight. It was daylight. It was fresh air.
“There was a painting,” he ventured, “done long ago, I think, by a Dutchman.”
“Yes?” said Annabelle encouragingly. She had a cast in one eye and it seemed at this moment as if she were eyeing her brother with amusement. In fact, she was looking at the collar of one of his shirts and thinking that it needed washing. But she was far from uninterested in what he had to say. “What was the subject of the painting?”
Branwell suspected that she was secretly hoping for ships. “Not ships,” he said, “no, wait, perhaps one, but far off, far off in the distance.” He paused, remembering. “There were great distances in the painting, Annabelle, rivers winding off and around, mountains and towns and many caves.” He had shuddered a little when he mentioned the towns, but mentioning the caves had helped him steady his nerves. “There were fields too, and orchards, all miles and miles away. At first I thought that there was nothing but air in the painting but, in fact everything was in it, the whole world.” Branwell was warming to his subject.
Annabelle now had the shirt tucked firmly under her arm.
“There was a saint. Very small,” Branwell continued. “You might not have noticed him at all. And the lion was even smaller but visible, doing this and that in the wilderness, sometimes chasing a wolf, I think.”
Annabelle had always been intrigued by dangerous wild animals, frightened and fascinated at the same time. She exchanged a glance with her brother when he mentioned the wolf. It almost looked as if he were about to say something but decided against it and instead, as she turned to leave the room, he announced, “I want to use these colours, I want to paint these distances, but not