A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [88]
They were drawn on parchment and were so old and stiff they were almost impossible to unroll. When, by securing their corners with heavy ledger books, Annabelle managed to prevent the maps from snapping back into tight scrolls, the varnish that had covered them cracked and lifted like a caramel glaze on one of Marie’s delicious desserts. Each time she unfurled another bog Annabelle gasped with pleasure, for these were beautiful works of art. Executed in what must have been hundreds of shades of brown that bled at the edges of the bog in question into infinitely varied shades of green, and occasionally criss-crossed by the tiniest of blue lines, intended, she supposed, to represent streams, these territories were drafted with such exquisite care they could only have been made with love. The calligraphy that spelled out the remarkable names of the bogs, and those of the arable green areas called cooms that sometimes existed in the centre of the bogs and the surrounding lakes and mountains, was also of the highest calibre. Coomaspeara, Coomavoher, Coomnahorna, Coomnakilla, Coomshana, and Knocknagantee, Knockmoyle, Knocknacusha, Knocklomena. Annabelle would remember always the shock and wonder she experienced when, at the bottom of each map, it was her father’s signature that she found. Then a terrible sadness came over her. She realized that the artist in him was someone he had never permitted her to meet.
Annabelle walked to the east window and stared out at the vacant shipyard. She tried, without much success, to solve the puzzle that had been presented to her. How was it possible that her father could render the very landscape that had been the source of his humiliation with such meticulous affection? There was something wistful and tender about the maps, and Annabelle, strolling once again among them, began to understand that her father must have been bruised by experience or filled with longing at one time or another. None of this made any sense at all in the face of the tyrant he had been in his prime, or even the confused old man he had turned into later, and yet there was no denying that the younger man who had made these maps was one with vision and heart. The loss she felt in the face of this was more intense in that it was the loss of a gift she had never been given. She felt overcome with shame that she had not known all this before. She could not bring herself to remove the maps from the floor, to roll them back up, return them to the shelves. Before she left the office she sat slowly down on the hard chair behind her father’s hard desk, put her face in her hands, and wept for the first time in years.
Summer after summer, beyond the bright windows of the Ballagh Oisin, the Great Lake roared or whispered against a sand beach on which visiting children made miniature towns, elaborate castles, or complicated drainage systems. Cumulus clouds bloomed like distant white forests far out over the lake, but never ventured inland to disturb the sunny afternoons. At night the constellations moved above the waves against a clear black background, and sometimes, in the very early mornings, or just before sunset, the water became entirely still as if intent on merging with the sky. Gulls rode the wind, ducks practised flight patterns for future migrations, and each year, on one spectacular July day, a flotilla of enormous arctic swans sailed regally past.
What a place it was! Perched on the very last finger of the arm of the peninsular County, the hotel was like a sturdy wooden ship that had come into port after a long journey, leaving fields and farmhouses