Jane Urquhart Page 8

  There was a story about the four horses: the three horses and the one that had been broken by her mother. There would likely be a story about the new horse that Malcolm had brought into the house, but it had not yet become known to Sylvia at the time of her marriage. In the original story, the four horses had always lived together in the brown field that was the top of the mahogany occasional table that sat under the wall clock. The pendulum was a kind of brass moon to them, swaying in skies that were given to storms punctuated by the thunderous resonance of the gong. Normal weather was just a rhythm, a solemn, steady ticking or sometimes a creaking as if someone were slowly descending a flight of stairs. There was no time at all in the brown pasture, just weather and changing light. The four horses were grouped together because there was a calm love that existed among them, with no variation in it: it neither gained nor faltered in intensity. That and the fact that as long as they were grouped together there could be no arrivals, no departures, no accidents. The horses could prevent things from happening by staying close to one another without ever touching. Touch, Sylvia knew, caused fracture, and horses should never, never fracture. Horses had to be shot if anything about them was broken. Her father had told her that. Her mother, in the story, had shot the one horse, and still, while Sylvia slept, the weather of the clock ticked on and the storms boomed out into the night, and then continued to mark the mornings when she was awake, and when she was at school while school was still a part of her life. These were the kind of things she liked to think about at the time that Malcolm first came into her life: unnamed china horses.

  Sylvia also liked to think about a piece of Staffordshire china that had been in the house for as long as she could remember. As a young child, she had asked her father when “the girl and the dog and the bird who were all joined together by the tree” had come to the house, and he had told her from the beginning, as far as he knew. And so, for her, the grouping became a kind of symbol of the Creation, one of “my first things,” as she liked to call these pieces of china at the time. This term had nothing to do with ownership, rather it concerned the connection she believed existed between her and the shape such a thing would hold on to, unchangingly, forever. Often without laying one finger on it, she would whisper to the piece, “There was a girl and a dog and a bird and they were all joined together, forever, by a tree.” The girl wore a pink dress, a white apron, and had a green ribbon round her neck and, on her head, a hat adorned with feathers. The dog was spotted and had delicate whiskers and nails made by the finest lines of paint. The bird was brown and black and was resting on a limb of the tree. They remained discrete, separate, attached only to and by the tree – a leafless tree, a tree that knew no seasons. A kind of security and contentment emanated from the grouping, as if the players in the tableaux knew who they were, what their role was, where they belonged. They were stable. They had no moods. They displayed no disturbing behavior.

  How charmed Malcolm had been by such things when he had finally persuaded her that it was safe to tell him about them. “I am safe, Syl,” he would say, and then as if to indicate that he understood what mattered to her, “I am as safe as houses.” It was then that she decided to show him the large 1878 County atlas with its old pictures of shops and houses and farms that had since fallen into disrepair or, in some cases, had disappeared completely from the roads on which they had stood. “These are safe too,” she had told him, pointing to one building after another. And when he had asked her why they were safe, she had said, “Because everything that was going to happen to them, in them, has already happened. There will be no more changes. They are here,” she placed her hand flat on a page, “just like this, forever.”

  “‘And, little town,’” he had said, looking at a depiction of a village street, “‘thy streets for evermore will silent be.’”

  She had smiled at him then and had, for the first time, looked fully into his face. He knew about the poem that she had carried with her in her mind since Grade Twelve and he had assumed that she would know as well. He had not explained, had not said the words “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” or “John Keats,” as almost anyone else would have done, condescending to her “disability,” her “condition.” She relaxed almost completely then, concluded that he was someone she could like.

  Oh Malcolm, she thought now, as she walked through the door of the hotel, you were safe. It was I who was never safe, for beneath the serene appearance of my house, there was always a story that I was making in my mind. No matter how carefully still the horses stood, in the end, even they couldn’t stop things from happening. They couldn’t stop the time that marched so noisily over their heads. They couldn’t prevent me from leaving the room, walking down the hall, out the door. Neither you, nor your goodness, nor china horses could keep me forever away from the arms of the world.

  The hotel room had felt almost familiar when Sylvia re-entered it; the only change since she’d left a few hours earlier was the stack of fresh towels placed in the bathroom and a further straightening of the bed she had made before leaving. Her few cosmetics were lined up near the sink just the way she had left them, and the leather portfolio remained in perfect alignment with the right-hand corner of the desk. Her suitcase stood near the wall, the curtains were closed. I am going to be able to manage this, she thought. I am going to be able to be calm here.

  When she was a child, there had been – apart from other people – two things that particularly separated her from calmness: wind in a room and outdoor mirrors. She could still call up the fear she had felt when, one morning in June, she had walked into the dining room to discover the sheer curtains moving like sleeves toward her, and a bouquet of flowers that had been dead and still the previous day bending and shaking in the breeze that entered through the open window. She had become accustomed to the fact that the air moved when she was outside, but she believed the interior of the house was the realm of stillness, so that when she became aware of the wind in the room it seemed to her that something alien and disturbing had begun to animate all that she had relied on to be quiet and in place.

  After that she would let neither her father nor her mother open her bedroom window at night and would inquire repeatedly about all the other windows in the house before climbing carefully into bed. In spite of her parents’ assurances, she would worry that while she lay motionless between white sheets the long, draped arms of the curtains would be rising and falling as if conducting music she would never be able to hear, and would not be able to bear had she been able to hear it. These indoor currents and suspicions of music had caused her anxiety during her first years with Malcolm as well, but almost all of that was gone by the time she began to meet Andrew. And yet she had never been entirely comfortable in summer when Andrew wanted the front door of the cottage left open. She liked the idea of the two of them being closed in together; she liked the idea of shutting everything else out.

  When she had been about twelve, her father had taken her to a country auction, thinking that it would be a pleasant outing for her after two days of tension in the house. A bad spell, he had said, referring to her mother’s mood that had been an unspoken but dark and pulsing presence. Sylvia had not responded well to anything about the auction: not to the jabbering man on the platform, not to the displaced furniture and household goods arranged on the grass, and certainly not to the more delicate items – sheets and doilies and tablecloths being pawed through by those she knew had no right to touch them. But when she had passed by a row of mirrors and had seen herself reflected in them – herself drenched in sunshine with the hem of her dress moving, grass under her shoes, barns and trees, hills and clouds behind her – she had begun to cry and had not stopped crying until her father was forced to take her home. When questioned, all she could say was that nothing was where it should be. What she had meant, she realized much later, was that the mirrors had shown her that there was no controlling what might enter the frame of experience, that the whole world might bully its way into a quiet interior
, and that there would be no way of keeping it out.

  It comforted her that the mirrors in her own house were hung in locations where windows and all that moved outside of windows could not be duplicated on their surfaces, and each day when she passed them the same reflected furniture stood, reversed it is true, but stoically and reassuringly in place. Nothing about the three mirrors in this hotel room could startle or betray her either. In the one that hung over the dresser she saw herself reflected, from the waist up, against the background of the bed, bedside tables, and lamps, and when she closed the bathroom door, she saw the whole woman she had become: angular, slightly stooped, vague grey eyes, the veins of the hands that hung by her hips, the sharp shin bones that traveled from the hem of her skirt down to her narrow feet, the grey-blond hair that was pulled back from her face, and behind all this just the blankness of a wall.

  On one of the bedside tables, beside the two notebooks, The Relations of History and Geography remained unopened where she had placed it the previous day. She had brought the book with her to the city, hoping that she might be able to begin to reread it when she was in a new place, as she had not had the courage to do so over the previous year. She had picked it up on occasion, had opened it, and had turned it on an angle to the light to search for the incised lines that would indicate that Andrew had marked a particular passage with his thumbnail. Then she had lightly touched with her fingers this practically invisible, frail trace of him on the printed text. But she could not read the passages that had interested him: not yet, not so far.

  The book had been Andrew’s last gift to her at a time when his gifts could take any shape at all – an empty shoebox, an oddly shaped stick, and once a Sears Catalogue from 1976. He would rise in the middle of a conversation, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, cross the room, rummage through the bookshelves or the box near the fire, and return to her with some object or another in his hands. “Please take it,” he would say. “It would mean so much to me if you did.” Once, he had approached her with a loaf of bread in his hands. “Please accept this bouquet,” he had said. And when she had laughed, he had laughed with her, and then had spoken the word joy while removing her blouse. This book, then, was the final offering from his hand, and she had kept it near her in the hope that, when she could bring herself to read it, there might be some message from him encoded in its chapters, though she knew this to be irrational, wishful thinking. Andrew was not the kind of man who sent symbolic messages, not even the younger Andrew, twenty years before. No, all of the messages she had read – in the objects that were near him or in the cloud formations that passed over him, even, sometimes, in the expressions that visited his face – were often, she now acknowledged, envisioned by her alone, invented by her need. She reached for the book, let it fall open to a page near the back, and forced herself to read a thumbnail-marked quotation by a man named York Powell:

  The country was to him a living being, developing under his eyes, and the history of its past was to be discovered from the conditions of its present.… He could read much of the palimpsest before him. He was keen to note the survivals that are the key to so much that has now disappeared but that once existed.

  She lifted her eyes from the page and stared at a small red light below the television that was beating soundlessly like something alive. She had not heard of the author who had written these lines or the scholar to whom the quotation referred, but the words described Andrew so accurately they stirred her heart and awakened her grief and she turned her face to one side, closed the book, and placed it back on the table.

  The next afternoon at two o’clock, as Sylvia approached Jerome’s door, she saw that it was held open by a broken piece of timber. Timber, she thought, no one uses the word any more, a light, musical word, so much better than lumber or wood. As a teenager she had often whispered to herself a sentence that sounded to her like poetry: My house is made of timber and of glass. The sentence had comforted her, especially when she found herself outside the house walking to school. Now as she stepped over the threshold of this interior that was so new to her, Sylvia found that she was in an empty room: no sign of Jerome and no fluorescent light either. “I’m in here,” the young man called from the adjoining space. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” He emerged a few seconds later looking distracted, distant.

  “Is something wrong?” Sylvia asked and then, by habit, made a mental note that she had read the expression of another, the way Malcolm had taught her to do.

  Jerome glanced in her direction, then lowered his gaze. “No, nothing, I was just looking at some drawings, some things I haven’t finished yet.”

  Sylvia wondered if she should ask to see these drawings but decided against making the request. She seated herself in the customary chair. Jerome walked over to the wall, flicked some switches, and looked up as two banks of fluorescent lights quivered toward full illumination. Then he walked across the room and leaned against the counter near the sink. “Would you like some tea?” he asked. “Mira has green tea. I could make some.”

  “No, I’m fine,” said Sylvia. “I’ve had lunch.” The restaurant had been one geared toward sandwiches; the variety of contents displayed behind the glass counter had almost driven her back out to the street until she realized she could simply mimic the choices of the customer who preceded her. Sylvia was beginning to appreciate the neutrality of the city, the fact that its inhabitants had absolutely no interest in her. Perhaps her life would have been easier to manage had she always been a stranger.

  “Okay then.” Jerome walked quietly over to the couch and slowly sat down, as if he felt that any sudden movement might be too disruptive, might startle her.

  He believes I am a problem, thought Sylvia, much like everyone else. She found this oddly unsettling, as if she had wanted to impress this young man and had failed somehow. Still, she had come this far and was not going to retreat into silence. She placed her handbag on the floor by her feet, removed her coat, and began to speak.

  “My father was a doctor and I married my father’s partner, a man called Malcolm Bradley. I married a kind man who came into my father’s life as a locum. Malcolm, who wanted to look after me.”

  She smiled after she said this, and Jerome smiled as well, out of politeness probably, for where was the joke? What she had said should not have been spoken lightly, she realized. Sometimes in recent years when she had stood in the evenings unnoticed at the doorway of Malcolm’s office, watching him turn the pages of the books that might or might not have described her condition, her heart nearly broke in the face of his need to believe in the purity of diagnosis. He was so innocent at these moments, this man who felt that everything deserved what he called “the dignity of a scientific explanation.” Had he taken her character through the several stages of the scientific method, spent months making observations, before carefully, deliberately, drawing his conclusion? Had he in fact married his conclusion?

  “‘She will have a good life,’ he assured my parents, ‘a good life with me. I understand her.’”

  Sylvia sat very still, fearing that Jerome might ask what was wrong with her. It was the inquiry she dreaded more than anything, this question. When it was clear that he was not going to do so, she relaxed and said, “Did they tell you that Andrew Woodman was a landscape geographer?” she asked.

  “No,” said Jerome, sitting back against the couch, “I think I read about that… afterwards, in the newspaper.” He cleared his throat. “And you told me as well.”

  “Did I? He claimed that everywhere he went he found evidence of the behavior of his forebears: rail fences, limestone foundations, lilac bushes blooming on otherwise abandoned farmsteads, an arcade of trees leading to a house that is no longer there.” She looked down. Her hands lying in her lap looked to her like two dead birds “All that sad refuse, Andrew used to say. And that island, of course… your island… abandoned by those ancestors a century before. He recorded everything that was left behind there, each sunken wreck, the re
mains of pilings, iron pulleys, cables, broken axels. You must have seen remnants… something?”

  The young man nodded. “There were empty buildings and a couple of smaller sheds that had collapsed. And one huge anchor near the jetty. But I never saw the wrecks. I was hoping that the ice would clear enough for me to catch sight of one or two, but then…” He placed his elbow on his bent knee and ran his hand through his hair, not looking at her.

  What is he seeing in his mind? Sylvia wondered. Certainly not Andrew. He wouldn’t want to remember that, wouldn’t want to think about it. Jerome’s hand was still in his hair, cupping the shape of his skull as if he were attempting to prevent the image of Andrew, or some other image, from entering his mind. As a younger woman Sylvia had been baffleed by the gestures of others. She could never understand, for example, why people raised their hands when they spoke. The sudden lifting of arms and hands in the middle of speech had seemed to her to be aggressive, imposing, a ceremonial display of weapons by warriors preparing for battle. But here, now, this simple gesture seemed to her to suggest frailty, vulnerability, and she found she was moved by it.

  When Jerome eventually glanced in her direction, she locked eyes for a moment with him. Then she looked away and continued, “Andrew’s great-great-grandfather, the first Woodman to come to Canada in the nineteenth century, settled on the island as a timber merchant,” she said. “Before that he had been in Ireland briefly as one of several engineers sent out by the British government to investigate, then to map and file reports on the state of the bogs of Ireland. County Kerry mostly.” She ran one hand up and down the sleeve of her cardigan. “According to Andrew,” she said, “Joseph Woodman had a complicated relationship with Ireland – the people, the landscape.”