A Map of Glass (10 page)

The next time Malcolm came for dinner, he brought her a china horse.

For the first six months, the horses were all they spoke about, with Malcolm doing most of the speaking. Then, gradually, she began to show him the rest of the house, the particular objects she had animated in one way or another; her grandfather’s important-looking shaving stand with its shining mirror the exact size of a face, a low footstool crouching near a Morris chair. Malcolm had pretended to be interested in all this, or perhaps he had really been interested. His tone when he talked was unthreatening, pleasing, careful. It was not unlike the tone her father had used to coax her out of bed, down the stairs, off to school in the past, except that, unlike her father, Malcolm seemed to want to enter her own world and to discuss what it might be that intrigued her there.

He did not shut her out of his world either, often describing an appealing child or a colorful adult who had come into the office, or making reference to a picturesque part of the County he had visited when making a housecall. Sometimes, when her parents were in the room, he complained a little about paperwork, how it never seemed to end. There was only one nurse-receptionist in the office: it seemed unfair to expect her to do it all. Maybe, he suggested, Sylvia could come in for a couple of afternoons a week, just to ease the load.

Her father seemed pleased; her mother had looked irritated, doubtful. “Sylvia will never be able to maintain a job,” she said.

Malcolm had bristled. “She could most certainly maintain a part-time job,” he said, “even after she is married.”

“Good Lord,” her mother had replied briskly. “Who on earth would ever have the patience for that?” She was not referring to the job.

Sylvia stared across the room and into the hall where she could see a painting of Niagara Falls. She concentrated on the white, indistinct cloud of steam at the bottom of the cataract and the way the river opened out from this spot, purposefully, with some other destination in mind.

“I would,” Malcolm had said as he reached across the table for the hand that Sylvia immediately withdrew. “I would have the patience for that.”

Her parents had made a faint attempt to discourage Malcolm, had used words like
sacrifice
while he had used words of love. Secretly, however, Sylvia knew that they considered the young doctor to be a miraculous blessing, a gift of luck visiting their unlucky home. When it was obvious that he was serious – determined in fact – her father had told her that if she married Malcolm, the young doctor had agreed that he would come to live in the house. “And you’ll never have to leave,” he said, knowing that that would be what she wanted. He was right, that was what she wanted although, until that moment, it had never occurred to her that the house, its objects and corners and stories, might be removed from her life.

After that, as if repeating a line he had been told he would be expected to say, her father asked if she’d thought about whether she wanted to marry Malcolm.

She had said nothing; none of it seemed to have much to do with her.

Her mother had spoken to her harshly one night in the kitchen shortly after Malcolm had left the house. She had spun around angrily from her place at the sink, suds and water dripping from her hands. “You’ll have to let him touch you,” she had hissed in the direction of her daughter. “You’ll have to let him touch you in ways you can’t even imagine. And you have never, never let me, your father, or anyone else touch you. You won’t be able to do it, and he will leave and we’ll all be worse off than before.” But neither the outburst nor what her mother said worried Sylvia. She knew exactly what her mother was talking about. And Malcolm had assured her, had promised her with his hand on the old family Bible. “I will not touch you,” he swore, “until you want me to.” She was never going to want him to; there was never going to be a problem.

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.