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Authors: Jane Urquhart
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important.” He pulled the flask from his pocket. “You go on ahead, I can’t go in there yet.”
When I walked out onto the dance floor with a girl whose name I’ve forgotten now, I saw Vivian spinning in the arms of one of George’s friends. She wore high heels and a blue linen dress that reached to her ankles but exposed her wonderful throat. She smiled and nodded to me, then said something to her partner, who rocked with laughter. I felt my face redden. One always wanted Vivian’s approval.
George came through the door a few minutes later and stood near the wall with his hands in his pockets, staring hard in her direction. Then he shook his head like a beaten animal and began to walk straight across the floor, his eyes focused on theopposite side of the room. He brushed by Vivian, his hip and shoulder making brief contact with her body, and continued purposefully towards the lakeside of the building. The screened door slapped back into place after he passed through it.
Vivian had been thrown slightly off balance. She stumbled, stopped dancing, and looked at the door for four or five seconds, just the hint of a question passing over her face. Then she turned again, laughing, towards the young man she had chosen earlier in the evening.
T his morning I awoke to the sound of water gurgling in the troughs and dripping like slow rain from the hundreds of icicles hanging from the eaves. The sky is clear, however, the sun dazzling, but the melting snow has created such pools in the street outside my window that each time a car passes, it is obscured by a brilliant cascade of water. The January thaw is always a surprise, a kind of invasion. Short-lived, it will be forgotten in a week, overshadowed, upstaged by one of our blizzards. But while it lasts it will disturb me. Films of moisture covering hidden ice will make my walks slow and difficult. If I were to fall now I would break like porcelain, and then there would be hospitals and medical people — another kind of invasion — and then, undoubtedly, there would be death.
Early this morning I dreamed of Sara’s wrist bones, her wrist bones and the back of her hand… the ligaments there, the knuckles. The hand was lying in a narrow band of sunlight, resting on a table near a window. Because of the sunlight I couldsee the fine golden hairs on her skin and the intricate grain of the wood. I could see the creases at the joint where her hand had bent back and forth over the years. But it was the bump on the outer side of the wrist that held my attention in the dream, and I thought suddenly that all the other bones in her body must hang like pendants from this spot. I know, now that I am awake, that it was the lower end of the bone called the ulna that was intriguing me, the outer edge of the hinge that is the wrist. The sun, of course, would be coming in through her father’s window, and the table on which it fell would be the one that had always been in his room. If I were to go there now, what would I do in that room, how would I use that table? But I have no need to go there. The accuracy with which I can recall Sara’s anatomy, the anatomy of that room, is frightening enough.
Could George, I wonder, have reconstructed Augusta Moffat bone by bone, tendon by tendon, vein by vein? Had he ever drawn her? I never even asked, believing I was indifferent to all his art, whether it was on china or paper. And I was for a long time unclear about the relationship between him and this woman who had entered his life after the Great War. Had I been indifferent to it as well? By the time Augusta had become a part of George’s life, I was adrift in my own, paying little attention to his letters, a semi-stranger during my then-infrequent visits. Augusta was a shadow on the wall of George’s early middle life, or at least that is how I saw her, until later when the shadow gained substance, and she defined all our lives.
As I looked at the wrist bones in the dream, I could hear
When I walked out onto the dance floor with a girl whose name I’ve forgotten now, I saw Vivian spinning in the arms of one of George’s friends. She wore high heels and a blue linen dress that reached to her ankles but exposed her wonderful throat. She smiled and nodded to me, then said something to her partner, who rocked with laughter. I felt my face redden. One always wanted Vivian’s approval.
George came through the door a few minutes later and stood near the wall with his hands in his pockets, staring hard in her direction. Then he shook his head like a beaten animal and began to walk straight across the floor, his eyes focused on theopposite side of the room. He brushed by Vivian, his hip and shoulder making brief contact with her body, and continued purposefully towards the lakeside of the building. The screened door slapped back into place after he passed through it.
Vivian had been thrown slightly off balance. She stumbled, stopped dancing, and looked at the door for four or five seconds, just the hint of a question passing over her face. Then she turned again, laughing, towards the young man she had chosen earlier in the evening.
T his morning I awoke to the sound of water gurgling in the troughs and dripping like slow rain from the hundreds of icicles hanging from the eaves. The sky is clear, however, the sun dazzling, but the melting snow has created such pools in the street outside my window that each time a car passes, it is obscured by a brilliant cascade of water. The January thaw is always a surprise, a kind of invasion. Short-lived, it will be forgotten in a week, overshadowed, upstaged by one of our blizzards. But while it lasts it will disturb me. Films of moisture covering hidden ice will make my walks slow and difficult. If I were to fall now I would break like porcelain, and then there would be hospitals and medical people — another kind of invasion — and then, undoubtedly, there would be death.
Early this morning I dreamed of Sara’s wrist bones, her wrist bones and the back of her hand… the ligaments there, the knuckles. The hand was lying in a narrow band of sunlight, resting on a table near a window. Because of the sunlight I couldsee the fine golden hairs on her skin and the intricate grain of the wood. I could see the creases at the joint where her hand had bent back and forth over the years. But it was the bump on the outer side of the wrist that held my attention in the dream, and I thought suddenly that all the other bones in her body must hang like pendants from this spot. I know, now that I am awake, that it was the lower end of the bone called the ulna that was intriguing me, the outer edge of the hinge that is the wrist. The sun, of course, would be coming in through her father’s window, and the table on which it fell would be the one that had always been in his room. If I were to go there now, what would I do in that room, how would I use that table? But I have no need to go there. The accuracy with which I can recall Sara’s anatomy, the anatomy of that room, is frightening enough.
Could George, I wonder, have reconstructed Augusta Moffat bone by bone, tendon by tendon, vein by vein? Had he ever drawn her? I never even asked, believing I was indifferent to all his art, whether it was on china or paper. And I was for a long time unclear about the relationship between him and this woman who had entered his life after the Great War. Had I been indifferent to it as well? By the time Augusta had become a part of George’s life, I was adrift in my own, paying little attention to his letters, a semi-stranger during my then-infrequent visits. Augusta was a shadow on the wall of George’s early middle life, or at least that is how I saw her, until later when the shadow gained substance, and she defined all our lives.
As I looked at the wrist bones in the dream, I could hear
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