What nonsense, thought Annabelle, and then, He’s had to sell almost all his ships anyway. “Very well,” she said, gathering the dishes from the table and heading, through the wreaths of smoke left in the air by her guest’s pipe, for the kitchen. Gilderson took his leave and walked off in the twilight toward the guest quarters. When he was gone, Annabelle gathered her camp stool, sketchbook, and brushes and went outside to capture the light.
So she would not be displaced after all. The island would remain in her possession. Whatever possibilities the sale had presented to her—a small house of her own, perhaps some travel—now faded and withdrew. But these had never really taken solid shape, anyway, in her imagination, beyond the images of the deck of an oceangoing vessel and a simple porch unsullied by fretsaw work. She let these pictures disappear from her mind without a great deal of regret and concentrated instead on the ships she could now see swaying in the distance and on the strange colour of the light from which the warmth seemed to be leaking minute by minute. The sky that had been orange was now violet, and the lake, which was quite still, had become not silver exactly but rather pewter-coloured, there being no glitter on its surface.
She felt his hand on her shoulder before she paid any attention to his voice, probably because the quay upon which she sat had always, in the past, been filled with male voices, French and English voices, voices she had very early on learned to ignore. A male hand squeezing her shoulder was an experience so new that it might have been a bolt of lightning judging from the effect it had on her system.
Annabelle stiffened, examined the hand that had so unexpectedly come to rest on her person, and noted with relief that the fingernails were clean. She turned on the stool then and looked up into the not altogether unattractive but very hairy face of Oran Gilderson. His moustache, she realized, was stained yellow as a result of his fondness for tobacco. There were two deep furrows that ran from his cheekbones to the beginning of his lavish, well-kept, but far too long beard, furrows that could only have been gouged by a grimace of some sort visiting his expression over and over. There was a full crop of grey hair in his nostrils, also showing a jaundiced tinge. She decided to concentrate on her painting.
“I like a woman who can do dainty things,” Gilderson said, referring, she supposed, to the watercolour on her lap. “Do you sing as well?”
“No,” said Annabelle. She was mildly offended by his reference to her picture as something dainty. And the man had been into the whisky; she could smell it. Still, there was the extraordinary warmth of his hand on her shoulder and this, like some unlikely force of gravity, bound her to her place.
“A widower is a very lonely man. A widower whose daughter has left him is lonelier still,” said the voice behind her.
Annabelle had absolutely no experience with this kind of talk. Her father had reacted to neither her mother’s presence nor her absence except with a kind of unvarying, vague irritation. Branwell had remained stubbornly silent on the subject of male affection of any kind, and Maurice … well, Maurice was, as far as she could tell, so frightened of his wife, and so in love with her, that had he an opinion on the subject it would be unreliable at best. The man’s fingers were beginning to explore her collarbones, his other hand having now come to rest on the opposite shoulder.
Annabelle rose quickly to her feet, upsetting the stool as she did so, and letting the sketchbook fall from her lap. As she began to limp away from him, Gilderson followed, caught her arm, then embraced her and pressed a quantity of whiskers and a mouth smelling of tobacco and whisky into her face. It was almost dark. Annabelle used more force than she knew she was capable of to push the man away, then walked, with as much speed as possible, back toward the house. He was calling her name and shouting sentences that she could have sworn included the word marriage, but she was determined not to pay any mind.
Once she was safely behind the locked door, she peered furtively out the window, just in time to see a silhouetted Gilderson begin to walk unsteadily back to the place where he would spend the night. There was a certain poignancy about the curve of his back and the careful determination with which he measured each step that softened Annabelle. He is getting old, she thought, and he will get older yet. Then, just as she thought this, Gilderson stumbled, lurched forward, and fell on his hands and knees, and something in Annabelle stumbled and fell with him. She brought her hand up to her mouth as if to prevent herself from crying out. It seemed to take him an extraordinary amount of time to get to his feet. He was like a bear that had been shot and had not quite realized that his wounds were fatal; Annabelle half-expected him to throw back his head and roar. It occurred to her that she should be leaving the house to see whether he had broken any bones, but she found it quite impossible to move, and eventually she perceived that he was once again stumbling through the increasing darkness toward the guest house. Would he spend the night tossing in an agony of remorse and embarrassment? she wondered. Not likely, she concluded, probably in the state he was in he would be snoring as soon as his head touched the pillow.
In the middle of the night, Annabelle sat bolt upright in her bed. Had he really used the word marriage and, if so, in what context had he used it? She wished she had listened more carefully now, in order to have caught exactly what he had said to her. Annabelle lit the lamp—there was to be no sleep for her that night—and looked first at one of her shoulders and then at the other. Perhaps she hadn’t heard him clearly. It could have been that he was simply inquiring about a carriage to meet him in Kingston the following day. But no, that was not likely because, like all shipbuilders, he would detest roads and railways and would insist on travelling, as much as possible, by water. She crossed her arms over her breasts and put her own hands on her shoulders, trying to determine how these bony protuberances would feel under the touch of another. Bony, she decided, was the only adjective one could apply to such shoulders, bony and old. Her heart, on the other hand, was behaving like a young trapped animal, restless, pacing, eager to get out.
The next morning everything in the house and outside its windows seemed just slightly unfamiliar, as if a series of minor alterations had taken place in the physical world overnight. Not since she had been young had Annabelle looked at objects with such intensity: the hairbrush on her dresser, the leather of her boots, the veins in her own hands as she laced up these boots, the cloth-covered buttons on the pale blue dress that she removed from the wardrobe, each chip and crack in the ironstone dishes she assembled on the kitchen table (two place settings for breakfast,) the dull sheen of an unpolished silver spoon, the oily yellow of the butter, the blue tinge of the milk. Waiting at the parlour window, from which the guest house was visible, she became absorbed by the dusty, disintegrating tassels on a worn velvet curtain. What could be the purpose of tassels on parlour curtains? The shadows of the leaves on her mother’s oak tree trembled on the carpet at her feet. What exactly was the purpose of that tree? While she was pondering such questions she saw Oran Gilderson emerge from the guest house along with his servant, who carried a valise in his hand. Without looking in the direction of the house, Gilderson walked as briskly as his age would allow toward the quay where the skiff in which he had arrived the previous day was anchored. A murky blend of anger and disappointment was awakened in Annabelle by this sight. This was followed by a sense of distress so overwhelming that she was affected physically, could barely manage to remove herself from the window. For the first time in her life she went back to bed in the morning and stayed there until midafternoon.
This was to be the beginning of a spate of days so disorganized that Annabelle would not have been able to fully recall them in the future, had she the inclination to recall them, which would be far from the case. She lit no fires, she cooked no meals. When she ate, which was rarely, she picked up an apple in passing, or a crust of bread, perhaps some cheese. She made no drawings, and beyond fixing a particular match to a page in her scrapbook, she did no work of any kind. Weeds were appearing in her ve
getable garden, flowers in the parched plots bordering the house died of thirst in the dry autumn heat. The bed into which she flung herself at any hour of the day or night remained unmade.
She neither dressed nor undressed, wearing the same blue cotton shirtwaist she had put on the morning of Gilderson’s departure. As the days progressed, the stains under the arms of this dress darkened and the cuffs at her wrists became more and more soiled. She did not wash; her fingernails became filthy and cracked. It was as if she had forgotten about her body and its functions altogether, as if her physical self had become simply a bothersome bundle that, as the result of an evil spell, her racing mind was required to haul around with it wherever it went. And in this racing mind sat Gilderson, as grim and pompous and unpleasant as ever, but tenacious—the idea of him like a warm hand glued to her shoulder as she moved from place to place. She was always moving from place to place because except for the few hours when she fell into the delirium that she now called sleep, she could not stop walking.
She walked through all the rooms of the house, up and down the halls, up and down the stairs, including those that led to the attic where Marie had once lived. She walked in and out of the guest house. “Lonely man, lonely man,” she whispered, looking at the faintly greasy dent his head had left in the feather pillow on the unmade bed. She walked around and around the circumference of the island, pausing only to glare at the distant lighthouses she had in the past been quite fond of. She began to play counting games: mentally cataloguing all the door latches on the island, for example, latches attached to the doors of the buildings that still stood, then picking through the collapsed wreckage of those that had gone down during one of the previous winters and finding a surprising number of latches there. She repeated the process with hinges and porcelain knobs, and then with panes of glass, broken (in the case of fully abandoned buildings) or otherwise. This inventory required a great deal of concentration; these phenomena, after all, had all been rejected by Gilderson, just as she herself, she now believed, had been rejected by him. Her table remained set for breakfast: two knives, two spoons, two forks, two folded linen napkins, her mother’s best cups and saucers.
The curious thing, she would soon come to realize, was that her opinion of the man had not changed one whit. She knew exactly what he had been, and what he would have been had a reversal of his fortunes not taken place. She knew that he had abused his employees, misused the landscape, greedily hoarded his wealth, and had cared not a fig for any other human being with the possible exception of his overindulged daughter. She had not even considered what they might talk about had they been given the opportunity to do so on a regular basis. And yet this did not prevent her from going over and over in her mind the conversation they had engaged in during the one meal they had shared, searching for a hint of affection in remarks such as “damn fine potatoes!” or questions such as “Have you much trouble getting supplies from the mainland in winter?” She was hoping to find a key to his behaviour, to what it was that drove him out the door of the guest house with the object of placing his hand on her shoulder. The other curious matter was that she was able to think of such things while, at the very same time, counting the number of pieces of scrap lumber left lying about on the island, scrap lumber that Gilderson was clearly not interested in.
Throughout all the walking and counting and listing Annabelle became gradually convinced that all through her adult life there had been something lost in her that now, as a consequence of one masculine touch, had been found, and that having been found she was now going to have to come to terms with it one way or another. Even though the lost thing was now found, she was never able to bring clearly into focus what the lost thing was, only that it had been discovered far too late. Sometimes she was grateful for this. At other times she was angry. She knew that it had something to do with the two place settings that she had been unable to remove from the kitchen table, and something to do as well with the dent in the guest-house pillow, but her mind would take her no further than that. Her thoughts skimmed past the complexities of her condition and insisted instead on increased motion, this nonsensical accounting.
In the midst of her counting exercises, or while she was walking vigorously from one end of the island to the other, she would now and then stop for several moments and look toward Kingston. If she saw a skiff approaching she would scrutinize it intently and, once she had determined that it was not the skiff she was looking for, she would crouch behind a convenient bush until the vessel drew up to the quay, deposited whatever it had on board, and withdrew. Often what it had on board was the post: odd bits of business she should have been attending to but, during this period, had no interest in whatsoever. Sometimes the skiff contained a person who would walk up to the house and pound on the door until, confused by her absence, they too would withdraw, though not before puzzling over the damp letters that had been left in the open box situated near the water. It was only during these spells of concealment that Annabelle became aware of herself, the fact that she had not bathed, or changed her clothes, or cleaned her house, or picked up the mail. She would huddle in a kind of fever of shame behind a cedar bush or a gooseberry bush, as if her previous self had joined with the visitor and was judging her condition. It was only then that it occurred to her that, had the gentleman she was looking for magically appeared, she would be in no state to receive him, only then that she admitted that she was never again going to have to receive him.
Still, the idea of his arrival, the reception of a guest, set off another bout of industrious activity and, after pulling from the cupboard bottles and powders and cereals and sugars that had not seen the light of day since Marie had departed for the hotel, Annabelle began to bake. Various small insects had died in the flour, the vanilla had become a gummy paste, and the sugar had transformed itself from crystals to a solid lump, the baking soda had almost disappeared, but none of this stopped her. She had fresh butter and she mixed all of the ingredients she could find into its greasy texture along with several jars of preserves she found in the cellar. Then she added a quantity of water and poured the mess she had made into round cake tins, square cake tins, cupcake tins, and finally onto a number of cookie sheets. As she gathered together the kindling and split logs in order to light the stove and heat the oven, she became aware that she was weeping, and weeping the way a child weeps, loudly, and for effect. Once she heard herself, she stopped and concentrated instead on placing the racks in the oven so that she could push almost all of the tins inside it.
The temperature inside the room rose. Annabelle sat perspiring beside the window looking at the lake.
Finally a skiff she recognized, though not at all the one she was waiting for, was seen on the horizon, coming from the open lake and not from the direction of Kingston. It annoyed her that Maurice would arrive at this moment as if he knew she was not herself and was consciously intending to invade her privacy. Perhaps he had been sent to spy on her. Well, he wouldn’t find her, she would remain hidden, and he would go away again. She looked at her forearms, which were almost unrecognizable: reddened by sun, covered with flour dust, and laced with scratches from long periods of time spent in the centre of bushes. She remembered the man’s fingers on her shoulder, the Masonic ring, the grey and black hairs that grew just above the knuckles.
It was the look on Maurice’s face as he approached the house that caused Annabelle to become instantly sane. As if she had snapped shut a book she had been reading—a fantasy about a foreign country, perhaps—and the world of numbered things she had inhabited for the past few days closed with a bang and her previous life opened before her in a violent rush. She forgot all about the latches and doorknobs and piles of discarded lumber. She forgot all about Gilderson and his big warm hand and her own bony shoulders. She forgot all about the baking. She gazed with horror at her unkempt flowerbeds and vegetable garden. Then she looked again at Maurice’s face, and the last vestiges of trance drained out of her. Even from this distance she coul
d see he too had been weeping; there was sorrow in the way he carried his body, even his hands appeared to be sad. Annabelle rose to her feet and called her nephew’s name. She was certain that he had come to deliver some terrible news. Marie, she suddenly knew, was dead.
When after a while they pulled away from the quay Annabelle remembered the small, dark figure she had seen arriving in the sleigh boat all those years ago and the Gilderson daydream fell forever from her mind. She realized, just for a moment, that in recent days while she had been wandering around her empty house and vacant island half-crazed, almost as if she had been acting out the silly Lady of stupid Shallot, Marie, her better, more beautiful self, lay trembling on the edge of death. Annabelle was filled with grief and shame, and fully herself again. She recalled her friend at the orphanage talking about the carved angels walking on the snow. Marie was not the dying type, they had agreed on that distant afternoon.
She would bring her back to the island to be buried. She would have a small white angel carved for her grave. What would any of their lives have been without the quickening that an orphan had caused in the only world that Annabelle had ever known?
Branwell remained at the Ballagh Oisin for another year and a half after his wife’s death. Alone and miserable, he responded only now and then to messages from his sister, who begged him to return immediately to Timber Island. This was something he had decided he would never do for, despite the fact that his dear wife was buried there, he would not allow himself to be a gravestander. His father, he remembered, had often carried on about the senselessness of an Irish poem entitled “I’m Stretched on Your Grave,” and somehow the idea of the futility of such gestures had stuck for all these years in his mind. Even Marie would not have approved of him moping around her headstone under the spell of what his father would have called “Irish behaviour.” No, he would leave the tending of the grave to poor Annabelle, who had once told him she had always believed that Marie was her other, more beautiful self.
A Map of Glass Page 23
