She was alone in the room now. As alone as she would be a few months later when the brightness of the last breath closed on the dark, forever. She had imagined the voyage in that dark—her thoughts speaking in an alien tongue—textural black landscape—non-visual—swimming towards the change. And then she had hoped that she would be blessed with some profound last words, some small amount of theatre to verify the end of things. But somehow she sensed it would be more of a letting go, slipping right through the centre of the concentric circles that are the world and into a private and inarticulate focus, and then …
The shore had changed again and again since her first summers there. One year there had been unexpected sand for her babies to play in. She remembered fine grains clinging to their soggy diapers, and their flat sturdy footprints which had existed for seconds only before the lake gathered them up. But a storm the following winter had altered the patterns of the water and the next year her small children had staggered over beach stones to the edge. In subsequent weeks their bare feet had toughened, allowing them to run over rocks and pebbles without pain. Her own feet had resisted the beach stones summer after summer, forcing her to wear some kind of shoes until she left the land for the smooth softness of the water.
Her husband, larger, more stubborn, less willing to admit to weaknesses than she, would brave the distance of the beach, like the children, barefoot. But his feet had never toughened, and standing, as she sometimes had, on the screened veranda, she had watched the pain move through his stiffened legs and up his back until, like a large performing animal, he had fallen, backwards and laughing, into the lake.
He was not there now, unwilling to admit to this, her last, most impossible weakness.
Yet he came and went, mostly at mealtimes, when a hired woman came to cook for them. He came in heavy with the smell of the farm where he had worked and worked, making things come to be; a field of corn, a litter of pigs, or even a basket of smooth, brown eggs. The farm took all of his time now, as if, as she moved down this isolated tunnel towards that change, it was even more important that he make things come to be. And though this small summer cottage was only minutes away from the earth that he worked, the fact of her lying there had made it a distance too great for him to travel except for the uncontrollable and predictable necessities of hunger and of sleep.
The beach was smaller this year, and higher. Strong spring winds had urged the lake to push the stones into several banks, like large steps, up to the grass. These elevations curved in a regular way around the shoreline as if a natural amphitheatre had been mysteriously provided so that audiences of pilgrims might come and sit and watch the miracle of the lake. They never arrived, of course, but she sometimes found it fun to conjure the image of the beach filled with spectators, row on row, cheering on the glide of a wave, the leap of a fish, the flash of a white sail on the horizon. In her imagination she could see their backs, an array of colourful shirts, covering the usual solid grey of the stones.
And yet, even without the imaginary spectators, the grey was not entirely solid. Here and there a white stone shone amongst the others, the result of some pre-Cambrian magic. In other years the children had collected these and old honey pails full of them still lined the windowsills on the porch. The children had changed, had left, had disappeared into adulthood, lost to cities and success. And yet they too came and went with smiles and gifts and offers of obscure and indefinite forms of help. She remembered mending things for them; a toy, a scratch on the skin, a piece of clothing, and she understood their helpless, inarticulate desire to pretend that now they could somehow mend her.
In her room there were two windows. One faced the lake, the other the weather, which always seemed to come in from the east. In the mornings when the sun shone, a golden rectangle appeared like an extra blanket placed on the bed by some anonymous benevolent hand. On those days her eyes moved from the small flame of her opal ring to the millions of diamonds scattered on the lake and she wished that she could lie out there among them, rolling slightly with the current until the sun moved to the other side of the sky. During the heat of all those summers she had never strayed far from the water, teaching her children to swim or swimming herself in long graceful strokes, covering the distance from one point of land to another, until she knew by heart the shoreline and the horizon visible from the small bay where the cottage was situated. And many times she had laughed and called until at last, with a certain reluctance, her husband had stumbled over the stones to join her.
He seldom swam now, and if he did it was early in the morning before she was awake. Perhaps he did not wish to illustrate to her his mobility, and her lack of it. Or perhaps, growing older, he wished his battle with the lake to be entirely private. In other times she had laughed at him for his method of attacking the lake, back bent, shoulders drawn forward, like a determined prize fighter, while she slipped effortlessly by, as fluid as the water, and as relaxed. His moments in the lake were tense, and quickly finished; a kind of enforced pleasure, containing more comedy than surrender.
But sometimes lately she had awakened to see him, shivering and bent, scrambling into his overalls in some far corner of the room and knowing he had been swimming, she would ask the customary questions about the lake. “Was it cold? Was there much of an undertow?” and he had replied with the customary answers. “Not bad, not really, once you are in, once you are used to it.”
That morning he had left her early, without swimming. The woman had made her bed, bathed her and abandoned her to the warm wind that drifted in one window and the vision of the beach and the lake that occupied the other. Her eyes scanned the stones beyond the glass trying to remember the objects that, in the past, she had found among them. Trying to remember, for instance, the look and then the texture of the clean dry bones of seagulls; more delicate than the dried stems of chrysanthemums and more pleasing to her than that flower in full bloom. These precise working parts of once animate things were so whole in themselves that they left no evidence of the final breakdown of flesh and feather. They were suspended somewhere between being and non-being like the documentation of an important event and their presence somehow justified the absence of all that had gone before.
But then, instead of bone, she caught sight of a minuscule edge of colour, blue-green, a dusty shine, an irregular shape surrounded by rounded rocks—so small she ought not to have seen it, she ought to have overlooked it altogether.
“Storm glass,” she whispered to herself, and then she laughed realizing that she had made use of her husband’s words without thinking, without allowing the pause of reason to interrupt her response as it so often did. When they spoke together she sometimes tried expressly to avoid his words, to be in possession of her own, hard thoughts. Those words and thoughts, she believed, were entirely her own. They were among the few things he had no ability to control with either his force or his tenderness.
It must have been at least fifteen summers before, when the children, bored and sullen in the clutches of early adolescence, had sat day after day like ominous boulders on the beach, until she, remembering the honey pails on the windowsills, had suggested that they collect the small pieces of worn glass that were sometimes scattered throughout the stones. Perhaps, she had remarked, they could do something with them; build a small patio or path, or fill glass mason jars to decorate their bedrooms. It would be better, at least, than sitting at the water’s edge wondering what to do with the endless summer days that stretched before them.
The three children had begun their search almost immediately; their thin backs brown and shining in the hot sun. Most of the pieces they found were a dark ochre colour, beer bottles no doubt, thrown into the lake by campers from the provincial park fifteen miles down the road. But occasionally they would come across a rarer commodity, a kind of soft turquoise glass similar to the colour of bottles they had seen in antique shops with their mother. These fragments sometimes caused disputes over who had spotted them first but, as often as not, t
here were enough pieces to go fairly around. Still rarer and smaller were the particles of emerald green and navy blue, to be found among the tiny damp pebbles at the very edge of the shore, the remnants of bottles even more advanced in age than those that were available in the shops. But the children had seen these intact as well, locked behind the glass of display cases in the county museum. Often the word poison or a skull and crossbones would be visible in raised relief across the surface of this older, darker glassware. Their mother knew that the bottles had held cleaning fluid, which was as toxic now in its cheerful tin and plastic containers as it had been then housed in dark glass, but the children associated it with dire and passionate plots, perhaps involving pirates, and they held it up to their parents as the most important prize of all.
The combing of the beach had lasted two days, maybe three, and had become, for a while, the topic of family conversations. But one evening, she remembered, when they were all seated at the table, her husband had argued with her, insisting as he often did on his own personal form of definition—even in the realm of the activities of children.
“It’s really storm glass,” he had announced to the children who had been calling it by a variety of different names, “that’s what I always called it.”
“But,” she had responded, “I remember a storm glass from high school, from physics, something to do with predicting weather, I don’t know just what. But that’s what it is, not the glass out there on the beach.”
“No,” he had continued, “storms make it with waves and stones. That wears down the edges. You can’t take the edge off a piece of glass that lies at the bottom of a bird bath. Storms make it, it’s storm glass.”
“Well, we always called it beach glass, or sometimes water glass when we were children, and the storm glass came later when we were in high school.”
“It is storm glass,” he said, with the kind of grave finality she had come to know; a statement you don’t retract, a place you don’t return from.
It was after these small, really insignificant, disputes that they would turn silently away from each other for a while; she holding fiercely, quietly, to her own privacy, her own person. To him it seemed she refused out of stubbornness to accept his simplified sense of the order of things, that she wished to confuse him by leaning towards the complexities of alternatives. He was not a man of great intellect. Almost every issue that he had questioned had settled into fact and belief in early manhood. He clung to the predictability of these preordained facts with such tenacity that when she became ill the very enormity of the impending disorder frightened him beyond words and into the privacy of his own belief that it was not so, could not be happening to her, or, perhaps more importantly, to him. They did not speak of it but turned instead quietly from each other, she not wishing to defend her own tragedy, and he not wishing to submit to any reference to such monumental change.
But fifteen years before, in the small matter of the glass, the children had submitted easily, as children will, to the sound of his authority; and storm glass it had become. Within a week, however, their project had been abandoned in favour of boredom and neither path nor patio had appeared. Nevertheless, the glass itself appeared year after year among the stones on the beach and, try as she might, she could never quite control the impulse to pick it up. The desire to collect it was with her even now, creating an invisible tension, like a slim, taut wire, from her eyes to her hands to the beach as she lay confined within her room. It was, after all, a small treasure, an enigma; broken glass robbed by time of one of its more important qualities, the ability to cut. And though she could no longer rub it between her palms she knew it would be as firm and as strong as ever. And as gentle.
From where she lay she could see the lake and she knew that this was good; to be able to see the land and the end of the land, to be able to see the vast indefinite bowl of the lake. And she was pleased that she had seen the storm glass. She felt she understood the evolution of its story. What had once been a shattered dangerous substance now lay upon the beach, harmless, inert and beautiful after being tossed and rubbed by the real weather of the world. It had, with time, become a pastel memory of a useful vessel, to be carried, perhaps in a back pocket, and brought out and examined now and then. It was a relic of that special moment when the memory and the edge of the break softened and combined in order to allow preservation.
How long, she wondered, did it take, from the break on the rocks, through the storms of different seasons, to the change? When did the edges cease to cut?
That night he came in tired and heavy, followed by the smell of making things come to be. He spoke of problems with the farm, of obstinate machinery that refused to function or of crops with inexplicable malformations—events that, even in the power of his stubbornness, he could never hope to control. And when he turned to look at her his eyes were like fresh broken glass: sharp, dangerous, alive. She answered him with kindness, though, knowing the storm ahead and then the softening of edges yet to come.
“There’s storm glass on the beach,” she said.
Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of three books of poetry, I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan, a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass, and three previous internationally acclaimed novels, The Whirlpool, Changing Heaven, and Away. Her fiction has been translated into numerous foreign languages, and has earned her awards and honours, including the Trillium Award, the Marian Engel Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France, and, for her bestselling novel Away, a place on the shortlist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In the fall of 1997, her fourth novel, The Underpainter, was published to wide critical acclaim internationally, won the 1997 Governor General’s Award, was shortlisted for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and became a long-time national bestseller. She was recently named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
Urquhart has received five honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and, during the winter and spring of 1997, she held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She has also given readings and lectures in Canada, Britain, Europe, the U.S.A., and Australia.
Jane Urquhart lives in southwestern Ontario.
Copyright © 1987 by Jane Urquhart
McClelland & Stewart edition published 2000
First published by the Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1987
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Urquhart, Jane, 1949
Storm glass
eISBN: 978-1-55199-428-4
I. Title.
PS8591.R68S86 2000 C813’.54 C99-933024-1
PR9199.3.U76S86 2000
Many of these stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies.
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