Storm Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  The cottage was cold and bright and clean and sharp; the way certain landscapes look in the sun after a sudden, fierce shower. Dustless, smokeless. Even the fire, when I lit it, had a polished look, not at all what you associate with flame, and appeared slightly ridiculous quivering away in the sunlight. But then, I came from a country where central heating abounds and where fires are lit for decorative purposes at night. I remembered that things always looked different to me in a warm room and I felt that this fire might change shape and colour as it began to throw out heat.

  Then John’s shadow nudged my elbow and suggested that I might want to write John a letter in which I could describe my new surroundings. But I knew that a letter from me was the last thing that John wanted to see slipping through the letter slot into the entrance hall of his real life, lying there on the welcome mat demanding an explanation for its presence. So I contented myself, instead, with taking the shadow on a tour of the place we were to inhabit for the next few months.

  As it had been, in the beginning, a hand-loom weaver’s cottage, a row of three light-giving windows dominated the single room on the first and second floors, providing all that sunlight that competed with the fire. Upstairs these windows reproduced themselves in sun squares on the lavender-coloured bedspread where I now flung my suitcase. As I unpacked I looked outside to the swells of the hills; moorgrass and then higher snow, and higher still, the uninterrupted blue of the sky. Suddenly, I remembered that there had been sky in some of the rooms I had entered with John, that occasionally, when the room had been on the tenth or eleventh floor he had felt safe enough to leave the curtains open and there had been all that blue behind gigantic sheets of plate glass. And once a bird of some sort had swung down from above and had hit the invisible barrier of the window with a thud that resembled the sound of a snowball hitting a car window. John had been very disturbed by that and had pulled the curtains so that no more birds would be fooled and harmed. So that they would know that the barrier existed and would always exist and would never change or go away. Because it made it different from all the other times, the sound of that bird breaking itself against our solid transparent window was the only real memory that John and I shared though neither one nor the other of us ever mentioned it. And sometimes I actually believed I could hear an echo of that noise when we were making love; as if it were love itself trying to get into the room, stunning itself on the invisible barrier and then falling ten stories to its death.

  By the time Mr. Southam delivered the coal it had been dark for several hours. I had prepared and eaten my evening meal and the fire was looking warm and natural in the lamplight. Little decorative parts of the cottage that I hadn’t noticed in the afternoon were beginning to attract my attention: a small Staffordshire piece, for instance, of a lady sitting on a horse with a man standing beside her, and a basket, shaped like a frog, with buttons, thread and a needle inside. There was also a round beaten-brass plate over the mantel with a scene depicting lots of good cheer in an old-fashioned pub. One of the men on the plate resembled John in the shape of his high forehead and the way he held his head before he lifted a glass to his lips. I was just thinking this when I heard the coal spilling into the cellar below. Seconds later both Southams presented themselves at my door and were enticed inside for a drink.

  Mrs. Southam inquired about tea towels and can openers while Mr. Southam settled back into one of the large comfortable arm chairs and lit his pipe. Although they spoke to me separately and rarely to each other there was an authority about their togetherness. You simply would never question it, even in a crowded room. I, who had never been married, was, for some reason, at that moment astonished by the irrefutable fact of it. I found myself addressing questions to both of them as if they were merely two sides of the same person.

  “How long have you people owned the cottage?” I asked and “Was it in need of many repairs?”

  “Two or three years,” Mr. Southam answered. “I put in window glass, fixed the door, replaced the stairs.”

  “Stanley is a carpenter,” Mrs. Southam added with a certain amount of pride. “He paints the walls too, after renters leave that have been here for a long time.”

  A long time, I thought, John and I were never anywhere for a long time. If you added up all the hours we had spent together they probably wouldn’t fill a week.

  Mr. Southam knocked the bowl of his pipe against the edge of a thick glass ashtray making a little mountain there of burnt and unburnt tobacco.

  “It were unsightly when I bought it, which is why it weren’t dear. A lad lived there, like a gypsy, with nothing but the clothes on his back and what he grew out there.” He jerked his head towards the windows which looked out on a small garden. “That and what he caught on t’ moor.”

  I imagined a barefoot boy, about fourteen, wearing a torn shirt and sporting a dagger in his teeth. One of Peter Pan’s lost boys.

  “Well, he were hardly a boy by the time he departed,” said Mrs. Southam speaking at last to her husband, “he must have been near thirty year old.”

  “Did he own the cottage?” I asked as my mind erased the image of the lost boy.

  “Aye,” said Mrs. Southam, “in that it were left to him by his Gran who he had lived with almost always as his parents had died. Old Mrs. Wetherald she kept the place right clean but after she died he let it open up.”

  “Open up?” I asked.

  “You know,” Mr. Southam explained, “a window goes and you don’t replace it with nothing but cardboard. Roof tiles blow away in the wind. It’s a hazard around here, the wind.”

  As they were leaving Mrs. Southam asked me if I would like a pint or two of milk delivered to the door and because I found the idea quaint I said that I would.

  “I’ll just tell the milkman, then, to come around and speak to you,” she continued, “I’ll just tell him there’s someone wanting milk up to John’s cottage.”

  I was speechless with shock and astonishment and my surprise must have shown in my face.

  “That were his name,” she said, “the lad who owned the house. Everyone in the village still calls this John’s cottage.”

  That first night, although it was still clear, the wind picked up and started fooling around with everything that wasn’t nailed down and several things that were. I could hear the empty garbage tins bumping against the wooden box that Mr. Southam had built to hold them and all of the window panes rattling in their sashes. I could also hear the kitchen door downstairs creaking slightly on its hinges because this was a wind that knew how to get inside despite the efforts of an excellent carpenter like Mr. Southam to keep it out. The letter slot was clattering away with a rhythm that was almost musical and I thought about how John’s letter slot would never feel the caress of words from me and how this one would hear nothing from him either, and I wondered what letters, if any, had come through the slot for that other John, that wild John who had owned the cottage.

  I lay upstairs in the lavender bed with all the lights out and the curtains open. Where there had been three panels of sunlight earlier in the day there were now three panels of moonlight and, although I couldn’t see the moon from where I lay, it was doing a great job of brightening the room. Getting in everywhere with the same persistence as the wind. I stayed awake for so long, not unhappily, that I actually watched those panels move across the bed. I felt warm and safe, despite all the wild activity around me and eventually, after a few hours, I fell asleep.

  I was awakened at about three o’clock by an even more furious wind and an even louder banging, this time coming from the little attic room on the third floor and I knew something had broken loose up there and that I would have to investigate if I was to get any more sleep that night. As I climbed the narrow staircase I remembered from childhood all the things that could possibly sneak into your bedroom at night; Peter Pan and Tinkerbell and Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Guardian Angels and The Lord to take your soul if you happened to die before you woke and I decide
d that the moon and the wind should be added to this list of benevolent intruders.

  Although there were no windows in the tiny attic room it was, if possible, even more filled with moonlight than the bedroom below and much more filled with wind. The source of both these elements, and of the banging noise, was a small skylight whose latch, for some reason, was not fastened. As I reached up to secure the mechanism I looked directly into the face of the moon which was framed, dead centre, in the single pane of glass. It was a male face; startling and powerful. John, I thought, sadly resigned to my obsession. But no, it wasn’t the face I was running away from, or even the face of the shadow I’d brought with me. It was some other face. The face of a stranger—a special stranger. A face filled with all the oddly familiar unfamiliarity of someone you are going to get to know very well, very soon.

  I spent the next few days exploring the village and everywhere I went people spoke to me about the cottage and about the strange John who had lived there. He was evidently a great favourite and everyone became kind and friendly the moment they discovered where I was staying. “John’s cottage,” they said over and over, smiling, leaning on garden walls, standing behind counters, sitting on stools in the pub, until, after a few encounters I would announce proudly, “I’m living in John’s cottage,” and wait for the positive response. “Ah, John,” the men would say, “he were a good mate.” “That John,” the women would add, “that rascal.” And in their voices there was a memory of a benevolent teaser; a memory of proximity and warmth.

  By the third day the cottage was warm all the time. I had learned the fire: how to build it and restructure it, how to move it around in the little theatre of its hearth. How to make it leap up or fold down into glowing coals that both kept and gave away heat all night long. I knew how to construct that gentle slope that meant that when I returned after four hours in the pub in the evening it would still be strong and how to construct that steeper slope that would guarantee that after nine hours of sleep I would descend the stairs into comfort. Even though the wind shrieked all night long and crept in through every crack it could.

  Those early mornings, though, I usually awoke to the shadow, and with a start, as if it had dreamed all night beside me, wakened sooner than I and then dug its elbow into my ribs. Especially on those still, cloudy days when neither wind nor sun demanded entrance to the cottage. Then I would lie flat on the bed for some time and struggle, almost physically, with some of the things that John had said to me before I left. “You should get married and have children,” he said, or “I can’t just change my life for you.” These statements followed by long silences and me adrift in a sea of pain. Remembering sentences like these in the cottage I would be attacked by a feeling of vertigo so intense the bed would be like Peter Pan’s conquered pirate ship careering through the sky.

  But then I would dig my hands into the flesh of the mattress and force myself up and out and onto the floor. Then downstairs to the reliable fire—its warmth, its comfort.

  On Friday nights everyone in the village over the age of sixteen came to the pub to talk about animals and unemployment, births, deaths and current events. When they discussed weather, which in that riding was difficult to avoid, they talked about it in terms of its absence indoors. “There is no rain in here,” they would say as they entered through the door and began to remove their dripping outer garments, or “there’s no ice over there by the fire.”

  “John let the rain in,” one of them might say to me knowing by now that my interest was acute—didn’t I live in his cottage? “When the roof tiles blew away he just let them blow. Mind the time,” this narrator would continue, turning to include his neighbour on the other side of the bench, “that river came right down the stairs and another one in the kitchen door at the back and out by the door at the front.”

  “Moor foxes,” one of the women told me, “scampered in and out of the cottage like small children, and birds nested right on the kitchen shelves.”

  “Moles,” an elderly farmer announced, “burrowing up between the flags near the fire.”

  “John would have regular waterfalls coming down the stairs and never mind a bit.”

  “And what about the fire?” I asked, curious because of my own recent mastery of same.

  “Oh, John always had a good fire and a good pot beside it full of strong tea. He was right comfortable there, was John.”

  Yes, I thought, he would be. Did Snow White lack for comfort when she lived in the cottage with the Seven Dwarfs?—which, if I remember my Disney movies, was full of turquoise birds and baby deer and rabbits of all sizes and lantern-carrying dwarfs scurrying in and out of the doors. Poor Snow White. She wasn’t very comfortable anywhere else; not in her stepmother’s castle, not in her glass catafalque, not in whatever place her awakening prince lugged her off to. But there in that disordered cottage she glowed to such an extent that you were certain that comfort was the rule she lived by. And how comfortable Wendy appeared to be in her night nursery with its wide open windows, its flying boys, its fairies, its dog nanny! She may have been occasionally surprised but she was certainly never ill at ease.

  “What happened to John?” I wanted to know. I asked this question several times during my evenings at the pub. “Oh,” they invariably answered vaguely, and without sadness, “he sold the cottage and moved away. He were a good lad, were John.”

  A good lad who was becoming, for me, as unreal and as real as a memorized fairy tale.

  I walked during the day either up to the higher moorlands where snow still shone or down into the valley below the cottage where the first flowers of spring were beginning to appear. It was a choice between two seasons and a choice also between openness and enclosure. But it wasn’t long before I realized that although the winds were not as strong in the valley the sense of enclosure wasn’t as strong either as one might expect in contrast to the sweep of the moors. The difference was in the details of the place—the crumbling walls, the becks, the wooden bridges, the trees, which were noticeably absent on higher ground. The moors were composed of great swaths of ling, heather and bilberry and the colours there were earthy charcoals, sepias and umbers. The valley was a deep, lush green.

  Whether I sauntered down from above or climbed up from below, when I returned I always dug for a while in John’s garden. Once I unearthed the arm of a china doll, unbroken, with its little hand curved into a shape like a bowl. Although this small object could never have been part of anything that belonged to the cottage’s John I kept it with me always as a reminder of him and what he was beginning to represent to me.

  Oh banisher of shadows, oh heart like a cup, filling.

  One day when I’d wandered farther than usual down the length of the valley I came across a bit of architecture that I decided was the very essence of John—the new John, the one I was getting to know. There he stood, constructed of strong millstone grit, surrounded by tangled clouds of what would become, in summer, wild roses. A pure stream of water ran straight through the middle of him carrying trout, those bright-eyed beauties of fresh water. Birds drank there. Some bathed. Sun and wind dominated for the roof had been gone for a long time. Below all that sky row after row of glassless windows—the true wind-holes of old, which if you stood outside the walls allowed you to see the confused garden of the interior, or if you climbed through them into that garden, gave you clear views of the rest of the world.

  After that it wasn’t long before the idea of John of the Open Windows, as I began to call him, stepped in through his open cottage door and, of course, I welcomed him as I would welcome the returning spirit of any house. The shadow of John of the Neutral Rooms was preparing to leave me anyway, unable as he was to live in open spaces.

  Everywhere there is weather now, it colours all the rooms as the idea and I sleep in the lavender bed. And then there are the elements that belong to us; song of wind, tint of moonlight until morning. The reliable fire. Then birdsong, the bright eyes of a wild animal gaining entrance to y
our life and wind breathing spring up to the higher moorlands.

  FIVE WHEELCHAIRS

  Shoes

  Later that evening he took off his shoes. He tossed them casually under the grand piano and began dancing. Although he began dancing, he did not stop drinking. He was capable of balancing a full glass of wine on his forehead. He did that now; balancing and drinking, balancing and drinking. The removal of the shoes helped him with the balancing. It also helped him with the dancing. He didn’t need any help with the drinking.

  The carpet was a soft grey colour and was made of pure wool. Wine from unbalanced glasses had formed permanent purple stains on its surface. But they were mementoes of another time, before he had become polished, practised, professional; before he had learned all there was to know about balance and before he had learned the little that he knew about dancing. He hadn’t spilled a drop for months now, except into his open mouth. What was more, he had become able, by a simple bending of the knees, to refill his glass without removing it from his forehead. A master indeed!

  She watched him, with some embarrassment, from her wheelchair in the corner. She thought he looked ridiculous, then she thought he looked charming, then she thought he looked ridiculous again. She wondered if balancing acts like this were part of the awesome responsibility one assumed when one was able to move about of one’s own accord; that is to say, without the chair. She thought of balancing her teacup on her own forehead but realized that dancing was a necessary, and for her impossible, part of the routine.

  Ah, but he was charming dancing there in her living room, moving precariously from step to step like a Niagara daredevil. But oh, there was such tension when he lurched forward or backward in order to prevent a tumble or spill. After a full evening of it she would be exhausted for days; lacking the strength to play show tunes on her piano, lacking the strength to whistle. In fact, she dreaded these performances, which caused her emotions to swing wildly from pleasure to tension and back again. And yet she was somehow addicted and, perhaps because she felt inwardly that no home should be without one, he danced for her often. And balanced too.