A Map of Glass Read online

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR A Map of Glass

  “Urquhart’s passion for the past and the land are at full poetic play in this intricate story of love, loss and memory.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A mesmerizing exposition of ideas, slowly nurtured to maturity with integrity and a rare meticulous intelligence.”

  — Irish Independent

  “A serious, mature novel abundantly displaying the power and skill Urquhart has built up over decades in her poetry and prose.… Urquhart’s considerable following, or anyone willing to be seduced by her cadences … will be moved by the truth in her story and enchanted by its beauty.”

  — Quill & Quire

  “ A Map of Glass is carefully observed, finely nuanced, and deeply involving.”

  — Richard Bachmann, A Different Drummer Books

  “Urquhart’s eerie, intense meditation about damaged seekers tracking salvation balances personal chaos with wider reflections on life and loss … . Achieves an odd beauty and unsettling urgency that may linger beyond the expected.”

  — Irish Times

  “A beautifully written elegy.”

  — Financial Times

  “An excellent piece of historical fiction … .”

  — National Post

  “Urquhart excels at making 100 years ago feel as vibrant as yesterday.”

  — Christian Science Monitor

  “Exquisite … . A marvellous, pristine ornament, an intricate poem.”

  — The Australian

  “A passion for history is the blood that keeps the narrative heart beating.…”

  — Toronto Star

  BOOKS BY JANE URQUHART

  FICTION

  The Whirlpool (1986)

  Storm Glass (short stories, 1987)

  Changing Heaven (1990)

  Away (1993)

  The Underpainter (1997)

  The Stone Carvers (2001)

  A Map of Glass (2005)

  Sanctuary Line (2010)

  NON-FICTION

  L. M. Montgomery (2009)

  POETRY

  I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace (1981)

  False Shuffles (1982)

  The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan (1985)

  Some Other Garden (2000)

  AS EDITOR

  The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007)

  Copyright © 2005 by Jane Urquhart

  Cloth edition published 2005

  Emblem edition published 2006

  This Emblem edition published 2010

  Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  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, or stored in a retrieval system, 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.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Urquhart, Jane, 1949-

  A map of glass / Jane Urquhart.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-425-3

  I. Title.

  PS8591.R68M36 2010 c813’.54 c2010-903457-0

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The epigraph on this page is from Robert Smithson’s essay “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites” (1968), published in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. Copyright © 1996. Used by permission of the Estate and VAGA (Visual Artists and Galleries Association).

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For A.M. to the west of me

  And A.M. to the east of me.

  They encouraged and inspired.

  “By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a ‘logical two dimensional picture.’ A ‘logical picture’ differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for.”

  — Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings

  He is an older man walking in winter. And he knows this. There is white everywhere and a peculiar, almost acidic smell that those who have passed through childhood in a northern country associate with new, freshly fallen snow. He recognizes the smell but cannot bring to mind the word acidic. Snow, walking, and winter are the best he can come up with—these few words—and then the word older, which is associated with effort. Effort is what he is making; the effort to place one foot in front of the other, the effort required to keep moving, to keep moving toward the island. It might have been more than an hour ago that he remembered, and then forgot, the word island. But even now, even though the word for island has gone, he believes he is walking toward a known place. He has a map of the shoreline in his brain; its docks and rundown wooden buildings, a few trees grown in the last century. Does he have the word for trees? Sometimes yes, but mostly no. He is better with landforms. Island—though it is gone at this moment—is a word that stays longer than most; island, peninsula, hill, valley, moraine, escarpment, shoreline, river, lake are all words that have passed in and out of his mind in the course of the morning, along with the odd hesitant, fragmented attempt at his name, which has come to him only partially, once as what he previously would have called the article An, then later as the conjunction And.

  Tears are sliding over the bones of his face, but these are tears caused by the dazzle of the sun in front of him, not by sorrow. Sorrow and the word for sorrow disappeared some months ago. Terror is the only emotion that visits him now, often accompanied by a transparent curtain of blinding gold, but even this is mercifully fleeting, often gone before he fully recognizes it. He does not remember the word gold. He does not remember that in the past he saw the real colours of the world.

  He senses an unusually cluttered form in his immediate vicinity: “a fence,” he once would have called it. It would have brought to mind the “path-masters” and surveyors of the past, but now he knows it only as something that has not grown out of the earth, something that is impeding his progress. As he stands bewildered near the fence, he looks at the intricate shadows of the wire created by sunlight on the snow in front of him and the word tangle slips into his mind. He walks right through the tangle of the shadow, but is not able to gain passage through the wires themselves.

  He does not remember what to do with a fence, how to get over it, through it, past it, but his body makes a decision to run, to charge headlong into the confusion, and in fact this appears to have been the correct decision, for he has catapulted to the opposite side and has landed first on one shoulder, then on his stomach so that his face is in the snow. Snow, he thinks, and then, walking, which is what he must do to reach the island. He gropes for the word island, and has almost conquered it by the time he is back on his feet. But the shape and sound of it slips away again before he can grasp the meaning, slips away and is replaced by a phrase, and the phrase is the place the water touches all around.

  He knows the island was the beginning—knows this in a vague way, not having the words for either island or beginning. He must get to the place that water touches all around because wi
thout the beginning he cannot understand this point in time, this walk in the snow, the breath that comes into his mouth and then departs in small clouds like the ghosts of all the words he can no longer recall. If he can arrive at this beginning, he believes he will remember what was born there, and what came into being later, and later again, and later again—a theorem that might lead him to the now of effort and snow.

  He begins once again to move forward. Often he bumps against trees, but this does not worry him because he knows they are meant to be there, and will remain after he has passed by them. Like an animal, he is stepping by instinct through the trees, branch by branch, the smell of the destination on the edge of his consciousness. While he is among pines, an image of an enormous raft made of timber floats through his imagination and connects somehow, for an instant, with the word glass, which, in turn, connects again, for just an instant, with the word ballroom. In this daydream there are men with poles standing on the raft’s surface. Sometimes they are dancing. Sometimes they are kneeling, praying.

  When he comes to a break in the forest, he is perplexed by an area of openness that curls off to the left and to the right. Then, quite suddenly, inexplicably, he remembers a fact about winter rivers and their tributaries, how they become frozen, covered with snow. He is momentarily aware of some of the natural things he used to think about. He enunciates, quite clearly, the syllables of the word watershed, then straightens his shoulders, attentive to, and briefly suspicious of, the deep, bell-like sound of his own voice.

  He walks for some time on the hard, pale river, his left sleeve now and then brushing against the arms of snow-laden pines. Eventually his body comes to know it is exhausted and takes the decision to lie on the smooth bed of ice and snow. By now the sun is gone; it is a deep winter night of great clarity and great beauty. He can see points of light that he knows are stars, and yet he no longer knows the word for stars. When he rolls his head to the left and then the right, the still, leafless branches of the trees on the bank move with him, black against a darkening sky. “Tributaries,” he whispers, and the word fills him with comfort, and also with something larger, something that, were he able to recognize it, would resemble joy.

  He sleeps for a long time. And when he wakens he discovers that his body has been covered by a thick, drifting blanket that is soft and cold and white. The whole unnamed world is so beautiful to him now that he is aware he has left behind vast, unremembered territories, certain faces, and a full orchestra of sounds that he has loved. With enormous difficulty he lifts his upper body from the frozen, snow-covered river and allows his arms to rest on the drift in front of him. The palms of his gloved hands are open to the sky as if he were silently requesting that the world come back to him, that the broken connections of heart and mind be mended, that language and the knowledge of a cherished place re-enter his consciousness. He remains alert for several moments, but eventually his spine relaxes and his head droops and he says, “I have lost everything.”

  This is his first full sentence in more than a month. These are his last spoken words. And there is nobody there to hear his voice, nobody at all.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1 - The Revelations Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2 - The Bog Commissioners Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 3 - A Map of Glass Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Acknowledgements

  Discussion Questions for Reading Groups

  About the Author

  The Revelations

  ————

  At the northeastern end of Lake Ontario, toward the mouth of the wide St. Lawrence River, a number of islands begin to appear. Some of these are large enough to support several farms, a pattern of roads, perhaps a village, and are still serviced year-round by a modest flotilla of ferries that departs from and returns to Kingston Harbour. One or two minor islands are completely deserted in winter, having always been summer playgrounds rather than places of employment. There is a small, difficult-to-reach island, however, an island that a hundred years ago was busy with ships and lumber, that is now a retreat for visual artists and, for this reason, its single serviceable nineteenth-century building—a sail loft—has been renovated as a studio where an artist can live and work for a limited period of time, alone.

  On the final leg of his journey from his Toronto studio to this sail loft, Jerome McNaughton had kept his back to the mainland view and had watched instead the skeletal trees and tilting grey buildings on the island grow in size and, behind them, the less definable evergreen forest enlarging, like a motionless black cloud, as the boat drew nearer. He had chosen the equinoctial period of late winter, early spring for his residency on the island, and he had chosen it because of the transience he associated with the heavy sinking snow, the dripping icicles of the season. The difficulty of arriving at the place when the ice was either uncertain or breaking up altogether—the enforced isolation brought about by these difficulties—had attracted him as well.

  He had left Kingston Harbour on a Great Lakes coast guard icebreaker, onto the deck of which he had loaded a stack of firewood, enough food to last at least two weeks, a couple of bottles of wine, some whisky, camera equipment, and a backpack filled with winter clothing. Though it was only a mile or so from the city to the island, the men on board had thought him reckless to go out there alone in this season. They were somewhat mollified, however, when he admitted he had a cellphone. “You’ll be using it soon enough,” the captain had ventured. “Pretty grim out there this time of year.”

  Grim was what Jerome was after. Grimness, uncertainty, difficulty of access—a hermit in a winter setting, the figure concentrated and small against the cold blues and whites and greys that made up the atmosphere of the landscape, the season.

  Ordinarily, residencies were not permitted during the winter months, but the officials at the Arts Council were aware of his work, his growing reputation, knew from his Fence Line Series that he preferred to work with snow. A young woman whose voice had indicated that she was impressed by his dedication had made the arrangements with the coast guard and had speeded his application through the usual channels. In a matter of days he had found himself standing on the deck of the vessel, his whole body vibrating with the hum of the engine, then shuddering with the boat’s frame as the bow broke through the ice. The wind had repeatedly punched the side of his face, and there was not much warmth in the late March sun, but Jerome had preferred to remain on the deck in order to dispel the impression that there was a look about him, a scent maybe, that suggested longing, dependence.

  The captain was right though, he would be using the phone soon, to call Mira. He had to admit that he wanted to please the girl who had miraculously remained in his life for almost two years, that he felt concern for her and must honour her affection for him. In this way he had been able, so far, to slip easily around the disturbing truth of his own feelings, the pleasure he felt when thinking of her, and the ease with which he remained in her company. He was almost always thinking about her.

  For the time being, however, he had stayed focused on his journey, intrigued by the dark, jagged path the boat had left in its wake as it moved through the ice. It would be a temporary incision, he knew, one that would likely be healed by the night’s falling temperature, so he removed his camera from th
e case, then leaned against the railing and photographed the irregular channel. The opened water was like a slash of black paint on a stretched white canvas. Breaking the river. He liked the sound of the phrase and would remember to record it in his notebook once he got settled in the loft.

  He himself would never be a painter, considered himself instead a sort of chronicler. He wanted to document a series of natural environments changed by the moods of the long winter. He wanted to mark the moment of metamorphosis, when something changed from what it had been in the past. He was drawn to the abandoned scraps of any material: peeling paint, worn surfaces, sun bleaching, rust, rot, the effects of prolonged moisture, as well as to the larger shifts of erosion and weather and season. This island was situated at the mouth of the great river that flowed out of Lake Ontario, then cut through the vast province of Quebec before losing its shape to the sea. The idea that he would be staying near the point where open water entered the estuary excited him and made the pull of the island stronger.

  Now, two days after he’d arrived, as he stood near the shore with the camera around his neck and a snow shovel in his hand, the phrase breaking the river was still fresh in his mind, and he had decided that it would be the title of the first series he would complete on the island. He observed, by looking at the shards of ice along the shoreline, that, in effect, the river was broken by the island. Arguably, this would be true even in summer in that the island would break up the current of the water that passed on either side of it. But it was the ice that interested Jerome, the way it had heaved itself up on end and onto the shore like some ancient species attempting to discard an aquatic past. He plunged the handle of the shovel into a nearby drift, where it remained upright like a dark road sign. Then he walked away and began to search the surroundings for slim fallen branches of a suitable length.