Storm Glass Read Online Free Page B

had continued well into this month of March. Snow was still present on the tops of the distant hills and the windows of the house were fogged in a way that suggested to me that, although it might be warmerin than out, one would still be able to see one’s breath in the parlour. (John’s breath or mine?)
    “You’ll be wanting,” she was saying, “coal, … maybe smokeless like we’re supposed to burn. But it’s very dear and we burn the old stuff and never get caught. Stanley will make delivery down chute,” she added, thoughtfully.
    “Stanley …?”
    “Me husband.”
    Shades of John’s wife slid into my imagination. I had never met her and had no idea what she was like. But I had invented her, over and over. A practical, attractive woman of the skirt and sweater variety—one who cooked wholesome meals or, if I was feeling tired, a snivelling neurotic with perpetual psychosomatic pains and the ability to manipulate through guilt.
    When John travelled to other places, which wasn’t very often, it was she who accompanied him and so, later, when he spoke about those rare times it would be she who shared his memories.
    He shared nothing but poured concrete with me. Nothing but walls and windows with curtains obscuring views and doors which either locked you in or out.
    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 thatthings 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 goaway. 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