Free Storm Glass by Jane Urquhart Page A

time. They look like spiders with tumours on their elbows.” (By this time he was setting up his tripod.) “They look like what the bone structure of octopi would look like if octopi had bones. I am very, very fond of these trees.”
    “I think,” I replied, “that they should leave it all alone.” I meant the trees, the footprints, the child’s game, the waste-baskets’ shadows.
    “Who are
they?”
he asked.
    This kind of question was designed by him to put a stop to any monologue that might have been cooking in my head. He could sense these monologues in advance, knew when they were about to come creeping into a walk, or a meal, or even a drive in the car. The trouble with the monologues, he had told me, was that although they started quietly, they quickly escalated, turning from apparent reverie to obvious accusation. This bored him. He hated my monologues. Put a stop to them, was his motto, before they go too far. Nip them in the bud with unanswerable questions. This time the echoes asked,
Why do they do it? Why do they do it?
They became fainter and fainter, however, and finally disappeared altogether.
    While he photographed the trees, I sat down on one of the green benches and searched through my cluttered purse for a pen and a piece of scrap paper. I was going to sketch the stone wall on the other side of the street. I had never done this before. I had never sketched anything. But now I wanted to. Not that the wall was worth sketching; it was just that there was absolutely nothing linear about its surface, making it impossible for anyone without skill to render it at all. Now I wanted to try something impossible, something I could work on for a while and then throw away saying,
this is impossible
. Something where the outcome was certain.
    He had attached a telephoto lens to his camera and had removed it from the tripod. The camera was suspended from a leather strap around his neck and his hands were clasped behindhis back. He looked like a soldier at ease. But I knew what he was going to do. He was going to photograph the particularly gnarled parts of the trees where the branches bent in peculiar directions. He had always been very interested in detail. Once he had even shot a series of hotel curtains up close—so that you could see the differences.
    “This is impossible,” I said as he wandered around clicking the camera. Then I crumpled up my piece of scrap paper and threw it in one of the metal wastebaskets.
    “What was that?” he asked absently.
    “A telephone number,” I answered. I wasn’t exactly lying. There was a telephone number on that scrap of paper, on the other side. I had no idea whose.
    The sun got lower. We began walking again towards the end of town.
    “I like this kind of late afternoon light,” he said. “It picks out detail, intensifies colour.”
    I looked down at my shoes which seemed a little intensified, then back at my shadow, which seemed the same, except that it was longer.
    “Not too much detail in a shadow,” I commented.
    “No,” he agreed.
    I began to feel even hungrier than I had in the hotel room and remembered another kind of plate that they sometimes had in restaurants, besides the ones with flowers or the ones with the peacocks. These were usually white and had a picture of the hotel on them along with its name. I was trying to remember whether the picture was sketched in black or grey and finally decided that it was probably black in the original but had turned to grey because people had dragged knives and forksacross it year after year. This could happen to any picture on any plate. I’d noticed otherwise normal peacocks with their heads or tails worn away or flowers without petals, but I’d never really thought about it until now.
    “Notice how the light picks out the detail on that wall,” he was saying. “Makes it almost linear. It’s only in this kind of light,” he went on, “that even moss can throw a shadow.” He set up his tripod again,