The Whirlpool by Jane Urquhart Page A

She wouldn’t ever want to be Patmore’s wife, Patmore’s angel. Not now, not ever.

T he next time Patrick entered the woods above the whirlpool he was prepared and unencumbered. He had left his bird dictionary and his wildflower book on a small wooden table at the farm. He had dressed in browns and greens for the purpose of camouflage. He had snuck through the orchards like a deserter, his fieldglasses bumping quietly against his ribs.
    He was sure she would be there.
    The previous days had been overcast, wet, hardly weather to be reading Browning in the woods. Yet somehow, Patrick could not imagine this woman occupying rooms. He believed she would have remained throughout the downpour, hardly moving except to turn the pages of her book. Patrick had stayed indoors, watching the fog in the orchard through the window and also reading Browning, as if in preparation.
    At night he dreamed of faceless women, shadows of leaves moving on their white skin.
    He was sure she would be there and rejected any possibility that she might have been a transient, a traveller, one who could have paused in that spot merely to catch her breath… for à rest. Something in her posture suggested permanence. The woods were easy with her. And she would be there. He knew it.
    Until that moment a week earlier, it had never occurred to him that a figure would enter any of his landscapes. They were fierce places, wild with growth, crazy with weather. Places where, a hundred miles north, huge fires ate their way through darkness while animals ran helplessly before them. Patrick feared the fires though he knew they rarely travelled this far south. He feared them and dreamed them, imagining the inside of his rooms turning orange.
    The fires, he supposed, had never made an appearance on this woman’s mind.
    Once, when he was a child, a neighbouring barn had burned in winter, melting the snow for yards around. He would always remember the heat of that fire on his face and the cold and the cast of the fire on the faces around him.
    Terrifying.
    This woman’s face was cool, absorbed.
    Now as Patrick crossed the car tracks at the edge of the woods he was pleased to see that the rain had brought the foliage out to such an extent that it created a solid mesh of light green. This screen would perfect his camouflage.
    Once he stepped onto the path he began to move in the manner of Indians, checking the ground for fallen twigs and avoiding them, performing a sort of silent, drunken dance. He was amazed to find himself in a set of circumstances where even the snap of a twig might alter everything utterly. Normally, landscape seemed too large for him to have any effect at all upon his surroundings. Now, detail drew him in, connecting him with the earth beneath him. The floor of the woods became an obstacle course, cluttered with natural traps that could result in error.
    He recognized the spot he was searching for by the familiar sumac bush and a small, unhealthy cedar that looked as if it couldn’t decide whether to grow beyond shrubhood. Crouching down behind the latter, and adjusting himself to the most comfortable hidden position, he brought the glasses up to his eyes and focused them on the correct location.
    No woman.
    Patrick was dumbfounded. He
knew
she would be there. How could this portion of the forest exist were she not in it? He wanted to start all over again; to walk out the door, over the orchards, through the woods, to approach this spot one more time. As if there had been a mistake in his route that he could now correct. He would do it all over again, right to the moment of lifting his glasses to his eyes. Then she would be there. He searched again. Still no woman. Just lime green woods and several birds whose identities, at this moment, didn’t interest him in the least.
    Still no woman. Sick with disappointment and self-doubt, he wanted to turn and leave the place. He felt cheated – as if the woman had made him a promise that she had never