Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [107]
“That doesn’t matter,” Ainsley said, her voice rising. “You thought you …”
“For God’s sake can’t you be realistic!” Leonard shrieked.
Marian had been sitting quietly, looking from one to the other, thinking how peculiarly they were acting; so out of control. Now she said, “Could we please be a little less noisy? The lady down below might hear.”
“Oh, SCREW the lady down below!” Len roared.
This novel idea was so blasphemous and at the same time so ludicrous that both Ainsley and Marian broke into horrified and delighted giggles. Len glared at them. This was the final outrage, the final feminine insolence – after putting him through all that, she was laughing at him! He snatched up his coat from the back of the chesterfield and strode towards the stairs.
“You and your goddamn fertility worship can go straight to hell!” he shouted, plunging downwards.
Ainsley, seeing the father-image escaping, remoulded her features into an imploring expression and ran after him. “Oh Len, come back and let’s talk it over seriously,” she pleaded. Marian followed them down the stairs, impelled less by a sense of being able to do anything concrete or helpful than by some obscure herd- or lemming-instinct. Everyone else was leaping over the cliff, she might as well go too.
Len’s descent was halted by the spinning wheel on the landing. He was temporarily snarled in it, and tugged and swore loudly. By the time he was able to start down the next flight of stairs Ainsley had caught up to him and was pulling at his sleeve, and all the ladies, as alert to the symptoms of wickedness as a spider to the vibrations of its web, had come fluttering out of the parlour and were gathered at the foot of the stairs, gazing up with a certain gloating alarm. The child was among them, still holding a plate of cakes, her mouth slackly open, her eyes wide. The lady down below in black silk and pearls was being dignified in the background.
Len looked over his shoulder, then down the stairs. Retreat was impossible. He was surrounded by the enemy; there was no choice but to go bravely forward.
Not only that, he had an audience. His eyes rolled in his head like those of a frenzied spaniel. “All you clawed scaly bloody predatory whoring fucking bitches can go straight to hell! All of you! Underneath you’re all the same!” he shouted, with, Marian thought, rather good enunciation.
He wrenched his sleeve out of Ainsley’s clutch. “You’ll never get me!” he screamed, charging down the stairs, his coat streaming behind him like a cape, scattering the assembled ladies before him in a blither of afternoon prints and velvet flowers, and gained the front door, which closed behind him with a thunderous crash. On the wall the yellowed ancestors rattled in their frames.
Ainsley and Marian retreated up the stairs, to the sound of excited bleating and twittering from the ladies in the parlour. The voice of the lady down below was rising above the others, calm and soothing: “The young man was obviously inebriated.”
“Well,” Ainsley said in a clipped practical voice when they were in the living room once more, “I guess that’s that.”
Marian didn’t know whether she was referring to Leonard or to the lady down below. “What’s what?” she asked.
Ainsley pushed her hair back over her shoulders and straightened her blouse. “I don’t think he’s going to come round. It’s just as well: I doubt if he’d make a very good one anyway. I’ll simply have to get another one, that’s all.”
“Yes; I guess so,” Marian said vaguely. Ainsley went into the bedroom, her firm stride expressing determination, and shut the door. The matter sounded ominously settled. She seemed to have decided on another plan already, but Marian didn’t even want to think about what it might be. Thinking would be of no use anyway. Whatever course it took, there would be nothing she herself could do to prevent it.
25
She went into the kitchen and took off her coat. Then she ate a vitamin pill, remembering as she did so that