Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [92]
Nevertheless it was for this reason that she couldn’t let him come to her apartment. It would be too great a risk. She had gone to his place several times, but one or both of the roommates had always been there, suspicious and awkwardly resentful. That would make Duncan more nervous than ever and they would leave quickly.
“Why don’t they like me?” she asked. They had paused to look at a suit of intricately embossed Chinese armour.
“Who?”
“Them. They always act as though they think I’m trying to gobble you up.”
“Well actually it isn’t that they don’t like you. As a matter of fact, they’ve said that you seem like a nice girl and why don’t I ask you home to dinner sometime, so they can really get to know you. I haven’t told them,” he said, suppressing a smile, “that you’re getting married. So they want a closer look at you to see if you’re acceptable to the family. They’re trying to protect me. They’re worried about me, it’s how they get their emotional vitamins, they don’t want me to get corrupted. They think I’m too young.”
“But why am I such a threat? What are they protecting you from?”
“Well, you see, you’re not in graduate English. And you’re a girl.”
“Well, haven’t they ever seen a girl before?” she asked indignantly.
Duncan considered. “I don’t think so. Not exactly. Oh I don’t know, what do you ever know about your parents? You always think they live in some kind of primal innocence. But I get the impression that Trevor believes in a version of Mediaeval Chastitie, sort of Spenserian you know. As for Fish, well, I guess he thinks it’s all right in theory, he’s always talking about it and you ought to hear his thesis topic, it’s all about sex, but he thinks you’ve got to wait for the right person and then it will be like an electric shock. I think he picked it up from ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ or D. H. Lawrence or something. God, he’s been waiting long enough, he’s almost thirty.…”
Marian felt compassion; she started to make a mental list of ageing single girls she knew who might be suitable for Fish. Millie? Lucy?
They walked on, turned another corner, and found themselves in yet another room full of glass cases. By this time she was thoroughly lost. The labyrinthine corridors and large halls and turnings had confused her sense of direction. There seemed to be no one else in this part of the Museum.
“Do you know where we are?” she asked, a little anxiously.
“Yes,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
They went under another archway. In contrast to the crowded and gilded oriental rooms they had been passing through, this one was comparatively grey and empty. Marian realized, from the murals on the walls, that they were in the Ancient Egyptian section.
“I come up here occasionally,” Duncan said, almost to himself, “to meditate on immortality. This is my favourite mummy case.”
Marian looked down through the glass at the painted golden face. The stylized eyes, edged with dark-blue lines, were wide open. They gazed up at her with an expression of serene vacancy. Across the front of the figure, at chest level, was a painted bird with outstretched wings, each feather separately defined; a similar bird was painted across the thighs, and another one at the feet. The rest of the decorations were smaller: several orange suns, gilded figures with crowns on their heads, seated on thrones or being ferried in boats; and a repeated design of odd symbols that were like eyes.
“She’s beautiful,” Marian said. She wondered whether she really thought so. Under the surface of the glass the form had a peculiar floating drowned look; the golden skin was rippling.…
“I think it’s supposed to be a man,” Duncan said. He had wandered over to the next case. “Sometimes I think I’d like to live forever. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about Time anymore. Ah, Mutabilitie; I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it.…”
She went to see what he was looking at. It was another mummy case, opened so that the shrivelled figure inside could be seen. The yellowed linen wrappings had been removed from the