Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [40]
Sometimes Oona drove up to the farm with Tig and the boys. She ate Saturday-night dinner with them, and went with the boys to inspect the barn, and watched them sliding on the ice, and slept on the musty single bed in Nell’s workroom. This arrangement was supposed to make the children feel secure, said Tig: they needed to know they had two parents who both loved them very much, despite the thorniness and leechiness of the marriage. Nell was not there on those days, nor was she allowed to be there on any weekend, even when Oona didn’t come up. Nell’s presence (said Tig) would not be good for the children, nor even for Nell herself in the long run, as it might signal to the children that it was Nell who had destroyed the marriage.
She hadn’t destroyed it, of course, said Tig: the thing was destruction incarnate long before she’d stumbled onto the scene. All of Tig’s and Oona’s friends knew this, they’d known it for years, and they’d admired the way Tig and Oona had worked things out so that life appeared to be going on in a normal way, said Tig. He also said he’d been so enraged one evening after an argument that he’d hurled every single one of their glassware and china items against the wall, leaving a pile of broken dishes to confront Oona in the morning. Nell was impressed by this gesture. She herself had never been good at impromptu rage. Throwing all the dishes at the wall was a fine and open act, much preferable to the white-faced silences and glum grudge-holding and resentful sulking she herself might have employed instead.
But Tig and Oona had been careful not to fight in front of the children, said Tig. They’d had a civilized arrangement on the outside, or civilized enough; they called each other “love” in public, and had sit-down Sunday dinners, with roasts – Nell herself had witnessed that. Thus the children would need some time to observe Tig living by himself in the country and Oona living by herself in the city before Nell could safely make an entrance, from the shadowy wings where she had been waiting.
So for the first part of that winter, Nell snuck around like a criminal on the run. She left no traces in the house when she wasn’t there – no clothes in the small dark cupboard at the top of the stairs, no toothbrush on the inadequate shelf in the bathroom, no textbooks or lecture notes or page proofs on the improvised desk. Did Tig go through the house after she’d left, wiping her fingerprints off the doorknobs? It felt like that to her.
On Thursdays and Fridays, she had a temporary part-time teaching job at the university, filling in for a friend on sabbatical. She taught the Victorian novel to second-year undergraduates: the Brontë sisters, followed by Dickens, Eliot, and Thackeray, then the depressing realists, George Gissing and Thomas Hardy, with a decadent finale supplied by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She’d never taught this course before, so she had to read hard to keep ahead of the students. In theory, her Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays were reserved for the freelance editorial work that had been her intermittent mainstay over the past few years. The novel-reading and the editing were both things that she could do at the farm. On her non-teaching weekdays, she would take the Greyhound bus to Stiles, the town nearest the farm, then wait in the bus station on a hard wooden bench along a wall as if in a skating-rink change room, breathing in the gas fumes and cigarette smoke that permeated the chilly air. She would eat potato chips and drink black, acid-filled coffee and read about love and money and madness and furniture and governesses and adultery and drapery and scenery and death, until Tig would come along in his rusty blue Chevy to collect her.