Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [41]
Or she’d drive up from the city with him after he’d taken the children back in on Monday mornings – early, so they could get to school by nine. Nell and Tig could be at the farm in time for lunch, though during these drives Nell did not get hungry. Instead she felt light-headed and slightly ill, as she used to do before examinations. It was the anticipation, and the sense of being tested and judged, and the fear of failing. But what was it she might fail?
The car would be warm, and would smell of apple cores: the boys often ate apples in the car on the way to the city. Tig and Nell would hold hands, on the lonelier and less icy stretches of road. Instead of talking they would listen to the radio. At a certain distance from the city it was mostly country and western. Nell liked the songs of yearning, Tig liked the songs of regret.
The farm was on a gravel road, several miles from the main highway. In winter the farmhouse looked like a picture – snow on the roof, icicles dripping from the eaves, the white hills and sombre trees rising behind it – but it wasn’t a picture Nell would ever have allowed on her Christmas cards. Like sunsets, it was beautiful in real life, but too overdone for art.
At the bottom of the long, curved, ice-covered driveway the car wheels would start spinning and the car would slew from side to side. Tig might take several runs at the hill, but he knew when to stop: it was important to avoid going into the decorative pond. If they couldn’t make it up the drive, even with the aid of the bag of sand and the shovel Tig kept in the trunk, they’d leave the car at the bottom and crunch their way through the snowbanks at the sides of the drive, their breaths whitening the air, their noses dripping. It wasn’t the best prelude to the romantic moment that was then supposed to follow once they’d gone in through the lean- to and the back door and stamped the snow off their feet and shed their boots and their heavy coats and their mittens and scarves.
Their other layers of clothing would be thrown off in Tig’s gelid bedroom – insulation had not been a feature of The Ancestral Roof type of house, Nell had read – and then they’d be shivering under Tig’s duvet, between Tig’s threadbare sheets, locked in the sort of desperate embrace that reminded Nell of her Victorian novelists’ descriptions of drowning. People drowned quite a lot in such novels, especially if they’d had sex out of wedlock.
After that would come an interlude of warm and languorous amnesia, followed shortly – for Nell – by disbelief: what was she doing here, in this situation? And what was the situation, exactly? She thought of herself as a person who liked things to be clear and direct and above-board, so how had she got mixed up in something so murky, and – if you looked at it objectively, from the point of view, say, of someone writing it up for the tabloids, should Tig and Nell be found asphyxiated in his car in a snowdrift because of carbon monoxide poisoning – so grubby? Runaway Hubby Gassed Near Rural Love Nest with Editorial Cutie. Although nothing like that had happened yet, and was unlikely to happen – neither of them was stupid enough to leave the motor running in a stranded car – the mere thought of it was humiliating.
Nell did not in any way let herself off the hook, being nothing if not self-critical, and anyway she was an adult – it was she who had chosen, it was she who had acted – but nonetheless the hard truth was that to some extent the whole thing was Oona’s doing. Oona was the pivotal factor. Oona had set up the relationship, Oona had pushed it forward, Oona had made herself scarce at what turned out to be the critical moments, like some salacious Nurse figure out of a Shakespearean play. Why? Because Nell had suited Oona’s purposes. Not that Nell herself had recognized those purposes at the time.
The first twosome had not been Nell and Tig, it had been Oona and Nell. They’d started out on fine terms. Oona could be very pleasant when she wanted to be: she could make you feel that you were her best friend, the only person