Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [45]
The two children had had their dinners earlier but appeared for the special dessert, a Grand Marnier soufflé with chocolate sauce.
The atmosphere was festive, if a little supercharged. Oona and Tig turned bright, interested faces toward Nell whenever she spoke, which wasn’t often – mostly it was the history professor who held forth. Still, when Nell did find something to say, she didn’t feel she had to sift through her words and pick only the short ones.
After dinner, the history couple left and Nell helped Oona carry the dishes out to the kitchen – that was one of the old rules – and then she played a game of Monopoly with the two boys. They were friendly and polite, and treated her as if she were a somewhat older child. She shook the dice and rolled them, and was lucky, and acquired not only the water works and the electric company and all four railways and some blocks of red streets and pale-blue and purple slum property, but Park Place and Boardwalk as well, on which she built hotels. Although surprised by her own ruthlessness – it was only a game, she should let the children win – she then charged high rents, and ended by driving the kids into bankruptcy and winning the game.
Impressively, the children did not sulk, but wanted to play again, though Oona declared that it was too late for that. Then they had ice cream, and two of the three family cats climbed up on Nell and purred. Nell felt charmed, and welcomed, and accepted, and somehow protected, with Tig and Oona beaming down at her and the boys like the kindly fairy godparents in some tale of rescued orphans.
The dinner invitation had been proffered so that Nell could get the full benefit of Tig. This was a conclusion Nell came to later. She was being interviewed, in a way: Oona had her fingered for the position of second wife, or if not a second wife exactly, something second. Something secondary. Something controllable. A sort of concubine. She was to serve as Tig’s other company, so that Oona could get on with the life of her own she was so determined to lead.
What had happened next? Nell wasn’t quite sure. She’d been swept off her feet, evidently. She’d been swept away. Or possibly she’d been kidnapped. Sometimes it felt like that. Whatever it was had played a part in Tig’s flight to the country, though no one had said so.
In late January, Nell bought some knitting wool, red and blue and purple. She hadn’t done any knitting for a long time, not since childhood, but she had an urge to take it up again. Her idea was to knit a wool bedcover for the seedy bed in her so-called study, the bed Oona slept in when she came up to the farm to visit on weekends. She would knit it in long strips, a red square, a purple one, a blue one, and then she would sew the strips together. It would take some planning to make it come out right, with the squares creating the bold checkerboard effect she had in mind. Once she had the bedcover done she would put it on the bed, and there it would stay.
Maybe she would do that. On the other hand, maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she would go back to her orange table and her Sally Ann sofa, taking her knitting with her. She hadn’t decided.
When Tig wasn’t there – when he’d gone off on some excursion or other – she would read, or edit manuscripts, or she would mark student papers. The Notion of the Gentleman in Great Expectations. Governesses in Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, and The Turn of the Screw: Drudge, Fortune Hunter, Hysteric. Conformity and Rebellion in The Mill on the Floss. But her study was on the north side of the house: it