Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [62]
Sometimes Gladys wanted to stop in mid-canter to see if Nell would fall off. Sometimes she wanted to stand still, swishing her tail and sighing as if extremely tired. Sometimes she wanted to revolve slowly in a circle. Sometimes she wanted to eat weeds and wayside clover – Nell drew the line at that. Sometimes she wanted to go over to the barnyard fence and watch the sheep and cows, and also the cats, which had taken to sleeping on her broad, comfortable back.
Between the two of them, Nell and Gladys passed their riding time pleasantly enough. It was a conspiracy, a double impersonation: Nell pretending to be a person who was riding a horse, Gladys pretending to be a horse that was being ridden.
Sometimes they didn’t bother cantering or trotting. They ambled along in the sunlight, lazily and without purpose. At these times Nell would talk to Gladys, which was better than talking to Howl, who was an idiot, or to the hens or cats. Gladys had to listen: she couldn’t get away. “What do you think, Gladys?” Nell would say. “Should I have a baby?” Gladys, trudging along, sighing, would swivel an ear back in the direction of the voice. “Tig isn’t sure. He says he isn’t ready. Should I just do it? Would he get angry? Would it ruin everything? What do you think?”
Gladys would cough.
Nell would have preferred to have had this conversation with her mother, but her mother wasn’t available. Anyway she probably wouldn’t have said much more than Gladys. She too would have coughed, because she would have disapproved. Nell and Tig were – after all – not married. How could they possibly be married, when Tig couldn’t manage to get himself divorced?
But if Nell’s mother knew about Gladys, maybe she would come up to the farm. Her mother had been a devoted horse person once, a long time ago. She’d had two horses of her own. Was it conceivable that, with Gladys dangled like a lure in front of her, she might overcome her reservations – about Tig, about Nell, about their unorthodox living arrangements? Wouldn’t she be tempted? Wouldn’t she long to have one small idyllic canter out to the back field, for old times’ sake, with Gladys’s pony-sized legs going like an eggbeater? Wouldn’t she want to know that Nell now loved – improbably, and at last – one of the same activities she herself had once loved?
Perhaps. But Nell had no way of knowing. She and her mother weren’t exactly speaking. They weren’t exactly not speaking, either. The silence that had taken the place of speech between them had become its own form of speech. In this silence, language was held suspended. It contained many questions, though no definite answers.
As spring turned into summer, Tig and Nell had more and more visitors, especially on the weekends. These visitors would just happen to be driving by, on a little outing from the city, and they’d drop in to say hello, and then they’d be invited for lunch – Tig loved cooking big impromptu lunches, featuring huge vats of soup and giant wads of cheese, and Nell’s home-baked bread – and then the day would wear on and the visitors would stroll out to the back field for a walk. They were not allowed to ride Gladys, because of her bad manners with strangers, said Nell, though really she’d become possessive about her, she wanted to keep Gladys all to herself. Then Tig would say they might as well stay for dinner, and then it would be too dark or too late or they would be too drunk to drive back to the city, and they’d end up on the pullout couch in the back parlour, and – if