Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [65]
The men are talking mostly to one another. The women aren’t talking at all. They’re leaning against the wall, or standing with their arms folded under their breasts, a cigarette carelessly in one hand, dropping ashes on the floor, looking as if they’re bored and about to leave for some other, better party; or they’re gazing expressionlessly at the men, or staring past their shoulders as if searching intently for someone else, some other man, a more important one.
A couple of the women glance over at Tony as she comes in, then shift their eyes quickly away. Tony is wearing the sort of clothes she usually wears, a dark green corduroy jumper with a white blouse under it, a green velvet hairband, and knee socks and brown loafers. She has kept a lot of her clothes from high school, because they still fit. She knows at this moment that she will have to acquire other clothes. But she is not sure how.
She stands on tiptoe and peers through the intertwined hedge of arms and shoulders and heads, of black wool rib-knit breasts and denim chests and torsos. But West is nowhere in sight.
Maybe it’s because the room is so dark; maybe that’s why she can’t see him. Then she realizes that the room is not only dark, it’s black. The walls, the ceiling, even the floor are a glossy, hard enamel black. Even the windows have been painted over; even the light fixtures. Instead of electric lights there are candles, stuck in Chianti bottles. And all over the room there are big silvery juice tins, peeled of their labels and filled with bunches of white chrysanthemums that waver and shine in the light from the candles.
Tony wants to leave, but she wouldn’t like to do that without seeing West. He might think she’d refused his invitation, had failed to come; he might think she was being snobby. Also she wants to be soothed and reassured: with him there she will not be so out of place. She goes in search of him, down a hallway that leads off to the left. This terminates in a bathroom. A door opens, there’s a flushing sound, and a large, hair-covered man comes out. He gives Tony an unfocused look. “Shit, the Girl Guides,” he says.
Tony feels about two inches tall. She flees into the bathroom, which will at least be a refuge. It too has been painted black, even the bathtub, even the sink, even the mirror. She locks the door and sits down on the black toilet, touching it first to make sure the paint is dry.
She’s not sure she’s in the right place. Perhaps West doesn’t live here at all. Perhaps she has the wrong address; perhaps this is some other bash. But she checked the scrap of paper before coming up the stairs. Perhaps, then, it’s the time that’s wrong – perhaps she’s too early for West, or too late. There’s no way of knowing, since his comings and goings have always been so unpredictable.
She could go out of the bathroom and ask someone – one of the enormous, furry men, one of the tall supercilious women – where he might be, but she dreads doing this. What if nobody knows who he is? It would be safer to stay in here, replaying the Battle of Culloden to herself, calculating the odds. She arranges the terrain – the hill that slopes downwards, the line of the stone wall with the tidy British soldiers and their tidy guns in a row behind it. The raggedy clans charging, plunging down the hill yelling, with nothing but their heavy outdated swords and their round bucklers. Falling in picturesque, noble heaps. An abattoir. Courage is of use only when technologies are evenly matched. Bonnie Prince Charlie was an idiot.
Unwinnable, she thinks, as a battle. The only hope would have been to avoid a battle altogether. To reject the terms of the argument, refuse the conventions. Strike at night, then melt away into the