Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [8]
They had her on morphine, she said there were webs floating in the air in front of her. She was very thin, much older than I’d ever thought possible, skin tight over her curved beak nose, hands on the sheet curled like bird claws clinging to a perch. She peered at me with bright blank eyes. She may not have known who I was: she didn’t ask me why I left or where I’d been, though she might not have asked anyway, feeling as she always had that personal questions were rude.
“I’m not going to your funeral,” I said. I had to lean close to her, the hearing in one of her ears was gone. I wanted her to understand in advance, and approve.
“I never enjoyed them,” she said to me, one word at a time. “You have to wear a hat. I don’t like liquor.” She must have been talking about Church or cocktail parties. She lifted her hand, slowly as if through water, and felt the top of her head; there was a tuft of white hair standing straight up. “I didn’t get the bulbs in. Is there snow outside?”
On the bedside table with the flowers, chrysanthemums, I saw her diary; she kept one every year. All she put in it was a record of the weather and the work done on that day: no reflections, no emotions. She would refer to it when she wanted to compare the years, decide whether the spring had been late or early, whether it had been a wet summer. It made me angry to see it in that windowless room where it was no use; I waited till her eyes were closed and slipped it into my shoulder bag. When I got outside I leafed through it, I thought there might be something about me, but except for the dates the pages were blank, she had given up months ago.
“Do what you think best,” she said from behind her closed eyes. “Is there snow?”
We rock some more. I want to ask Paul about my father but he ought to begin, he must have news to tell me. Maybe he’s avoiding it; or maybe he’s being tactful, waiting until I’m ready. Finally I say “What happened to him?”
Paul shrugs. “He is just gone,” he says. “I go there one day to see him, the door is open, the boats is there, I think maybe he is off somewheres near and I wait awhile. Next day I go back, everything the same, I begin to worry, where he is, I don’t know. So I write to you, he has leaved your caisse postale and the keys, I lock up the place. His car she is here, with me.” He gestures towards the back, the garage. My father trusted Paul, he said Paul could build anything and fix anything. They were once caught in a three-week rainstorm, my father said if you could spend three weeks in a wet tent with a man without killing him or having him kill you then he was a good man. Paul justified for him his own ideal of the simple life; but for Paul the anachronism was imposed, he’d never chosen it.
“Did you look on the island?” I say. “If the boats are there he can’t have gone off the island.”
“I look, sure,” Paul says, “I tell the police from down-the-road, they look around, nobody find nothing. Your husband here too?” he asks irrelevantly.
“Yes, he’s here,” I say, skipping over the lie even in my own mind. What he means is that a man should be handling this; Joe will do as a stand-in. My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies. I sent my parents a postcard after the wedding, they must have mentioned it to Paul; that, but not the divorce. It isn’t part of the vocabulary here, there’s no reason to upset them.
I’m waiting for Madame to ask about the baby, I’m prepared, alerted, I’ll tell her I left him in the city; that would be perfectly true, only it was a different city, he’s better off with my husband, former husband.
But Madame doesn’t mention it, she lifts another cube of sugar from the tray by her side and he intrudes, across from me, a coffee shop, not city but roadside, on the way to or from somewhere, some goal or encounter. He peels the advertisement paper from the sugar and lets one square