The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [111]
At least I didn’t have to wait, drinking a glass of ice water by myself with the well-dressed women staring at me and wondering how I’d got in, because there was Winifred already, sitting at one of the pale tables. She was taller than I’d remembered – slender, or perhaps willowy, you’d say, though some of that was foundation garment. She had on a green ensemble – not a pastel green but a vibrant green, almost flagrant. (When chlorophyll chewing gum came into fashion two decades later, it was that colour.) She had green alligator shoes to match. They were glossy, rubbery, slightly wet-looking, like lily pads, and I thought I had never seen such exquisite, unusual shoes. Her hat was the same shade – a round swirl of green fabric, balanced on her head like a poisonous cake.
Right at that moment she was doing something I had been taught never to do because it was cheap: she was looking at her face in the mirror of her compact, in public. Worse, she was powdering her nose. While I hesitated, not wishing to let her know I’d caught her in this vulgar act, she snapped the compact shut and slipped it into her shiny green alligator purse as if there was nothing to it. Then she stretched her neck and slowly turned her powdered face and looked around her with a white glare, like a headlight. Then she saw me, and smiled, and held out a languid, welcoming hand. She had a silver bangle, which I coveted instantly.
“Call me Freddie,” she said after I’d sat down. “All my chums do, and I want us to be great chums.” It was the fashion then for women like Winifred to favour diminutives that made them sound like youths: Billie, Bobbie, Willie, Charlie. I had no such nickname, so could not offer one in return.
“Oh, is that the ring?” she said. “It is a beauty, isn’t it? I helped Richard pick it out – he likes me to go shopping for him. It does give men such migraines, doesn’t it, shopping? He thought perhaps an emerald, but there’s really nothing like a diamond, is there?”
While saying this, she examined me with interest and a certain chilly amusement, to see how I would take it – this reduction of my engagement ring to a minor errand. Her eyes were intelligent and oddly large, with green eyeshadow on the lids. Her pencilled eyebrows were plucked into a smoothly arched line, giving her that expression of boredom and, at the same time, incredulous astonishment, which was cultivated by the film stars of that era, though I doubt that Winifred was ever much astonished. Her lipstick was a dark pinkish orange, a shade that had just come in – shrimp was the proper name for it, as I’d learned from my afternoon magazines. Her mouth had the same cinematic quality as the eyebrows, the two halves of the upper lip drawn into Cupid’s-bow points. Her voice was what was called a whisky voice – low, deep almost, with a rough, scraped overlay to it like a cat’s tongue – like velvet made of leather.
(She was a card player, I discovered later. Bridge, not poker – she would have been good at poker, good at bluffing, but it was too risky, too much a gamble; she liked to bid on known quantities. She played golf as well, but mostly for the social contacts; she wasn’t as good at it as she made out. Tennis was too strenuous for her; she would not have wanted to be caught sweating. She “sailed,” which meant, for her, sitting on a cushion on a boat, in a hat, with a drink.)
Winifred asked me what I would like to eat. I said anything at all. She called me “dear,” and said that the Waldorf salad was marvellous. I said that would be fine.
I didn’t see how I could ever work up to calling her Freddie : it seemed too familiar, disrespectful even. She was after all an adult – thirty, or twenty-nine at least. She was six or seven years younger than Richard, but they were pals:“Richard and I are such great pals,” she said to me confidingly, for the first time but not for the last. It was a threat, of course, as was much of what she would say to me in this easy and confiding tone. It meant not only that she