The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [147]
Towards the end of the time allotted for our honeymoon we spent a week in Berlin. Richard had some business there, which had to do with the handles of shovels. One of Richard’s firms made shovel handles, and the Germans were short of wood. There was a lot of digging to be done, and more projected, and Richard could supply the shovel handles at a price that undercut his competitors.
As Reenie used to say, Every little bit helps. As she also used to say, Business is business and then there’s funny business. But I knew nothing about business. My task was to smile.
I have to admit I enjoyed Berlin. Nowhere had I been so blonde. The men were exceptionally polite, although they did not look behind themselves when striding through swinging doors. Hand-kissing covered a multitude of sins. It was in Berlin that I learned to perfume my wrists.
I memorized the cities through their hotels, the hotels through their bathrooms. Dressing, undressing, lying in the water. But enough of these travel notes.
We returned to Toronto via New York, in mid-August, in a heat wave. After Europe and New York, Toronto seemed squat and cramped. Outside Union Station there was a mist of bituminous fumes, from where they were fixing the potholes. A hired car met us and took us past the streetcars and their dust and clanging, then past the ornate banks and the department stores, then up the slant of land into Rosedale and the shade of chestnuts and maples.
We stopped in front of the house Richard had bought for us by telegram. He’d picked it up for a song, he said, after the previous owner had managed to bankrupt himself. Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
The house was dark on the outside, festooned with ivy, its tall, narrow windows turned inward. The key was under the mat, the front hall smelled of chemicals. Winifred had been redecorating during our absence, and the work was not quite finished: there were painters’ cloths down still in the front rooms, where they’d stripped off the old Victorian wallpaper. The new colours were pearly, pale – the colours of luxurious indifference, of cool detachment. Cirrus clouds tinged by a faint sunset, drifting high above the vulgar intensities of birds and flowers and such. This was the setting proposed for me, the rarefied air I was to waft around in.
Reenie would be scornful of this interior – of its gleaming emptiness, its pallor. This whole place looks like a bathroom. But at the same time she’d be frightened by it, as I was. I called up Grandmother Adelia: she’d know what to do. She’d recognize the new-money attempt to make an impression; she’d be polite, but dismissive. My, it’s certainly modern , she might say. She’d make short work of Winifred, I thought, but it brought me no solace: I was now of the tribe of Winifred myself. Or I was partly.
And Laura? Laura would smuggle in her coloured pencils, her tubes of pigment. She’d spill something on this house, break something, deface at least a small corner of it. She’d make her mark.
A note from Winifred was propped against the telephone in the front hall. “Hi kids! Welcome home! I got them to finish the bedroom first! I hope you love it – so snazzy! Freddie.”
“I didn’t know Winifred was doing this,” I said.
“We wanted it to be a surprise,” said Richard. “We didn’t want you to get bogged down in details.” Not for the first time, I felt like a child excluded by its parents. Genial, brutal parents, up to their necks in collusion, determined on the rightness of their choices, in everything. I could tell already that my birthday presents from Richard would always be something I didn’t want.
I went