The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [151]
My eggshell hat fell out onto the gravel and Laura stepped on it. There was a crackling sound, an intake of breath from Richard. I said nothing. In that instant I no longer cared about the hat.
Arms around each other’s waists, Laura and I went up the steps into the house. Reenie loomed in the kitchen door at the far end of the hall, but she knew enough to leave us alone right then. I expect she turned her attention to Richard – distracted him with a drink or something. Well, he would have wanted to look over the premises and have a stroll around the grounds, now that he’d effectively inherited them.
We went straight up to Laura’s room and sat down on her bed. We held on tightly to each other’s hands – left in right, right in left. Laura wasn’t weeping, as on the telephone. Instead she was calm as wood.
“He was in the turret,” said Laura. “He’d locked himself in.”
“He always did that,” I said.
“But this time he didn’t come out. Reenie left the trays with his meals on them outside the door as usual, but he wasn’t eating anything, or drinking anything either – or not that we could tell. So then we had to kick down the door.”
“You and Reenie?”
“Reenie’s boyfriend came – Ron Hincks – the one she’s going to marry. He kicked it down. And Father was lying on the floor. He must have been there for at least two days, the doctor said. He looked awful.”
I hadn’t realized that Ron Hincks was Reenie’s boyfriend – indeed her fiancé. How long had that been going on, and how had I missed it?
“Was he dead, is that what you’re saying?”
“I didn’t think so at first, because his eyes were open. But he was dead all right. He looked ... I can’t tell you how he looked. As if he was listening, to something that had startled him. He looked watchful .”
“Was he shot?” I don’t know why I asked this.
“No. He was just dead. It was put in the paper as natural causes – suddenly, of natural causes, is what it said – and Reenie told Mrs. Hillcoate that it was natural causes all right, because drinking certainly was like second nature to Father, and judging from all the empty bottles he’d downed enough booze to choke a horse.”
“He drank himself to death,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “When was this?”
“It was right after they announced the permanent closing of the factories. That’s what killed him. I know it was!”
“What?” I said. “What permanent closing? Which factories?”
“All of them,” said Laura. “All of ours. Everything of ours in town. I thought you must have known about it.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Ours have been merged in with Richard’s. Everything’s been moved to Toronto. It’s all Griffen-Chase Royal Consolidated, now.” No more Sons, in other words. Richard had made a clean sweep of them.
“So that means no jobs,” I said. “None here. It’s finished. Wiped out.”
“They said it was a matter of costs. After the button factory was burned – they said it would take too much to rebuild it.”
“Who is they?”
“I don’t know,” said Laura. “Wasn’t it Richard?”
“That wasn’t the deal,” I said. Poor Father – trusting to handshakes and words of honour and unspoken assumptions. It was becoming clear to me that this was not the way things worked any more. Maybe it never had been.
“What deal?” said Laura.
“Never mind.”
I’d married Richard for nothing, then – I hadn’t saved the factories, and I certainly hadn’t saved Father. But there was Laura, still; she wasn’t out on the street. I had to think of that. “Did he leave anything – any letter, any note?”
“No.”
“Did you look?”
“Reenie looked,” said Laura in a small voice; which meant that she herself hadn’t been up to it.
Of course, I thought. Reenie would have looked. And if she had in fact