The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [160]
A likely story. But people believed it, or had to pretend they did. I suppose the Newton-Dobbses were spreading the real story around among their twenty closest friends, hush-hush and for your ears only, which was what Winifred would have done in their place, gossip being a commodity like any other. But at least it never hit the papers.
Laura was bundled up in an itchy kilt and a plaid tie and sent off to St. Cecilia’s. She made no secret of detesting it. She said she didn’t have to go there; she said that now she’d got one job she could get another one. She said these things to me, when Richard was present. She would not speak directly to him.
She was chewing her fingers, she was not eating enough, she was too thin. I became very worried about her, as I was expected to become, and, in fairness, as I should have been. But Richard said he was tired of this hysterical nonsense, and as for a job, he didn’t want to hear anything more about it. Laura was far too young to be out on her own; she would get involved in something unsavoury, because the woods were full of those who made a business of preying on silly young girls like her. If she didn’t like her school, she could be sent to another one, far away, in a different city, and if she ran away from that one he would put her into a Home for Wayward Girls along with all the other moral delinquents, and if that didn’t do the trick there was always a clinic. A private clinic, with bars on the windows: if it was sackcloth and ashes she wanted, that would certainly fill the bill. She was a minor, he was in authority, and make no mistake about it, he would do exactly as he said. As she knew – as everyone knew – he was a man of his word.
His eyes tended to bulge out when he was angry, and they were bulging out now, but he said all of this in a calm, believable tone, and Laura believed him, and was intimidated. I tried to intervene – these threats were too harsh, he didn’t understand about Laura and the way she took things literally – but he told me to keep out of it. What was needed was a firm hand. Laura had been mollycoddled enough. It was time for her to shape up.
Over the weeks, an uneasy truce was established. I tried to arrange things in the house so that the two of them never collided. Ships in the night, was what I hoped for.
Winifred had put in her oar over this, of course. She must have told Richard to take a stand, because Laura was the kind of girl who would bite the hand that fed her unless a muzzle was applied.
Richard consulted Winifred about everything, because she was the one who sympathized with him, propped him up, encouraged him generally. She was the one who propped him up socially, who promoted his interests in what she considered the right quarters. When would he make his bid for Parliament? Not quite yet, she’d whisper into whatever ear she was bending – the time was not yet ripe – but soon. They’d both decided that Richard was the man of the future, and that the woman standing behind him – didn’t every successful man have one of those? – was her.
It certainly wasn’t me. Our relative positions were now clear, hers and mine; or they’d always been clear to her, but they were now becoming clear to me as well. She was necessary to Richard, I on the other hand could always be replaced. My job was