The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [175]
I heard a gurgling, which may or may not have been coming from inside me; I felt my heart gulping in my chest with panic. I knew the water was a quirk, of eye or ear or mind; still, better not to descend. I dropped the laundry on the cellar stairs, abandoning it. Perhaps I might go back and pick it up later, perhaps not. Someone would. Myra would, lips tightening. Now I’d done it, now I would have the woman foisted on me for sure. I turned, half fell, grasped the banister; then pulled myself back up, one step at a time, to the sane bland daylight of the kitchen.
Outside the window it was grey, a uniform spiritless grey, the sky as well as the porous, aging snow. I plugged in the electric kettle; soon it began its lullaby of steam. Things have gone pretty far when you’ve come to feel that it’s your utensils that are taking care of you and not the other way around. Still, I was comforted.
I made a cup of tea, drank it, then rinsed out the cup. I can still wash my own dishes, at any rate. Then I put the cup away, on the shelf with the other cups, Grandmother Adelia’s hand-painted patterns, lilies with lilies, violets with violets, like patterns matched with like. My cupboards at least have not gone haywire. But the image of the cast-away items of laundry fallen on the cellar steps was bothering me. All those tatters, those crumpled fragments, like shed white skins. Though not entirely white. A testament to something: blank pages my body’s been scrawling on, leaving its cryptic evidence as it slowly but surely turns itself inside out.
Perhaps I should make a try at gathering these things up, then stowing them away in their hamper, and none the wiser. None means Myra.
I have been overcome, it seems, by a lust for tidiness.
Better late than never, says Reenie.
Oh Reenie. How I wish you were here. Come back and take care of me!
She won’t, though. I will have to take care of myself. Myself and Laura, as I solemnly promised to do.
Better late than never.
Where am I? It was winter. No, I’ve done that.
It was spring. The spring of 1936. That was the year everything began to fall apart. Continued to fall apart, that is, in a more serious fashion than it was doing already.
King Edward abdicated in that year; he chose love over ambition. No. He chose the Duchess of Windsor’s ambition over his own. That’s the event people remember. And the Civil War began, in Spain. But those things didn’t happen until months later. What was March known for? Something. Richard rattling his paper at the breakfast table, and saying, So he’s done it .
There were just the two of us at breakfast, that day. Laura did not eat breakfast with us, except on weekends, and then she avoided it as much as possible by pretending to sleep in. On weekdays she ate by herself in the kitchen, because she had to go to school. Or not by herself: Mrs. Murgatroyd would have been present. Mr. Murgatroyd then drove her to school and picked her up, because Richard didn’t like the idea of her walking. What he really didn’t like was the idea that she might go astray.
She had lunch at the school, and took flute lessons there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because a musical instrument was mandatory. The piano had been tried, but had come to nothing. Likewise the cello. Laura was averse to practising, we were told, although in the evenings we were sometimes treated to the sorrowful, off-key wailing of her flute. The false notes sounded deliberate.
“I’ll speak to her,” said Richard.
“We can scarcely complain,” I said. “She’s only doing what you require.”
Laura was no longer overtly rude to Richard. But if he entered a room, she would leave it.
Back to the morning paper. Since Richard was holding it up between us, I could read the headline. He was Hitler, who had marched into the Rhineland. He’d broken the rules, he’d crossed the line, he’d done the forbidden thing. Well, said Richard, you could see it coming a mile away, but the rest of them got