The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [176]
I agreed, but did not listen. Not listening was the only way I had, during those months, of keeping my balance. I had to blot out the ambient noise: like a tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls, I could not afford to look around me, for fear of slipping. What else can you do when what you are thinking about every waking moment is so far removed from the life you’re supposedly living? From what’s right there on the table, which that morning was a bud vase with a paper-white narcissus in it, picked from the bowl of forced bulbs sent over by Winifred. So lovely to have at this time of year, she’d said. So fragrant. Like a breath of hope.
Winifred thought I was innocuous. Put another way, she thought I was a fool. Later – ten years into the future – she was to say, over the phone because we no longer met in person, “I used to think you were stupid, but really you’re evil. You’ve always hated us because your father went bankrupt and burned down his own factory, and you held it against us.”
“He didn’t burn it down,” I would say. “Richard did. Or he fixed it.”
“That is a malicious lie. Your father was stony flat broke, and if it wasn’t for the insurance on that building you wouldn’t have had a bean! We pulled the two of you out of the swamp, you and your dopey sister! If it wasn’t for us, you would’ve been out walking the streets instead of sitting around on your bottoms like the silver-plated spoiled brats you were. You always had everything handed to you, you never had to make an effort, you never showed one moment of gratitude to Richard. You didn’t lift one finger to help him out, not once, ever.”
“I did what you wanted. I kept my mouth shut. I smiled. I was the window-dressing. But Laura was going too far. He should have left Laura out of it.”
“All of that was just spite, spite, spite! You owed us everything, and you couldn’t stand it. You had to get back at him! You killed him dead between the two of you, just as if you’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”
“Who killed Laura, then?”
“Laura killed herself, as you know perfectly well.”
“I could say the same of Richard.”
“That is a slanderous lie. Anyway, Laura was crazy as a coot. I don’t know how you could ever have believed a word she said, about Richard or anything else. Nobody in their right mind would have!”
I couldn’t say another word, and so I hung up on her. But I was powerless against her, because by then she had a hostage. She had Aimee.
In 1936, however, she was still affable enough, and I was still her protégée. She continued to haul me around from function to function – Junior League meetings, political bun-fests, committees for this and that – and to park me on chairs and in corners, while she did the necessary socializing. I could see now that she was for the most part not liked, but merely tolerated, because of her money, and her boundless energy: most of the women in those circles were content to let Winifred do the lion’s share of whatever work might be involved.
Every now and then, one of them would sidle up to me and remark that she had known my grandmother – or, if younger, that she wished she’d known her, back in those golden days before the Great War, when true elegance had still been possible. This was a password: it meant that Winifred was an arriviste – new money, brash and vulgar – and that I should be standing up for some other set of values. I would smile vaguely, and say that my grandmother had died long before I was born. In other words, they couldn’t expect any kind of opposition to Winifred from me.
And how is your clever husband? they would say. When may we expect the big announcement? The big announcement had to do with Richard’s political career, not yet formally begun but considered imminent.
Oh, I would smile, I expect I’ll be the first to know . I did not believe this: I expected to be the last.
Our life – Richard’s and mine – had settled