The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [181]
“That’s hardly fair,” I said. “I’ve tried and tried, I’ve always given you the benefit of the doubt, I’ve given you the utmost . . .”
“Let’s leave it alone,” she said. “Look, what a silly game! I wonder why they call them quoits?”
I put all this down to old grief – to mourning, for Avilion and all that had happened there. Or could she still be mooning over Alex Thomas? I should have asked her more, I should have insisted, but I doubt that even then she would have told me what was really bothering her.
The thing I recall most clearly from the voyage, apart from Laura, was the looting that went on, all over the ship, on the day we sailed into port. Everything with the Queen Mary name or monogram on it went into a handbag or a suitcase – writing paper, silverware, towels, soap dishes, the works – anything not chained to the floor. Some people even unscrewed the faucet handles, and the smaller mirrors, and doorknobs. The first-class passengers were worse than the others; but then, the rich have always been kleptomaniacs.
What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don’t really believe you’re there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.
I myself made off with an ashtray.
The man with his head on fire
Last night I took one of the pills the doctor prescribed for me. It put me to sleep all right, but then I dreamed, and this dream was no improvement on the kind I’d been having without benefit of medication.
I was standing on the dock at Avilion, with the broken, greenish ice of the river tinkling all around like bells, but I wasn’t wearing a winter coat – only a cotton print dress covered with butterflies. Also a hat made of plastic flowers in lurid colours – tomato red, a hideous lilac – that was lit up from inside by tiny light bulbs.
Where’s mine? said Laura, in her five-year-old’s voice. I looked down at her, but then we were not children any longer. Laura had grown old, like me; her eyes were little dried raisins. This was horrifying to me, and I woke up.
It was three in the morning. I waited until my heart had stopped protesting, then groped my way downstairs and made myself a hot milk. I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can’t buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply.
But to continue.
Once off the Queen Mary, our family party spent three days in New York. Richard had some business to conclude; the rest of us could sightsee, he said.
Laura did not want to go to the Rockettes, or up to the top of the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Nor did she want to shop. She just wanted to walk around and look at things on the street, she said, but that was too dangerous a thing for her to do by herself, said Richard, so I went with her. She was not lively company – a relief after Winifred, who was determined to be as lively as was humanly possible.
After that we spent several weeks in Toronto, while Richard caught up on his affairs. After that we went to Avilion. We would go sailing there, said Richard. His tone implied that this was the only thing the place was good for; also that he was happy to make the sacrifice of his own time in order to indulge our whims. Or, more gently put, to please us – to please me, but to please Laura too.
It seemed to me that he’d come to regard Laura as a puzzle, one that it was now his business to solve. I’d catch him looking at her at odd moments, in much the same way as he looked at the stock-market pages – searching out the grip, the twist, the handle, the wedge, the way in. According to his view of life, there was such a grip or twist for everything. Either that, or a price. He wanted to get Laura under his thumb, he wanted her neck under his foot, however lightly placed. But Laura didn’t have that kind of neck. So after each of his attempts he was left standing with one leg in the air, like a