The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [188]
“Mr. Erskine?”
“You know who.” She paused, turned to look out the window again. “Do you still have your picture?”
“Laura, I don’t think you should dwell on him,” I said. “I don’t think he’s going to turn up. It’s not in the cards.”
“Why? Do you think he’s dead?”
“Why would he be dead?” I said. “I don’t think he’s dead. I just think he’s gone somewhere else.”
“Anyway they haven’t caught him, or we would have heard about it. It would have been in the papers,” said Laura. She gathered up the old exercise books and slid them into her paper bag.
We lingered on at Avilion longer than I’d thought we would, and certainly longer than I wanted: I felt hemmed in there, locked up, unable to move.
The day before we were due to leave, I came down to breakfast, and Richard wasn’t there; only Winifred, who was eating an egg. “You missed the big launch,” she said.
“What big launch?”
She gestured at our view, which was of the Louveteau on one hand, the Jogues on the other. I was surprised to see Laura on the Water Nixie , sailing away downriver. She was sitting up in the bow, like a figurehead. Her back was towards us. Richard was at the wheel. He was wearing some awful white sailor hat.
“At least they haven’t sunk,” said Winifred, with a hint of acid.
“Didn’t you want to go?” I said.
“No, actually.” There was an odd tone to her voice, which I mistook for jealousy: she did so like being in on the ground floor, in any project of Richard’s.
I was relieved: maybe Laura would unbend a little now, maybe she would let up on the deep-freeze campaign. Maybe she would start treating Richard as if he were a human being instead of something that had crawled out from under a rock. That would certainly make my own life easier, I thought. It would lighten the atmosphere.
It didn’t, however. If anything, the tension increased, though it had reversed itself: now it was Richard who would leave the room whenever Laura came into it. It was almost as if he was afraid of her.
“What did you say to Richard?” I asked her one evening when we were all back in Toronto.
“What do you mean?”
“That day you went sailing with him, on the Water Nixie .”
“I didn’t say anything to him,” she said. “Why would I?”
“I don’t know.”
“I never say anything to him,” said Laura, “because I have nothing to say.”
The chestnut tree
I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light.
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.
Last night I woke abruptly, my heart pounding. From the window there was a clinking sound: someone was throwing pebbles against the glass. I climbed out of bed and groped my way towards the window, and raised the sash higher and leaned out. I didn’t have my glasses on, but I could see well enough. There was the moon, almost full, spider-veined with old scars, and below it the ambient sub-orange glow cast up into the sky by the street lights. Beneath me was the sidewalk, patchy with shadow and partially hidden by the chestnut tree in the front yard.
I was aware that there shouldn’t be a chestnut tree there: that tree belonged elsewhere, a hundred miles away, outside the house where I had once lived with Richard. Yet there it was, the tree, its branches spread out like a hard thick net, its white-moth flowers glimmering faintly.
The glassy clinking came again. There was a shape there, bending over: a man, foraging in the garbage cans, shuffling the wine bottles in the desperate hope that there might be something left in one of them. A street drunk, impelled by emptiness and thirst. His movements were stealthy, invasive, as if he was not hunting, but spying – sifting through my discarded trash for evidence against me.
Then he straightened and moved sideways into the fuller light, and looked up. I could see