The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [197]
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears blot out a Word of it.
Ha, I think. That would make them sit up and bark.
Some day when I’m feeling better I’ll go back there and actually write the thing down. They should all be cheered by it, for isn’t it what they want? What we all want: to leave a message behind us that has an effect, if only a dire one; a message that cannot be cancelled out.
But such messages can be dangerous. Think twice before you wish, and especially before you wish to make yourself into the hand of fate.
(Think twice, said Reenie. Laura said, Why only twice ?)
The kitten
September came, then October. Laura was back at school, a different school. The kilts there were grey and blue rather than maroon and black; otherwise this school was much the same as the first, so far as I could see.
In November, just after she’d turned seventeen, Laura announced that Richard was wasting his money. She would continue to attend the school if he demanded it, she would place her body at a desk, but she wasn’t learning anything useful. She stated this calmly and without rancour, and surprisingly enough Richard gave in. “She doesn’t really need to go to school anyway,” he said. “It’s not as if she’ll ever have to work for a living.”
But Laura had to be busied with something, just as I did. She was enlisted in one of Winifred’s causes, a volunteer organization called The Abigails, which had to do with hospital visiting. The Abigails were a perky group: girls of good family, training to be future Winifreds. They dressed up in dairy-maid pinafores with tulips appliquéd on their bibs and traipsed around to hospital wards, where they were supposed to talk to the patients, read to them perhaps, and cheer them up – how, it was not specified.
Laura proved to be adept at this. She did not like the other Abigails, that goes without saying, but she took to the pinafore. Predictably, she gravitated to the poverty wards, which the other Abigails tended to avoid because of their stench and outrageousness. These wards were filled with derelicts: old women with dementia, impecunious veterans down on their luck, noseless men with tertiary syphilis and the like. Nurses were in short supply in these realms, and soon Laura was setting her hand to tasks that were strictly speaking none of her business. Bedpans and vomit did not throw her for a loop, it appeared, nor did the swearing and raving and general carryings-on. This was not the situation Winifred had intended, but pretty soon it was the one we were stuck with.
The nurses thought Laura was an angel (or some of them did; others simply thought she was in the way.) According to Winifred, who tried to keep an eye on things and had her spies, Laura was said to be especially good with the hopeless cases. It didn’t seem to register on her that they were dying, said Winifred. She treated their condition as ordinary, as normal even, which – Winifred supposed – they must have found calming after a fashion, although a sane person wouldn’t. To Winifred, this facility or talent of Laura’s was another sign of her fundamentally bizarre nature.
“She must have nerves of ice,” said Winifred. “I certainly couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear it. Think of the squalor!”
Meanwhile, plans were afoot for Laura’s début. These plans had not yet been shared with Laura: I’d led Winifred to expect that the reaction from her would not be positive. In that case, said Winifred, the whole thing would have to be arranged, then presented as a fait accompli; or, even better, the début could be dispensed with altogether if its primary object had already been accomplished, the primary object being a strategic marriage.
We were having lunch at the Arcadian Court; Winifred had invited me there, just the two of us, to devise a stratagem for Laura, as she put it.
“Stratagem?” I said.
“You know what I mean,” said Winifred. “Not