The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [199]
“I never said Free Love,” said Laura. “I only said marriage was an outworn institution. I said it had nothing to do with love, that’s all. Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can’t put love into a contract. Then I said there was no marriage in Heaven.”
“This isn’t Heaven,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed. Anyway, you certainly put the wind up her.”
“I was just telling the truth.” She was pushing back her cuticles with my orange stick. “I guess now she’ll start introducing me to people. She’s always putting her oar in.”
“She’s just afraid you might ruin your life. If you go in for love, I mean.”
“Did getting married keep your life from being ruined? Or is it too soon to tell?”
I ignored the tone. “What do you think, though?”
“You’ve got a new perfume. Did Richard give it to you?”
“Of the marriage idea, I mean.”
“Nothing.” Now she was brushing her long blonde hair, with my hairbrush, seated at my vanity table. She’d been taking more interest in her personal appearance lately; she’d begun to dress quite stylishly, both in her own clothes and in mine.
“You mean, you don’t think much of it?” I asked.
“No. I don’t think about it at all.”
“Perhaps you should,” I said. “Perhaps you should give at least a minute of thought to your future. You can’t always just keep ambling along, doing . . .” I wanted to say doing nothing, but this would have been a mistake.
“The future doesn’t exist,” said Laura. She’d acquired the habit of talking to me as if I was the younger sister and she was the elder one; as if she had to spell things out for me. Then she said one of her odd things. “If you were a blindfolded tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, what would you pay more attention to – the crowds on the far shore, or your own feet?”
“My feet, I suppose. I wish you wouldn’t use my hairbrush. It’s unsanitary.”
“But if you paid too much attention to your feet, you’d fall. Or too much attention to the crowds, you’d fall too.”
“So what’s the right answer?”
“If you were dead, would this hairbrush still be yours?” she said, looking at her profile out of the sides of her eyes. This gave her, in reflection, a sly expression, which was unusual for her. “Can the dead own things? And if not, what makes it ‘yours’ now? Your initials on it? Or your germs?”
“Laura, stop teasing!”
“I’m not teasing,” said Laura, setting the hairbrush down. “I’m thinking. You can never tell the difference. I don’t know why you listen to anything Winifred has to say. It’s like listening to a mousetrap. One without a mouse in it,” she added.
She’d become different lately: she’d become brittle, insouciant, reckless in a new way. She was no longer open about her defiances. I suspected her of taking up smoking, behind my back: I’d smelled tobacco on her once or twice. Tobacco, and something else: something too old, too knowing. I ought to have been more alert to the changes taking place in her, but I had a good many other things on my mind. I waited until the end of October to tell Richard that I was pregnant. I said I’d wanted to be sure. He expressed conventional joy, and kissed my forehead. “Good girl,” he said. I was only doing what was expected of me.
One benefit was that he now left me scrupulously alone at night. He didn’t want to damage anything, he said. I told him that was very thoughtful of him. “And you’re on gin rations from now on. I won’t allow any naughtiness,” he said, wagging his finger at me in a way I found sinister. He was more alarming to me during his moments of levity than he was the rest of the time; it was like watching a lizard gambol. “We’ll have the very best doctor,” he added. “No matter what it costs.” Putting things on a commercial footing was reassuring to both of us. With money in play, I knew where I stood: I was the bearer of a very expensive package, pure and simple.
Winifred, after her first little scream of genuine fright, made an insincere fuss. Really she was alarmed. She guessed