The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [205]
Perhaps I should have stretched out my own arms. I should have hugged her. I should have cried. Then I should have sat down with her and told her this story I’m now telling you. But I didn’t do that. I missed the chance, and I regret it bitterly.
It was only three weeks after this that Aimee fell down the stairs. I mourned her, of course. She was my daughter. But I have to admit I mourned the self she’d been at a much earlier age. I mourned what she could have become; I mourned her lost possibilities. More than anything, I mourned my own failures.
After Aimee was dead, Winifred got her claws into Sabrina. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and she was on the scene first. She whisked Sabrina off to her tarted-up mansionette in Rosedale, and faster than you could blink she’d had herself declared the official guardian. I considered fighting, but it would just have been the battle over Aimee all over again – one I was doomed to lose.
When Winifred took charge of Sabrina I wasn’t yet sixty; I could still drive then. From time to time I would make the trip into Toronto and shadow Sabrina, like a private eye in an old detective story. I’d hang around outside her primary school – her new primary school, her new exclusive primary school – just to catch a glimpse of her, and to assure myself that, despite everything, she was all right.
I was in the department store, for instance, the morning Winifred took her to Eaton’s to get her some party shoes, a few months after she’d acquired her. No doubt she bought Sabrina’s other clothes without consulting her – that would have been her way – but shoes do need to be tried on, and for some reason Winifred had not entrusted this chore to the hired help.
It was the Christmas season – the pillars in the store were twined with fake holly, wreaths of gold-sprayed pine cones and red velvet ribbon hung over the doorways like prickly haloes – and Winifred got trapped in the carol singing, much to her annoyance. I was in the next aisle over. My wardrobe wasn’t what it used to be – I was wearing an old tweed coat and a kerchief pulled down over my forehead – and although she looked right at me, she didn’t see me. She probably saw a cleaning lady, or an immigrant bargain-hunter.
She was done up to the nines as usual, but despite this she was looking quite tatty. Well, she must have been pushing seventy, and after a certain age her style of maquillage does tend to make you look mummified. She shouldn’t have stuck to the orange lipstick, it was too harsh for her.
I could see the powdery furrows of exasperation between her eyebrows, the clamped muscles of her rouged jaw. She was hauling Sabrina along by one arm, trying to push her way through the chorus of bulky, winter-coated shoppers; she must have hated the enthusiastic, uncooked quality of the singing.
Sabrina on the other hand wanted to hear the music. She was dragging down, making herself a dead weight in the way children do – resistance without the appearance of it. Her arm was straight up, as if she was a good girl answering a question in school, but she was scowling like an imp. It must have hurt, what she was doing. Taking a stance, making a declaration. Holding out.
The song was “Good King Wenceslas.” Sabrina knew the words: I could see her little mouth moving. “‘Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel,’” she sang. “‘When a poor man came in sight, gathering winter fu-u-el.’”
It’s a song about hunger. I could tell Sabrina understood it – she must still have remembered that, being hungry. Winifred gave her arm a jerk, and looked around nervously. She didn’t see me, but she sensed me, the way a cow in a well-fenced field will sense a wolf. Even so, cows aren’t like wild animals; they’re used to being protected. Winifred was skittish, but she wasn’t frightened. If I crossed her mind at all, she doubtless