The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [211]
I carry no brief, for better or for worse.
Loose Lips Sink Ships, said the wartime poster. Of course the ships will all sink anyway, sooner or later.
After indulging myself in this way, I wandered into the kitchen, where I ate half of a blackening banana and two soda crackers. I wondered if something – food of some sort – had fallen down behind the garbage can – there was a meaty smell – but a quick check revealed nothing. Perhaps this odour was my own. I can’t overcome the notion that my body smells like cat food, despite whatever stagnant scent I sprayed on myself this morning –Tosca, was it, or Ma Griffe, or perhaps Je Reviens? I still have a few odds and ends of that sort kicking around. Grist for the green garbage bags, Myra, when you get around to them.
Richard used to give me perfume, when he felt I needed mollifying. Perfume, silk scarves, small jewelled pins in the shapes of domestic animals, of caged birds, of goldfish. Winifred’s tastes, not for herself but for me.
On the train coming back from Port Ticonderoga, and then for weeks afterwards, I pondered Laura’s message, the one Reenie said she’d left for me. She must have known, then, that whatever she was planning to say to the strange doctor at the hospital might have repercussions. She must have known it was a risk, and so she’d taken precautions. Somehow, somewhere, she’d left some word, some clue for me, like a dropped handkerchief or a trail of white stones in the woods.
I pictured her writing this message, in the way she always set about writing. No doubt it would be in pencil, a pencil with a chewed end. She often chewed her pencils; as a child her mouth had smelled of cedar, and if it was a coloured pencil her lips would be blue or green or purple. She wrote slowly; her script was childish, with round vowels and closed o’s, and long, wavery stems on her g’s and her y’s. The dots on the i’s and j’s were circular, placed far to the right, as if the dot were a small black balloon tethered to its stem by an invisible thread; the cross-strokes of the t’s were one-sided. I sat beside her in spirit, to see what she would do next.
She’d have reached the end of her message, then put it into an envelope and sealed it, and then hidden it, the way she’d hidden her bundle of bits and scraps at Avilion. But where could she have put this envelope? Not at Avilion: she hadn’t been anywhere near there, not just before she was taken away.
No, it must be in the house in Toronto. Somewhere no one else would look – not Richard, not Winifred, not any of the Murgatroyds. I searched in various places – the bottoms of drawers, the backs of cupboards, the pockets of my winter coats, my supply of handbags, my winter mittens even – but found nothing.
Then I remembered coming upon her once, in Grandfather’s study, when she was ten or eleven. She’d had the family Bible spread out in front of her, a great leathery brute of a thing, and was snipping sections out of it with Mother’s old sewing scissors.
“Laura, what are you doing?” I said. “That’s the Bible!”
“I’m cutting out the parts I don’t like.”
I uncrumpled the pages she’d tossed into the wastebasket: swathes of Chronicles, pages and pages of Leviticus, the little snippet from St. Matthew in which Jesus curses the barren fig tree. I remembered now that Laura had been indignant about that fig tree, in her Sunday-school days. She’d been furious that Jesus had been so spiteful towards a tree. We all have our bad days, Reenie had commented, briskly whipping up egg whites in a yellow bowl.
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.
“It’s only paper,” said Laura, continuing to snip. “Paper isn’t important. It’s the words on them that are important.”
“You’ll get in big trouble.”
“No, I won’t,