The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [212]
She was right, too. She was never found out.
That memory was what led me to pull out my wedding album, where the photographs of that event were stored. Certainly this volume was of scant interest to Winifred, nor had Richard ever been found leafing fondly through it. Laura must have known that, she must have known it would be safe. But what – she must have thought – would lead me ever to look into it myself?
If I’d been searching for Laura, I would have. She’d know that. There were a lot of pictures of her in there, stuck to the brown pages with black triangles at the corners; pictures of her scowling and gazing at her feet, dressed in her bridesmaid’s outfit.
I found the message, although it was not in words. Laura had gone to town on my wedding with the hand-tinting materials, the little tubes of paint she’d nicked from Elwood Murray’s newspaper office back in Port Ticonderoga. She must have had them squirrelled away all this time. For a person who claimed such disdain for the material world, she was very bad at throwing things out.
She’d altered only two of the photographs. The first was a group shot of the wedding party. In this, the bridesmaids and groomsmen had been covered over with a thick coat of indigo – eliminated from the picture altogether. I had been left, and Richard, and Laura herself, and Winifred, who had been a matron of honour. Winifred had been coloured a lurid green, as had Richard. I had been given a wash of aqua blue. Laura herself was a brilliant yellow, not only her dress, but her face and hands as well. What did it mean, this radiance? For radiance it was, as if Laura was glowing from within, like a glass lamp or a girl made of phosphorus. She wasn’t looking straight ahead, but sideways, as if the focus of her attention was not in the picture at all.
The second was the formal shot of bride and groom, taken in front of the church. Richard’s face had been painted grey, such a dark grey that the features were all but obliterated. The hands were red, as were the flames that shot up from around and somehow from inside the head, as if the skull itself were burning. My wedding gown, the gloves, the veil, the flowers – these trappings Laura had not bothered with. She’d dealt with my face, however – bleached it so that the eyes and the nose and mouth looked fogged over, like a window on a cold, wet day. The background and even the church steps beneath our feet had been entirely blacked out, leaving our two figures floating as if in mid-air, in the deepest and darkest of nights.
XII
The Globe and Mail, October 7, 1938
GRIFFEN LAUDS MUNICH ACCORD
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
In a vigorous and hard-hitting speech entitled “Minding Our Own Business,” delivered at the Wednesday meeting of the Empire Club in Toronto, Mr. Richard E. Griffen, President and Chairman of Griffen-Chase-Royal Consolidated Industries Ltd., praised the outstanding efforts of the British Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, which have resulted in last week’s Munich Accord. It was significant, said Mr. Griffen, that all parties in the British House of Commons cheered the news, and he hoped that all parties in Canada would also cheer, as this accord would put paid to the Depression and would usher in a new “golden era” of peace and prosperity. It also went to show the value of statesmanship and diplomacy as well as positive thinking and plain old hard-headed business sense. “If everyone gives a little,” he said, “then everyone stands to gain a lot.”
In reply to questions about the status of Czecho-Slovakia under the Accord, he stated that in his opinion the citizens of that country had been guaranteed sufficient safe-guards. A strong, healthy Germany, he claimed, was in the interests of the West, and of business in particular, and would serve to “keep Bolshevism at bay, and away from Bay Street.” The next thing to be desired was a bilateral trade treaty, and he was assured that this was in progress. Attention