The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [36]
Did my mother cry? It’s possible. They must have kissed awkwardly, as if at a box social, one for which he’d bought the wrong ticket. This wasn’t what he’d remembered, this efficient, careworn woman, with a pince-nez like some maiden aunt’s glinting on a silver chain around her neck. They were now strangers, and – it must have occurred to them – they always had been. How harsh the light was. How much older they’d become. There was no trace of the young man who’d once knelt so deferentially on the ice to lace up her skates, or of the young woman who’d sweetly accepted this homage.
Something else materialized like a sword between them. Of course he’d had other women, the kind who hung around battlefields, taking advantage. Whores, not to mince a word my mother would never have pronounced. She must have been able to tell, the first time he laid a hand on her: the timidity, the reverence, would have been gone. Probably he’d held out against temptation through Bermuda, then through England, up to the time when Eddie and Percy were killed and he himself was wounded. After that he’d clutched at life, at whatever handfuls of it might come within his reach. How could she fail to understand his need for it, under the circumstances?
She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can’t have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had tended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone – to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.
However, my father wasn’t so healthy as all that. In fact he was a shattered wreck, as witness the shouts in the dark, the nightmares, the sudden fits of rage, the bowl or glass thrown against the wall or floor, though never at her. He was broken, and needed mending: therefore she could still be useful. She would create around him an atmosphere of calm, she would indulge him, she would coddle him, she would put flowers on his breakfast table and arrange his favourite dinners. At least he hadn’t caught some evil disease.
However, a much worse thing had happened: my father was now an atheist. Over the trenches God had burst like a balloon, and there was nothing left of him but grubby little scraps of hypocrisy. Religion was just a stick to beat the soldiers with, and anyone who declared otherwise was full of pious drivel. What had been served by the gallantry of Percy and Eddie – by their bravery, their hideous deaths? What had been accomplished? They’d been killed by the blunderings of a pack of incompetent and criminal old men who might just as well have cut their throats and heaved them over the side of the SS Caledonian. All the talk of fighting for God and Civilization made him vomit.
My mother was appalled. Was he saying that Percy and Eddie had died for no higher purpose? That all those poor men had died for nothing? As for God, who else had seen them through this time of trial and suffering? She begged him at the very least to keep his atheism to himself. Then she was deeply ashamed for having asked this – as if what mattered most to her was the opinion of the neighbours, and not the relationship in which my father’s living soul stood to God.
He did respect her wish, though. He saw the necessity of it. Anyway, he only said such things when he’d been drinking. He’d never used to drink before the war, not in any regular, determined way, but he did now. He drank and paced the floor, his bad foot dragging. After a while he would begin