The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [43]
Laura and I were under the kitchen table. I was reading an illustrated book for children called Great Men of History. Napoleon was in exile on the island of St. Helena, standing on a cliff with his hand inside his coat. I thought he must have a stomachache. Laura was restless. She crawled out from under the table to get a drink of water. “You want some dough to make a bread man?” said Reenie.
“No,” said Laura.
“No, thank you,” said Mother.
Laura crawled back under the table. We could see the two pairs of feet, Mother’s narrow ones and Reenie’s wider ones in their sturdy shoes, and Mother’s skinny legs and Reenie’s plump ones in their pinkybrown stockings. We could hear the muffled turning and thumping of the bread dough. Then all of a sudden the teacup shattered and Mother was down on the floor, and Reenie was kneeling beside her. “Oh dear God,” she was saying. “Iris, go get your father.”
I ran to the library. The telephone was ringing, but Father wasn’t there. I climbed up the stairs to his turret, usually a forbidden place. The door was unlocked: nothing was in the room but a chair and several ashtrays. He wasn’t in the front parlour, he wasn’t in the morning room, he wasn’t in the garage. He must be at the factory, I thought, but I wasn’t sure of the way, and also it was too far. I didn’t know where else to look.
I went back into the kitchen and crept under the table, where Laura sat hugging her knees. She wasn’t crying. There was something on the floor that looked like blood, a trail of it, dark-red spots on the white tiles. I put a finger down, licked it – it was blood. I got a cloth and wiped it up. “Don’t look,” I told Laura.
After a while Reenie came down the back stairs and cranked the telephone and rang up the doctor – not that he was in, he was gadding about somewhere as usual. Then she phoned the factory and demanded Father. He could not be located. “Find him if you can. Tell him it’s an emergency,” she said. Then she hurried upstairs again. She’d forgotten all about the bread, which rose too high, and fell back in on itself, and was ruined.
“She shouldn’t have been in that hot kitchen,” said Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate, “not in this weather with a thunderstorm coming, but she won’t spare herself, you can’t tell her anything.”
“Did she have a lot of pain?” asked Mrs. Hillcoate, in a pitying, interested voice.
“I’ve seen worse,” said Reenie. “Thank God for small mercies. It slipped out just like a kitten, but I have to say she bled buckets. We’ll need to burn the mattress, I don’t know how we’d ever get it clean.”
“Oh dear, well, she can always have another,” said Mrs. Hillcoate. “It must have been meant. There must have been something wrong with it.”
“Not from what I heard, she can’t,” said Reenie. “Doctor says that better be the end of that, because another one would kill her and this one almost did.”
“Some women shouldn’t marry,” said Mrs. Hillcoate. “They’re not suited to it. You have to be strong. My own mother had ten, and never blinked an eye. Not that they all lived.”
“Mine had eleven,” said Reenie. “It wore her right down to the ground.”
I knew from past experience that this was the prelude to a contest about the hardness of their mothers’ lives, and that soon they would be onto the subject of laundry. I took Laura by the hand and we tiptoed up the back stairs. We were worried, but very curious as well: we wanted to find out what had happened to Mother, but also we wanted to see the kitten. There it was, beside a pile of blood-soaked sheets on the hall floor outside Mother’s room, in an enamel basin. But it wasn’t a kitten. It was grey, like an old cooked potato, with a head that was too big; it was all curled up. Its eyes were squinched shut, as if the light was hurting it.
“What is it?” Laura whispered. “It’s not a kitten.