The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [63]
“That’s not God. It’s only Father. He’s in the turret.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Smoking.” I didn’t want to say drinking. It seemed disloyal.
I felt most tenderly towards Laura when she was asleep – her mouth a little open, her eyelashes still wet – but she was a restless sleeper; she groaned and kicked, and snored sometimes, and kept me from getting to sleep myself. I would climb down out of the bed and tiptoe across the floor, and hoist myself up to look out the bedroom window. When there was a moon the flower gardens would be silvery grey, as if all the colours had been sucked out of them. I could see the stone nymph, foreshortened; the moon was reflected in her lily pond, and she was dipping her toes into its cold light. Shivering, I would get back into bed, and lie watching the moving shadows of the curtains and listening to the gurglings and crackings of the house as it shifted itself. Wondering what I’d done wrong.
Children believe that everything bad that happens is somehow their fault, and in this I was no exception; but they also believe in happy endings, despite all evidence to the contrary, and I was no exception in that either. I only wished the happy ending would hurry up, because – especially at night, when Laura was asleep and I did not have to cheer her up – I felt so desolate.
In the mornings I would help Laura to dress – that had been my task even when Mother was alive – and make sure she brushed her teeth and washed her face. At lunchtime Reenie would sometimes let us have a picnic. We’d have buttered white bread spread with grape jelly translucent as cellophane, and raw carrots, and cut-up apples. We’d have corned beef turned out of the tin, the shape of it like an Aztec temple. We’d have hard-boiled eggs. We’d put these things on plates, and take them outside, and eat them here and there – by the pool, in the conservatory. If it was raining we’d eat them inside.
“Remember the starving Armenians,” Laura would say, hands clasped, eyes closed, bowing over the crusts of her jelly sandwich. I knew she was saying it because Mother used to, and it made me want to cry. “There are no starving Armenians, they’re just made up,” I told her once, but she wouldn’t have it.
We were left on our own a lot at that time. We learned Avilion inside out: its crevices, its caves, its tunnels. We peered into the hiding place under the back stairs, which contained a jumble of discarded overshoes and single mittens, and an umbrella with broken ribs. We explored the various branches of the cellar – the coal cellar for the coal; the root cellar for the cabbages and squashes laid out on a board, and the beets and carrots growing whiskery in their box of sand, and the potatoes with their blind albino tentacles, like the legs of crabs; the cold cellar for the apples in their barrels, and for the shelves of preserves – dusty jams and jellies glinting like uncut gems, chutneys and pickles and strawberries and peeled tomatoes and applesauce, all in Crown sealing jars. There was a wine cellar too, but it was kept locked; only Father had the key.
We found the damp dirt-floored grotto beneath the verandah, reached by crawling between the hollyhocks, where only spidery dandelions tried to grow, and creeping Charlie, its crushed-mint smell mingling with cat spray and (once) the hot, sick stink of an alarmed garter snake. We found the attic, with boxes of old books and stored quilts and three empty trunks, and a broken harmonium, and Grandmother Adelia’s headless dress form, a pallid, musty torso.
Holding our breaths, we would make our way stealthily through our labyrinths of shadow. We took solace in this – in our secrecy, our knowledge of hidden pathways, our belief that we could not be seen.
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