The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [94]
I didn’t go to the soup kitchen with Laura. She didn’t ask me to, and in any case I wouldn’t have had the time: Father had now taken it into his head that I must learn the ins and outs of the button business, as was my duty. Faute de mieux, I was to be the son in Chase and Sons, and if I was ever going to run the show I needed to get my hands dirty.
I knew I had no business abilities, but I was too cowed to object. I accompanied Father to the factory every morning, to see (he said) how things worked in the real world. If I’d been a boy he would have started me working at the assembly line, on the military analogy that an officer should not expect his men to perform any job he could not perform himself. As it was, he set me to taking inventory and balancing shipping accounts – raw materials in, finished product out.
I was bad at it, more or less intentionally. I was bored, and also intimidated. When I arrived at the factory every morning in my convent-like skirts and blouses, walking at Father’s heels like a dog, I would have to pass the lines of workers. I felt scorned by the women and stared at by the men. I knew they were making jokes about me behind my back – jokes that had to do with my deportment (the women) and my body (the men), and that this was their way of getting even. In some ways I didn’t blame them – in their place I would have done the same – but I felt affronted by them nonetheless.
La-di-da. Thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba.
A good shagging would take her down a peg.
Father noticed none of this. Or he chose not to notice.
One afternoon Elwood Murray arrived at Reenie’s back door with the inflated chest and self-important manner of the bearer of unpleasant news. I was helping Reenie with the canning: it was late September, and we were doing up the last of the tomatoes from the kitchen garden. Reenie had always been frugal, but in these times waste was a sin. She must have realized how thin the thread was becoming – the thread of excess dollars that attached her to her job.
There was something we should know, said Elwood Murray, for our own good. Reenie took a look at him, him and his puffed-up stance, evaluating the gravity of his news, and judged it serious enough to invite him in. She even offered him a cup of tea. Then she asked him to wait until she’d lifted the last jars out of the boiling water with the tongs and had the tops screwed on. Then she sat down.
Here was the news. Miss Laura Chase had been seen around town – said Elwood – in the company of a young man, the very same young man she’d been photographed with at the button factory picnic. They’d first been spotted down by the soup kitchen; then, later, sitting on a park bench – on more than one park bench – and smoking cigarettes. Or the man had been smoking; as to Laura, he couldn’t swear to it, he said, pursing his mouth. They’d been seen beside the War Memorial by the Town Hall, and leaning on the railings of the Jubilee Bridge, looking down at the rapids – a traditional spot for courtship. They may even have been glimpsed out by the Camp Grounds, which was an almost certain sign of dubious behaviour, or the prelude to it – though he couldn’t vouch for this, as he hadn’t witnessed it himself.
Anyway, he thought we should know. The man was a grown man, and wasn’t Miss Laura only fourteen? Such a shame, him taking advantage of her like that. He sat back in his chair, shaking his head in sorrow, smug as a woodchuck, his eyes glittering with malicious pleasure.
Reenie was furious. She hated anyone getting the jump on her in the gossip department. “We certainly thank you for informing us,” she said with stiff politeness. “A stitch in time saves nine.” This was her way of defending Laura’s honour: nothing had happened, yet, that couldn’t be forestalled.
“What did I tell you,” said Reenie, after Elwood Murray had gone. “He’s got no shame.” She did not mean Elwood, of course, but Alex Thomas.
When confronted, Laura denied nothing, except the Camp