The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [95]
Being Laura, I thought, was like being tone deaf: the music played and you heard something, but it wasn’t what everyone else heard.
According to Laura, on all of these occasions – and there had been only three of them – she and Alex Thomas had been engaged in serious discussion. What about? About God. Alex Thomas had lost his faith, and Laura was trying to help him regain it. It was hard work because he was very cynical, or maybe skeptical was what she meant. He thought that the modern age would be an age of this world rather than the next – of man, for mankind – and he was all for it. He claimed not to have a soul, and said he didn’t give a hang what might happen to him after he was dead. Still, she meant to keep on with her efforts, however difficult the task might appear.
I coughed into my hand. I didn’t dare laugh. I’d seen Laura use that virtuous expression on Mr. Erskine often enough, and I thought that was what she was doing now: pulling the wool over. Reenie, hands on hips, legs apart, mouth open, looked like a hen at bay.
“Why’s he still in town, is what I’d like to know,” said Reenie, baffled, shifting her ground. “I thought he was just visiting.”
“Oh, he has some business here,” said Laura mildly. “But he can be where he wants to be. It’s not a slave state. Except for the wage slaves, of course.” I guessed that the attempt at conversion hadn’t been all one way: Alex Thomas had been getting his own oar in. If things went on in this fashion we’d have a little Bolshevik on our hands.
“Isn’t he too old?” I said.
Laura gave me a fierce look – too old for what? – daring me to butt in. “The soul has no age,” she said.
“People are talking,” said Reenie: always her clinching argument.
“That is their own concern,” said Laura. Her tone was one of lofty irritation: other people were her cross to bear.
Reenie and I were both at a loss. What could be done? We could have told Father, who might then have forbidden Laura to see Alex Thomas. But she wouldn’t have obeyed, not with a soul at stake. Telling Father would have caused more trouble than it would be worth, we decided; and after all, what had actually taken place? Nothing you could put your finger on. (Reenie and I were confidants by then, on this matter; we’d put our heads together.)
As the days passed I came to feel that Laura was making a fool of me, though I couldn’t specify how, exactly. I didn’t think she was lying as such, but neither was she telling the entire truth. Once I saw her with Alex Thomas, deep in conversation, ambling along past the War Memorial; once at the Jubilee Bridge, once idling outside Betty’s Luncheonette, oblivious to turning heads, mine included. It was sheer defiance.
“You have to talk sense to her,” Reenie said to me. But I couldn’t talk sense to Laura. Increasingly, I couldn’t talk to her at all; or I could talk, but did she listen? It was like talking to a sheet of white blotting paper: the words went out of my mouth and disappeared behind her face as if into a wall of falling snow.
When I wasn’t spending time at the button factory – an exercise that was daily appearing more futile, even to Father – I began to wander around by myself. I would march along by the riverbank, trying to pretend I had a destination, or stand on the Jubilee Bridge as if waiting for someone, gazing down at the black water and remembering the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They’d done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once