Blind Assassin (13 page)

“I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.”

“I’m not going to have one either,” I said, not to be outdone.

“Fat chance of that,” said Reenie. “You like your nice soft bed. You’d have to sleep on the cement and get all covered in grease and oil.”

“I’m going to live in the conservatory,” I said.

“It’s not heated any more,” said Reenie. “You’d freeze to death in the winters.”

“I’ll sleep in one of the motor cars,” said Laura.

On that horrible Tuesday we’d had breakfast in the kitchen, with Reenie. It was oatmeal porridge and toast with marmalade. Sometimes we had it with Mother, but that day she was too tired. Mother was stricter, and made us sit up straight and eat the crusts. “Remember the starving Armenians,” she would say.

Perhaps the Armenians were no longer starving by then. The war was long over, order had been restored. But their plight must have remained in Mother’s mind as a kind of slogan. A slogan, an invocation, a prayer, a charm. Toast crusts must be eaten in memory of these Armenians, whoever they may have been; not to eat them was a sacrilege. Laura and I must have understood the weight of this charm, because it never failed to work.

Mother didn’t eat her crusts that day. I remember that. Laura went on at her about it—What about the crusts, what about the starving Armenians?—until finally Mother admitted that she didn’t feel well. When she said that, I felt an electric chill run through me, because I knew it. I’d known it all along.

Reenie said God made people the way she herself made bread, and that was why the mothers’ tummies got fat when they were going to have a baby: it was the dough rising. She said her dimples were God’s thumb-prints. She said she had three dimples and some people had none, because God didn’t make everyone the same, otherwise he would just get bored of it all, and so he dished things out unevenly. It didn’t seem fair, but it would come out fair at the end.

Laura was six, by the time I’m remembering. I was nine. I knew that babies weren’t made out of bread dough—that was a story for little kids like Laura. Still, no detailed explanation had been offered.

In the afternoons Mother had been sitting in the gazebo, knitting. She was knitting a tiny sweater, like the ones she still knitted for the Overseas Refugees. Was this one for a refugee too? I wanted to know.Perhaps, she’d say, and smile. After a while she would doze off, her eyes sliding heavily shut, her round glasses slipping down. She told us she had eyes in the back of her head, and that was how she knew when we’d done something wrong. I pictured these eyes as flat and shiny and without colour, like the glasses.

It wasn’t like her to sleep so much in the afternoons. There were a lot of things that weren’t like her. Laura wasn’t worried, but I was. I was putting two and two together, out of what I’d been told and what I’d overheard. What I’d been told: “Your mother needs her rest, so you’ll have to keep Laura out of her hair.” What I’d overheard (Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate): “The doctor’s not pleased. It might be nip and tuck. Of course she’d never say a word, but she’s not a well woman. Some men can never leave well enough alone.” So I knew my mother was in danger of some kind, something to do with her health and something to do with Father, though I was unsure what this danger might be.

I’ve said Laura wasn’t worried, but she was clinging to Mother more than usual. She sat cross-legged in the cool space beneath the gazebo when Mother was resting, or behind her chair when she was writing letters. When Mother was in the kitchen, Laura liked to be under the kitchen table. She’d drag a cushion in there, and her alphabet book, the one that used to be mine. She had a lot of things that used to be mine.

Laura could read by now, or at least she could read the alphabet book. Her favourite letter was L, because it was her own letter, the one that began her name,L is for Laura. I never had a favourite letter that began my name—I is for Iris—becauseI was everybody’s letter.

L is for Lily,

So pure and so white;

It opens by day,

And it closes at night.

The picture in the book was of two children in old-fashioned straw bonnets, next to a water lily with a fairy sitting on it—bare-naked, with shimmering, gauzy wings. Reenie used to say that if she came across a thing like that she’d go after it with the fly swatter. She’d say it to me, for a joke, but she didn’t say it to Laura because Laura might take it seriously and get upset.

Laura wasdifferent. Different meantstrange, I knew that, but I would pester Reenie. “What do you mean, different?”

“Not the same as other people,” Reenie would say.

But perhaps Laura wasn’t very different from other people after all. Perhaps she was the same—the same as some odd, skewed element in them that most people keep hidden but that Laura did not, and this was why she frightened them. Because she did frighten them—or if not frighten, then alarm them in some way; though more, of course, as she got older.

Tuesday morning, then, in the kitchen. Reenie and Mother were making the bread. No: Reenie was making the bread, and Mother was having a cup of tea. Reenie had said to Mother that she wouldn’t be surprised if there was thunder later in the day, the air was so heavy, and shouldn’t Mother be out in the shade, or lying down; but Mother had said she hated doing nothing. She said it made her feel useless; she said she’d like to keep Reenie company.

Mother could walk on water as far as Reenie was concerned, and in any case she had no power to order her around. So Mother sat drinking her tea while Reenie stood at the table, turning the mound of bread dough, pushing down into it with both hands, folding, turning, pushing down. Her hands were covered with flour; she looked as if she had white floury gloves on. There was flour on the bib of her apron too. She had half-circles of sweat under her arms, darkening the yellow daisies on her house dress. Some of the loaves were already shaped and in the pans, with a clean, damp dishtowel over each one. The humid mushroom smell filled the kitchen.

The kitchen was hot, because the oven needed a good bed of coals, and also because there was a heat wave. The window was open, the wave of heat rolled in through it. The flour for the bread came out of the big barrel in the pantry. You should never climb into that barrel because the flour could get into your nose and mouth and smother you. Reenie had known a baby who was stuck into the flour barrel upside down by its brothers and sisters and almost choked to death.

Laura and I were under the kitchen table. I was reading an illustrated book for children calledGreat 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 pinky-brown 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.” She squatted down, peering.

“Let’s go downstairs,” I said. The doctor was still in the room, we could hear his footsteps. I didn’t want him to catch us, because I knew this creature was forbidden to us; I knew we shouldn’t have seen it. Especially not Laura—it was the kind of sight, like a squashed animal, that as a rule would make her scream, and then I would get blamed.

“It’s a baby,” said Laura. “It’s not finished.” She was surprisingly calm. “The poor thing. It didn’t want to get itself born.”

In the late afternoon Reenie took us in to see Mother. She was lying in bed with her head propped up on two pillows; her thin arms were outside the sheet; her whitening hair was transparent. Her wedding ring glinted on her left hand, her fists bunched the sheet at her sides. Her mouth was pulled tight as if she was considering something; it was the look she had when she was making lists. Her eyes were closed. With the curved eyelids rolled down over them, her eyes looked even bigger than they did when they were open. Her glasses were sitting on the night table beside the water jug, each round eye of them shining and empty.

“She’s asleep,” Reenie whispered. “Don’t touch her.”

Mother’s eyes slid open. Her mouth flickered; the fingers of her near hand unfolded. “You can give her a hug,” said Reenie, “but not too hard.” I did as I was told. Laura burrowed her head fiercely against Mother’s side, underneath her arm. There was the starchy pale-blue lavender smell of the sheets, the soap smell of Mother, and underneath that a hot smell of rust, mixed with the sweetly acid scent of damp but smouldering leaves.

Mother died five days later. She died of a fever; also of being weak, because she could not manage to get her strength back, said Reenie. During this time the doctor came and went, and a succession of crisp, brittle nurses occupied the easy chair in the bedroom. Reenie hurried up and down the stairs with basins, with towels, with cups of broth. Father shuttled restlessly back and forth to the factory, and appeared at the dinner table haggard as a beggar. Where had he been, that afternoon when he could not be found? Nobody said.

Laura crouched in the upstairs hallway. I was told to play with her in order to keep her out of harm’s way, but she didn’t want that. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees and her chin on them, and a thoughtful, secret expression, as if she were sucking on a candy. We weren’t allowed to have candies. But when I made her show me, it was only a round white stone.

During this last week I was allowed to see Mother every morning, but only for a few minutes. I wasn’t allowed to talk to her, because (said Reenie) she was rambling. That meant she thought she was somewhere else. Each day there was less of her. Her cheekbones were prominent; she smelled of milk, and of something raw, something rancid, like the brown paper meat came wrapped in.

I was sulky during these visits. I could see how ill she was, and I resented her for it. I felt she was in some way betraying me—that she was shirking her duties, that she’d abdicated. It didn’t occur to me that she might die. I’d been afraid of this possibility earlier, but now I was so terrified that I’d put it out of my mind.

On the last morning, which I did not know would be the last, Mother seemed more like herself. She was frailer, but at the same time more packed together—more dense. She looked at me as if she saw me. “It’s so bright in here,” she whispered. “Could you just pull the curtains?” I did as I was told, then went back to stand by her bedside, twisting the handkerchief Reenie had given me in case I cried. My mother took hold of my hand; her own was hot and dry, the fingers like soft wire.

“Be a good girl,” she said. “I hope you’ll be a good sister to Laura. I know you try to be.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around? Surely my mother loved Laura more than she loved me.