Blind Assassin (68 page)

After the war, things changed. They changed the way we looked. After a time the grainy muted greys and half-tones were gone. Instead there was the full glare of noon—gaudy, primary, shadowless. Hot pinks, violent blues, red and white beach balls, the fluorescent green of plastic, the sun blazing down like a spotlight.

Around the outskirts of towns and cities, bulldozers rampaged and trees were toppled; great holes were scooped in the ground as if bombs had been dropped there. The streets were gravel and mud. Lawns of bare earth appeared, with spindly saplings planted on them: weeping birches were popular. There was far too much sky.

There was meat, great hunks and slabs and chunks of it glistening in the butchers’ windows. There were oranges and lemons bright as a sunrise, and mounds of sugar and mountains of yellow butter. Everyone ate and ate. They stuffed themselves full of technicolour meat and all the technicolour food they could get, as if there was no tomorrow.

But there was a tomorrow, there was nothing but a tomorrow. It was yesterday that had vanished.

I had enough money now, from Richard and also from Laura’s estate. I’d bought my little house. Aimee was still resentful of me for having dragged her away from her former and considerably more affluent life, but she appeared to have settled down, though once in a while I’d catch a cold look from her: she was already deciding that I was unsatisfactory as a mother. Richard on the other hand had reaped the benefits of long distance, and had much more of a gleam to him, in her eyes, now that he was no longer present. However, the flow of gifts from him had slowed to a trickle, so she didn’t have many options. I’m afraid I expected her to be more stoical than she was.

Meanwhile, Richard was readying himself for the mantle of command, which was—according to the newspapers—as good as within his grasp. True, I was an impediment, but rumours of a separation had been squashed. I was said to be “in the country,” and that was marginally all right, as long as I was prepared to stay there.

Unbeknownst to myself, other rumours had been floated: that I was mentally unstable; that Richard was maintaining me financially, despite my wackiness; that Richard was a saint. No harm in a mad wife, if properly handled: it does make the spouses of the powerful so much more sympathetic to one’s cause.

In Port Ticonderoga I lived quietly enough. Whenever I went out, I moved through a sea of respectful whispers, the voices hushing when I came within earshot, then starting up again. It was agreed that whatever had happened with Richard, I must be the wronged party. I’d got the short end of the straw, but as there was no justice and precious little mercy, nothing could be done for me. This was before the book appeared, of course.

Time passed. I gardened, I read, and so on. I had already begun—in a modest way, and beginning with a few pieces of animal jewellery from Richard—the trade in second-hand artifacts that, as it turned out, would stand me in good stead in the coming decades. A semblance of normality had been installed.

But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn’t sleep.

Officially, Laura had been papered over. A few years more and it would be almost as if she’d never existed. I shouldn’t have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial of some kind. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

Lest we forget. Remember me. To you from failing hands we throw.Cries of the thirsty ghosts.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.

I sent the book off. In due time, I received a letter back. I answered it. Events took their course.

The author’s copies arrived, in advance of publication. On the inside jacket flap was a touching biographical note:

Laura Chase wroteThe Blind Assassin before the age of twenty-five. It was her first novel; sadly, it will also be her last, as she died in a tragic automobile accident in 1945. We are proud to present the work of this young and gifted writer in its first astonishing flowering.

Above this was Laura’s photo, a bad reproduction: it made her look flyspecked. Nevertheless, it was something.

When the book came out, there was at first a silence. It was quite a small book, after all, and hardly best-seller material; and although well received in critical circles in New York and London, it didn’t make much of a splash up here, not initially. Then the moralists grabbed hold of it, and the pulpit-thumpers and local biddies got into the act, and the uproar began. Once the corpse flies had made the connection—Laura was Richard Griffen’s dead sister-in-law—they were all over the story like a rash. Richard had, by that time, his store of political enemies. Innuendo began to flow.

The story that Laura had committed suicide, so efficiently quashed at the time, rose to the surface again. People were talking, not just in Port Ticonderoga but in the circles that mattered. If she’d done it, why? Someone made an anonymous phone call—now who could that have been?—and the Bella Vista Clinic entered the picture. Testimony by a former employee (well paid, it was said, by one of the newspapers) led to a full investigation of the seedier practices carried on there, as a result of which the backyard was dug up and the whole place was closed down. I studied the pictures of it with interest: it had been the mansion of one of the lumber barons before it became a clinic, and was said to have some rather fine stained-glass windows in the dining room, though not so fine as Avilion’s.

There was some correspondence between Richard and the director that was particularly damaging.

Once in a while Richard appears to me, in the mind’s eye or in a dream. He’s grey, but with an iridescent sheen to him, like oil on a puddle. He gives me a fishy look. Another reproachful ghost.

Shortly before the newspapers announced his retirement from official politics, I received a telephone call from him, the first since my departure. He was enraged, and also frantic. He’d been told that due to the scandal he could no longer be considered as a leadership candidate, and now the men that mattered were not returning his calls. He’d been cold-shouldered. He’d been stiffed. I’d done this on purpose, he said, to ruin him.

“Done what?” I said. “You’re not ruined. You’re still very rich.”

“That book!” he said. “You sabotaged me! How much did you have to pay them, to get it published? I can’t believe Laura wrote that filthy—that piece of garbage!”

“You don’t want to believe it,” I said, “because you were besotted with her. You can’t face the possibility that all the time you were having your squalid little fling with her, she must have been in and out of bed with another man—one she loved, unlike you. Or I assume that’s what the book means—doesn’t it?”

“It was that pinko, wasn’t it? That fucking bastard—at the picnic!” Richard must have been very upset: as a rule, he seldom swore.

“How would I know?” I said. “I didn’t spy on her. But I agree with you, it would have started at the picnic.” I didn’t tell him there had been two picnics involving Alex: one with Laura, and a second one, a year later, without her, after I’d run into Alex that day on Queen Street. The one with the hard-boiled eggs.

“She was doing it out of spite,” said Richard. “She was just getting back at me.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “She must have hated you. Why wouldn’t she? You as good as raped her.”

“That’s untrue! I did nothing without her consent!”

“Consent? Is that what you’d call it? I’d call it blackmail.”

He hung up on me. It was a family trait. When she’d called earlier to rail at me, Winifred had done that too.

Then Richard went missing, and then he was found in theWater Nixie —well, you know all that. He must have crept into the town, crept onto the grounds of Avilion, crept onto the boat, which was in the boathouse, by the way, not tied up at the jetty as it erroneously said in the papers. That was a cover-up: a corpse in a boat on the water is normal enough, but one in a boathouse is peculiar. Winifred wouldn’t have wanted it thought that Richard had gone round the bend.

What really happened then? I’m not sure. Once he was located, Winifred took charge of events, and put the best face on things.A stroke was her story. He was found with the book at his elbow, however. That much I know, because Winifred phoned in a state of hysteria and told me so. “How could you have done this to him?” she said. “You destroyed his political career, and then you destroyed his memories of Laura. He loved her! He adored her! He couldn’t bear it when she died!”

“I’m glad to hear he felt some remorse,” I said coldly. “I can’t say I noticed any at the time.”

Winifred blamed me, of course. After that, it was open war. She did the worst thing to me that she could think of. She took Aimee.

I suppose you were taught the gospel according to Winifred. In her version, I would have been a lush, a tramp, a slut, a bad mother. As time went by I no doubt became, in her mouth, a slovenly harridan, a crazy old bat, a peddler of ratty old junk. I doubt she ever said to you that I murdered Richard, however. If she’d told you that, she would also have had to say where she got the idea.

Junkwould have been a slur. It’s true I bought cheap and sold dear—who doesn’t, in the antiques racket?—but I had a good eye and I never twisted anyone’s arm. There was a period of excessive drinking—I admit it—though not until after Aimee was gone. As for the men, there were some of those as well. It was never a question of love, it was more like a sort of periodic bandaging. I was cut off from everything around me, unable to reach, to touch; at the same time I felt scraped raw. I needed the comfort of another body.

I avoided any man from my own former social circles, though some of these appeared, like fruit flies, as soon as they got wind of my solitary and possibly rotten state. Men like that could have been egged on by Winifred, and no doubt were. I stuck to strangers, picked up on my forays to nearby towns and cities in search of what they now callcollectibles. I never gave my real name. But Winifred was too persistent for me, in the end. All she’d needed was one man, and that’s what she’d got. The pictures of the motel room door, going in, coming out; the fake signatures in the register; the testimony of the owner, who’d welcomed the cash.You could fight it in court, said my lawyer,but I’d advise against it. We’ll try for visiting rights, that’s all you can expect. You handed them the ammunition and they’ve used it. Even he took a dim view of me, not for my moral turpitude but for my clumsiness.

Richard had appointed Winifred as Aimee’s guardian in his will, and also as sole trustee of Aimee’s not inconsiderable trust fund. So she had that in her favour, as well.

As for the book, Laura didn’t write a word of it. But you must have known that for some time. I wrote it myself, during my long evenings alone, when I was waiting for Alex to come back, and then afterwards, once I knew he wouldn’t. I didn’t think of what I was doing as writing—just writing down. What I remembered, and also what I imagined, which is also the truth. I thought of myself as recording. A bodiless hand, scrawling across a wall.

I wanted a memorial. That was how it began. For Alex, but also for myself.

It was no great leap from that to naming Laura as the author. You might decide it was cowardice that inspired me, or a failure of nerve—I’ve never been fond of spotlights. Or simple prudence: my own name would have guaranteed the loss of Aimee, whom I lost in any case. But on second thought it was merely doing justice, because I can’t say Laura didn’t write a word. Technically that’s accurate, but in another sense—what Laura would have called the spiritual sense—you could say she was my collaborator. The real author was neither one of us: a fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

I remember Laura, when she was ten or eleven, sitting at Grandfather’s desk, in the library at Avilion. She had a sheet of paper in front of her, and was busying herself with the seating arrangements in Heaven. “Jesus sits at the right hand of God,” she said, “so who sits at God’s left hand?”

“Maybe God doesn’t have a left hand,” I said, to tease her. “Left hands are supposed to be bad, so maybe he wouldn’t have one. Or maybe he got his left hand cut off in a war.”

“We’re made in God’s image,” Laura said, “and we have left hands, so God must have one as well.” She consulted her diagram, chewing on the end of her pencil. “I know!” she said. “The table must be circular! So everyone sits at everyone else’s right hand, all the way round.”

“And vice versa,” I said.

Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together. It’s a left-handed book. That’s why one of us is always out of sight, whichever way you look at it.

When I began this account of Laura’s life—of my own life—I had no idea why I was writing it, or who I expected might read it once I’d done. But it’s clear to me now. I was writing it for you, dearest Sabrina, because you’re the one—the only one—who needs it now.