The Robber Bride

“Nobody maps female psychic territory the way Margaret Atwood does.… What a treasure she is.…”

–
Newsweek

“A hugely enjoyable novel.”

–
Globe and Mail

“Imaginative and suspenseful … a virtuoso performance.”

–
Publishers Weekly

“Thoroughly engaging … it has heft … depth and staying power.”

–
The Gazette
(Montreal)

“Wickedly funny … witty … well-observed.”

–
The Observer
(U.K.)

“Atwood is at the top of her form.”

–
Boston Sunday Globe

“Grabs the funny bone, the brain, and sometimes the throat.”

–
The Whig-Standard
(Kingston)

“Brilliant and entertaining.”

–
Ottawa Sun

“Startling, provocative and rewarding.”

–
Canadian Forum

“Excitements, wit and insight sizzle across the pages. Atwood’s survey of impulses that bedevil life seethes with imagination, inventiveness and intelligence.”

– Peter Kemp

“Compelling and astonishingly rich.…”

–
Books in Canada

T
he story of Zenia ought to begin when Zenia began. It must have been someplace long ago and distant in space, thinks Tony; someplace bruised, and very tangled. A European print, hand-tinted, ochre-coloured, with dusty sunlight and a lot of bushes in it – bushes with thick leaves and ancient twisted roots, behind which, out of sight in the undergrowth and hinted at only by a boot protruding, or a slack hand, something ordinary but horrifying is taking place.

Or this is the impression Tony has been left with. But so much has been erased, so much has been bandaged over, so much deliberately snarled, that Tony isn’t sure any longer which of Zenia’s accounts of herself was true. She can hardly ask now, and even if she could, Zenia wouldn’t answer. Or she would lie. She would lie earnestly, with a catch in her voice, a quaver of suppressed grief, or she would lie haltingly, as if confessing; or she would lie with a cool, defiant anger, and Tony would believe her. She has before.

Pick any strand and snip, and history comes unravelled
. This is how Tony begins one of her more convoluted lectures, the one on the dynamics of spontaneous massacres. The metaphor is of weaving
or else of knitting, and of sewing scissors. She likes using it: she likes the faint shock on the faces of her listeners. It’s the mix of domestic image and mass bloodshed that does it to them; a mix that would have been appreciated by Zenia, who enjoyed such turbulence, such violent contradictions. More than enjoyed: created.
Why
is still unclear.

Tony doesn’t know why she feels compelled to know. Who cares why, at this distance? A disaster is a disaster; those hurt by it remain hurt, those killed remain killed, the rubble remains rubble. Talk of causes is beside the point. Zenia was a bad business, and should be left alone. Why try to decode her motives?

But Zenia is also a puzzle, a knot: if Tony could just find a loose end and pull, a great deal would come free, for everyone involved, and for herself as well. Or this is her hope. She has a historian’s belief in the salutary power of explanations.

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. History is a construct, she tells her students. Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still, there are definitive moments, moments we use as references, because they break our sense of continuity, they change the direction of time. We can look at these events and we can say that after them things were never the same again. They provide beginnings for us, and endings too. Births and deaths, for instance, and marriages. And wars.

It’s the wars that interest Tony, despite her lace-edged collars. She likes clear outcomes.

So did Zenia, or so Tony thought once. Now, she can hardly tell.

An arbitrary choice then, a definitive moment: October 23, 1990. It’s a bright clear day, unseasonably warm. It’s a Tuesday. The Soviet bloc
is crumbling, the old maps are dissolving, the Eastern tribes are on the move again across the shifting borders. There’s trouble in the Gulf, the real estate market is crashing, and a large hole has developed in the ozone layer. The sun moves into Scorpio, Tony has lunch at the Toxique with her two friends Roz and Charis, a slight breeze blows in over Lake Ontario, and Zenia returns from the dead.

T
ony gets up at six-thirty, as she always does. West sleeps on, groaning a little. Probably in his dreams he’s shouting; sounds in dreams are always louder. Tony inspects his sleeping face, his angular jaw-line relaxed to softness, his unearthly blue hermit’s eyes so gently closed. She’s happy he’s still alive: women live longer than men and men have weak hearts, sometimes they just keel over, and although she and West aren’t old – they’re hardly old at all – still, women her age have awakened in the morning to find dead men beside them. Tony does not consider this a morbid thought.

She’s happy in a more general way, too. She’s happy that West is on this earth at all, and in this house, and that he goes to sleep every night beside her and not somewhere else. Despite everything, despite Zenia, he’s still here. It seems a miracle really. Some days she can’t get over it.

Quietly, so as not to wake him, she gropes for her glasses on the night-table, then slides down out of the bed. She pulls on her Viyella dressing gown and her cotton socks and her grey wool work socks over them, and stuffs her bundled feet into her slippers. She
suffers from cold feet, a sign of low blood pressure. The slippers are in the form of raccoons, and were given to her by Roz, many years ago, for reasons best known to Roz. They’re the duplicates of the slippers Roz gave her eight-year-old twins at the time; they’re even the same foot size. The raccoons are somewhat ratty by now and one of them is missing an eye, but Tony has never been good at throwing things out.

On her insulated feet she makes her way stealthily down the hall to her study. She prefers to spend an hour in there first thing every morning; she finds it concentrates her mind. There’s an eastern exposure, so she catches the sunrise when there is one. Today there is.

Her study has new green curtains in a palm-tree-and-exotic-fruit print, and an easy chair with matching cushions. Roz helped her choose the print, and talked her into paying the price, which was higher than what Tony would have paid if she’d been alone.
Listen to me, sweetie
, said Roz.
Now this – this! is a bargain. Anyway, it’s for the place where you think! It’s your mental environment! Get rid of those dull old navy blue sailboats! You owe it to yourself
. There are days when Tony is overwhelmed by the trumpet vines and the orange mangoes, or whatever they are; but she’s intimidated by interior decoration, and finds Roz’s expertise hard to resist.

She feels more at home with the rest of the study. Books and papers are stacked in piles on the carpet; on the wall there’s a print of the Battle of Trafalgar, and another one of Laura Secord, in unlikely white, driving her mythical cow through the American lines to warn the British during the War of 1812. Armfuls of dog-eared war memoirs and collections of letters and foxed volumes of front-line reportage by long-forgotten journalists are stuffed into the olive green bookcase, along with several copies of Tony’s two published books,
Five Ambushes
and
Four Lost Causes. Meticulously researched; a refreshing new interpretation
, say the reviews quoted on the quality
paperbacks.
Sensationalistic; overly digressive; marred by obsessive detail
, say those not quoted. Tony’s face, owl-eyed and elf-nosed and younger than her face is now, goggles out from the back covers, frowning slightly in an attempt to look substantial.