Or I would leaf through old society magazines, remembering how I'd once envied the people in them; or I'd ferret through the poetry books with their tissue-thin gilt-edged pages. The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary - the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers - I could now see - faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch.
Already my childhood seemed far away - a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.
Laura didn't stay inside. She rambled around the town, the way we used to do. She wore a yellow cotton dress of mine from the summer before, and the hat that went with it. Seeing her from behind gave me a peculiar sensation, as if I were watching myself.
Winifred made no secret of the fact that she was bored stiff. She went swimming every day, from the small private beach beside the boathouse, though she never went in over her depth: mostly she just splashed around, wearing a giant magenta coolie hat. She wanted Laura and me to join her, but we declined. Neither of us could swim very well, and also we knew what sorts of things used to be dumped into the river, and possibly still were. When she wasn't swimming or sunbathing, Winifred wandered around the house making notes and sketches, and lists of imperfections - the wallpaper in the front hall really had to be replaced, there was dry rot under the stairs - or else she took naps in her room. Avilion seemed to drain her energy. It was reassuring to know that something could.
Richard talked on the telephone a lot, long distance; or else he'd go into Toronto for the day. The rest of the time he diddled around with the Water Nixie, supervising the repairs. It was his goal to get the thing floated, he said, before we had to leave.
He had the papers delivered every morning. "Civil war in Spain," he said one day at lunch. "Well, it's been a long time coming."
"That's unpleasant," said Winifred.
"Not for us," said Richard. "As long as we keep out of it. Let the Commies and the Nazis kill each other off - they'll both jump into the fray soon enough."
Laura had skipped lunch. She was down on the dock, by herself, with only a cup of coffee. She was frequently down there: it made me nervous. She would lie on the dock, trailing one arm in the water, gazing into the river as if she'd dropped something and was looking for it down at the bottom. The water was too dark though. You couldn't see much. Only the occasional clutch of silvery minnows, flitting about like a pickpocket's fingers.
"Still," said Winifred. "I wish they wouldn't. It's very disagreeable."
"We could use a good war," said Richard. "Maybe it will pep things up - put paid to the Depression. I know a few fellows who are counting on it. Some folks are going to make a lot of money." I was never told anything about Richard's financial position, but I'd come to believe lately - from various hints and indications - that he didn't have as much money as I'd once thought. Or he no longer had it. The restoration of Avilion had been halted - postponed - because Richard had been unwilling to spend any more. That was according to Reenie.
"Why will they make money?" I said. I knew the answer perfectly well, but I'd drifted into the habit of asking naive questions just to see what Richard and Winifred would say. The sliding moral scale they applied to almost every area of life had not yet ceased to hold my attention.
"Because that's the way things are," said Winifred shortly. "By the by, your pal got arrested."
"What pal?" I said, too quickly.
"That Callista woman. Your father's old light o'love. The one who thinks of herself as an artist."
I resented her tone, but didn't know how to counter it. "She was awfully good to us when we were kids," I said.
"Of course she would have been, wouldn't she?"
"I liked her," I said.
"No doubt. She got hold of me a couple of months ago - tried to get me to buy some dreadful painting or mural or something - a bunch of ugly women in overalls. Not anyone's first choice for the dining room."
"Why would they arrest her?"
"The Red Squad, some roundup or other at a pinko party. She called here - she was quite frantic. She wanted to speak to you. I didn't see why you should be involved, so Richard went all the way into town and bailed her out."
"Why would he do that?" I said. "He hardly knows her."
"Oh, just out of the goodness of his heart," said Winifred, smiling sweetly. "Though he's always said those people are more trouble in jail than out of it, haven't you, Richard? They howl their heads off, in the press. Justice this, justice that. Maybe he was doing the prime minister a favour."
"Is there any more coffee?" said Richard.
This meant Winifred should drop the subject, but she went on. "Or maybe he felt he owed it to your family. I suppose you might consider her a sort of family heirloom, like some old crock that gets passed down from hand to hand."
"I think I'll join Laura on the dock," I said. "It's such a beautiful day."
Richard had been reading the paper all through my conversation with Winifred, but now he looked up quickly. "No," he said, "stay here. You encourage her too much. Leave her alone and she'll get over it."
"Over what?" I said.
"Whatever's eating her," said Richard. He'd turned his head to look at her out the window, and I noticed for the first time that there was a thinning spot at the back of his head, a round of pink scalp showing through his brown hair. Soon he would have a tonsure.
"Next summer we'll go to Muskoka," said Winifred. "I can't say this little vacation experiment has been a raging success."
Towards the end of our stay I decided to visit the attic. I waited until Richard was occupied on the telephone and Winifred was lying in a deck chair on our little strip of sand with a damp washcloth across her eyes. Then I opened the door to the attic stairs, closing it behind me, and went up as quietly as I could.
Laura was already there, sitting on one of the cedar chests. She'd got the window open, which was a mercy: otherwise the place would have been stifling. There was a musky scent of old cloth and mouse droppings.
She turned her head, not quickly. I hadn't startled her. "Hello," she said. "There's bats living up here."
"I'm not surprised," I said. There was a large paper grocery bag beside her. "What've you got there?"
She began to take things out - various bits and pieces, bric-a-brac. The silver teapot that was my grandmother's, and three china cups and saucers, hand-painted, from Dresden. A few monogrammed spoons. The nutcracker shaped like an alligator, a lone mother-of pearl cuff link, a tortoiseshell comb with missing teeth, a broken silver lighter, a cruet stand minus the vinegar.
"What're you doing with these things?" I said. "You can't take them back to Toronto!"
"I'm hiding them. They can't lay waste to everything."
"Who can't?"
"Richard and Winifred. They'd just throw these things out anyway; I've heard them talking about worthless junk. They'll make a clean sweep, sooner or later. So I'm saving a few things, for us. I'll leave them up here in one of the trunks. That way they'll be safe, and we'll know where they are."
"What if they notice?" I said.
"They won't notice. There's nothing really valuable. Look," she said, "I found our old school exercise books. They were still here, in the same place we left them. Remember when we brought them up here? For him?"
Alex Thomas never needed a name, for Laura: he was always he, him, his. I'd thought for a while that she'd given him up, or given up the idea of him, but it was obvious now that she hadn't.
"It's hard to believe we did it," I said. "That we hid him up here, that we weren't found out."
"We were careful," said Laura. She thought for a moment, then smiled. "You never really believed me, about Mr. Erskine," she said. "Did you?"
I suppose I s
hould have lied outright. Instead I compromised. "I didn't like him. He was horrible," I said.
"Reenie believed me, though. Where do you think he is?"
"Mr. Erskine?"
"You know who." She paused, turned to look out the window again. "Do you still have your picture?"
"Laura, I don't think you should dwell on him," I said. "I don't think he's going to turn up. It's not in the cards."
"Why? Do you think he's dead?"
"Why would he be dead?" I said. "I don't think he's dead. I just think he's gone somewhere else."
"Anyway they haven't caught him, or we would have heard about it. It would have been in the papers," said Laura. She gathered up the old exercise books and slid them into her paper bag.
We lingered on at Avilion longer than I'd thought we would, and certainly longer than I wanted: I felt hemmed in there, locked up, unable to move.
The day before we were due to leave, I came down to breakfast, and Richard wasn't there; only Winifred, who was eating an egg. "You missed the big launch," she said.
"What big launch?"
She gestured at our view, which was of the Louveteau on one hand, the Jogues on the other. I was surprised to see Laura on the Water Nixie , sailing away downriver. She was sitting up in the bow, like a figurehead. Her back was towards us. Richard was at the wheel. He was wearing some awful white sailor hat.
"At least they haven't sunk," said Winifred, with a hint of acid.
"Didn't you want to go?" I said.
"No, actually." There was an odd tone to her voice, which I mistook for jealousy: she did so like being in on the ground floor, in any project of Richard's.
I was relieved: maybe Laura would unbend a little now, maybe she would let up on the deep-freeze campaign. Maybe she would start treating Richard as if he were a human being instead of something that had crawled out from under a rock. That would certainly make my own life easier, I thought. It would lighten the atmosphere.
It didn't, however. If anything, the tension increased, though it had reversed itself: now it was Richard who would leave the room whenever Laura came into it. It was almost as if he was afraid of her.
"What did you say to Richard?" I asked her one evening when we were all back in Toronto.
"What do you mean?"
"That day you went sailing with him, on the Water Nixie ."
"I didn't say anything to him," she said. "Why would I?"
"I don't know."
"I never say anything to him," said Laura, "because I have nothing to say."
The chestnut tree
I look back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I've set down, but because of what I've omitted. What isn't there has a presence, like the absence of light.
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.
Last night I woke abruptly, my heart pounding. From the window there was a clinking sound: someone was throwing pebbles against the glass. I climbed out of bed and groped my way towards the window, and raised the sash higher and leaned out. I didn't have my glasses on, but I could see well enough. There was the moon, almost full, spider-veined with old scars, and below it the ambient sub-orange glow cast up into the sky by the street lights. Beneath me was the sidewalk, patchy with shadow and partially hidden by the chestnut tree in the front yard.
I was aware that there shouldn't be a chestnut tree there: that tree belonged elsewhere, a hundred miles away, outside the house where I had once lived with Richard. Yet there it was, the tree, its branches spread out like a hard thick net, its white-moth flowers glimmering faintly.
The glassy clinking came again. There was a shape there, bending over: a man, foraging in the garbage cans, shuffling the wine bottles in the desperate hope that there might be something left in one of them. A street drunk, impelled by emptiness and thirst. His movements were stealthy, invasive, as if he was not hunting, but spying - sifting through my discarded trash for evidence against me.
Then he straightened and moved sideways into the fuller light, and looked up. I could see the dark eyebrows, the hollows of the eye sockets, the smile a white slash across the dark oval of his face. At the V below his throat there was pallor: a shirt. He lifted his hand, moved it to the side. A wave of greeting, or else departure.
Now he was walking away, and I couldn't call after him. He knew I couldn't call. Now he was gone.
I felt a choking pressure around the heart. No, no, no, no, said a voice. Tears were running down my face.
But I'd said that out loud - too loudly, because Richard was awake now. He was standing right behind me. He was about to put his hand on my neck.
This was when I woke up really. I lay with my wet face, eyes open, staring at the grey blank of the ceiling, waiting for my heart to slow down. I don't cry often any more, when awake; only a few dry tears now and then. It's a surprise to find I've been doing it.
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
There really was a clinking sound, glass against glass. I climbed out of bed - out of my real, single bed - and made my way over to the window. Two raccoons were pawing through the neighbours' Blue Box across the street, turning over the bottles and cans. Scavengers, at home in the junkyard. They looked up at me, alert, unalarmed, their small thieves' masks black in the moonlight.
Good luck to you, I thought. Take what you can, while you can get it. Who cares if it belongs to you? Just don't get caught.
I went back to bed and lay in the heavy darkness, listening to the sound of breathing I knew was not there.
X
The Blind Assassin: Lizard Men of Xenor
For weeks she trolls the racks. She goes to the nearest drugstore, buys some emery boards or an orange stick, something minor, then strolls past the magazines, not touching and careful not to be seen looking, but riffling through the titles with her eyes, on the lookout for his name. One of his names. She knows them by now, or most of them: she used to cash the cheques.
Wonder Stories. Weird Tales. Astounding. She scans them all.
At last she spots something. This must be it: Lizard Men of Xenor. First Thrilling Episode in the Annals of the Zycronian Wars. On the cover, a blonde in a quasi-Babylonian getup, a white robe tightly cinched under her unlikely breasts by a gold-link belt, her throat wound in lapis jewellery, a crescent moon in silver sprouting from her head. She's wet-lipped, open-mouthed, big-eyed, in the grip of two creatures with three-fingered claws and eyes with vertical pupils. They're wearing nothing but red shorts. Their faces are flattened disks, their skin is covered with scales, a pewtery teal in hue. They shine slickly, as if basted; under their grey-blue hide their muscles bulge and gleam. The teeth in their lipless mouths are numerous and needle-sharp.
She'd know them anywhere.
How to get hold of a copy? Not in this store, where she's recognized. It would never do to start rumours, by strange behaviour of any kind at all. On her next shopping trip she makes a detour to the train station and locates the magazine at the newsstand there. One thin dime; she pays with her gloves on, rolls the magazine up quickly, caches it in her handbag. The newsie looks at her strangely, but then men do.
She hugs the magazine to her all the way back in the taxi, smuggles it up the stairs, locks herself in the bathroom with it. Her hands, she knows, will tremble turning the pages. It's a story of the kind bums read on boxcars, or school-age boys by the light of a flashlight. Factory watchmen at midnight, to keep themselves awake; salesmen in their travellers' hotels after a fruitl
ess day, tie off, shirt open, feet up, whisky in the toothbrush glass. Police, on a dull evening. None of them will find the message that will surely be concealed somewhere within the print. It will be a message meant only for her.
The paper's so soft it almost falls apart in her hands.
Here in the locked bathroom, spread out on her knees in hard print, is Sakiel-Norn, city of a thousand splendours - its gods, its customs, its wondrous carpet-weaving, its enslaved and maltreated children, the maidens about to be sacrificed. Its seven seas, its five moons, its three suns; the western mountains and their sinister tombs, where wolves howl and beautiful undead women lurk. The palace coup stretches its tentacles, the King bides his time, guessing at the forces deployed against him; the High Priestess pockets her bribes.
Now it's the night before the sacrifice; the chosen one waits in the fatal bed. But where is the blind assassin? What's become of him, and his love for the innocent girl? He must be keeping that part for later, she decides.
Then, sooner than she's expecting it, the ruthless barbarians attack, spurred on by their monomaniac leader. But they've just made their way inside the city gates when there's a surprise: three spaceships make a landing on the flat plain to the east. They're shaped like fried eggs or Saturn cut in half, and they come from Xenor. Out of them burst the Lizard Men, with their rippling grey muscles and their metallic bathing trunks and their advanced weaponry. They have ray guns, electric lassoes, one-man flying machines. All sorts of newfangled gadgets.
The sudden invasion changes things for the Zycronians. Barbarians and urbanites, incumbents and rebels, masters and slaves - all forget their differences and make common cause. Class barriers dissolve - the Snilfards discard their ancient titles along with their face masks, and roll up their sleeves, manning the barricades alongside the Ygnirods. All salute to each other by the name of tristok, which means (roughly), he with whom I have exchanged blood, that is to say, comrade or brother. The women are taken to the Temple and locked into it for their own safety, the children as well. The King takes charge. The barbarian forces are welcomed into the city because of their prowess in battle. The King shakes hands with the Servant of Rejoicing, and they decide to share command. A fist is more than the sum of its fingers, says the King, quoting an archaic proverb. In the nick of time the eight heavy gates of the city swing shut.
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