Moral Disorder

by Margaret Atwood

  Impressively, the children did not sulk, but wanted to play again, though Oona declared that it was too late for that. Then they had ice cream, and two of the three family cats climbed up on Nell and purred. Nell felt charmed, and welcomed, and accepted, and somehow protected, with Tig and Oona beaming down at her and the boys like the kindly fairy godparents in some tale of rescued orphans.

  The dinner invitation had been proffered so that Nell could get the full benefit of Tig. This was a conclusion Nell came to later. She was being interviewed, in a way: Oona had her fingered for the position of second wife, or if not a second wife exactly, something second. Something secondary. Something controllable. A sort of concubine. She was to serve as Tig’s other company, so that Oona could get on with the life of her own she was so determined to lead.

  What had happened next? Nell wasn’t quite sure. She’d been swept off her feet, evidently. She’d been swept away. Or possibly she’d been kidnapped. Sometimes it felt like that. Whatever it was had played a part in Tig’s flight to the country, though no one had said so.

  In late January, Nell bought some knitting wool, red and blue and purple. She hadn’t done any knitting for a long time, not since childhood, but she had an urge to take it up again. Her idea was to knit a wool bedcover for the seedy bed in her so-called study, the bed Oona slept in when she came up to the farm to visit on weekends. She would knit it in long strips, a red square, a purple one, a blue one, and then she would sew the strips together. It would take some planning to make it come out right, with the squares creating the bold checkerboard effect she had in mind. Once she had the bedcover done she would put it on the bed, and there it would stay.

  Maybe she would do that. On the other hand, maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she would go back to her orange table and her Sally Ann sofa, taking her knitting with her. She hadn’t decided.

  When Tig wasn’t there – when he’d gone off on some excursion or other – she would read, or edit manuscripts, or she would mark student papers. The Notion of the Gentleman in Great Expectations. Governesses in Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, and The Turn of the Screw: Drudge, Fortune Hunter, Hysteric. Conformity and Rebellion in The Mill on the Floss. But her study was on the north side of the house: it got chilly, and darkened early. So she would take long breaks from whatever she was doing, and make herself cups of tea, and sit beside the sunny window that had once been the front parlour’s, knitting away at her blue and red and purple bed covering and listening to the dripping of water from the eavestrough icicles, and gazing out toward the line of dazzling white snowdrifts curving across the field, and the row of cedars behind them, and the blue shadows. At these times she could forget that she had any decisions yet to be made. She felt lazy and soothed, as if she were floating in a warm bath. But then she would have to pinch herself, and return to a state of alertness, and make an attempt to consider her position.

  What exactly was it that Tig was offering her? He claimed to want permanence, but in what form? He was still married, after all. There would be a plot, there would be emotions and events, that much was predictable. There would be love – the word had been used – but what kind of love was it? And in terms of daily life, what did it mean? “I think it could work out for us,” was how Tig had put it. “I want to share my life with you.” But did the life he said he wanted to share include – for instance – Oona?

  Nell could feel Oona’s presence as soon as she walked through the door of her study. Feel, or possibly smell: Oona favoured perfumed cosmetics, leaning toward the more exotic end of the aroma spectrum. During their editing days Nell had found these scents pleasant enough, but now she couldn’t settle down to work unless she opened the window first to let in a current of fresh air, despite the sub-zero temperatures. She had the sensation that Oona was standing just behind her, looking over her shoulder, smiling in an ambiguous manner and giving off waves of soporific odour, like a field of ripe poppies.

  But Oona had been coming up to the farm less and less, according to Tig. As for the project of Oona’s new book, the one Nell was to have edited, or – more like it – ghost-written, it had been quietly dropped.

  In late February, Tig announced that it was now time for Nell to be at the farm at the same time as the boys. Nell wasn’t sure she was ready for that. She’d got used to being invisible: to change the arrangement now would be to upset a balance. But Tig said he’d explained about her to the boys, about how she was living at the farm for most of the week, so she had to do her part. Anyway he and Oona had discussed it and had agreed that this was the way things should go: it was time for the boys to see Nell on her home turf.

  “Why did you discuss it with her?” asked Nell, making her voice as neutral as possible.

  Tig looked baffled. “Naturally I discussed it with her,” he said. “We discuss everything about the boys. She’s their mother.”

  “What exactly did she say?” said Nell. “About me?”

  “She’s all in favour of it,” said Tig. “She’s all in favour of you. She thinks you’ll be good for the boys.”

  “But what about me?” asked Nell. She wanted to add that the farm wasn’t her home turf. She didn’t have a home turf, she wasn’t settled, she hadn’t made up her mind. She wanted more courtship.

  “What do you mean?” said Tig.

  “Who do they think I am?” said Nell. “What am I supposed to be?”

  “You’re supposed to be the wonderful woman who lives here with me,” said Tig. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her neck, but she could tell that he was annoyed nonetheless. She was making difficulties where none existed. She was overstepping a line. But where was the line? She couldn’t see it.

  On the last Saturday in February, Nell took the Greyhound bus up to Stiles. It was already the afternoon: Tig and Oona had decided that Nell shouldn’t try to spend the entire weekend, not the first time, because it might be too much of a strain for the children. She waited in the station for Tig to pick her up, knitting away at her bedspread. She had only two more rows of squares to go; she’d already attached the finished rows together, using a crochet hook, and the red and purple and blue checkerboard effect had come out just the way she’d pictured it.

  Tig was late, but this was nothing new. He was usually late collecting her. He had other errands to do in Stiles. He needed to get gas, go to the hardware store, buy groceries. Once she’d recognized that, she was fine about the lateness, more or less.

  They drove to the farm in the rusted-out Chevy. The boys were sliding around on the frozen pond. They didn’t have skates on, but they had hockey sticks; they were shooting pucks. They waved their mittened hands as the car skewed its way up the drive.

  This time there was no embrace, no throwing off of garments, no hurried plunge under Tig’s duvet. Instead, once they were inside the door there was an awkward pause.

  “They’ll be happy out there for a while,” said Tig.

  “Maybe we should make some cocoa,” said Nell. That was what you did with children: you made them cocoa. “And popcorn,” she added. Those were the foods that had been served up for her when she was a child, on cold winter afternoons such as this one: comforting foods, rich and sweet and warm.

  “That’s a good idea,” said Tig. He smiled at her, pleased that she was making an effort.

  Luckily there was some cocoa, and also some popping corn. Nell busied herself mixing up the cocoa powder and the sugar. She measured the milk into a saucepan, then she turned on the stove and began jiggling the corn kernels in an iron pot. Den mother, she thought. Camp counsellor. Sunday-school teacher on an outing. Those were her choices, her disguises: prissy ones, all of them, reeking of blue cotton blouses with badges on their sleeves. How would she greet the boys? “Hello there, I’m your dad’s mistress.” But mistress as a word had gone out the window along with adultery. You couldn’t have the one without the other.

  The boys came in through the shed; she could hear them laughing, stamping the snow off their feet. Then the
y were in the main room. They looked at her shyly, with what might also have been distrust or apprehension: much the same way – Nell supposed – that she was looking at them. Then they shook her hand, each one in turn. Despite the thorniness and leechiness of the marriage that had been their habitat until now, they had been what used to be known as well brought up. They were taller than she remembered them, and older, but of course they would be. It was months – a lot of months – since she had last seen them.

  The three of them sat at the kitchen table, drinking their cocoa and eating their popcorn and playing Monopoly, while Tig boiled up spaghetti for dinner. The game did not have the spontaneity of their first game together; the moves were more cautious, more guarded; the boys hoarded their Monopoly money as if for some future emergency. There wasn’t the same reckless acquisition of property, the same gambling and risk-taking. Possibly they were remembering their first game with Nell, back when both parents were still under the same roof pretending that all was well. Now it was the boys who had to pretend that all was well. Tig was pretending too: he was overly jolly, vibrating with anxiety. He so much wanted everything to go smoothly.

  Nell played as sloppily as she could and made numerous loans, but she won the game anyway despite her best efforts. She couldn’t bring herself to cheat. (In the months to come, she and the boys, and sometimes even Tig, would play many more such games. Nell tried to substitute Hearts or group Solitaire, but the boys demanded Monopoly. Nell felt sorry for them: each boy wanted to win, just once. But they had bad luck, and it could not somehow be managed.)

  While they were eating their spaghetti, Oona phoned. After a few exchanges with Tig and a conversation with each of the boys, she asked to speak with Nell. Nell came to the phone reluctantly. It was a wall phone, right in the kitchen. Tig and the boys went still: they couldn’t help listening.

  Oona’s voice had the confiding though authoritative tone Nell remembered. “You will make sure they do their homework, won’t you?” she said. “Tig lets them play around too much. They’re getting behind at school.”

  So that’s who I’m supposed to be, thought Nell. I’m the governess.

  At the end of March, when the snow was mostly gone except in the shadows, and the buds were swelling, Nell finished her bedspread and arranged it on the single bed in her study. She was pleased with the way it had turned out. She called Tig in to admire it.

  “Does this mean you’re here to stay?” asked Tig, folding his long arms around her from behind. Nell didn’t say anything, but she smiled. He wasn’t so obtuse after all.

  In April, the boys brought up one of their cats because a farm needed a cat: they’d seen some mice, or possibly rats, in the barn. The cat was a city cat. Not being used to travel, it growled and threw up in the car, and when they’d reached the farm it leapt out before anyone could grab it and ran off into the bushes and wasn’t seen for days. When it came back it was thinner and had burrs stuck all over its fur. It scooted under the bed in Nell’s study and wouldn’t come out. Evidently, however, it must have emerged at night and rolled around on Nell’s knitted bedspread, to which it transferred most of the burrs. Nell picked away at them, but she could never get out all the little hooks and prickles.

  Moral Disorder

  There’s never been such a lovely spring, Nell thought. Frogs – or were they toads? – trilled from the pond, and there were pussy willows and catkins – what was the difference? – and then the hawthorn bushes and the wild plums and the neglected apple trees came into bloom, and an uneven row of daffodils planted by some long-vanished farmer’s wife thrust up through the weeds and dead grasses beside the drive. Birds sang. Mud dried.

  In the evenings, Nell and Tig sat outside their rented farmhouse on two aluminium-framed lawn chairs they’d found in the back shed, holding hands, slapping away the occasional mosquito, and watching a barred owl teach her two young to hunt. For practise they were using the twelve ducklings Tig had bought and installed on the pond. He’d made a shelter for the ducklings – like a little house without walls, set on a floating raft. They could have gone in under the roof and been safe, but they didn’t seem to know enough to do that.

  The owl swooped down in silence down over the surface of the pond where the ducklings ignorantly paddled, snatching a duckling a night, carrying each one up to the cavity in the dead tree where she had her nest, then rending the duckling apart and sharing it out to the young to be gobbled down, until all twelve ducklings were gone.

  “Look at that,” said Tig. “Such grace.”

  At the beginning of May the businessman who owned the farm said he was selling it. He gave them a month to move out. Since there wasn’t any lease, they had to go. But they couldn’t move back to the city, they were agreed on that. It was just too beautiful up here.

  They drove a half hour farther north, where the prices would be cheaper, and scouted around on back roads, searching out the For Sale signs. Up near Garrett they managed to find something in their price range: a house, a barn, and a hundred acres. It had been on the market for more than a year. Vacant possession, said the owner, who was showing them around himself. He lived on another farm; he’d been using this barn to store hay. But now he was selling both properties, cashing in. “I want to see a bit of the world before it’s time for me to be putting on the wooden overcoat,” he said.

  There was a pond on this farm as well, and a number of gnarled apple trees set around the house, and a drive shed with an old tractor in it. That came with, said the owner. The house was white clapboard, built in the mid-1830s, with a cement-floored addition on the back – a summer kitchen. The cellar was unfinished; its beams were trees with some of the bark still on them. The steps down to it were steep and hazardous. The dirt floor was damp, and had a hard-to-place odour. Not dry rot, not dead mouse, not sewage, exactly.

  “It needs a lot of work,” said Nell. The farmer cheerfully admitted it, and knocked five thousand dollars off the price. Then there was the matter of the mortgage, said Tig: they were iffy propositions for a bank, since neither of them had a permanent full-time job. But the owner said he would give them a mortgage himself.

  “He’s in a hurry to get rid of this place,” said Nell. They were standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, which sloped steeply down toward the centre wall: they’d have to jack the floor up from underneath and run in a new crossbeam, sooner or later. The wallpaper – one of many layers, as could be seen by the torn parts – was a faded green, with bulbous pinkish-brown flowers on it. The floor was linoleum-covered, in a pattern of maroon and orange oblongs Nell recognized from the Fifties.

  “There’s a hundred acres,” said Tig.

  “The house is kind of dark,” said Nell. “It’s not very cheerful.”

  “We’ll clean the windows,” said Tig. No one had lived in here for years. Dust and dead flies coated the windowsills. “We’ll paint the wallpaper white.” He’d been out with the farmer, walking over the land. He’d seen a marsh hawk in the back field; he treated it like an omen.

  Nell didn’t say it wasn’t the windows, not the wallpaper. But paint would help.

  They scraped together the down payment, using Nell’s savings and a sum from a television documentary Tig had recently put together. The weekend after they’d closed the deal, they moved their bed in. Then they sat on the linoleum floor, eating sardines out of the tin, and slices of brown bread and hunks of cheese, and drinking red wine. There was only a single glaring overhead light bulb dangling from a wire, so they turned it off and lit a candle instead. It was like an indoor picnic.

  “So, it’s all ours,” said Tig.

  “I’ve never owned any real estate before,” said Nell.

  “Neither have I,” said Tig.

  “It’s a bit scary,” said Nell.

  “We’ll go out and see the hawk tomorrow.”

  Nell kissed Tig. It wasn’t the best idea because of the sardines, but they’d both been eating them.

  “Let’s go to bed,�
�� said Tig.

  “I need to brush my teeth,” said Nell.

  They lay on Tig’s mattress – their mattress – with their arms around each other. They’d carried the candle upstairs; it flickered in the warm breeze that came in through the open bedroom window. Nell thought about filmy white curtains – she’d always wanted those, when she was young – and about how such curtains would ripple in such a breeze, once they had some.

  “You shouldn’t have said I’m your wife,” said Nell after a while. “At the lawyer’s.”

  “A lot of women are keeping their own names now,” said Tig.

  “But it’s not true. Oona’s your wife. You’re still married to her.”

  “Not really,” said Tig.

  “Anyway, you put spouse instead of wife. It’s a dead giveaway. Didn’t you catch the way he was looking at me? That lawyer?”

  “What way?”

  “Just that way.”

  “What would you like to be called?” said Tig. Now he sounded hurt.

  Nell said nothing. She was spoiling things; she didn’t want to. She’d been put in a false position, and she hated that. But she had no other word to suggest – no word for herself that would be both truthful and acceptable.

  Over the next few days, they moved in the rest of their possessions – the bunk beds for Tig’s two children, the ones they slept on when they came to visit; the single bed for the guest room; Nell’s desk; a few chairs; some bookcases and books. Nell’s orange table. She’d left the rest of her furniture behind in the city. They’d have to get some other furniture eventually – the house looked quite empty – but they didn’t have the spare cash for it at the moment.