"The Robber Bride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atwood Margaret)

XXII

Tony’s mother cooks supper as usual: She doesn’t take off her good bridge club dress, but puts her apron over it, her best apron, the white one with ruffles over the shoulders. She has redone her lipstick: her mouth shines like a waxed apple. Tony sits on the kitchen stool, watching her, until Anthea tells her to stop goggling: if she wants to be useful she can set the table. Then she can go and dig up her father. Anthea often puts it this way: dig up, as if he’s a potato. Sometimes she says root out.

Tony has no particular desire to be useful, but she’s relieved that her mother is acting more normally. She deals out the plates and then the forks, knives, and spoons, a left right right, a left right right, and then she goes into her father’s study, knocking first, and sits down crosslegged on the floor. She can always go in there as long as she keeps quiet.

Her father is working at his desk. He has his desk lamp on, with its green shade, so his face has a greenish tinge. He’s a large man with small neat handwriting that looks as if it’s been done by fastidious mice. Beside it, Tony’s own writing is that of a three-fingered giant. His long arrow nose is pointing straight down at the papers he’s working on; his yellowy-grey hair is combed back, and the nose and the hair together make him seem as if he’s flying through a strong headwind, hurtling down towards the target of his paper. He’s frowning, as if braced for the impact. Tony is dimly aware that he isn’t happy; but happiness isn’t something she expects, in men. He never complains about not having it; unlike her mother.

His yellow pencil twiddles. He has a jarful of these pencils on his desk, kept very sharp. Sometimes he asks Tony to sharpen them for him; she turns them one by one in the businesslike sharpener clamped to the windowsill, feeling that she’s preparing his arrows. What he does with these pencils is beyond her, but she knows that it’s something of the utmost importance. More important—for instance—than she is.

Her father’s name is Griff, but she doesn’t think of him as Griff, the way she thinks of her mother as Anthea. He’s somewhat more like the other fathers, whereas Anthea isn’t very much like the other mothers, although occasionally she tries to be. (Griffis not her Dad, though: Griffis not a Dad.)

Griff was in the war. Anthea says that although he may have been in it, he didn’t go through it, the way she did. Her parents’ house in London was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz and her parents were both killed. She’d come home—where had she been? She has never said—to find nothing but a crater, one standing wall, and a pile of rubble; and her own mother’s shoe, with a foot in it.

But Griff missed all that. He only got into it at D-Day. (It meaning the danger, the killing; not the training, the waiting, the fooling around.) He was there for the landing, the advance, the easy bit, says Anthea. The winning.

Tony likes to think of him like that—winning—like someone winning a race. Victorious. He has not been noticeably victorious lately. But Anthea says the easy bit in front of people, in front of their friends when they come over for drinks and Tony watches from doorways. Anthea says the easy bit, looking straight at Griff with her chin up, and he turns red.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.

“He never does,” says Anthea with mock despair, lifting her shoulders. It’s the same gesture she makes when Tony refuses to play the piano for the bridge club.

“At the end it was just children,” says Griff. “Children, in men’s uniforms. We were killing children:”

“Lucky you,” says Anthea lightly. “That must have made it smoother for you.”

“It didn’t,” says Tony’s father. They stare at each other as if no one else is in the room: tense and measuring.

“He liberated a gun,” says Anthea. “Didn’t you, darling? He’s got it in his study. I wonder if the gun feels liberated.” She gives a dismissive laugh, and turns away. A silence eddies behind her.

That was how Anthea and Griff met—during the war, when he was in England. Stationed in England, Anthea would say; so Tony pictures the two of them in a train station, waiting to depart. It would have been a winter train station; they had on their overcoats and her mother was wearing a hat, and their breath was turning to white fog as it came out of their mouths. Were they kissing, as in pictures? It’s not clear. Perhaps they were going on the train together, perhaps not. They had a lot of suitcases. There are always a lot of suitcases in the story of Tony’s parents.

“I was a war bride,” Anthea says; she gives a self-deprecating smile, and then a sigh. She says war bride as if she’s making fun of it—minor-key, rueful fun. What does she mean to imply~ That she has fallen prey to an old trick, an old confidence trick, and knows it now and deplores it? That Tony’s father took advantage of her in some way? That it was the fault of the war?

The raw. A raw bride, thinks Tony. Uncooked. Or, more like it: rubbed raw, like her own wrists by the frozen cuffs of her snowsuit.

“I was a war husband,” her father says; or used to say, back when he still made jokes. He also said that he’d picked Anthea up in a dance hall. Anthea didn’t like that.

“Griff, don’t be vulgar,” she would say.

“Men were scarce,” he would add, to the audience. (There was usually an audience for these exchanges. They rarely said such things when they were alone.) “She had to grab what she could get:”

Then Anthea would laugh. “Decent men were scarce, and who grabbed who? And it wasn’t a dance hall, it was a dance.”

“Well, you can’t expect us poor barbarians to know the difference.”

What happened after that? After the dance. It’s unclear. But for some reason, Anthea decided to marry Griff. That it was her decision is frequently underlined by Tony’s father: Well, nobody forced you. Her mother was somehow forced, however. She was forced, she was coerced, she was carried off by that crude thieving lout, Tony’s father, to this too-cramped, two-storey, fake Tudor, half-timbered, half-baked house, in this tedious neighbourhood, in this narrow-minded provincial city, in this too-large, too-small, too-cold, too-hot country that she hates with a strange, entrapped, and baffled fury. Don’t talk like that! she hisses at Tony. She means the accent. Flat, she calls it. But how can Tony talk the same way her mother does? Like the radio, at noon. The kids at school would laugh.

So Tony is a foreigner, to her own mother; and to her father’ also, because, although she talks the same way he does, she is—and he has made this clear—not a boy. Like a foreigner, she listens carefully, interpreting. Like a foreigner she keeps an eye out for sudden hostile gestures. Like a foreigner she makes mistakes.

Tony sits on the floor, looking at her father and wondering about the war, which is such a mystery to her but which appears to have been decisive in her life. She would like to ask him about battles, and if she can look at the gun; but she knows already that he will evade these questions, as if there’s a sore place on him that he must protect. A raw place. He will keep her from putting her hand on it.

Sometimes she wonders what he did before the war, but he won’t talk about that either. He has told only one story. When he was small he lived on a farm, and his father took him out into the woods, in winter. His father intended to chop firewood, but the tree was frozen so hard that the axe bounced off it and cut into his leg. He threw down the axe and strode away, leaving Griffby himself in the woods. But he followed the footprints home through the snow: a red one, a white one, a red one.

If it hadn’t been for the war, Griff wouldn’t have an education. That’s what he says. He would still be on the farm. And then, where would Tony be?

Her father keeps on doing whatever it is he does. He works for an insurance company. Life insurance.

“So, Tony,” her father says without looking up. “What can I do for you?”

“Anthea says to tell you supper is almost ready,” she says. “Almost ready?” he says. “Or really ready?”

“I don’t know,” says Tony.

“Then you’d better go and see,” says her father.

The supper is sausages, as it often is when Anthea has been out in the afternoon. Sausages and boiled potatoes, and greeff beans from a can. The sausages are a little burned, but Tony’s father doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t say anything when the food is really good either. Anthea says Tony and her father are two of a kind. Two cold fish.

She brings the serving dishes in from the kitchen, and sits down in her own chair still wearing her apron. Usually she takes it off. “Well!” she says brightly. “And how are we all today?”

“Fine,” says Tony’s father. “That’s good,” says her mother.

“You look all dolled up,” says her father. “Special occasion?”

“Not likely, is it?” says her mother.

After that there’s a silence, which fills with the sound of chewing. Tony has spent a good deal of her life listening to her parents chew. The noises their mouths make, their teeth grinding together as they bite down, are disconcerting to her. It’s like seeing someone taking their clothes off through a bathroom window when they don’t know you’re there. Her mother eats nervously, in small bites; her father eats ruminatingly. His eyes are fixed on Anthea as if on a distant point in space; hers are narrowed a little, as if aiming.

Nothing moves, although great force is being exerted. Nothing moves yet. Tony feels as if there’s a thick elastic band stretching right through her own head, with one end of it attached to each of them: any tighter and it would snap.

“How was the bridge club?” says her father at last. “Fine,” says her mother.

“Did you win?”

“No. We came second:”

“Who won, then?”

Her mother thinks for a moment. “Rhonda and Bev.”

“Rhonda was there?” says her father.

“This is not the Spanish Inquisition,” says her mother. “I just said she was.”      —“That’s funny,” says her father. “I bumped into her, downtown.”

“Rhonda left early,” says her mother. She sets her fork down carefully on her plate.

“That’s not what she told me,” says her father.

Her mother pushes back her chair and stands up. She crumples her paper napkin and throws it on top of the sausage ends on her plate. “I refuse to discuss this in front of Tony,” she says.

“Discuss what?” says Tony’s father. He keeps on chewing. “Tony, you are excused:”

“Stay where you are,” says Anthea. “That you called me a liar.” Her voice is low and quivering, as if she’s about to cry. “Did I?” says Tony’s father. He sounds bemused, and curious about the answer.

“Antonia,” says her mother warningly, as if Tony has been about to do something wrong or dangerous. “Couldn’t you have waited until after dessert? I try every day to get her to eat a decent meal:”

“That’s right, make this my fault,” says Tony’s father.

The dessert is rice pudding. It stays in the fridge, because Tony says she doesn’t want any. She doesn’t, she isn’t hungry. She goes up to her bedroom and climbs into her flannelettesheeted bed, and tries not to hear or imagine what they are saying to each other.

Bulc egdirb, she murmurs to herself in the darkness. The barbarians gallop across the plains. At their head rides Tnomerf Ynot, her long ragged hair flying in the wind, a sword in each of her hands. Bulc egdirb! she calls, urging them forward. It’s a battle cry, and they are on the rampage. They are sweeping all before them, trampling down crops and burning villages. They loot and plunder and smash pianos, and kill children. At night they put up their tents and eat supper with their hands, whole cows roasted on bonfires. They wipe their greasy fingers on their leather clothes. They have no manners at all. .

Tnomerf Ynot herself drinks from a skull, with silver handles attached where the ears used to be. She raises the skull high in a toast to victory, and to the war god of the barbarians: Ettovag! she yells, and the hordes answer, cheering: Ettovag! Ettovag!

In the morning there will be broken glass.

Tony wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night. She gets out of bed, gropes under her nighttable until she finds her rabbit-shaped slippers, and tiptoes across the room to the door. It opens easily.

She creeps along the hallway to her parents’ room, but their door is closed and she can’t hear anything. Maybe they are in there, maybe not. Though most likely they are. When she was younger she used to worry—or was it a dream?—that she would come home from school and find only a hole in the ground, and their shoes with feet in them.

She continues to the stairs and goes down them, guiding herself with one hand on the banister. She often gets up like this in the middle of the night; she often makes the rounds, checking for damage.

She gropes her way through the blurry darkness of the hushed living room. Items gleam here and there in the dull glow from the streetlights outside: the mirror over the fireplace, the two china dogs on the mantelpiece. Her eyes feel huge, her slippered feet are soundless on the carpet.

She doesn’t turn on a light until she gets to the kitchen. There’s nothing on the counter or on the floor, nothing broken. She opens the refrigerator door: the rice pudding is in there but it’s intact, so she can’t eat any of it without detection. She makes herself a piece of bread and jam instead. Anthea says that Canadian bread is a disgrace, all air and sawdust, but it tastes fine to Tony. The bread is like many of Anthea’s hatreds—Tony doesn’t get the point. Why is the country too big, or too small? What would “just right” be? What’s wrong with the way=w she talks, anyways? Anyway. She wipes the crumbs up carefully, and goes back to bed.

When she gets up the next morning she doesn’t have a chance to make a pot of tea—her one possible atonement to Anthea for failing to be English—because Anthea is already in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. She has on her daily apron, blueand-white checks; she’s frying things at the stove. (This is a sporadic activity, for her. Tony often makes her own breakfast, and her own brown-bag school lunch as well.)

Tony slides herself across the padded seat of the breakfast nook. Her father is already in there, reading the paper. Tony pours herself some cold cereal and spoons it into her mouth, with her left hand because nobody’s watching. With her right hand she holds the cereal box close to her eyes. Sekalf narb. Ytiraluger, Tony whispers to herself. They never come right out and say “constipation.” Noitapitsnoc: a much more satisfactory word.

She has a collection of palindromes—Live evil, Madam I’m Adam, Able was I ere I saw Elba—but the phrases she prefers are different backwards: skewed, odd, melodious. They belong to another world, where Tony is at home because she can speak the language. Re~fo eerfl Evas! Faol tun egnaro! Two barbarians stand on a narrow bridge, hurling insults, daring their enemies to cross ...

“Tony, put that down,” says her father tonelessly. “You shouldn’t read at the table.” He says this every morning, once he’s finished with the paper.

Anthea comes with two full plates, bacon and eggs and toast, setting them down formally as if it’s a restaurant. Tony cuts her egg open and watches the yolk run like yellow glue into her toast. Then she watches her father’s Adam’s apple go up and down while he swallows his coffee. It’s like something stuck in his throat. Madam I’m Adam’s apple.

Anthea has a bright enamelled cheerfulness this morning that makes her seem covered with nail polish. She scrapes the cereal bowls into the garbage can, singing: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile ...”

“You should have been on stage,” says Tony’s father.

“Yes, I should have, shouldn’t I?” says her mother. Her voice is airy and careless.        ‘

There’s been nothing out of place, nothing obvious; nevertheless, when Tony comes home from school that afternoon, her mother isn’t there. She isn’t just out, she’s gone. She’s left a wrapped package for Tony, on her bed, and a note in an envelope. As soon as Tony sees the note and the package she turns cold all over. She’s frightened, but somehow she is not surprised.

The note is in the brown ink Anthea favours, on her initialled cream-coloured notepaper. In her curling handwriting with its florid capital letters she has written:

Darling, you know I would like to take you with me but I can’t right now. When you are older you will understand why. Be a good girl and do well in school. I will write you lots. Your Mother who loves you very much.

P S. See you soon!

(Tony kept this note, and marvelled over it later, when she was grown up. As an explanation it was of course inadequate. Also, nothing in it was true. To begin with, Tony was not darling. The only people who were darling, for Anthea, were men, and sometimes women if she was annoyed with them. She didn’t want to take Tony with her: if she’d wanted to she would have done it, because she mostly did what she wanted. She didn’t write Tony lots, she didn’t love her very much, and she didn’t see her soon. And although Tony did get older, she did nzst understand why.)

At the moment of finding this note, however, Tony wants to believe every word of it, and by an effort of will she does. She even manages to believe more than is there. She believes her mother will send for her, or else come back. She isn’t sure which.

She opens the package; it’s the same package Anthea was carrying yesterday, in the drizzle, on her way back from the bridge club, which means that all of this was planned out in advance. It isn’t like the times she rushed out of the house, slamming the door, or locked herself in the bathroom and turned on the taps so that the tub overflowed out into the hall and down the stairs and through the ceiling, and Griff had to call the Fire Department to break in. It isn’t a tantrum, or a whim.

Inside the package is a box, and inside the box there’s a dress. It’s navy blue, with a sailor collar piped in white. Since there’s nothing else she can think of to do, Tony tries it on. It’s two sizes too big for her. It looks like a dressing gown.

Tony sits down on the floor and pulls up her knees, and pushes her nose into the skirt of the dress, inhaling its smell, a rough chemical smell of broadcloth and sizing. The smell of newness, the smell of futility, the smell of noiseless grief.

All of this is her own fault, somehow. She hasn’t made enough cups of tea, she’s misread the signals, she has let go of the string or the rope or the chain or whatever it is that’s been attaching her mother to this house, holding her in place, and like an escaped sailboat or a balloon her mother has come loose. She’s out in the blue, she’s blowing away with the wind. She’s lost.

This is the story Tony tells to Zenia, as they sit in Christie’s Coffee Shop, their heads leaning together across the table, drinking harsh acidy coffee in the dead of night. It seems a bleak story, as she tells it—starker and more dire than when it was actually happening to her. Possibly because she believes it, by now. Back then it seemed temporary—her motherlessness. Now she knows it was permanent.

“So she buggered off, just like that! Where’d she go?” says Zenia, with interest.

Tony sighs. “She ran off with a man. A life insurance man, from my father’s office. His name was Perry. He was married to some-one called Rhonda, from my mother’s bridge club. They went to California.”

“Good choice,” says Zenia, laughing. In Tony’s opinion it was not a good choice. It was a lapse of taste, and of consistency as well: if Anthea had to go anywhere, why didn’t she go to England, home as she always called it? Why go to California, where the bread is even airier, the accent even flatter, the grammar even more spurious, than it is here?

So Tony doesn’t think it’s all that funny, and Zenia catches this reservation and changes her face immediately. “Weren’t you furious?”

“No,” says Tony. “I don’t think so.” She searches through herself, patting surfaces, testing pockets. She doesn’t discover any fury.

“I would have been,” says Zenia. “I would have been enraged:”

Tony isn’t sure what it would be like, to be enraged. Possibly too dangerous. Or else a relief.

No rage at the time: only a cold panic, a desolation; and fear, because of what her father would do, or say: would she be blamed?

Tony’s father wasn’t yet back from work. There was nobody else in the house, nobody but Ethel, mopping the floor in the kitchen. Anthea asked her to stay late on the afternoons when she went out so someone would be there when Tony came home from school.

Ethel was a craggy big-boned woman with lines on her face like those on other people’s hands, and dry, wig-like hair. She had six children. Only four of them were still alive—diphtheria had killed the others—but if you asked her how many children she had, she would say six: Anthea used to tell this as if it were a joke, as if Ethel couldn’t count properly. Ethel had a habit of groaning as she worked, and talking to herself words that sounded like “Oh no, oh no,” and “Pisspisspiss.” As a rule Tony kept out of her way.

Tony went into her parents’ bedroom and opened her mother’s closet door. Aroma wafted out: there were little satin bags of lavender tied with mauve ribbons on every hanger. Most of Anthea’s suits and dresses were still in there, with the matching shoes in their shoe-trees ranged beneath them. They were like hostages, these clothes. Anthea would never just leave them behind, not forever. She would have to come back and retrieve them.

Ethel was coning up the stairs; Tony could hear her grunting and mumbling. Now she, had reached the bedroom door, dragging the vacuum cleaner by its hose. She stood still and looked at Tony.

“Your mother’s run away,” she said. She talked in regular language when anyone else was there.

Tony could hear the scorn in Ethel’s voice. Dogs ran away, cats, horses. Mothers did not.

Here Tony’s memory divides, into what she wanted to happen and what actually did happen. What she wanted was for Ethel to take her in her knobbly arms, and stroke her hair and rock her, and tell her that everything would be all right. Ethel, who had bulgy blue veins on her legs, who smelled of sweat and javex, whom she didn’t even like! But who might have been capable of providing comfort, of a sort.

What actually did happen was nothing. Ethel turned back to the vacuuming, and Tony went into her own room and shut the door and took off the baggy sailor dress and folded it, and put it back into its box.

After a while Tony’s father came home and spoke with Ethel in the front hall, and then Ethel went away and Tony and her father had supper. The supper was a tin of tomato soup; her father warmed it up in a saucepan, and Tony put some crackers and cheddar cheese on a plate. Both of them felt at a loss, as if there were gaps in this meal that could not be filled in because they could not be identified. What had happened was so momentous, and so unheard of, that it could not yet be mentioned.

Tony’s father ate in silence. The little slurping noises he made scratched against Tony’s skin. He was looking at Tony slyly, in a speculative way; Tony had seen the same expression on door-to-door salesmen, and on street beggars, and on other children who were about to tell outrageous and transparent lies. The two of them were in a conspiracy now, his look implied: they were going to gang up, have secrets together. Secrets about Anthea, of course. Who else? Although Anthea was gone, she was still there, sitting at the table with them. She was there more than ever.

After a while Tony’s father put down his spoon; it clanked against the plate.

“We’ll make out fine,” he said. “Won’t we?”

Tony was not convinced of this, but she felt under pressure to reassure him. “Yes,” she said.

Tomato, she whispered to herself. Otamot. One of the Great Lakes. A stone war hammer used by an ancient tribe. If you said a word backwards, the meaning emptied out and then the word was vacant. Ready for a new meaning to flow in. Anthea. Aehtna. Like dead, it was almost the same thing, backwards or forwards.

And then what, and then what? Zenia wants to know. But Tony is at a loss: how can she describe emptiness? Acres of vacancy, which Tony filled up with whatever she could, with knowledge, with dates and facts, more and more of them, pouring them into her head to silence the echoes. Because whatever had been lacking when Anthea was there, it was much worse now that she wasn’t.

Anthea was her own absence. She hovered just out of reach, a tantalizing wraith, an almost, endowed with a sort of gauzy flesh by Tony’s longing for her. If only she loved Tony more, she would be here. Or Tony would be elsewhere, with her, wherever she was.

Anthea wrote, of course. She sent a postcard with a picture of palm trees and surf, and said that she wished Tony was there. She sent packages for Tony with clothes in them that never fit: sun suits, shorts, hot-weather dresses, too big or sometimes—after a while—too small. She sent birthday cards, late. She sent snapshots taken always, it seemed, in full sunlight; snapshots of herself wearing white, in which she looked fatter than Tony remembered, her face tanned and shining as if oiled, with a little moustache of shadow cast by her nose. In some of these, runaway, culpable Perry stood beside her with his arm around her waist: a flabby man with wrinkled knees and bags under his eyes and a lopsided, rueful smile. Then after a while Perry was no longer in the pictures, and another man was; and after a while, yet another. The shoulders on Tony’s mother’s dresses shrank, the skirts grew longer and fuller, the necklines scooped themselves out; Spanish-dancer ruffles appeared on the sleeves. There was talk of Tony visiting, during Easter holidays, duringsummer holidays, but nothing ever came of it.

(As for Anthea’s other clothes, the ones she’d left behind in her closet, Tony’s father had Ethel pack them into boxes and give them away to the Salvation Army. He did not warn Tony in advance. She was in the habit of checking the closet every few days, when she came back from school, and one day it was empty. Tony said nothing about it, but she knew. Anthea would not be coming back.)

Meanwhile the years became other years. At school, Tony was diagnosed as near-sighted and was supplied with glasses, which she did not particularly mind. They were a sort of barrier, and also she could now see the blackboard. For dinner she ate casseroles prepared in advance by Ethel and left on the kitchen counter to be warmed up. She made her own school lunches as usual; also she made caramel puddings out of a package and cakes from cake mixes, to impress her father, though they failed to have this result.

Her father gave her twenty-dollar bills for Christmas and told her to buy her own presents. She made him cups of tea, which he did not drink, any more than her mother had. He was frequently not there. During one of these years there was a girlfriend, a secretary from his company, who wore jangly bracelets and smelled of violets and warm rubber, who gushed over Tony and said she was cute as a button, and wanted to take her shopping or else to movies. Girl stuff, she called it. We won’t take big old Griff! I want us to be chums. Tony despised her.

After the girlfriend was finished with, Griff began drinking more than ever. He would come into Tony’s room and sit there watching her while she did her homework, as if he wanted her to say something to him. But by this time she was older and more hardened, and she expected nothing much from him. She had ceased to consider him her responsibility; she found him simply an irritating interruption. He was much less interesting than the siege techniques of Julius Caesar, which she was study’= ing in Latin. Her father’s suffering wore her out: it was too flat, it was too wordless, it was too powerless, it was too much like her own.

Once or twice, when he was drunker than usual, he chased her through the house, stumbling and shouting, overturning furniture. At other times he would become affectionate: he wanted to tousle her hair, to hug her as if she were still a child, though he had never behaved like that when she really was one. She would crawl underneath the dining-room table to escape from him: she was a lot smaller than he was, but she was also a lot more agile. The worst thing about these episodes was that he seemed to remember nothing about them the next day. Tony took to avoiding him when possible. During the course of the evening she would monitor his level of drunkenness—she could tell by the smell partly, of sugary varnish—and plan her exit routes: into the bathroom, out the kitchen door, into her bedroom. The main thing was not to be cornered. Her bedroom had a lock, but she would also push her bureau in front of the door, taking all the drawers out first and then putting them back when the bureau was in place; otherwise it would have been too heavy for her. Then she would sit with her back against the bureau and her book open on her knees, trying to block out the sound of the knob turning, and of the muffled, broken voice, snuffling at her door: I just want to talk to you! That’s all! I just want ...

Once she tried an experiment: she poured out all the liquor from his bottles so there was none when he came home from work—he had changed jobs, he had changed jobs again—and he threw all the wineglasses, all the glasses of every kind, against the kitchen wall, and there was a lot of broken glass in the morning. Tony was interested to note that this evidence of chaos no longer frightened her. She used to think that Anthea was the glass-breaker of the family; maybe she had been, once. They had to drink their orange juice out of teacups for a week; until Ethel could buy new glassware.

When Tony got her first period, it was Ethel who dealt with it. It was Ethel who explained that bloodstains would come out easier if you soaked them first in cold water. She was an authority on stains of all kinds. “It’s only the curse,” she said, and Tony liked that. It was a curse, but it was only a curse. Pain and distress were of scant importance, really. They could be ignored.

Tony’s mother died by drowning. She dove off a yacht, at night, somewhere off the coast of l3aja California, and didn’t come back up: She must have become confused underwater, and surfaced in the wrong place and hit her head on the bottom of the boat and knocked herself out. Or this was the story told by Roger, the man she was with at the time. Roger was very sorry about it, in the way you would be if you’d lost someone’s car keys or broken their best china plate. He sounded as if he wanted to buy a replacement but wasn’t sure how. He also sounded drunk.

Tony was the one who took the phone call, because neither her father nor Ethel was there. Roger didn’t seem to know who she was.

“I’m the daughter,” she said.

“Who?” said Roger. “She didn’t have any daughter.”

“What was she wearing?” said Tony.

“What?” said Roger.

“Was she wearing a bathing suit, or a dress?”

“What kind of a dumb question is that?” said Roger. He was shouting by then, long distance.

Tony couldn’t see why he should be angry. She just wanted to reconstruct. Had Anthea dived off the boat in her bathing suit for a midnight swim, or had she jumped off, wearing a long, entangling skirt, in a fit of anger? The equivalent of a slammed door? The latter seemed more probable. Or perhaps Roger had pushed her. This too was not out of the questiori: Tony was not interested in revenge, or even injustice. Merely in accuracy.

Despite his rambling vagueness, it was Roger who arranged for the cremation and shipped back the ashes in a metal cylinder. Tony thought there should be a service of some kind; but then, who would have gone to it except her?

Shortly after its arrival the cylinder disappeared. She found it again several years later, after her father had died too and she and Ethel were cleaning out the house. It was in the cellar, stuck in among some old tennis racquets. This gave it the proper period flavour: many of her mother’s snapshots had shown her in a tennis dress.

After her mother died Tony went to boarding school, by her own request. She’d wanted to get out of the house, which she did not think of as home, where her father lurked and drank and followed her around, clearing his throat as if he was about to start a conversation. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say. She knew it would be some kind of excuse, a plea for understanding, something maudlin. Or else an accusation: if it weren’t for Tony he never would have married her mother, and if it weren’t for him, Tony never would have been born. Tony had been the catastrophe in his life. It was for Tony he had sacrificed—what, exactly? Even he didn’t seem to know. But all the same, didn’t she owe him something?

From piecing things together, from checking dates, from a few stray comments dropped earlier, Tony had come to suspect something of the sort: a pregnancy, a hasty wartime marriage. Her mother was a war bride, her father was a war husband, she herself was a war baby. She was an accident. So what? She didn’t want to hear about it.

Whatever he wanted to say to her remained unsaid. It was Ethel who found him, lying on the floor of his still-neat study, with his sharpened pencils lined up on the desk. He said in the’ note that Tony’s high school graduation was all he’d been waiting for. He’d even come to the ceremony, that afternoon, and had sat in the auditorium with the other parents, and had given Tony a gold wristwatch afterwards. He kissed her on the cheek. “You’ll do all right,” he told her. After that he went home and shot himself in the head with his liberated gun. A Luger pistol, as Tony knows now, since she inherited it. He put newspapers down first because of the rug.

Ethel said that was what he was like: considerate, a gentleman. She cried at the funeral, unlike Tony, and talked to herself during the prayers. Tony thought at first that she was saying Pisspiss but actually it was Pleaseplease. Maybe it always had been. Maybe she wasn’t crying about Griffat all, but about her two dead children. Or life in general. Tony could consider all possibilities, she had an open mind.

Griff’s life insurance was no good, of course. It didn’t cover suicide. But Tony had the money from the house, after the mortgage was paid off, and her mother’s leftover money, which had been willed to her, and whatever else was in the bank. Maybe that’s what her father meant when he said she would be all right.

So that’s it, Tony tells Zenia. And it is, as far as she knows. She doesn’t think about her parents very much. She doesn’t have nightmares about her father appearing with half of his head blown off, still with something to tell; or of her mother, trailing wet skirts and salt water, her hair hanging over her face like seaweed. She thinks maybe she ought to have such nightmares, but she doesn’t. The study of history has steeled her to violent death; she is well armoured.

“You’ve still got the ashes?” says Zenia. “Your mother’s?”

“They’re on my sweater shelf,” says Tony.

“You are a gruesome little creature,” says Zenia, laughing. Tony takes it as a compliment: it’s the same thing Zenia said when Tony showed her the battle notebooks with the scores of the men lost. “What else have you got? The gun?” But then she turns serious. “You should get rid of those ashes right away! They’re bad luck, they’ll ill-wish you:”

This is a new side to Zenia: she’s superstitious. Tony would not have suspected it, and her high estimate of Zenia, slips a notch. “They’re just plain old ashes,” she says.

“You know that’s not true,” says Zenia. “You know it isn’t. Keep those, and she’ll still have a hold on you.”

So the next evening at twilight the two of them take the ferry across to the Island. It’s December and there’s a bitter wind, but no ice on the lake yet, so the ferry is still running. Halfway across Tony tosses the canister with her mother’s ashes off the back of the ferry, into the dark choppy water. It’s not something she’d have done on her own; it’s just to please Zenia.

“Rest in peace,” says Zenia. She doesn’t sound altogether convinced. Worse, the metal cylinder isn’t sinking. It’s floating, bobbing along in the wake of the ferry. Tony realizes she should have opened it and dumped out the contents. If she had a rifle she could put a couple of holes through it. If she could shoot.