I tried to avoid thinking about Father, and the way he had died, and what he might have been up to before that event, and about how he must have felt, and about everything Richard had not seen fit to tell me.
Winifred was a very busy bee. Despite the heat she looked cool, swathed in light and airy draperies like some parody of a fairy godmother. Richard kept saying how marvellous she was and how much work and bother she was sparing me, but she made me increasingly nervous. She was in and out of the house constantly; I never knew when she might appear, popping her head around the door with a brisk smile. My only refuge was the bathroom, because there I could turn the lock without seeming unduly rude. She was overseeing the rest of the decoration, ordering the furniture for Laura's room. (A dressing table with a frilled skirt, in a pink floral print, with curtains and bedspread to match. A mirror with a white curlicue frame, picked out in gold. It was just the thing for Laura, didn't I agree? I didn't, but there was no point in saying so.)
She was also planning the garden; she'd already sketched out several designs-just a few little ideas, she said, thrusting the pieces of paper at me, then withdrawing them, replacing them carefully in the folder already bulging with her other little ideas. A fountain would be lovely, she said-something French, but it would have to be authentic. Didn't I think?
I wished Laura would come. The date of her arrival had been postponed three times now-she wasn't packed yet, she'd had a cold, she'd lost the ticket. I talked to her on the white phone; her voice was restrained, remote.
The two servants had been installed, a grouchy cook-housekeeper and a large jowly man who was passed off as the gardener/chauffeur. Their name was Murgatroyd, and they were said to be husband and wife, but they looked like brother and sister. They regarded me with distrust, which I reciprocated. During the days, when Richard was at his office and Winifred was ubiquitous, I tried to get away from the house as much as I could. I would say I was going downtown-shopping, I'd say, which was an acceptable version of how I should be spending my time. I would have myself dropped off at Simpsons department store by the chauffeur, telling him I would take a taxi home. Then I would go inside, make a quick purchase: stockings and gloves were always convincing as evidence of my zeal. Then I would walk the length of the store and exit by the opposite door.
I resumed my former habits-the aimless wandering, the examination of display windows, of theatre posters. I even went to the movies, by myself; I was no longer susceptible to groping men, who had lost their aura of demonic magic, now that I knew what they had in mind. I wasn't interested in more of the same-the same obsessive clutching and fumbling. Keep your hands to yourself or I'll scream worked well enough as long as you were prepared to follow it up. They seemed to know I was. Joan Crawford was my favourite movie star at that time. Wounded eyes, lethal mouth.
Sometimes I went to the Royal Ontario Museum. I looked at suits of armour, stuffed animals, antique musical instruments. This did not take me very far. Or I would go to Diana Sweets for a soda or a cup of coffee: it was a genteel tea room across from the department stores, much patronised by ladies, and I was unlikely to be bothered by stray men there. Or I would walk through Queen's Park, quickly and with purpose. If too slowly, a man was bound to appear. Flypaper, Reenie used to call some young woman or other. She has to scrape them off. Once, a man exposed himself, right in front of me, at eye level. (I'd made the mistake of sitting on a secluded bench, on the grounds of the university.) He wasn't a tramp either, he was quite well dressed. "I'm sorry," I said to him. "I'm just not interested." He looked so disappointed. Most likely he'd wanted me to faint.
In theory I could go wherever I liked, in practice, there were invisible barriers. I kept to the main streets, the more prosperous areas: even within those confines, there were not really very many places where I felt unconstrained. I watched other people-not the men so much, the women. Were they married? Where were they going? Did they have jobs? I couldn't tell much from looking at them, except the price of their shoes.
I felt as if I'd been picked up and set down in a foreign country, where everyone spoke a different language.
Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm-laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt. I stared at them with rancour.
Then one day-it was a Thursday-I saw Alex Thomas. He was on the other side of the street, waiting for the light to change. It was Queen Street, at Yonge. He was the worse for wear-he had on a blue shirt, like a worker, and a battered hat-but it was him all right. He looked illuminated, as if a shaft of light were falling on him from some invisible source, rendering him frighteningly visible. Surely everyone else on the street was looking at him too-surely they all knew who he was! Any minute now they would recognise him, they'd shout, they'd give chase.
My first impulse was to warn him. But then I knew that the warning must be for both of us, because whatever trouble he was involved in, I was suddenly involved in it as well.
I could have paid no attention. I could have turned away. That would have been wise. But such wisdom was not available to me then.
I stepped down off the curb and began to cross towards him. The light changed again: I was stranded in the middle of the street. Cars honked their horns; there were shouts; the traffic surged. I didn't know whether to go back or forward.
He turned then, and at first I was not sure he could see me. I stretched out my hand, like a drowning person beseeching rescue. In that moment I had already committed treachery in my heart.
Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.
Three days after this, Laura was due to arrive. I had myself driven down to Union Station to meet the train, but she wasn't on it. She wasn't at Avilion either: I phoned Reenie to check, provoking an outburst: she'd always known something like this would happen, just because of the way Laura was. She'd gone with Laura to the train, she'd shipped off the trunk and everything as instructed, she'd taken every precaution. She should have accompanied her all the way, and now look! Some white slaver had made off with her.
Laura's trunk turned up on schedule, but Laura herself appeared to have vanished. Richard was more upset than I would have predicted. He was afraid she'd been spirited away by unknown forces-people who had it in for him. It could be the Reds, or else an unscrupulous business rivaclass="underline" such twisted men existed. Criminals, he hinted, who were in cahoots with all sorts of folks-folks who'd stop at nothing to assert undue influence on him, because of his growing political connections. Next thing you knew we'd get a blackmail note.
He was suspicious of many elements, that August; he said we had to keep a sharp lookout. There had been a big march on Ottawa, in July-thousands, tens of thousands of men who claimed to be unemployed, and who were demanding jobs and fair pay, egged on by subversives bent on overthrowing the government.
"I bet young what's-his-name was mixed up in it," said Richard, looking at me narrowly.
"Young who?" I said, glancing out the window.
"Pay attention, darling. Laura's pal. The dark one. The young thug who burned down your father's factory."
"It didn't burn down," I said. "They put it out in time. Anyway, they never proved it."
"He skedaddled," said Richard. "Ran like a rabbit. That's proof enough for me."
The marchers on Ottawa had been trapped through a clever back-room stratagem suggested-or so he said-by Richard himself, who moved in high circles these days. The leaders of the march had been decoyed to Ottawa for "official talks," and the whole kit and kaboodle had been stalled in Regina. The talks came to nothing, as planned, but then there had been riots: the subversives had stirred things up, the crowd had gone out of control, men had been killed and injured. It was the Communists who were behind it, because they had a finger in every dubious pie, and who was to say that waylaying Laura was not one of the pies?