The Robber Bride Read online

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR

  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

  BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD

  FICTION

  The Edible Woman (1969)

  Surfacing (1972)

  Lady Oracle (1976)

  Dancing Girls (1977)

  Life Before Man (1979)

  Bodily Harm (1981)

  Murder in the Dark (1983)

  Bluebeard's Egg (1983)

  The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

  Cat's Eye (1988)

  Wilderness Tips (1991)

  Good Bones (1992)

  The Robber Bride (1993)

  Alias Grace (1996)

  The Blind Assassin (2000)

  Good Bones and Simple Murders (2001)

  Oryx and Crake (2003)

  The Penelopiad (2005)

  The Tent (2006)

  Moral Disorder (2006)

  FOR CHILDREN

  Up in the Tree (1978)

  Anna's Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980)

  For the Birds (1990)

  Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)

  Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)

  Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)

  NON-FICTION

  Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)

  Days of the Rebels 1815-1840 (1977)

  Second Words (1982)

  Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996)

  Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)

  Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982-2004 (2004)

  POETRY

  Double Persephone (1961)

  The Circle Game (1966)

  The Animals in That Country (1968)

  The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)

  Procedures for Underground (1970)

  Power Politics (1971)

  You Are Happy (1974)

  Selected Poems (1976)

  Two-Headed Poems (1978)

  True Stories (1981)

  Interlunar (1984)

  Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (1986)

  Morning in the Burned House (1995)

  Copyright (c) 1993 by O.W. Toad Ltd.

  First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1993

  Trade paperback edition first published 1998

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Atwood, Margaret, 1939-

  The robber bride eISBN: 978-1-55199497-0

  I. Title.

  PS8501.T86R63 C813'.54 C93-094444-5

  PR9199.3.A78R63

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  For Graeme and Jess;

  and for Ruth, Phoebe, Rosie, and Anna.

  For Absent Friends.

  A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

  - Jessamyn West

  Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is a mania to call the lost thing until it returns.

  - Gunter Grass

  Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

  - Oscar Wilde

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Onset

  The Toxique

  Black Enamel

  Weasel Nights

  The Robber Bride

  The Toxique

  Outcome

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ONSET

  1

  The 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.

  THE TOXIQUE

  2

  TONY

  Tony 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.

  In addition to a study desk she has an architect's drawing board with a high swivelling stool that renders her instantly taller. She uses it for marking student term papers: she likes to perch up there on the stool, swinging her short legs, with the papers on a slant in front of her, and correct from a judicious distance, as if painting. The truth is that she's getting far-sighted as well as the near-sighted she's always been. Bifocals will soon be her fate.

  She marks with her left hand, using different-coloured pencils, which she holds between the fingers of her right hand like brushes: red for bad comments, blue for good ones, orange for spelling mistakes, and mauve for queries. Sometimes she reverses hands. When each paper is finished she drops it onto the floor, making a satisfying flurry. To combat boredom she occasionally reads a few sentences out loud to herself, backwards. Seigolonhcet gnitepmoc fo ecneics eht si raw fo ecneics eht. How true. She has said it herself, many times.

  Today she marks quickly, today she's synchronized. Her left hand knows what her right hand is doing. Her two halves are superimposed: there's only a slight penumbra, a slight degree of slippage.

  Tony marks papers until quarter to eight. Sunlight floods the room, made golden by the yellow leaves outside; a jet flies over; the garbage truck approaches along the street, clanking like a tank. Tony hears it, slippers hastily down the stairs and into the kitchen, lifts the plastic sack from its bin, twist-ties it, runs to the front door with it, and scampers down the porch steps, hiking up her dressing gown. She has to sprint only a short distance before catching up with the truck. The men grin at her: they've seen her in her dressing gown before. West is supposed to do the garbage, but he forgets.

  She goes back to the kitchen and makes the tea, warming the pot, measuring the leaves carefully, timing the steeping with her big-numbers wristwatch. It was Tony's mother who taught her about making tea; one of the few useful things she did teach her. Tony has known how to make tea since she was nine. She can remember standing on the kitchen stool, measuring, pouring, carrying the cup upstairs, tenderly balanced, to where her mother was lying in bed under the sheet, a rounded mound, white as a snowdrift. How lovely. Put it there. And finding the cup later, cold, still full.

  Begone, Mother, she thinks. Rehtom, enogeb. She banishes her, not for the first time.

  West always drinks the tea that Tony makes. He always accepts her offerings. When she goes upstairs with his cup he's standing by the back window, looking out over the neglected and derelict autumn yard. (Both of them say they will plant things in it, soon, later. Neither of them does.) He's already dressed: jeans, and a blue sweatshirt that says Scales & Tails and has a turtle on it. Some organization devoted to the saving of amphibians and reptiles, which - Tony imagines - doesn't have a very large membership, yet. There are so many other things, these days, that require saving.

  "Here's your tea," she says.

  West bends in several places, like a camel sitting down, in order to kiss her. She raises herself on tiptoe.

  "Sorry about the garbage," he says.

  "It's all right," she says, "it wasn't heavy. One egg or two?" Once, during the morning garbage race, she tripped on her dressing gown and took a header down the front steps. Luckily she landed on the bag itself, which burst. She didn't mention this to West, though. She's always careful with him. She knows how frangible he is, how subject to breakage.

  3

  While boiling the eggs Tony thinks of Zenia. Is it a premonition? Not at all. She frequently thinks of Zenia, more frequently than when Zenia was alive. Zenia dead is less of a threat, and doesn't have to be shoved away, shoved back into the spidery corner where Tony keeps her shadows.

  Though even Zenia's name i
s enough to evoke the old sense of outrage, of humiliation and confused pain. Or at least an echo of it. The truth is that at certain times - early mornings, the middle of the night - she finds it hard to believe that Zenia is really dead. Despite herself, despite the rational part of herself, Tony keeps expecting her to turn up, stroll in through some unlocked door, climb through a window carelessly left open. It seems improbable that she would simply have evaporated, with nothing left over. There was too much of her: all that malign vitality must have gone somewhere.

  Tony slides two slices of bread into the toaster, then rummages in the cupboard for the jam. Zenia is dead, of course. Lost and gone forever. Dead as a cinder. Every time Tony thinks this, the air goes into her lungs, then out in a long sigh of relief.

  Zenia's memorial service was five years ago, or four and a half. It was in March. Tony can recall the day perfectly, a wet grey day that turned to sleet later. What surprised her at the time was that there were so few people there. Men, mostly, with their coat collars turned up. They avoided the front row and kept trying to get behind one another, as if they didn't want to be seen.

  None of these men was Roz's runaway husband Mitch, Tony noted with interest and some disappointment, though she was glad for Roz. She could sense Roz craning her neck, riffling through the faces: she must have expected him to be there, and then what? Then there would have been a scene.

  Charis was looking too, in a less obtrusive way; but if any of these men was Billy, Tony wouldn't have been able to tell, because she'd never met Billy. He'd arrived, then vanished, during the interval when she hadn't been in touch with Charis. True, Charis had shown her a photo, but the focus was bad and the top of Billy's head was cut off, and he'd had a beard then. Men's faces changed more than women's did, over time. Or they could change them more, at will. Add facial hair and subtract it.

  There was no one at all that Tony knew; except Roz and Charis, of course. They wouldn't have missed it for anything, said Roz. They wanted to see the end of Zenia, make sure she was now fully (Tony's word) inoperational. Charis's word was peaceful. Roz's was kaput.

  The service was unsettling. It seemed a patched-up affair, held at a funeral parlour chapel of a lumpy, magenta clumsiness that would have filled Zenia with scorn. There were several bunches of flowers, white chrysanthemums. Tony wondered who could have sent them. She hadn't sent any flowers herself.