Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood Page B

her. He was broken, and needed mending: therefore she could still be useful. She would create around him an atmosphere of calm, she would indulge him, she would coddle him, she would put flowers on his breakfast table and arrange his favourite dinners. At least he hadn’t caught some evil disease.
    However, a much worse thing had happened: my father was now an atheist. Over the trenches God had burst like a balloon, and there was nothing left of him but grubby little scraps of hypocrisy. Religion was just a stick to beat the soldiers with, and anyone who declared otherwise was full of pious drivel. What had been served by the gallantry of Percy and Eddie—by their bravery, their hideous deaths? What had been accomplished? They’d been killed by the blunderings of a pack of incompetent and criminal old men who might just as well have cut their throats and heaved them over the side of the SSCaledonian. All the talk of fighting for God and Civilization made him vomit.
    My mother was appalled. Was he saying that Percy and Eddie had died for no higher purpose? That all those poor men had died for nothing? As for God, who else had seen them through this time of trial and suffering? She begged him at the very least to keep his atheism to himself. Then she was deeply ashamed for having asked this—as if what mattered most to her was the opinion of the neighbours, and not the relationship in which my father’s living soul stood to God.
    He did respect her wish, though. He saw the necessity of it. Anyway, he only said such things when he’d been drinking. He’d never used to drink before the war, not in any regular, determined way, but he did now. He drank and paced the floor, his bad foot dragging. After a while he would begin to shake. My mother would attempt to soothe him, but he didn’t want to be soothed. He would climb up into the stumpy turret of Avilion, saying he wished to smoke. Really it was an excuse to be alone. Up there he would talk to himself and slam against the walls, and end by drinking himself numb. He left my mother’s presence to do this because he was still a gentleman in his own view, or he held on to the shreds of the costume. He didn’t want to frighten her. Also he felt badly, I suppose, that her well-meant ministrations grated on him so much.
    Light step, heavy step, light step, heavy step, like an animal with one foot in a trap. Groaning and muffled shouts. Broken glass. These sounds would wake me up: the floor of the turret was above my room.
    Then there would be footsteps descending; then silence, a black outline looming outside the closed oblong of my bedroom door. I couldn’t see him there, but I could feel him, a shambling monster with one eye, so sad. I’d become used to the sounds, I didn’t think he would ever hurt me, but I treated him gingerly all the same.
    I don’t wish to give the impression that he did this every night. Also these sessions—seizures, perhaps—became fewer and farther apart, in time. But you could see one coming on by the tightening of my mother’s mouth. She had a kind of radar, she could detect the waves of his building rage.
    Do I mean to say he didn’t love her? Not at all. He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn’t reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they’d drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.
    What would that be like—to long, to yearn for one who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out? I’ll never know.
    After some months my father began his disreputable rambles. Not in our town though, or not at first. He’d take the train in to Toronto, “on business,” and go drinking, and also tomcatting, as it was then called. Word got around, surprisingly quickly, as a scandal is likely to do. Oddly enough, both my mother and my father were more respected in town because of it. Who could