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.But my stomach leaps and dissolves; I can’t even look at it; Martin picks up the glass, regards it mildly, and then drinks it off neat.Judith’s voice floats over my head in a sort of chanting reassuring descant.“Look at it like this, Charleen, they’ve both been seen alive and well.Yesterday.So they’re okay.Maybe she’s a bit on the crazy side, but she isn’t dangerous, that’s what Doug Savage said on the phone.He said try not to get Charleen upset because Greta wouldn’t hurt a fly, it’s just a matter of hours before they find him.”Martin pats me awkwardly on the crown of my head.“Look here now, Charleen, she’s a little unbalanced maybe, but, God, who isn‘t, and you’ve known her for years.You know she wouldn’t do anything to hurt him, nothing really crazy.You’ve got to keep thinking what she’s really like.”Eugene sits wordless beside me.He’s not a wordy man, he never was a wordy man.He’s still holding on to my hands, and I’m grateful to him.There’s nothing to say.And nothing we can do.I think of the huge distance between Toronto and Vancouver, the blending agricultural regions, the mountain ranges, river systems, squares of acreage, contours, city limits, county lines, townships and backyards with chickens and shrubs and children.I try to hold that whole terrain in my head; it is a numbing exercise, though it shouldn’t be all that difficult, for haven’t I just crossed that country myself? Haven’t I touched every inch of it? I think of all the people strung out over that distance, imbedded in their separate time zones.Seven-thirty: they’re washing dishes.I can hear cutlery right across the country dropping into drawers.They’re bathing children, playing bridge, reading newspapers, all of them magically sealed in their preserving spheres of activity.Out there in all that darkness is Greta’s car, a blue Volvo—it has to be there—cruising past apartment houses and suburbs and farms; and these people, shutting their windows, watering their lawns, walking their dogs, they just allow her to go by.Maybe they even wave to her.Maybe she waves back, she has always been so friendly, so pathetically friendly.She would do anything to help a friend; she is so kind, she wouldn’t hurt a fly.Remember that, above all remember that; she wouldn’t hurt a fly.Eight o‘clock.We wait in the kitchen.The silence is minutely detailed like a blueprint for a piece of immensely complicated machinery.The minutes are sharply cornered and pressing, and each one hangs rigidly separate.Eight-fifteen.Why doesn’t Doug call? Something has happened.One of the policemen asks if he might phone in a report.“No,” I gasp.Eugene shakes his head, “Better not tie up the phone here.” The policeman nods politely and asks if he might use the next-door neighbour’s phone.At this my mother looks up, horribly alarmed, and I see her mouth twist into its tight diminishing shape.I know that shape, its denials, negations, interdictions, the way it closes to inquiries, the way it forbids, the way it ultimately blames and refuses.Now.She is going to do it now, going to give one of her terrible, unforgiving no’s.But she doesn’t.Bewilderment—or is it fatigue?—makes her thin lips collapse.She nods a shaky assent.Then she rises and puts the kettle on.In a moment the policeman returns; there are no further developments, he tells us.We will have to wait a little longer, that’s all.My mother is moving around the kitchen putting her trembling hands to work.(What have I done to her, what have I done to her this time?) Now she is making tea, now she is arranging jittery cups on a tray.Judith gets up to help her and together they begin to make sandwiches.How extraordinary, my mother actually has a package of boiled ham in the refrigerator.And cheese.Sandwiches are disaster fare; who would have thought my mother had a sense of occasion.She and Judith stand with their backs to us buttering bread.They are exactly the same height; I never noticed that.Their elbows move together, marionettes on a single lateral string.Abstract kinship suddenly made substantial.But why am I thinking about ham and cheese and kinship? Why am I not thinking about the centre of this disaster; why am I not thinking about Seth?Because I can’t bear to.Seth dead.No, that’s not possible.It’s not possible because my life isn’t possible without him; it’s not possible when I’m sitting here, wired with reality.Pulse, heartbeat, nerves, breath, sudden sweating, hurting consciousness, all the signs of life failing me now by not failing.In this kitchen every small sound is magnified; my mother’s half-invalid, half-despairing shuffle, the policemen laughing in the living room (laughing!), Martin crashing into his ham sandwich, the sugar spoon which strikes with dead neutrality on the formica table.And my eyes: suddenly I can see with wolfish clarity.I can see the neat hem on my mother’s sheer kitchen curtains, her tiny over and under and over stitches, and through the curtains a glittering, mocking, glassware moon is coming into view.Evening.Nine o‘clock.Doug Savage, why doesn’t he phone? Seth dead.No, it’s not possible.Sleeping pills.Greta stuffing Seth with sleeping pills; she is so small, such a weak, wiry woman, something dark about her face, always a sense of shadow.But Seth is quite strong for his age, well developed, remarkably healthy.His health is startling; something godlike nourishes him despite his inheritance; I’ve never been able to understand it.I picture his strength against Greta’s weakness, and a tiny flashbulb of hope goes off under my skin; she can’t possibly harm him.Then I remember how clever she is, how she is veined with a wily unaccountability.Her secrecy about Watson’s letters; she hints she has heard from him but says nothing more.And her sudden, piercing, illogical bursts of purity.Madness? Not really madness.How did Doug once put it to me? “Greta is rational enough, it’s just that her rationality is not as evenly distributed as it is in more balanced people.” Certainly she is not a fanatic, not in the accepted sense of that word, but she suffers from blinding pinpricks of virtue.The way, for instance, she once burned Doug’s thesis on the diseases of short ferns because she believed it had been conceived to fill an artificial academic requirement.(Only by good fortune had she overlooked the carbon.)Her weaving too is girded by purity; the way she refuses to touch synthetics and swears to give up weaving altogether if she is forced to work with wool which is chemically dyed and treated.Then there is her violent anti-smoking stance.And her contempt for Eugene and what she considers his crass profession [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]