“Don’t be disgusting,” Winifred said. She was very angry by now: she’d gone blotchy under her makeup. “Aimee is his own daughter.”

I was on the verge of saying, “No, she’s not,” but I knew that would be a tactical mistake. Legally, she was his daughter; I had no way of proving otherwise, they hadn’t invented all those genes and so forth, not yet. If Richard knew the truth, he’d be even more eager to snatch Aimee away from me. He’d hold her hostage, and I’d lose all the advantage I’d gained so far. It was a game of nasty chess. “He’d stop at nothing,” I said, “not even at Aimee. Then he’d pack her off to some under-the-counter abortion farm, the way he did with Laura.”

“I can see there’s no point in continuing this discussion further,” said Winifred, gathering up her gloves and her stole and her reptilian purse.

After the war, things changed. They changed the way we looked. After a time the grainy muted greys and half-tones were gone. Instead there was the full glare of noon—gaudy, primary, shadowless. Hot pinks, violent blues, red and white beach balls, the fluorescent green of plastic, the sun blazing down like a spotlight.

Around the outskirts of towns and cities, bulldozers rampaged and trees were toppled; great holes were scooped in the ground as if bombs had been dropped there. The streets were gravel and mud. Lawns of bare earth appeared, with spindly saplings planted on them: weeping birches were popular. There was far too much sky.

There was meat, great hunks and slabs and chunks of it glistening in the butchers’ windows. There were oranges and lemons bright as a sunrise, and mounds of sugar and mountains of yellow butter. Everyone ate and ate. They stuffed themselves full of technicolour meat and all the technicolour food they could get, as if there was no tomorrow.

But there was a tomorrow, there was nothing but a tomorrow. It was yesterday that had vanished.

I had enough money now, from Richard and also from Laura’s estate. I’d bought my little house. Aimee was still resentful of me for having dragged her away from her former and considerably more affluent life, but she appeared to have settled down, though once in a while I’d catch a cold look from her: she was already deciding that I was unsatisfactory as a mother. Richard on the other hand had reaped the benefits of long distance, and had much more of a gleam to him, in her eyes, now that he was no longer present. However, the flow of gifts from him had slowed to a trickle, so she didn’t have many options. I’m afraid I expected her to be more stoical than she was.

Meanwhile, Richard was readying himself for the mantle of command, which was—according to the newspapers—as good as within his grasp. True, I was an impediment, but rumours of a separation had been squashed. I was said to be “in the country,” and that was marginally all right, as long as I was prepared to stay there.

Unbeknownst to myself, other rumours had been floated: that I was mentally unstable; that Richard was maintaining me financially, despite my wackiness; that Richard was a saint. No harm in a mad wife, if properly handled: it does make the spouses of the powerful so much more sympathetic to one’s cause.

In Port Ticonderoga I lived quietly enough. Whenever I went out, I moved through a sea of respectful whispers, the voices hushing when I came within earshot, then starting up again. It was agreed that whatever had happened with Richard, I must be the wronged party. I’d got the short end of the straw, but as there was no justice and precious little mercy, nothing could be done for me. This was before the book appeared, of course.

Time passed. I gardened, I read, and so on. I had already begun—in a modest way, and beginning with a few pieces of animal jewellery from Richard—the trade in second-hand artifacts that, as it turned out, would stand me in good stead in the coming decades. A semblance of normality had been installed.

But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn’t sleep.

Officially, Laura had been papered over. A few years more and it would be almost as if she’d never existed. I shouldn’t have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial of some kind. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

Lest we forget. Remember me. To you from failing hands we throw. Cries of the thirsty ghosts.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.

The heap of rubble

I sent the book off. In due time, I received a letter back. I answered it. Events took their course.

The author’s copies arrived, in advance of publication. On the inside jacket flap was a touching biographical note:

Laura Chase wrote The Blind Assassin before the age of twenty-five. It was her first novel; sadly, it will also be her last, as she died in a tragic automobile accident in 1945. We are proud to present the work of this young and gifted writer in its first astonishing flowering.

Above this was Laura’s photo, a bad reproduction: it made her look flyspecked. Nevertheless, it was something.

When the book came out, there was at first a silence. It was quite a small book, after all, and hardly best-seller material; and although well received in critical circles in New York and London, it didn’t make much of a splash up here, not initially. Then the moralists grabbed hold of it, and the pulpit-thumpers and local biddies got into the act, and the uproar began. Once the corpse flies had made the connection—Laura was Richard Griffen’s dead sister-in-law—they were all over the story like a rash. Richard had, by that time, his store of political enemies. Innuendo began to flow.

The story that Laura had committed suicide, so efficiently quashed at the time, rose to the surface again. People were talking, not just in Port Ticonderoga but in the circles that mattered. If she’d done it, why? Someone made an anonymous phone call—now who could that have been?—and the Bella Vista Clinic entered the picture. Testimony by a former employee (well paid, it was said, by one of the newspapers) led to a full investigation of the seedier practices carried on there, as a result of which the backyard was dug up and the whole place was closed down. I studied the pictures of it with interest: it had been the mansion of one of the lumber barons before it became a clinic, and was said to have some rather fine stained-glass windows in the dining room, though not so fine as Avilion’s.

There was some correspondence between Richard and the director that was particularly damaging.

Once in a while Richard appears to me, in the mind’s eye or in a dream. He’s grey, but with an iridescent sheen to him, like oil on a puddle. He gives me a fishy look. Another reproachful ghost.

Shortly before the newspapers announced his retirement from official politics, I received a telephone call from him, the first since my departure. He was enraged, and also frantic. He’d been told that due to the scandal he could no longer be considered as a leadership candidate, and now the men that mattered were not returning his calls. He’d been cold-shouldered. He’d been stiffed. I’d done this on purpose, he said, to ruin him.

“Done what?” I said. “You’re not ruined. You’re still very rich.”

“That book!” he said. “You sabotaged me! How much did you have to pay them, to get it published? I can’t believe Laura wrote that filthy—that piece of garbage!”