Seven The steamer trunk

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible, of course.

I pay out my line, I pay out my line, this black thread I'm spinning across the page.

Yesterday a package arrived for me: a fresh edition of The Blind Assassin. This copy is merely a courtesy: no money will result, or not for me. The book is now in the public domain and anyone at all can publish it, so Laura's estate won't be seeing any of the proceeds. That's what happens a set number of years after the death of the author: you lose control. The thing is out there in the world, replicating itself in God knows how many forms, without any say-so from me.

Artemesia Press, this outfit's called; it's English. I think they're the ones who wanted me to write an introduction, which I refused to do, of course. Probably run by a bunch of women, with a name like that. I wonder which Artemesia they have in mind-the Persian lady general from Herodotus who turned tail when the battle was going against her, or the Roman matron who ate the ashes of her dead husband so her body could become his living sepulchre? Probably the raped Renaissance painter: that's the only one of them that gets remembered now.

The book is on my kitchen table. Neglected masterpieces of the twentieth century, it says in italic script under the tide. Laura was a "modernist," we are told on the inside flap. She was "influenced" by the likes of Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Smart, Carson Mc Cullers-authors I know for a fact that Laura never read. The cover design isn't too bad, however. Shades of washed-out brownish purple, a photographic look: a woman in a slip, at a window, seen through a net curtain, her face in shadow. Behind her, a segment of a man-the arm, the hand, the back of the head. Appropriate enough, I suppose.

I decided it was time for me to phone my lawyer. Or not my real lawyer. The one I used to consider mine, the one who handled that business with Richard, who battled Winifred so heroically, though in vain-that one died several decades ago. Ever since then I have been passed from hand to hand within the firm, like some ornate silver teapot fobbed off on each new generation as a wedding gift, but that nobody ever uses.

"Mr. Sykes, please," I said to the girl who answered. Some receptionist or other, I suppose. I imagined her fingernails, long and maroon and pointed. But perhaps these are the wrong kind of fingernails for a receptionist of today. Perhaps they are ice blue.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Sykes is in a meeting. Who may I say is calling?"

They might as well use robots. "Mrs. Iris Griffen," I said, in my best diamond-cutting voice. "I'm one of his oldest clients."

This did not open any doors. Mr. Sykes was still in a meeting. He is a busy lad, it appears. But why do I think of him as a lad? He must be in his mid-fifties-born, perhaps, in the same year Laura died. Has she really been dead that long, the time it's taken to grow and ripen a lawyer? Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me.

"May I tell Mr. Sykes what it concerns?" said the receptionist.

"My will," I said. "I'm considering writing one. He's often told me that I should." (A lie, but I wanted to establish in her easily distracted brain the fact that Mr. Sykes and I were as close as two peas in a pod.) "That, and some other matters. I ought to come into Toronto soon, to consult him. Perhaps he could give me a call, when he can spare a minute."

I imagined Mr. Sykes receiving the message; I imagined the tiny chill that would run down the back of his neck as he tried to place my name, and then succeeded. Goose feet on his grave. It's what you feel-even I feel-when coming across those small items in the paper concerning folks once famous or glamorous or notorious, and long thought dead. Yet it appears they continue to live on, in some shrivelled, darkened form, encrusted with years, like beetles under a stone.

"Of course, Mrs. Griffen," said the receptionist. "I'll make sure he gets back to you." They must take lessons-elocution lessons-to achieve just the right blend of consideration and contempt. But why am I complaining? It's a skill I perfected, once, myself.

I set down the phone. No doubt there will be some eyebrow-raising among Mr. Sykes and his youthful, balding, Mercedes-driving, tubby-bellied cronies: What can the old bat possibly have to leave? What, that is, worth mentioning?

In one corner of my kitchen there's a steamer trunk, stuck with tattered labels. It's part of the matched luggage set from my trousseau-clear yellow calfskin once, dingy now, the steel bindings marred and grimy. I keep it locked, the key sunk deep in a sealer jar filled with bran cereal. Coffee and sugar tins would be too obvious.

I wrestled with the jar lid-I must think of some better, easier hiding place-and finally got it open, and extracted the key. I knelt with some difficulty, turned the key in the lock, lifted the lid.

I hadn't opened this trunk for some time. The singed, autumn-leaf smell of old paper rose to greet me. There were all of the notebooks with their cheap cardboard covers, like pressed sawdust. Also the typescript, held together by a crisscross of ancient kitchen string. Also the letters to the publishers-from me, of course, not from Laura, she was dead by then-and the corrected proofs. Also the hate mail, until I stopped saving it.

Also five copies of the first edition, with the dust jackets still in mint condition-tawdry, but dust jackets were then, in the years just after the war. The colours are a garish orange, a flat purple, a lime green, printed on flimsy paper, with an awful drawing-a faux Cleopatra type with bulbous green breasts and kohl-rimmed eyes and purple necklaces from navel to chin and an enormous, pouting orange mouth, rising up like a genie from the writhing smoke of a purple cigarette. Acid is eating into the pages, the virulent cover fading like the feathers of a stuffed tropical bird.

(I received six free copies-the author's copies, they were called-but I gave one of them to Richard. I don't know what became of it. I expect he tore it up, which was what he always did with pieces of paper he didn't want. No-I remember now. It was found on the boat with him, on the galley table, beside his head. Winifred sent it back to me with a note: Now look what you've done! I threw it out. I didn't want anything near me that had ever touched Richard.)

I've often wondered what to do with all of this-this cache of odds and ends, this tiny archive. I can't bring myself to sell it, but I can't bring myself to discard it either. If I do nothing, the choice will be left to Myra, tidying up after me. After her first moments of shock-supposing she begins to read-there will no doubt be some ripping and shredding. Then a struck match and none the wiser. She'd interpret that as loyalty: it's what Reenie would have done. In the old days trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

Perhaps I should leave this trunk and its contents to a university, or else to a library. It would at least be appreciated there, in a ghoulish way. There are more than a few scholars who'd like to get their claws into all this waste paper. Material, they'd call it-their name for loot. They must think of me as a fusty old dragon crouched on an ill-gotten hoard-some gaunt dog-in-the-manger, some desiccated, censorious wardress, a prim-lipped keeper of the keys, guarding the dungeon in which starved Laura is chained to the wall.

For years they've bombarded me with letters, wanting Laura's own letters-wanting manuscripts, mementoes, interviews, anecdotes-all the grisly details. To these importunate missives I used to compose tersely worded replies: "Dear Miss W., In my view your plan for a ‘Commemoration Ceremony' at the bridge which was the scene of Laura Chase's tragic death is both tasteless and morbid. You must be out of your mind. I believe you are suffering from auto-intoxication. You should try an enema."

"Dear Ms. X., I acknowledge your letter concerning your proposed thesis, though I can't say that its tide makes a great deal of sense to me. Doubtless it does to you or you would not have come up with it. I cannot give you any help. Also you do not deserve any. ‘Deconstruction' implies the wrecking ball, and ‘problematize' is not a verb."

"Dear Dr. Y, Concerning your study of the theological implications ofmy sister's religious beliefs were strongly held but were scarcely what is called conventional. She did not like God or approve of God or claim to understand God. She said she loved God, and as with human beings that was a different thing. No, she was not a Buddhist. Don't be fatuous. I suggest you learn to read."

"Dear Professor Z: I have noted your opinion that a biography of Laura Chase is long overdue. She may well be, as you say, ‘among our most important female mid-century writers.' I wouldn't know. But my cooperation in what you call ‘your project' is out of the question. I have no wish to satisfy your lust for phials of dried blood and the severed fingers of saints.

Laura Chase is not your ‘project.' She was my sister. She would not have wished to be pawed over after her death, whatever that pawing over might euphemistically be termed. Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that."

"Dear Miss W: This is your fourth letter on the same subject. Stop pestering me. You are a drone."

For decades I took a grim satisfaction in this venomous doodling. I enjoyed licking the stamps, then dropping the letters like so many hand grenades into the shiny red box, with the sense of having settled the hash of some earnest, greedy snoop. But lately I've stopped answering. Why needle strangers? They don't give a hoot what I think of them. For them I'm only an appendage: Laura's odd, extra hand, attached to no body-the hand that passed her on, to the world, to them. They see me as a repository-a living mausoleum, aresource, as they term it. Why should I do them any favours? As far as I'm concerned they're scavengers-hyenas, the lot of them; jackals on the scent of carrion, ravens hunting for roadkill; corpse flies. They want to pick through me as if I'm a boneheap, looking for scrap metal and broken pottery, for shards of cuneiform and scraps of papyrus, for curios, lost toys, gold teeth. If they ever suspected what I've got stashed away here, they'd jimmy the locks, they'd break and enter, they'd knock me over the head and make off with the boodle, and feel more than justified.

No. Not a university then. Why give them the satisfaction?

Perhaps my steamer trunk should go to Sabrina, despite her decision to remain incommunicado, despite -this is where it festers-her persistent neglect of me. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both. These things are hers by right. You might even say they are her inheritance: she is, after all, my granddaughter. She is also Laura's grandniece. Surely she will want to inform herself about her origins, once she gets around to it.

But no doubt Sabrina would reject such a gift. She's an adult now, I keep reminding myself. If she has anything to ask me, anything to say to me at all, she'll let me know.

But why doesn't she? What can be taking her so long? Is her silence a form of revenge, for something or someone? Not for Richard, surely. She never knew him. Not for Winifred, from whom she ran away. For her mother then-for poor Aimee?

How much can she possibly remember? She was only four.

Aimee's death was not my fault.

Where is Sabrina now, and what can she be seeking? I picture her as a thinnish girl, with a hesitant smile, a little ascetic; lovely though, with her grave eyes blue as Laura's, her long dark hair coiled like sleeping serpents around her head. She won't have a veil, though; she'll have sensible sandals, or even boots, the soles worn down. Or has she assumed a sari? Girls of her sort do.

She's on some mission or other-feeding the Third World poor, soothing the dying; expiating the sins of the rest of us. A fruitless task-our sins are a bottomless pit, and there's lots more where they came from. But that's God's point, she'd doubtless argue-the fruitlessness. He's always liked futility. He thinks it's noble.

She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.