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 bestseller 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 practises 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!"

"You don't want to believe it," I said, "because you were besotted with her. You can't face the possibility that all the time you were having your squalid little fling with her, she must have been in and out of bed with another man-one she loved, unlike you. Or I assume that's what the book means-doesn't it?"

"It was that pinko, wasn't it? That fucking bastard-at the picnic!" Richard must have been very upset: as a rule, he seldom swore.

"How would I know?" I said. "I didn't spy on her. But I agree with you, it would have started at the picnic." I didn't tell him there had been two picnics involving Alex: one with Laura, and a second one, a year later, without her, after I'd run into Alex that day on Queen Street. The one with the hard-boiled eggs.

"She was doing it out of spite," said Richard. "She was just getting back at me."

"That wouldn't surprise me," I said. "She must have hated you. Why wouldn't she? You as good as raped her."

"That's untrue! I did nothing without her consent!"

"Consent? Is that what you'd call it? I'd call it blackmail."

He hung up on me. It was a family trait. When she'd called earlier to rail at me, Winifred had done that too.

Then Richard went missing, and then he was found in the Water Nixie -well, you know all that. He must have crept into the town, crept onto the grounds of Avilion, crept onto the boat, which was in the boathouse, by the way, not tied up at the jetty as it erroneously said in the papers. That was a cover-up: a corpse in a boat on the water is normal enough, but one in a boathouse is peculiar. Winifred wouldn't have wanted it thought that Richard had gone round the bend.

What really happened then? I'm not sure. Once he was located, Winifred took charge of events, and put the best face on things. A stroke was her story. He was found with the book at his elbow, however. That much I know, because Winifred phoned in a state of hysteria and told me so. "How could you have done this to him?" she said. "You destroyed his political career, and then you destroyed his memories of Laura. He loved her! He adored her! He couldn't bear it when she died!"

"I'm glad to hear he felt some remorse," I said coldly. "I can't say I noticed any at the time."

Winifred blamed me, of course. After that, it was open war. She did the worst thing to me that she could think of. She took Aimee.

I suppose you were taught the gospel according to Winifred. In her version, I would have been a lush, a tramp, a slut, a bad mother. As time went by I no doubt became, in her mouth, a slovenly harridan, a crazy old bat, a peddler of ratty old junk. I doubt she ever said to you that I murdered Richard, however. If she'd told you that, she would also have had to say where she got the idea.

Junkwould have been a slur. It's true I bought cheap and sold dear-who doesn't, in the antiques racket? -but I had a good eye and I never twisted anyone's arm. There was a period of excessive drinking-I admit it-though not until after Aimee was gone. As for the men, there were some of those as well. It was never a question of love, it was more like a sort of periodic bandaging. I was cut off from everything around me, unable to reach, to touch; at the same time I felt scraped raw. I needed the comfort of another body.

I avoided any man from my own former social circles, though some of these appeared, like fruit flies, as soon as they got wind of my solitary and possibly rotten state. Men like that could have been egged on by Winifred, and no doubt were. I stuck to strangers, picked up on my forays to nearby towns and cities in search of what they now callcollectibles. I never gave my real name. But Winifred was too persistent for me, in the end. All she'd needed was one man, and that's what she'd got. The pictures of the motel room door, going in, coming out; the fake signatures in the register; the testimony of the owner, who'd welcomed the cash. You could fight it in court, said my lawyer, but I'd advise against it. We'll try for visiting rights, that's all you can expect. You handed them the ammunition and they've used it. Even he took a dim view of me, not for my moral turpitude but for my clumsiness.

Richard had appointed Winifred as Aimee's guardian in his will, and also as sole trustee of Aimee's not inconsiderable trust fund. So she had that in her favour, as well.

As for the book, Laura didn't write a word of it. But you must have known that for some time. I wrote it myself, during my long evenings alone, when I was waiting for Alex to come back, and then afterwards, once I knew he wouldn't. I didn't think of what I was doing as writing-just writing down. What I remembered, and also what I imagined, which is also the truth. I thought of myself as recording. A bodiless hand, scrawling across a wall.

I wanted a memorial. That was how it began. For Alex, but also for myself.

It was no great leap from that to naming Laura as the author. You might decide it was cowardice that inspired me, or a failure of nerve-I've never been fond of spotlights. Or simple prudence: my own name would have guaranteed the loss of Aimee, whom I lost in any case. But on second thought it was merely doing justice, because I can't say Laura didn't write a word. Technically that's accurate, but in another sense-what Laura would have called the spiritual sense-you could say she was my collaborator. The real author was neither one of us: a fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

I remember Laura, when she was ten or eleven, sitting at Grandfather's desk, in the library at Avilion. She had a sheet of paper in front of her, and was busying herself with the seating arrangements in Heaven. "Jesus sits at the right hand of God," she said, "so who sits at God's left hand?"

"Maybe God doesn't have a left hand," I said, to tease her. "Left hands are supposed to be bad, so maybe he wouldn't have one. Or maybe he got his left hand cut off in a war."

"We're made in God's image," Laura said, "and we have left hands, so God must have one as well." She consulted her diagram, chewing on the end of her pencil. "I know!" she said. "The table must be circular! So everyone sits at everyone else's right hand, all the way round."

"And vice versa," I said.

Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together. It's a left-handed book. That's why one of us is always out of sight, whichever way you look at it.

When I began this account of Laura's life-of my own life-I had no idea why I was writing it, or who I expected might read it once I'd done. But it's clear to me now. I was writing it for you, dearest Sabrina, because you're the one-the only one-who needs it now.

Since Laura is no longer who you thought she was, you're no longer who you think you are, either. That can be a shock, but it can also be a relief. For instance, you're no relation at all to, Winifred, and none to Richard. There's not a speck of Griffen in you at all: your hands are clean on that score. Your real grandfather was Alex Thomas, and as to who his own father was, well, the sky's the limit. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, saint, a score of countries of origin, a dozen cancelled maps, a hundred levelled villages-take your pick. Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will.