Lady Oracle

by Margaret Atwood

  I'd been in England about six weeks when I fell off the bus. The Polish Count helped me up, and I thanked him. It was a simple enough beginning.

  He was slightly shorter than I was, with wispy light-brown hair receding from his forehead, sloping shoulders, and rimless spectacles, which were not fashionable at the time. He was wearing a navy-blue overcoat, a little frayed and shiny, and carrying a briefcase. In order to help me up he set down the briefcase, placed a hand under each of my armpits, and gave a gallant heave. I almost toppled him over but we regained our balance, and he picked up his briefcase.

  "Are you all right?" he asked, in a vaguely English accent. If I had been English I might have been able to tell he was a Polish Count; as it was, I could not.

  "Thank you very much," I said. I had ripped a stocking and scraped my knee, and my ankle was badly twisted.

  "You must sit down," he said. He steered me across the road and into a restaurant called, as I remember, The Golden Egg, and brought me some tea and a black-currant tart, slightly squashed. His manner was warm but patronizing, as if I were an unusually inept child. "There," he said, beaming. I noticed that he had an aquiline nose, though it didn't achieve its potential due to his height. "This tea is the English remedy for everything. They are a strange people."

  "Aren't you English?" I asked.

  His eyes - which were greenish-gray, or perhaps grayish-green - clouded over behind his spectacles, as if I'd asked a rude personal question. "No," he said. "But in these days, one must adapt. You, of course, are American."

  I explained that I wasn't, and he seemed disappointed. He asked me if I liked to ski, and I replied that I had never learned. "I owe my life to skis," he said enigmatically. "All Canadians ski. How else would one get around, over the snow?"

  "Some of us use toboggans," I said. The word puzzled him, and I explained.

  I finished my tea. This was the moment, I felt, when I should thank him graciously for his kindness and leave. Otherwise we would have to exchange the stories of our lives and I was too depressed about mine to want to do that. So I thanked him and stood up. Then I sat back down again. My ankle had swollen and I could barely walk.

  He insisted on taking me all the way back to Willesden Green, supporting me as I hobbled to the underground station and along the street past the candy stores.

  "But this is appalling," he said when he saw my rooming house. "You can't live here. Nobody lives here." Then he volunteered to wrap my ankle in towels wrung out in cold water. He was doing this, kneeling in front of me while I sat on the bed, when the landlord appeared and gave me a week's notice. The Polish Count informed him that the lady had sprained her ankle. The landlord replied that he didn't care what I had sprained, I was out come Thursday, as he couldn't have that kind of carryings-on in his house. It was the sight of my naked, tumescent foot that had offended him.

  When he had gone, the Polish Count shrugged. "They are a small-minded people, the English," he said. "A nation of shopkeepers." I didn't know this was a quotation and thought it was very clever of him. I had been shocked to find Stonehenge surrounded by a fence, with a gate in it for taking tickets. "You have seen the Tower of London?" he asked. I hadn't. "We will go there tomorrow."

  "But I can't walk!"

  "We will go in a taxi, and by boat." He had not asked me, he had told me, so I didn't think of saying no. Also, he seemed old to me; in fact he was forty-one, but I put him in the category of aged and therefore harmless men.

  On this excursion, he told me the story of his life. He requested mine first, as politeness demands. I said I'd come to London to study art at the art school, but I'd decided I had no talent. He sighed. "You are a wise girl," he said, "to have made this discovery so early in life. You will not delude yourself with false hopes. I myself once wished to be a writer, I wished to be like Tolstoy, you understand; but now I am exiled from my own language, and this one is fit for nothing but to make hoardings with. It has no music, it does not sing, it is always trying to sell you something."

  I didn't know who Tolstoy was; I nodded and smiled. He went on to relate his personal history. His family had belonged to the upper class, before the war; he wasn't a Count exactly, but he was something or other, and he showed me a signet ring he wore on his little finger. It was a mythical bird, a griffin or a phoenix, I forget which. The family had scrabbled along under the Germans, but when the Russians invaded he knew he had to get out or be shot.

  "Why?" I said. "You hadn't done anything."

  He gave me a pitying look. "It is not what you do," he said, "but who you are."

  He and a party of six others had skied to the border, where a guide was to meet them and take them across. But he became ill. He insisted the others go on without him, and crawled into a cave, certain he would die. The others were caught at the border and executed. He recovered and made his own way across, traveling at night and taking the direction from the stars. When he first arrived in England, he washed dishes in Soho restaurants to make a living; but once he had learned enough English, he obtained a position as a clerk in a bank, working in the foreign exchange department. "I am the last," he said, "of a dying race. The last of the Mohicans." In fact he had a daughter back in Poland, as well as a mother; but he had no son, and this weighed on him.

  My first reaction to this story was that I had met a liar as compulsive and romantic as myself. But my usual impulse was to believe everything I was told, as I myself wished to be believed, and in this case it was the right impulse, since his story was essentially true. I was very impressed. He seemed to belong to a vanished and preferable era, when courage was possible. I limped through the Tower of London on his rather stringy arm with a mixture of emotions new to me: I felt sorry for him because of the sufferings he had undergone, I admired his daring, I was flattered by the attention he was paying to me and grateful for it, and especially I was pleased to be thought wise. I later found that almost anyone would tell you you were wise if you confessed you had no talent.

  That was a Sunday. On Monday he had to work at the bank in the daytime, but in the evening he took me to dinner at a club for Polish expatriates, which was full of one-eyed Generals and other Polish Counts. "We are the few that are left," he said. "The Russians killed off the others."

  "But weren't you both against the Germans?" I asked. He laughed gently and explained, at some length.

  My own ignorance amazed me. All sorts of things had been happening behind my back, it appeared: treacheries and famines, diplomatic coups, ideological murders and doomed heroic exploits. Why had no one told me? They had, perhaps, but I hadn't been listening. I had been worrying about my weight.

  On Tuesday he took me to a chamber music concert, a benefit for some Polish political organization I had never heard of. I mentioned that I hadn't yet found another room.

  "But you will live with me!" he exclaimed. "I have a nice place, very nice, very charming, with lots of room. Of course you must do this." He had the entire second floor of a house in Kensington, which was owned by a nonagenarian English Lord who was usually in a nursing home. The third floor was occupied by three working girls, but of a good class, he assured me: they worked in offices.

  I thought it was very considerate and kind of him to offer to share his apartment with me. As he had never touched me, except to help me across the street or along it, because of my ankle, and had never made any suggestive remarks, I was quite surprised when, after I had brushed my teeth and was about to climb into bed (wearing, I believe, a heavy sack-shaped flannel gown I'd bought at Marks & Spencer's the week before), there was a discreet knock at my door and this man, whose first name I didn't even know, appeared in the doorway, dressed in a pair of blue-and-white-striped pajamas. He understood that he was getting into bed with me, and he understood that I understood this also.

  The story I told Arthur later, about being seduced under a pine tree at the age of sixteen, by a summer camp sailing instructor from Montreal, was a lie. I was not seduced at all. I was
a victim of the Miss Flegg syndrome: if you find yourself trapped in a situation you can't get out of gracefully, you might as well pretend you chose it. Otherwise you will look ridiculous. Innocence has its hazards, and in my case one of them was that the Polish Count couldn't conceive of anyone being as simpleminded as I was. If you ask a woman to move into your apartment and she consents, naturally she is consenting to be your mistress. It's an odd term, "mistress," but that was how he thought of me, these were the categories into which his sexual life was arranged: wives and mistresses. I was not the first mistress. For him there was no such thing as a female lover.

  When describing the episode with the Montreal sailing instructor to Arthur, I took care to include some salacious details. I added a few convincing small touches as well, the pine needles sticking into my bum, his Jockey undershorts, the smell of Brylcreem; I was good at things like that. Of course I never went to summer camp in my life. My mother wanted me to, but it meant being shut up for two months with a pack of sadistic overgrown Brownies, with no escape. So I spent the summers lying about the house, eating and reading trashy books, some of which had salacious details. It was these I used in the story of my life; I had to borrow, because the first experience with the Polish Count was not at all erotic. My ankle hurt, the pajamas turned me off, and he looked weird without his spectacles. Also it was painful; and although he was patient and instructive later, though inclined to give performance points - it was almost like taking tap-dancing lessons - he wasn't on this occasion.

  When he discovered I wasn't the easygoing art student manquee he'd thought I was - when he realized he had deprived me of my virginity - the Polish Count was filled with remorse. "What have I done?" he said mournfully. "My poor child. Why didn't you say something?" But anything I could have said would have been implausible. This was the reason I fabricated my life, time after time: the truth was not convincing.

  So I said nothing, and he patted my shoulder anxiously. He felt he'd injured my chances for a good marriage. He wanted to make it up to me and couldn't understand why I wasn't more upset. I was sitting up in bed, pulling my flannel gown back on (for it was just as cold and damp in his flat as it had been in mine) and watching his long, melancholy face with the green-gray eyes slightly askew. I was glad it had happened. It proved to me finally that I was normal, that my halo of flesh had disappeared and I was no longer among the untouchables.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I often wondered what would have happened if I'd stayed with the Polish Count instead of moving in with Arthur. Maybe I would be fat and content, sitting in his apartment during the day, wearing a flowered negligee, doing a little embroidering, a little mending, reading trashy books and eating chocolates; in the evenings we would dine out at the Polish Officer's Club and I would be treated with respect, more or less; I would have an acknowledged position, I would be "Paul's mistress." But it wouldn't have worked, he was too methodical. His first name was Tadeo but he preferred to be called Paul, his third name, after Saint Paul, who was a systematic man, no loose ends. His idea of the good life was that it should be tidy.

  Even his escape over the Polish border had been tidy. ("But it was chance that saved your life!" I exclaimed. "No," he said, "I would have been dead anyway if I had not used my head.") He calculated his course precisely and emerged from the forest at the exact point he intended. To keep himself awake and to dispel the hallucinations he was having, he recited the multiplication tables as he plodded through the snow and the darkness (plodded, for he had given his skis to a member of the doomed party). He didn't panic, as I would have done; he paid no attention to the vivid geometrical shapes and, later, the menacing faces that appeared before him in the air. I too had seen the shapes and the faces, during my attack of blood poisoning, and I knew that my response, especially in the depths of that Polish forest, dense as hair, cold as despair, would have been to sit down in the snow and let disaster overtake me. Details would distract me, the candle stubs and bones of those who had gone before; in any labyrinth I would have let go of the thread in order to follow a wandering light, a fleeting voice. In a fairy tale I would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the forbidden door and are shocked by the murdered wives, not the third, clever one who keeps to the essentials: presence of mind, foresight, the telling of watertight lies. I told lies but they were not watertight. My mind was not disciplined, as Arthur sometimes pointed out.

  So did Paul. He was compulsive about time, he had to leave the house at precisely eight-fifteen, and before that he spent ten minutes by the clock polishing his shoes and brushing his suit. He found my lack of order charming, but not for long; soon he was making speeches about how much easier it was to hang up one's clothes at the time, rather than leaving them in a heap on the floor till the next morning. He didn't expect much of me - after all, I was only a mistress - but those few things he expected absolutely. I think he considered training me to live with him a minor and tedious challenge, sort of like training a dog: a limited number of tricks, learned thoroughly.

  With the exception of that first surprising night he confined sex to weekends. He believed in separate rooms, so I slept on a foldout bed in the room he called the library. He was not stingy or repressive by nature, but he was a man with a mission, and because I slept in the library I soon discovered what it was.

  The first day, after he left for the bank, I slept in till eleven. Then I got up and browsed around the flat, opening the kitchen cupboards, looking for something to eat but also exploring the personality of this man who the night before had, as they say, violated my honor. I was curious, and you can tell a lot about a person from their kitchen cupboards. Paul's were very well-organized; tinned goods prevailed, with some utilitarian dried soups and a package of water biscuits. The foods were of two kinds, bare necessities and exotica: squid, I recall, and some seal meat (which we had later; it was rank and oily). Next I did the refrigerator, which was spotless and almost empty. I ate several water biscuits with some tinned sardines, then made myself a cup of tea and went into Paul's room to go through his closet and bureau drawers. I was careful not to disturb anything. There were some tinted photos on the bureau, the lips purplish, the hair yellowish-gray. Boxer shorts; all his pajamas were striped except for a pair of silk ones. Under the boxer shorts there was a revolver, which I didn't touch.

  I went back to the library, intending to get dressed, but I thought I'd go through the bookshelves first. The books were mostly old, cloth-and leather-bound with marbled endpapers, the kind you find on secondhand book tables. A number of them were in Polish, though there were English ones too: Sir Walter Scott, quite a lot of that, and Dickens and Harrison Ainsworth and Wilkie Collins; I remember the names because I subsequently read most of them. But there was one shelf that puzzled me. It consisted of nurse novels, the mushy kind that have a nurse on the cover and a doctor in the background gazing at her with interest and admiration, though never pop-eyed with desire. They had titles such as Janet Holmes, Student Nurse; Helen Curtis, Senior Nurse; and Anne Armstrong, Junior Nurse. Some had more daring titles, such as Romance in Paradise and Lucy Gallant, Army Nurse. They were all by a woman with the improbable name of Mavis Quilp. I skimmed through a couple, remembering them well. I'd read dozens, back in my fat days. They were standard fare, each ending with nurse and doctor wrapped in each other's arms as firmly and antiseptically as elastic bandages. There was something odd about the language, the cliches were a little off, distorted just slightly. For instance, someone said, "They're selling like pancakes" instead of "hotcakes," someone else said, "Keep a stiff upper jaw," and Anne Armstrong "trombled" rather than trembled when the doctor brushed past her, though that could have been a typo. Other than this, however, they weren't remarkable; but they were so out of place in Paul's library that I asked him about them that evening.

  "Paul," I said, when we were seated opposite each other at the kitchen table, eating the tinned seal meat and drinking the half-bottle of champagne he had brought back as a pr
opitiation offering, "why do you read those trashy books by Mavis Quilp?"

  He gave me a peculiar, twisted smile. "I never read those trashy books by Mavis Quilp."

  "Then why do you have fourteen of them in your library?" Perhaps Paul was a secret agent - which would explain the revolver - and the Quilp books were messages in code.

  He was still smiling. "I write those trashy books by Mavis Quilp."

  I dropped my fork. "You mean, you're Mavis Quilp?" I started to laugh, but was stopped by the offended look on his face.

  "I have a mother and a daughter on the inside," he replied stiffly.

  The story he told me was this. On first arriving in England, he had still fancied himself a writer. He had written a three-volume epic dealing with the fortunes of a petit-aristocratic family (his) before, during and after the war, laboring away at it with the help of a dictionary in the intervals between his ten-hour stints as a dishwasher. He would rather have written in Polish, but felt it was no use. His novel had thirteen major characters, all of them related, and each with an entourage of wives, mistresses, friends, children and uncles. When he'd finished his book at last and had typed it, painfully, himself, he took it to a publisher. He knew nothing of publishers; inadvertently, he had chosen one that did nothing but Westerns, nurse novels and historical romances.

  They rejected his novel, of course, but they were impressed by the quality and especially the quantity of his work. "You can turn it out, all right, mate," the man had told him. "Here's a story line for you, write it up and keep it simple, a hundred quid. Fair enough?" He had needed the money.

  While his three-volume epic went the rounds of other, more respectable publishers - it never did get accepted - he churned out junky novels, using at first the story lines provided for him, later supplying his own. He was now receiving between two and three hundred pounds a book, no royalties. With his new job at the bank he earned exactly enough to support himself, so the nurse-novel money was extra, and he sent it to his mother and daughter in Poland. He had a wife there too, but she had divorced him.