Free Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood Page B

business of tailors, with their endless fussing and snobberies.
    At least he isn’t a woman, and thus not obliged to wear corsets, and to deform himself with tight lacing.
    For the widely held view that women are weak-spined and jelly-like by nature, and would slump to the floor like melted cheese if not roped in, he has nothing but contempt. While a medical student, he dissected a good many women — from the labouring classes, naturally — and their spines and musculature were on the average no feebler than those of men, although many suffered from rickets.
    He’s wrestled his stock into the semblance of a bow. It’s lopsided, but the best he can do; he can no longer afford a valet. He brushes down his unruly hair, which rebounds instantly. Then he takes up his topcoat, and on second thought his umbrella. There’s weak sunlight making its way in through the windows, but it’s too much to hope that it won’t rain. Kingston in the spring is a watery place.
    He makes his way stealthily down the front stairs, but not stealthily enough: his landlady has taken to waylaying him on some trivial matter or another, and she glides out from the parlour now, in her faded black silk and lace collar, clutching her customary handkerchief in one thin hand, as if tears are never far off. She was obviously a beauty not so long ago, and could still be one if she would take the trouble to be so, and if the centre parting in her fair hair were not quite so severe. Her face is heart-shaped, her skin milky, her eyes large and compelling; but although her waist is slender, there is something metallic about it, as if she is using a short length of stove-pipe instead of stays. Today she wears her habitual expression of strained anxiety; she smells of violets, and also of camphor — she is doubtless prone to headaches —
    and of something else he can’t quite place. A hot dry smell. A white linen sheet being ironed?
    As a rule, Simon avoids her type of attenuated and quietly distraught female, although doctors attract such women like magnets. Still, there’s a severe and unadorned elegance about her — like a Quaker meeting house — which has its appeal; an appeal which, for him, is aesthetic only. One does not make love to a minor religious edifice.
    “Dr. Jordan,” she says. “I wanted to ask you…” She hesitates. Simon smiles, prompting her to get on with it. “Your egg this morning — was it satisfactory? This time I cooked it myself.”
    Simon lies. To do otherwise would be unpardonably rude. “Delicious, thank you,” he says. In reality the egg had the consistency of the excised tumour a fellow medical student once slipped into his pocket for a joke — both hard and spongy at the same time. It takes a perverse talent to maltreat an egg so completely.
    “I am so glad,” she says. “It is so difficult to get good help. You are going out?”
    The fact is so obvious that Simon merely inclines his head.
    “There is another letter for you,” she says. “The servant mislaid it, but I have found it again. I have placed it on the hall table.” She says this tremulously, as if any letter for Simon must be tragic in content. Her lips are full, but fragile, like a rose on the verge of collapse.
    Simon thanks her, says goodbye, picks up his letter — it’s from his mother — and leaves. He doesn’t wish to encourage long conversations with Mrs. Humphrey. She’s lonely — as well she might be, married to the sodden and straying Major — and loneliness in a woman is like hunger in a dog. He has no wish to be the recipient of dolorous afternoon confidences, behind drawn curtains, in the parlour.
    Nonetheless she’s an interesting study. Her idea of herself, for instance, is much more exalted than her present circumstances warrant. Surely there was a governess in her childhood: the set of her shoulders proclaims it. So fastidious and stern was she when he was arranging for the rooms, that he’d found it embarrassing to ask