The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale #2) - Margaret Atwood Page 0,24

me help her. That was some comfort: to be allowed to put on an apron, and to grate the cheese, and to squeeze the dough out of the pastry tube onto the baking sheet, and then to watch through the glass window of the oven as it puffed up. We baked these at the last minute, once the people had come.

Then I took off the apron and went in to the reception in my black dress, as my father had requested, and was silent, as he had also requested. Most of the guests ignored me, except for one of the Wives, whose name was Paula. She was a widow, and somewhat famous because her husband, Commander Saunders, had been killed in his study by their Handmaid, using a kitchen skewer—a scandal that had been much whispered about at school the year before. What was the Handmaid doing in the study? How had she got in?

Paula’s version was that the girl was insane, and had crept downstairs at night and stolen the skewer from the kitchen, and when poor Commander Saunders had opened his study door she had taken him by surprise—killed a man who had always been respectful to her and to her position. The Handmaid had run away, but they’d caught her and hanged her, and displayed her on the Wall.

The other version was Shunammite’s, via her Martha, via the main Martha at the Saunders house. It involved violent urges and a sinful connection. The Handmaid must have enticed Commander Saunders in some way, and then he’d ordered her to creep downstairs during the nights when everyone was supposed to be asleep. Then she would slither into the study, where the Commander would be waiting for her, and his eyes would light up like flashlights. Who knows what lustful demands he must have made? Demands that had been unnatural, and had driven the Handmaid mad, not that it would take that much with some of them, because they were borderline as it was, but this one must have been worse than most. It did not bear thinking about, said the Marthas, who could think of little else.

When her husband hadn’t turned up for breakfast, Paula had gone looking for him and had discovered him lying on the floor without his trousers. Paula had put the trousers back on him before calling the Angels. She’d had to order one of her own Marthas to help her: dead people were either stiff or floppy, and Commander Saunders was a large and clumsily shaped man. Shunammite said the Martha said that Paula had got a lot of blood on herself while wrestling the clothes onto the dead body, and must have nerves of steel because she’d done what was right to save appearances.

I preferred Shunammite’s version to Paula’s. I thought about it at the funeral reception when my father was introducing me to Paula. She was eating a cheese puff; she gave me a measuring look. I’d seen a look like that on Vera when she was poking a straw into a cake to see if it was done.

Then she smiled and said, “Agnes Jemima. How lovely,” and patted me on the head as if I was five, and said it must be nice to have a new dress. I felt like biting her: was the new dress supposed to make up for my mother being dead? But it was better to hold my tongue than to show my true thoughts. I did not always succeed in that, but I succeeded on this occasion.

“Thank you,” I said. I pictured her kneeling on the floor in a pool of blood, trying to put a pair of trousers on a dead man. This put her in an awkward position in my mind, and made me feel better.

* * *

—

Several months after my mother’s death, my father married the widow Paula. On her finger appeared my mother’s magic ring. I suppose my father didn’t want to waste it, and why buy another ring when such a beautiful and expensive one was already available?

The Marthas grumbled about it. “Your mother wanted that ring to go to you,” Rosa said. But of course there was nothing they could do. I was enraged, but there was nothing I could do either. I brooded and sulked, but neither my father nor Paula paid any attention to that. They had taken to doing something they called “humouring me,” which in practice meant ignoring any displays of mood so I