Blind Assassin (22 page)

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

“Lovely, dear,” said Miss Violence. She was fond of boundless love, but she was equally fond of hopeless melancholy.

There was a thin book bound in snuff-coloured leather, which had belonged to Grandmother Adelia:The Rubåiyåt of Omar Khayyåm, by Edward Fitzgerald. (Edward Fitzgerald hadn’t really written it, and yet he was said to be the author. How to account for it? I didn’t try to.) Miss Violence would sometimes read from this book, to show me how poetry ought to be pronounced:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

    Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

She gasped out the Oh as if someone had kicked her in the chest; similarly the Thou. I thought it was a lot of fuss to make about a picnic, and wondered what they’d had on the bread. “Of course it wasn’t real wine, dear,” said Miss Violence. “It refers to the Communion Service.”

Would but some wingèd Angel ere too late

Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,

    And make the stern Recorder otherwise

Enregister, or quite obliterate!

Ah, Love! Could you and I with Him conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

    Would we not shatter it to bits—and then

Remould it nearer to the heart’s Desire!

“So true,” said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well—into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper.

Laura didn’t read much. Instead she would copy pictures, or else she’d colour in the black-and-white illustrations in thick, erudite books of travel and history with her coloured pencils. (Miss Violence let her do this, on the assumption that no one else would notice.) Laura had strange but very definite ideas about which colours were required: she’d make a tree blue or red, she’d make the sky pink or green. If there was a picture of someone she disapproved she’d do the face purple or dark grey to obliterate the features.

She liked to draw the pyramids, from a book on Egypt; she liked to colour in the Egyptian idols. Also Assyrian statues with the bodies of winged lions and the heads of eagles or men. That was from a book by Sir Henry Layard, who’d discovered the statues in the ruins of Nineveh and had them shipped to England; they were said to be illustrations of the angels described in the Book of Ezekiel. Miss Violence did not consider these pictures very nice—the statues looked pagan, and also bloodthirsty—but Laura was not to be deterred. In the face of criticism she would just crouch farther over the page and colour away as if her life depended on it.

“Back straight, dear,” Miss Violence would say. “Pretend your spine is a tree, growing up towards the sun.” But Laura was not interested in this kind of pretending.

“I don’t want to be a tree,” she would say.

“Better a tree than a hunchback, dear,” Miss Violence would sigh, “and if you don’t pay attention to your posture, that’s what you’ll turn into.”

Much of the time Miss Violence sat by the window and read romantic novels from the lending library. She also liked to leaf through my Grandmother Adelia’s tooled-leather scrapbooks, with their dainty embossed invitations carefully glued in, their menus printed up at the newspaper office, and the subsequent newspaper clippings—the charity teas, the improving lectures illustrated by lantern slides—the hardy, amiable travellers to Paris and Greece and even India, the Sweden-borgians, the Fabians, the Vegetarians, all the various promoters of self-improvement, with once in a while something truly outré—a missionary to Africa, or the Sahara, or New Guinea, describing how the natives practised witchcraft or hid their women behind elaborate wooden masks or decorated the skulls of their ancestors with red paint and cowrie shells. All the yellowing paper evidence of that luxurious, ambitious, relentless vanished life, which Miss Violence pored over inch by inch, as if remembering it, smiling with gentle vicarious pleasure.

She had a packet of tinsel stars, gold and silver, which she would stick onto things we’d done. Sometimes she took us out to collect wildflowers, which we pressed between two sheets of blotting paper, with a heavy book on top. We grew fond of her, although we didn’t cry when she left. She cried, however—wetly, inelegantly, the way she did everything.

I became thirteen. I’d been growing, in ways that were not my fault, although they seemed to annoy Father as much as if they had been. He began to take an interest in my posture, in my speech, in my deportment generally. My clothing should be simple and plain, with white blouses and dark pleated skirts, and dark velvet dresses for church. Clothes that looked like uniforms—that looked like sailor suits, but were not. My shoulders should be straight, with no slouching. I should not sprawl, chew gum, fidget, or chatter. The values he required were those of the army: neatness, obedience, silence, and no evident sexuality. Sexuality, although it was never spoken of, was to be nipped in the bud. He had let me run wild for too long. It was time for me to be taken in hand.

Laura came in for some of this hectoring too, although she had not yet reached the age for it. (What was the age for it? The pubescent age, it’s clear to me now. But then I was merely confused. What crime had I committed? Why was I being treated like the inmate of some curious reform school?)

“You’re being too hard on the kiddies,” said Callista. “They’re not boys.”

“Unfortunately,” said Father.

It was Callista I went to on the day I found I had developed a horrible disease, because blood was seeping out from between my legs: surely I was dying! Callista laughed. Then she explained. “It’s just a nuisance,” she said. She said I should refer to it as “my friend,” or else “a visitor.” Reenie had more Presbyterian ideas. “It’s the curse,” she said. She stopped short of saying that it was yet one more peculiar arrangement of God’s, devised to make life disagreeable: it was just the way things were, she said. As for the blood, you tore up rags. (She did not sayblood, she saidmess. ) She made me a cup of chamomile tea, which tasted the way spoiled lettuce smelled; also a hot-water bottle, for the cramps. Neither one helped.

Laura found a splotch of blood on my bedsheets and began to weep. She concluded that I was dying. I would die like Mother, she sobbed, without telling her first. I would have a little grey baby like a kitten and then I would die.

I told her not to be an idiot. I said this blood had nothing to do with babies. (Callista hadn’t gone into that part, having no doubt decided that too much of this kind of information at once might warp my psyche.)

“It’ll happen to you one day too,” I said to Laura. “When you’re my age. It’s a thing that happens to girls.”

Laura was indignant. She refused to believe it. As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case.

There’s a studio portrait of Laura and me, taken at this time. I’m wearing the regulation dark velvet dress, a style too young for me: I have, noticeably, what used to be calledbosoms. Laura sits beside me, in an identical dress. We both have white knee socks, patent-leather Mary Janes; our legs are crossed decorously at the ankle, right over left, as instructed. I have my arm around Laura, but tentatively, as if ordered to place it there. Laura on her part has her hands folded in her lap. Each of us has her light hair parted in the middle and pulled back tightly from her face. Both of us are smiling, in that apprehensive way children have when told they must be good and smile, as if the two things are the same: it’s a smile imposed by the threat of disapproval. The threat and the disapproval would have been Father’s. We were afraid of them, but did not know how to avoid them.

Father had decided, correctly enough, that our education had been neglected. He wanted us taught French, but also Mathematics and Latin—brisk mental exercises that would act as a corrective for our excessive dreaminess. Geography too would be bracing. Although he’d barely noticed her during her tenure, he decreed that Miss Violence and her lax, musty, rose-tinted ways must be scrubbed away. He wanted the lacy, frilly, somewhat murky edges trimmed off us as if we were lettuces, leaving a plain, sound core. He didn’t understand why we liked what we liked. He wanted us turned into the semblances of boys, one way or another. Well, what do you expect? He’d never had sisters.

In the place of Miss Violence, he engaged a man called Mr. Erskine, who’d once taught at a boys’ school in England but had been packed off to Canada, suddenly, for his health. He did not seem at all unhealthy to us: he never coughed, for instance. He was stocky, tweed-covered, thirty or thirty-five perhaps, with reddish hair and a plump wet red mouth, and a tiny goatee and a cutting irony and a nasty temper, and a smell like the bottom of a damp laundry hamper.

It was soon clear that inattentiveness and staring at Mr. Erskine’s forehead would not rid us of him. First of all he gave us tests, to determine what we knew. Not much, it appeared, though more than we saw fit to divulge. He then told Father that we had the brains of insects or marmots. We were nothing short of deplorable, and it was a wonder we were not cretins. We had developed slothful mental habits—we had beenallowed to develop them, he added reprovingly. Happily, it was not too late. My father said that in that case Mr. Erskine should work us up into shape.

To us, Mr. Erskine said that our laziness, our arrogance, our tendency to lollygag and daydream, and our sloppy sentimentality had all but ruined us for the serious business of life. No one expected us to be geniuses, and it would be conferring no favours if we were, but there was surely a minimum, even for girls: we would be nothing but encumbrances to any man foolish enough to marry us unless we were made to pull up our socks.

He ordered a large stack of school exercise books, the cheap kind with ruled lines and flimsy cardboard covers. He ordered a supply of plain lead pencils, with erasers. These were the magic wands, he said, by means of which we were about to transform ourselves, with his assistance.

He saidassistance with a smirk.

He threw out Miss Goreham’s tinsel stars.

The library was too distracting for us, he said. He asked for and received two school desks, which he installed in one of the extra bedrooms; he had the bed removed, along with all the other furniture, so there was just the bare room left. The door locked with a key, and he had the key. Now we would be able to roll up our sleeves and get down to it.

Mr. Erskine’s methods were direct. He was a hair-puller, an ear-twister. He would whack the desks beside our fingers with his ruler, and the actual fingers too, or cuff us across the back of the head when exasperated, or, as a last resort, hurl books at us or hit us across the backs of our legs. His sarcasm was withering, at least to me: Laura frequently thought he meant exactly what he said, which angered him further. He was not moved by tears; in fact I believe he enjoyed them.

He was not like this every day. Things would go along on an even keel for a week at a time. He might display patience, even a sort of clumsy kindness. Then there would be an outburst, and he would go on the rampage. Never knowing what he might do, or when he might do it, was the worst.

We could not complain to Father, because wasn’t Mr. Erskine acting under his orders? He said he was. But we complained to Reenie, of course. She was outraged. I was too old to be treated like that, she said, and Laura was too nervous, and both of us were—well, who did he think he was? Raised in a gutter and putting on airs, like all the English who ended up over here, thinking they could lord it, and if he took a bath once a month she’d eat her own shirt. When Laura came to Reenie with welts on the palms of her hands, Reenie confronted Mr. Erskine, but was told to mind her own business. She was the one who’d spoiled us, said Mr. Erskine. She’d spoiled us with overindulgence and babying—that much was obvious—and now it was up to him to repair the damage she had done.

Laura said that unless Mr. Erskine went away, she would go away herself. She would run away. She would jump out the window.

“Don’t do that, my pet,” said Reenie. “We’ll put on our thinking caps. We’ll fix his wagon!”

“He hasn’t got a wagon,” sobbed Laura.

Callista Fitzsimmons might have been some help, but she could see which way the wind was blowing: we weren’t her children, we were Father’s. He had chosen his course of action, and it would have been a tactical mistake for her to meddle. It was a case ofsauve qui peut, an expression which, due to Mr. Erskine’s diligence, I could now translate.

Mr. Erskine’s idea of Mathematics was simple enough: we needed to know how to balance household accounts, which meant adding and subtracting and double-entry bookkeeping.

His idea of French was verb forms andPhaedra, with a reliance on pithy maxims from noted authors.Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait —Estienne;C’est de quoi j’ ai le plus de peur que la peur —Montaigne;Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point —Pascal;L’histoire, cette vieille dame exaltée et menteuse —de Maupassant.Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains —Flaubert.Dieu s’est fait homme; soit. Le diable s’ est fait femme —Victor Hugo. And so forth.