Blind Assassin (21 page)

Callie Fitzsimmons was there, but she kept in the background. It was not the sort of occasion on which the artist should step forward and make a bow, she’d told us. She wore a decorous black coat and a regular skirt instead of a robe, and a hat that concealed most of her face, but was whispered about all the same.

Afterwards Reenie made cocoa, for Laura and me, in the kitchen, to warm us up because we’d got chilled in the drizzle. A cup was offered as well to Mrs. Hillcoate, who said she wouldn’t say no to it.

“Why is it called a memorial?” said Laura.

“It’s for us to remember the dead,” said Reenie.

“Why?” said Laura. “What for? Do they like it?”

“It’s not for them, it’s more for us,” said Reenie. “You’ll understand when you’re older.” Laura was always being told this, and discounted it. She wanted to understand now. She upended her cocoa.

“Can I have more? What is the Supreme Sacrifice?”

“The soldiers gave their lives for the rest of us. I certainly hope your eyes aren’t bigger than your stomach, because if I make this I’ll expect you to finish it.”

“Why did they give their lives? Did they want to?”

“No, but they did it anyway. That’s why it’s a sacrifice,” said Reenie. “Now that’s enough of that. Here’s your cocoa.”

“They gave their lives to God, because that’s what God wants. It’s like Jesus, who died for all of our sins,” said Mrs. Hillcoate, who was a Baptist, and considered herself the ultimate authority.

A week later Laura and I were walking along the path beside the Louveteau, below the Gorge. There was mist that day, rising from the river, swirling like skim milk in the air, dripping from the bare twigs of the bushes. The stones of the path were slippery.

All of a sudden Laura was in the river. Luckily we weren’t right beside the main current, so she wasn’t swept away. I screamed and ran downstream and got hold of her by the coat; her clothes weren’t waterlogged yet, but still she was very heavy, and I almost fell in myself. I managed to pull her along to where there was a flat ledge; then I hauled her out. She was sopping like a wet sheep, and I was pretty wet myself. Then I shook her. By that time she was shivering and crying.

“You did it on purpose!” I said. “I saw you! You could’ve drowned!” Laura gulped and sobbed. I hugged her. “Why did you?”

“So God would let Mother be alive again,” she wailed.

“God doesn’t want you to be dead,” I said. “That would make him very mad! If he wanted Mother to be alive, he could do it anyway, without you drowning yourself.” This was the only way to talk to Laura when she got into such moods: you had to pretend you knew something about God that she didn’t.

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “How doyou know?”

“Because look—he let me save you! See? If he wanted you to be dead, then I’d have fallen in too. We’d both be dead! Now come on, you have to get dry. I won’t tell Reenie. I’ll say it was an accident, I’ll say you slipped. But don’t do anything like that again. Okay?”

Laura said nothing, but she allowed me to lead her home. There was a lot of frightened clucking and dithering and scolding, and a cup of beef broth and a warm bath and a hot-water bottle for Laura, whose mishap was put down to her well-known clumsiness; she was told to watch where she was going. Father saidWell done to me; I wondered what he would have said if I’d lost her. Reenie said it was a good thing we had at least half a wit between the two of us, but what had we been doing down there in the first place? And in the mist, at that. She said I should have known better.

I lay awake for hours that night, arms wrapped around myself, hugging myself tight. My feet were stone cold, my teeth were chattering. I couldn’t get out of my mind the image of Laura, in the icy black water of the Louveteau—how her hair had spread out like smoke in a swirling wind, how her wet face had gleamed silvery, how she had glared at me when I’d grabbed her by the coat. How hard it had been to hold on to her. How close I had come to letting go.

Instead of school, Laura and I were provided with a succession of tutors, men and women both. We didn’t think they were necessary, and did our best to discourage them. We would fix them with our light-blue stares, or pretend to be deaf or stupid; we’d never look them in the eye, only in the forehead. It often took longer than you’d think to get rid of them: as a rule they’d put up with quite a lot from us, because they were browbeaten by life and needed the pay. We had nothing against them as individuals; we simply didn’t want to be burdened with them.

When we weren’t with these tutors we were supposed to stay at Avilion, either inside the house or on the grounds. But who was there to police us? The tutors were easy to elude, they didn’t know our secret pathways, and Reenie couldn’t keep track of us every minute, as she herself often pointed out. Whenever we could, we would steal away from Avilion and roam the town, despite Reenie’s belief that the world was full of criminals and anarchists and sinister Orientals with opium pipes, thin moustaches like twisted rope and long pointed fingernails, and dope fiends and white slavers, waiting to snatch us away and hold us to ransom for Father’s money.

One of Reenie’s many brothers had something to do with cheap magazines, the pulpy, trashy kind you could buy in drugstores, and the worse ones you could get only under the counter. What was his job?Distribution, Reenie called it. Smuggling them into the country, I now believe. In any case he would sometimes give the leftovers to Reenie, and despite her efforts to conceal them from us we would get our hands on them sooner or later. Some of them were about romance, and although Reenie devoured these we had little use for them. We preferred—or I preferred, and Laura tagged along—those with stories about other lands or even other planets. Spaceships from the future, where women would wear very short skirts made of shiny fabric and everything would gleam; asteroids where the plants could talk, roamed by monsters with enormous eyes and fangs; long-ago countries inhabited by lithe girls with topaz eyes and opaline skin, dressed in cheesecloth trousers and little metal brassieres like two funnels joined by a chain. Heroes in harsh costumes, their winged helmets bristling with spikes.

Silly,Reenie called these.Like nothing on earth. But that’s what I liked about them.

The criminals and white, slavers were in the detective magazines, with their pistol-strewn, blood-drenched covers. In these, the wide-eyed heiresses to great fortunes were always being conked out with ether and tied up with clothesline—much more than was needed—and locked into yacht cabins or abandoned church crypts, or the dank cellars of castles. Laura and I believed in the existence of such men, but we weren’t too afraid of them, because we knew what to expect. They would have large, dark motor cars, and would be wearing overcoats and thick gloves and black fedoras, and we would be able to spot them immediately and run away.

But we never saw any. The only hostile forces we encountered were the factory workers’ children, the younger ones, who didn’t yet know that we were supposed to be untouchable. They would follow us in twos and threes, silent and curious or calling names; once in a while they’d throw stones, although they never hit us. We were most vulner able to them when poking along the narrow path down beside the Louveteau, with the cliff overhead—things could be dropped on us there—or in back alleyways, which we learned to avoid.

We would go along Erie Street, examining the store windows: the five and dime was our favourite. Or we would peer in through the chain-link fence at the primary school, which was for ordinary children—workers’ children—with its cinder playground and its high carved doorways marked Boys and Girls. At recess there was a lot of screaming, and the children were not clean, especially after they’d been fighting or had been pushed down onto the cinders. We were thankful that we didn’t have to attend this school. (Were we indeed thankful? Or, on the other hand, did we feel excluded? Perhaps both.)

We wore hats for these excursions. We had the idea that they were a protection; that they made us, in a way, invisible. A lady never went out without her hat, said Reenie. She also saidgloves, but we didn’t always bother with those. Straw hats are what I remember, from that time: not pale straw, a burnt colour. And the damp heat of June, the air drowsy with pollen. The blue glare of the sky. The indolence, the loitering.

How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons—the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities. And I do have them back, in a way; except now there won’t be much of whatever happens next.

The tutor we had by this time had lasted longer than most. She was a forty-year-old woman with a wardrobe of faded cashmere cardigans that hinted at an earlier, more prosperous existence, and a roll of mouse-hair pinned to the back of her head. Her name was Miss Goreham—Miss Violet Goreham. I nicknamed her Miss Violence behind her back, because I thought it was such an unlikely combination, and after that I could scarcely look at her without giggling. The name stuck, though; I taught it to Laura, and then of course Reenie found out about it. She told us we were naughty to make fun of Miss Goreham in this way; the poor thing had come down in the world and deserved our pity, because she was an old maid. What was that? A woman with no husband. Miss Goreham had been doomed to a life of single blessedness, said Reenie with a trace of contempt.

“But you don’t have a husband either,” said Laura.

“That’s different,” said Reenie. “I never yet saw a man I’d stoop to blow my nose on, but I’ve turned away my share. I’ve had my offers.”

“Maybe Miss Violence has too,” I said, just to be contradictory. I was approaching that age.

“No,” said Reenie, “she hasn’t.”

“How do you know?” said Laura.

“You can tell by the look of her,” said Reenie. “Anyway if she’d had any offer at all, even if the man had three heads and a tail, she’d of grabbed him quick as a snake.”

We got along with Miss Violence because she let us do what we liked. She realized early on that she lacked the forcefulness to control us, and had wisely decided not to bother trying. We took our lessons in the mornings, in the library, which had once been Grandfather Benjamin’s and was now Father’s, and Miss Violence simply gave us the run of it. The shelves were full of heavy leather-backed books with the titles stamped in dim gold, and I doubt that Grandfather Benjamin ever read them: they were only Grandmother Adelia’s idea of what he ought to have read.

I’d pick out books that interested me:A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens; Macaulay’s histories;The Conquest of Mexico andThe Conquest of Peru, illustrated. I read poetry, as well, and Miss Violence occasionally made a half-hearted attempt at teaching by having me read it out loud.In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree. In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row.

“Don’t jog along,” said Miss Violence. “The lines shouldflow, dear. Pretend you’re a fountain.” Although she herself was lumpy and inelegant, she had high standards of delicacy and a long list of things she wanted us to pretend to be: flowering trees, butterflies, the gentle breezes. Anything but little girls with dirty knees and their fingers up their noses: about matters of personal hygiene she was fastidious.

“Don’t chew your coloured pencils, dear,” said Miss Violence to Laura. “You aren’t a rodent. Look, your mouth is all green. It’s bad for your teeth.”

I readEvangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’sSonnets from the Portuguese. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. “Beautiful,” sighed Miss Violence. She was gushy, or as gushy as her dejected nature would allow, on the subject of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; also E. Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk Princess.

And oh, the river runs swifter now;

The eddies circle about my bow.

Swirl, swirl!

How the ripples curl

In many a dangerous pool awhirl!

“Stirring, dear,” said Miss Violence.

Or I read Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a man whose majesty was second only to God’s, in the opinion of Miss Violence.

With blackest moss the flower-plots

    Were thickly crusted, one and all:

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall….

  She only said, “My life is dreary,

    He cometh not,” she said;

  She said, “I am aweary, aweary,

    I would that I were dead!”

“Why did she wish that?” said Laura, who did not usually show much interest in my recitations.

“It was love, dear,” said Miss Violence. “It was boundless love. But it was unrequited.”

“Why?”

Miss Violence sighed. “It’s a poem, dear,” she said. “Lord Tennyson wrote it and I suppose he knew best. A poem does not reason why. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”

Laura looked at her with scorn, and went back to her colouring. I turned the page: I’d already skimmed the whole poem, and found that nothing else happened in it.