Blind Assassin (89 page)

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 say
blood,
she said
mess.
) 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 called
bosoms.
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.

Ovid’sMetamorphoses

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 been
allowed
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 said
assistance
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 of
sauve 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 and
Phaedra,
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.

His idea of Geography was the capital cities of Europe. His idea of Latin was Caesar subduing the Gauls and crossing the Rubicon,
alea iacta est;
and, after that, selections from Virgil’s
Aeneid
—he was fond of the suicide of Dido—or from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
the parts where unpleasant things were done by the gods to various young women. The rape of Europa by a large white bull, of Leda by a swan, of Danae by a shower of gold—these would at least hold our attention, he said, with his ironic smile. He was right about that. For a change, he would have us translate Latin love poems of a cynical kind.
Odi et amo
—that sort of thing. He got a kick out of watching us struggle with the poets’ bad opinions of the kinds of girls we were apparently destined to be.

“
Rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum,”
said Mr. Erskine. “‘To seize and carry off.’ The English word
rapture
comes from the same root. Decline.”
Smack
went the ruler.

We learned. We did learn, in a spirit of vengefulness: we would give Mr. Erskine no excuses. There was nothing he wanted more than to get a foot on each of our necks—well, he would be denied the pleasure, if possible. What we really learned from him was how to cheat. It was difficult to fake the mathematics, but we spent many hours in the late afternoons cribbing up our translations of Ovid from a couple of books in Grandfather’s library—old translations by eminent Victorians, with small print and complicated vocabularies. We would get the sense of the passage from these books, then substitute other, simpler words, and add a few mistakes, to make it look as if we’d done it ourselves. Whatever we did, though, Mr. Erskine would slash up our translations with his red pencil and write savage comments in the margins. We didn’t learn very much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery. We also learned how to make our faces blank and stiff, as if they’d been starched. It was best not to react to Mr. Erskine in any visible way, especially not by flinching.

For a while Laura became alert to Mr. Erskine, but physical pain—her own pain, that is—did not have much of a hold over her. Her attention would wander away, even when he was shouting. He had such a limited range. She would gaze at the wallpaper—a design of rosebuds and ribbons—or out the window. She developed the ability to subtract herself in the blink of an eye—one minute she’d be focused on you, the next she’d be elsewhere. Or rather you would be elsewhere: she’d dismiss you, as if she’d waved an invisible wand; as if it was you yourself who’d been made to vanish.

Mr. Erskine could not stand being negated in this fashion. He took to shaking her—to snap her out of it, he said.
You’re not the Sleeping Beauty,
he would yell. Sometimes he threw her against the wall, or shook her with his hands around her neck. When he shook her she’d close her eyes and go limp, which incensed him further. At first I tried to intervene, but it did no good. I would simply be pushed aside with one swipe of his tweedy, malodorous arm.

“Don’t annoy him,” I said to Laura.

“It doesn’t matter whether I annoy him or not,” said Laura. “Anyway, he’s not annoyed. He only wants to put his hand up my blouse.”

“I’ve never seen him do that,” I said. “Why would he?”

“He does it when you’re not looking,” said Laura. “Or under my skirt. What he likes is panties.” She said it so calmly I thought she must have made it up, or misunderstood. Misunderstood Mr. Erskine’s hands, their intentions. What she’d described was so implausible. It didn’t seem to me like the sort of thing a grown-up man would do, or be interested in doing at all, because wasn’t Laura only a little girl?

“Shouldn’t we tell Reenie?” I asked tentatively.

“She might not believe me,” said Laura. “You don’t.”

But Reenie did believe her, or she elected to believe her, and that was the end of Mr. Erskine. She knew better than to take him on in single combat: he would just accuse Laura of telling dirty lies, and then things would be worse than ever. Four days later she marched into Father’s office at the button factory with a handful of contraband photographs. They weren’t the sort of thing that would raise more than an eyebrow today, but they were scandalous then—women in black stockings with pudding-shaped breasts spilling out over their gigantic brassières, the same women with nothing on at all, in contorted, splay-legged positions. She said she’d found them under Mr. Erskine’s bed when she’d been sweeping out his room, and was this the sort of man who ought to be trusted with Captain Chase’s young daughters?

There was an interested audience, which included a group of factory workers and Father’s lawyer and, incidentally, Reenie’s future husband, Ron Hincks. The sight of Reenie, her dimpled cheeks flushed, her eyes blazing like an avenging Fury’s, the black snail of her hair coming unpinned, brandishing a clutch of huge-boobed, bushy-tailed, bare-naked women, was too much for him. Mentally he fell on his knees before her, and from that day on he began his pursuit of her, which was in the end successful. But that is another story.

If there was one thing Port Ticonderoga would not stand for, said Father’s lawyer in an advisory tone, it was this kind of smut in the hands of the teachers of innocent youth. Father realized he could not keep Mr. Erskine in the house after that without being considered an ogre.

(I have long suspected Reenie of having got hold of the photographs herself, from the brother who was in the magazine distribution business, and who could easily have managed it. I suspect Mr. Erskine was guiltless in respect of these photographs. If anything, his tastes ran to children, not to large brassieres. But by that time he could not expect fair play from Reenie.)

Mr. Erskine departed, protesting his innocence—indignant, but also shaken. Laura said that her prayers had been answered. She said she’d prayed to have Mr. Erskine expelled from our house, and that God had heard her. Reenie, she said, had been doing His will, filthy pictures and all. I wondered what God thought of that, supposing He existed—a thing I increasingly doubted.

Laura, on the other hand, had taken to religion in a serious way during Mr. Erskine’s tenure: she was still frightened of God, but forced to choose between one irascible, unpredictable tyrant and another, she’d chosen the one that was bigger, and also farther away.

Once the choice had been made she took it to extremes, as she took everything. “I’m going to become a nun,” she announced placidly, while we were eating our lunchtime sandwiches at the kitchen table.

“You can’t,” said Reenie. “They wouldn’t have you. You’re not a Catholic.”

“I could become one,” said Laura. “I could join up.”

“Well,” said Reenie, “you’ll have to cut off your hair. Underneath those veils of theirs, a nun is bald as an egg.”

This was a shrewd move of Reenie’s. Laura hadn’t known about that. If she had one vanity, it was her hair. “Why do they?” she said.

“They think God wants them to. They think God wants them to offer up their hair to him, which just goes to show how ignorant they are. What would he want with it?” said Reenie. “The idea! All that hair!”

“What do they do with the hair?” said Laura. “Once it’s been cut off.”

Reenie was snapping beans: snap, snap, snap. “It gets turned into wigs, for, rich women,” she said. She didn’t miss a beat, but I knew this was a fib, like her earlier stories about babies being made from dough. “Snooty-nosed rich women. You wouldn’t want to see your lovely hair walking around on someone else’s big fat mucky-muck head.”