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 said Well 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.
Miss Violence
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 realised 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 and The 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.