Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [22]
It wasn’t only her no-nonsense professional appearance the boys in the class respected: it was the fact that she had an M.A. Those two letters were a qualification: they stood for something important, like M.D. So the boys respected that, but they also respected the tight leash on which she kept them. “Richard, do you have something amusing to say? If so, be so kind as to say it to all of us.” “David, that observation is beneath you. You can do better than that. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” “Robert, was that a flimsy attempt at wit?” Sarcastic was the word we used, about such remarks. But Miss Bessie was never sarcastic about honest blunders. She was patient with those.
“Now then. ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,’ ” said Miss Bessie, “ ‘Looking as if she were alive.’ As if she were alive. Class, what does as if tell us?”
This time she did wait. I never knew – none of us knew – when one of her waits would set in. They always woke me up. It was the suspense, the looming danger – the threat of being pounced on, called by name, forced to speak. At such times my mouth would fill with words, too many of them, a glutinous pudding of syllables I would have to mould into speech while Miss Bessie’s ironic narrowed eyes beamed their message at me: You can do better than that. During such waiting periods I found it best to look down – otherwise Miss Bessie might single me out – and so I busied myself by making notes in my notebook.
He bumped her off, I wrote. Bumped her off was not a thing I would ever have said out loud in class, as it was slang and Miss Bessie disapproved of such sloppy and vulgar talk. I’d picked up bumped off from the detective stories I was in the habit of reading as a way of evading my homework, or at least delaying it. Unfortunately, there were a lot of detective stories in the house, along with historical novels and books about World War One, and about monasteries in Tibet – a country where women could have two husbands at the same time – and about naval warfare in Napoleonic times, and about the form and function of the Fallopian tubes. If I wasn’t in the mood for a whole book, I’d go through the stacks of old Lifes and Times and Chatelaines and Good Housekeepings – my parents were reluctant to throw anything out – and puzzle over the ads (what was a douche?) and the articles on fashion and personal problems (Teenage Rebellion: Five Antidotes. Halitosis: Your Silent Enemy. Can This Marriage Be Saved?). I’d learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Bumped off, I wrote. The Duke had bumped off the Duchess. Cheap floozies often got bumped off, and so did hot tomatoes and dumb bunnies, and so did sleazy broads. Bumped suggested a blow to the head with a blunt instrument, such as a blackjack, but this was not likely the method the Duke had used on the Duchess. Nor had he buried her in the cellar and covered up the grave with wet cement, or cut her up into pieces and heaved the pieces into the lake or dropped them down a well or left them in a park, like the husbands in some of the more grisly narratives I’d encountered. I thought he’d most likely poisoned her: it was a well-known fact among the writers of historical romances that Dukes of that time were expert poisoners. They had rings with hollow stones on the fronts and they slid the stones open when nobody was looking and slipped the poison into people’s flagons of wine, in powder form. Arsenic was a substance they favoured. The poor Duchess would have sickened gradually; a doctor would have been called in, a sinister doctor in the pay of the Duke. This doctor would have mixed up a final, lethal, potion to finish her off. There would have been a touching death scene and then a fancy funeral, with candles, and after that the Duke would have been free to go on the prowl for another beautiful girl to turn into a Duchess and then bump off.
On second thought, I decided