Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [27]
“Why put that in?” said Bill.
“Put what in?”
“Who cares whether they’re upstairs or downstairs?” Bill was already getting exasperated.
“They have to be upstairs because there are other people downstairs – see, look, it’s right here – and the Duke wants a private conversation. Anyway, the portrait of the Duchess is upstairs. That’s what the Duke is taking the envoy to see. The Duke pulls a curtain. There’s the picture of his last Duchess behind it. His last Duchess, get it? The picture has verisimilitude.”
“What?”
“Verisimilitude. It means lifelike. Put that word into your answer on the exam. I bet it’s worth a whole mark.”
“Cripes,” said Bill, giving a rueful little grin. “Sure. If you say so. Okay. Write it down for me.”
“Okay. So they stand looking at this Duchess picture. Then basically the Duke tells the envoy about her, and what was wrong with her, and why he bumped her off.”
“Or shut her up in a convent,” said Bill hopefully. Miss Bessie had proposed this as an alternative, saying that Browning himself had done so. The boys in the class preferred this milder version, oddly enough. They could see wanting to dump your wife because she was boring or ugly or a nag, or unsatisfactory in some other way; they could understand the desire for a better model; but killing the first wife seemed extreme to them. They were nice boys, they intended to be doctors and so forth. Only pervs like the Duke would have to go all the way. “She would have been out of his hair, in a convent,” said Bill. “She’d be happier in there anyway. The guy was a pain in the neck.”
“I don’t buy that,” I said. “He definitely killed her. ‘All smiles stopped together’ – that’s really sudden. It’s pretty definite. But on the exam, you need to say there’s the two choices. Anyway, he got rid of her. Why, is what the poem’s about. What the Duke says is that she smiled too much.”
“That’s what I don’t get,” said Bill. “It’s a really dumb reason. And there’s another thing I don’t get. If he’s so smooth” – Miss Bessie had dwelt for some time on the Duke’s smoothness, though she hadn’t called it that, she’d called it cultivated and sophisticated – “if he’s so smooth, why is he dumb enough to tell all this to the envoy? The envoy’s just going to run back to the Count and say, ‘Cancel the marriage – the guy’s a dangerous creep!’ ”
I got up from the funeral-home wall, straightened down my skirt front and back, picked up my books. “We’ll go through it again on Saturday,” I told him. “I’ll copy out my notes for you.”
“I’m not going to pass it,” said Bill.
At home, I lived in the cellar. I’d moved down there in order to study for my exams. The cellar was cooler than the rest of the house; also it was farther away from everyone else. These days I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, or at least not to my parents. They didn’t understand the gruesomeness of the ordeal before me, they thought I still had time to mow the lawn.
I slipped in through the back door and crept down the cellar stairs, unseen by my mother, and opened the freezer and took out the jar of Noxzema I kept in there. It was my theory that covering my face with frozen mentholated skin cream would stimulate the blood flow to my brain and make it more possible for me to study.
Once my face was entirely cold and white, I paced around my cellar room. I needed to get my thoughts in order, but the Duchess was eluding me. Maybe she hadn’t been poisoned after all. Maybe she’d been stabbed with a poignard, or else strangled – not with a nylon stocking, as was habitual in the detective stories, but with a silken cord. Maybe she had been garrotted. This method also involved strangling; I didn’t know what kind exactly, but I liked the sound of it. The poor girl, I thought. Garrotted, and all because she smiled