The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [75]
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