“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 realized 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.

“Don’t jog along,” said Miss Violence. “The lines should flow, dear. Pretend you’re a fountain.” Although she herself was lumpy and inelegant, she had high standards of delicacy and a long list of things she wanted us to pretend to be: flowering trees, butterflies, the gentle breezes. Anything but little girls with dirty knees and their fingers up their noses: about matters of personal hygiene she was fastidious.

“Don’t chew your coloured pencils, dear,” said Miss Violence to Laura. “You aren’t a rodent. Look, your mouth is all green. It’s bad for your teeth.”

I read Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. “Beautiful,” sighed Miss Violence. She was gushy, or as gushy as her dejected nature would allow, on the subject of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; also E. Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk Princess.

“Stirring, dear,” said Miss Violence.

Or I read Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a man whose majesty was second only to God’s, in the opinion of Miss Violence.

“Why did she wish that?” said Laura, who did not usually show much interest in my recitations.

“It was love, dear,” said Miss Violence. “It was boundless love. But it was unrequited.”

“Why?”

Miss Violence sighed. “It’s a poem, dear,” she said. “Lord Tennyson wrote it and I suppose he knew best. A poem does not reason why. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”

Laura looked at her with scorn, and went back to her colouring. I turned the page: I’d already skimmed the whole poem, and found that nothing else happened in it.

“Lovely, dear,” said Miss Violence. She was fond of boundless love, but she was equally fond of hopeless melancholy.

There was a thin book bound in snuff-coloured leather, which had belonged to Grandmother Adelia: The Rubåiyåt of Omar Khayyåm, by Edward Fitzgerald. (Edward Fitzgerald hadn’t really written it, and yet he was said to be the author. How to account for it? I didn’t try to.) Miss Violence would sometimes read from this book, to show me how poetry ought to be pronounced:

She gasped out the Oh as if someone had kicked her in the chest; similarly the Thou. I thought it was a lot of fuss to make about a picnic, and wondered what they’d had on the bread. “Of course it wasn’t real wine, dear,” said Miss Violence. “It refers to the Communion Service.”

“So true,” said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well—into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper.

Laura didn’t read much. Instead she would copy pictures, or else she’d colour in the black-and-white illustrations in thick, erudite books of travel and history with her coloured pencils. (Miss Violence let her do this, on the assumption that no one else would notice.) Laura had strange but very definite ideas about which colours were required: she’d make a tree blue or red, she’d make the sky pink or green. If there was a picture of someone she disapproved she’d do the face purple or dark grey to obliterate the features.

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.