Sabine Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the uneasy silence that followed, scanning downwards from her scrubbed puritanical face with its shiny pink nose and Queen Victoria eyes, to the high and defiantly protruding breasts not far beneath and thinking, not without a stab of spite, that they had been set there by a teasing Fate as ballast. Hmmm, yes, I thought, you can run away from this sex thing that you claim to find so distasteful but it will catch you up in the end because you’re taking a lot of it with you. You’re thwarted, that’s what you are, you’re not shocked, you’re just envious. And she married shortly afterwards and sent us all triumphant little boxes of sugared almonds in silver wrapping, so perhaps I was right. Napoleonic title, the husband’s, was Aimée’s disparaging comment as she threw her box into the fire.
    For a full week after this setback – or maybe it was only three or four days but the pall of boredom was so heavy that they felt like at least seven – Aimée gave us lessons herself. The paradox of her permissiveness, which worked so well on the behaviour front, was for some reason powerless in the field of study. Under her tuition we did nothing, just gabbled away to each other in English and flicked through fashion magazines, right there in front of her nose, planning out loud our weekend wardrobes. Cussed bunnies, stolid Saxon bunnies, unmoved by the stirring rhythms of Racine. Then finally she announced, relieved, that she had found a helper: a girl from a nearby family who,
malheureusement,
had no experience of teaching whatsoever, but who she was sure – this said with a tiny twist of grimness, like a weak-willed ruler announcing the coming of a Gauleiter – would din a little more into our heads than she could.
    And it was thus that, bit by bit, from under the pall and out of the smoke, into our lives came Sabine. On a daily basis at first, bouncing in each morning in a disintegrating Deux Chevaux that shuddered and shed pieces of itself when brought to a stop; and then, a few weeks later, when she moved into one of the guest rooms for convenience, on a more permanent one.
    No first picture of her, no, but to my delight I find I have a first recording. A cough and a bark, intermeshed. A barking cough and/or a coughingbark, followed by the single word,
Alors!
as she tears open her teaching book and glowers at us over its pages: Aimée must have warned her we are no picnic. And then a rasping drag on the ever-present cigarette,
Zeeeetttt.
It’s not a Gitane, it’s a Gauloise, and it comes in a blue packet with … With what on it? A winged helmet? Winged victory? Winged horse? Wings anyway, wings. Wings to escape on, wings to take you places, and wings to give you a sweeping vision of how things look when you can set them in perspective: this is what you are, Viola, this is what has been made of you to date, and this is what you could become, if only you managed to cross that obstacle, and that one, and that other one over there, which may look a bit daunting but is in fact only made of plywood. See?
    Why is she so truculent? And from the very start, before she has even had time to sort us out as individuals, let alone dislike us? Well, let’s see if I can answer that for her. She tried so hard to get me to see things the way she saw them, let’s see if she was successful, let’s see if I can – hop behind her eyes for a second and survey the scene as she surveyed it. OK, there’s the table, with her on the shady side, her back to the windows, and on the other – on the side where the light filters through the slats, chopping all the objects it rests on into smoky stripes – who sits there? A quintet of spoilt foreign brats, that’s what. Christopher, thin, silver-blond and giggling, looks like the worst caricature of anEnglish public school boy you could ever imagine – as might have been drawn by a Nazi propagandist attempting to