Lessons

by Ian McEwan

She could humiliate him and make him tearful. When he repeatedly failed at an exercise and risked saying he could not do it, she told him he was a useless little girl. She had a frilly pink frock at home belonging to her niece and would bring it to the next lesson, confiscate his clothes and make him wear it to class. All that week he lived in terror of the pink frock. At night he was sleepless. He wondered about running away but then he would have to confront his father, and he had nowhere to run to. He had no money for the train and buses to get to his sister’s. He did not have the courage to drown himself in the River Orwell. When the dread lesson came round at last there was no evidence or mention of the pink frock. The threat was not repeated. Perhaps Miss Cornell did not even have a niece.