Questão de Língua Inglesa

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write. There was no real motive and no premeditation; no money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman’s disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the ‘atavistic ape disguised as twentieth-century woman. Literacy is one of the cornerstones of civilization. To be illiterate is to be deformed. And the derision that was once directed at the physical freak may, perhaps more justly, descend upon the illiterate. If he or she can live a cautious life among the uneducated all may be well, for in the country of the purblind the eyeless is not rejected. It was unfortunate for Eunice Parchman, and for them, that the people who employed her and in whose home she lived for nine months were peculiarly literate. Had they been a family of philistines, they might be alive today and Eunice free in her mysterious dark freedom of sensation and instinct and blank absence of the printed word. The family belonged to the upper middle class, and they lived a conventional upper-middle-class life in a country house. George Coverdale had a degree in philosophy, but since the age of thirty he had been managing director of his late father’s company, The Box Coverdale, at Stantwich in Suffolk. With his wife and his three children, Peter, Paula and Melinda, he had occupied a large nineteen-thirtyish house on the outskirts of Stantwich until his wife died of cancer when Melinda was twelve. Two years later, at the wedding of Paula to Brian Caswall, George met thirty-seven-year-old Jacqueline Mont. She also had been married before had divorced her husband for desertion, and had been left with one son. George and Jacqueline fell in love more or less at first sight and were married three months later. George bought a manor house ten miles from Stantwich and went to live there with his bride, with Melinda and with Giles Mont, Peter Coverdale having at that time been married for three years. When Eunice Parchman was engaged as their housekeeper George was fifty-seven and Jacqueline forty-two. They took an active part in the social life of the neighbourhood, and in an unobtrusive way had slipped into playing the parts of the squire and his lady. Their marriage was idyllic and Jacqueline was popular with her stepchildren. Peter, a lecturer in political economy at a northern university, Paula, now herself a mother and living in London, and Melinda, who, at twenty, was reading English at the University of Norfolk in Galwich. Her own son, Giles, aged seventeen, was still at school. Four members of this family, George, Jacqueline and Melinda Coverdale and Giles Mont, died in the space of fifteen minutes on 13 February, St Valentine’s Day. Eunice Parchman and the prosaically named Joan Smith shot them down on a Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television. Two weeks later Eunice was arrested for the crime – because she could not read. But there was more to it than that. RENDELL, Ruth. A Judgement in Stone. London: Arrow Books, 1990, Chapter 1.