An Experiment in Love: A Novel (10 page)

No more marking the calendar, I thought. Or that fear. That way of listening to the body, as if you could gauge the peregrinations of each cell; the sick gladness each month as you woke to feel a tension behind the eyes, perhaps a soreness in the breasts, a little tentative cramp. The long breath released; the fingers groping in the drawer for Tampax, of which my mother disapproved.

I could not say that the new dispensation was having much effect on my figure. I was as slim as ever. If anything, more so.

You won’t mind, will you, if I call Niall by his real name, and call the other Tonbridge boyfriends by the composite name of Roger? It may seem a confusing technique, but the truth is that all these years on I can’t separate them in my mind. One of Julianne’s gang – who filled the room, drinking coffee and making a noise, while I worked at my desk with my back to them – inquired of Julianne whether I was, you know, fixed up? She replied that I was practically married, but that the man was in prison. Doing a stretch, she said. It’s a shame, but she’s very loyal, is Carmel.

Up and down the corrider, the Sophies began to say, ‘Have you heard, Miss McBain has a fiancé who’s in gaol?’

‘Really?’ the second Sophy would gasp.

And the first, frowning, careful, ‘Oh yes, he’s “doing a stretch”.’

Claire came tapping at the door. ‘Look I – Carmel . . .’ Inside her jolly jumper – striped, like a burglar’s in a cartoon – she was turning a deep crimson.

‘Yes?’

‘I heard. Well, you know, I couldn’t help . . . I’m so sorry. It must be hell for you. Sue told me not to come, but I thought I must just say a word.’

‘Ah now, Claire,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you kind?’

Perhaps I wouldn’t have to wait till Christmas. Perhaps one weekend Niall would visit me, when he was in funds. Please God he would visit me, and not let this weary ten weeks stretch out in fretful celibacy and a big hole where my heart used to be. I relished the thought of the dark glitter around him as he trod the corridors. Already I was preparing my little speech . . . Oh, you know, they call it parole . . . The Sophies wanted to ask what his crime was, but they were too polite.

It’s a long way to London from the University of Glasgow, and Niall was too proud to hitch-hike.

The day after Claire’s visit, I ran into Sue at breakfast. It was fried-egg morning. It blinked up from my plate like a septic eye. Sue gave me a big wink.

Let me go back now to my former life, to 1963. Spring came to the north of England; you wait long enough, and it always does. Timid and experimental buds appeared,
high on the black trees in the park. Sister Monica, my class teacher, began to tack sheets of tough blue paper on to a trestle table, and to call it the nature table; in time, we were told, we would have the opportunity to observe the Life of the Frog. The florist that we passed on our way to school began to file daffodils in buckets on the pavement outside the shop. They were brassy trumpets, they were brazen instruments; I touched their leaves, and feared they would slice my finger open.

St Patrick’s day was dry but blustery, and the wind bowled us downhill towards school. Twenty minutes to nine, Karina stopped before the florist’s. I stopped too; this was something out of the ordinary. She moved from foot to foot, staring into the window, then said to me roughly, ‘Are you coming or not?’

I followed her in. The shop bell jangled. I had never been into a flower shop before. It seemed colder than the street outside; wetly, it seemed to breathe. The stone floor was running with water, water swished through recently with a yard brush; the marks were still in it, and the brush stood in the corner, up-ended to give its bristles a chance to dry. There was a smell of torn stems and damp newspaper. A woman came out of the back, pinched and blue and wearing a plastic pinny. On the counter was a box of shamrock, fresh in. Karina pointed to an ostentatious bunch. ‘I’ll have that,’ she said.

‘Karina,’ I whispered. ‘You can’t. You’re not qualified. You’re foreign.’

‘I’m English,’ she said stonily.

‘Yes, but you’ve got to be Irish.’

‘There’s no law,’ the woman behind the counter said.
She plucked out the bunch Karina had indicated, and shook it gently; silver drops of water scattered into the air. ‘I’ll pin it on for you, love, shall I?’

‘Does it cost extra for the pin?’ Karina asked.

‘No, the pin’s free.’

‘That’s nice,’ Karina said. She stood with her chin raised, stock-still, like a soldier listening to lies before a battle, while the woman fastened the shamrock to her coat. Out of her pocket Karina took a stitched leather purse, a grown-up woman’s purse. I gaped at it. The popper, as she opened it, made a muffled explosion. ‘How much is that?’ Karina inquired.

She peered into the purse. Among the coins she had was a whole shilling piece. She put the money, bit by bit, into the florist’s cupped palm, then closed the purse with another thunderous snap.

‘Thanks, love,’ the florist said. ‘Watch the road when you cross.’ All grown-up people said that: watch the road. I looked forward to being grown up so I could say it myself. The wind gently rippled the shamrock as we stepped back into the street.

‘Karina . . .’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Can I have a bit?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m Irish.’

‘Why don’t you buy your own?’

‘I’ve got no money.’

‘What, none at all?’

‘A penny.’

‘A penny!’ she repeated.

‘Could I buy a pennyworth off you?’

‘That’d be about one leaf.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘It’d be about fifteen stalks with full shamrocks on.’

Just before the school gates, Karina stopped and reached up to her corsage; plucked a single head of shamrock, and placed it in my open and respectful palm.

About a week after that, my mother went down to school to see Sister Monica. As I’ve said, Karina and I were in the top class now. Every morning we did sums, followed by English, followed by Intelligence. Intelligence was about picking the odd one out: beetroot, asparagus, cabbage, pea. Hen, cow, jaguar, pig; pilot, fireman, engineer, nurse. I hesitated for hours over these questions, sucking the end of my pencil till it was pulp. ‘Carmel McBain,’ Sister Monica would say, ‘if the education committee was disposed to give a bursary for the slowest girl in this class, I’d say you’d get it every time. Don’t you realize this will be a timed test, girl, a timed test? You don’t pass your scholarship by sucking your pencil, my lady, and if you give me that look once again you’ll be out here and have the cane.’

Intelligence was about shapes; about the next number in the sequence. My mother had come to ask Sister Monica to give me extra homework, to increase my chances of passing my scholarship. She returned triumphant. ‘And I’m stopping your comics,’ she said. ‘You’ll have no time for all that folderol. Besides, we’ve to save up now. There’ll be your uniform and bus fares. Me and your father will have to scrimp and save.’

My comics were
Judy, Bunty, Princess
and
Diana
. ‘Belle of the Ballet’ was my favourite story. Sometimes when I was alone in my bedroom I hung on to the head of the bed and rose on my toes and teetered forward, a hand flailing at the mantelpiece for support; I did this until the bones crumpled, until tears of effort leapt into my eyes and my calves sang with pain. ‘Karina,’ I said, ‘do you get
Princess?’

‘Do I get it?’ Karina said.
‘Princess?
It’s soft.’

Coming back that day from school, my mother had looked thoughtful. ‘I’ve been talking to Sister Monica about Karina. Sister Monica tells me that she’s very bright.’

I looked up. I saw that some comment was called for. I remembered Karina’s exercise books, besprinkled with red ticks by Sister Monica. Karina was neat, and Sister often said so: not to praise her, but to blame the rest of us. Karina wrote slowly, forming big deliberate letters like house bricks, square at the corners and evenly spaced. She did her numbers the same, and though when she wrote a composition Sister Monica would often scrawl ‘More effort required’, she usually got nine out of ten for her sums and sometimes nine and a half. Even if she got all the sums right she didn’t get ten out of ten, because that was impossible; among human beings, perfection belongs to Our Holy Mother and Our Holy Mother alone.

‘Well?’ my mother said.

I nodded. ‘She’s good at sums. Fractions.’

‘Better than you?’ my mother said. There was an anxious, greedy edge to her voice.

‘Yes. But I’m better at compositions.’

‘You’ll have to work hard at your arithmetic,’ my mother said. ‘Say your times tables at night before you go to sleep, after you’ve said your night prayers.’ She gnawed her lip and then nodded, as if resolved. ‘There’s nothing like a good education,’ she said, ‘of which I personally didn’t have the chance.’

Night came. I was a good child and an ambitious one, and I did what I was told, though when I was sleepy the prayers and the times tables got mixed up. Three sevens are twenty-one. Hail, holy queen, mother of mercy. Four sevens are twenty-eight. Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope. Five sevens are thirty-five. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

The other story I liked in my comics was ‘Sue Day of the Happy Days’. The Days were her family; that was their name. Sue had a snobby elder sister who wore tight skirts and ironed her blouses in the kitchen before she went on dates, but that was really the only disadvantage to Sue’s life. Sometimes she got a new classmate who was snobby or unpopular, but it usually turned out there was a good reason for that. Sue Day’s mother had a round perm and made gravy and her father was kind in a detached way, like Dr Carr in
What Katy Did
. Her best friend was called . . . Edie Potter? Sue wore a school blazer, and had fair hair that flicked up at the ends. She must have been at least thirteen. Her lips were constantly parted, to show that she was speaking.

Nine sevens are sixty-three. Turn then, O gracious advocate, thine eyes of pity towards us, and after this our exile . . . Ten sevens are seventy.

The next day, when I was coming home from school, I saw my mother and Karina’s mother walking together down Eliza Street. They had their heads together. They were deep in conversation; at least, my mother was. And they were linking.

In the first few weeks of term at Tonbridge Hall, we didn’t see as much of Karina as I’d imagined we would. Sometimes when I was going in to breakfast she would be leaving, setting off for Euston Square and her college on Mile End Road. ‘The mysterious East’, Julianne called it. Karina would grunt a good morning, and I’d say, ‘Everything all right?’ and of course she wouldn’t reply, because why should she reply to a question as daft as that?

One night Lynette came to our room, looking defeated and carrying a box of bonbons and candied fruits from Fortnum and Mason. She popped the box on to our coffee table, sat down on Julianne’s bed, massaged her tired calves and sighed. ‘I’ve tried to break the ice,’ she complained. ‘But Karina, it’s like – oh, go on, let’s have a mixed metaphor – it’s like pounding my head on a bleedin’ brick wall.’

She finished her sentence with a flourish, a brilliant imitation of Sue’s peculiar accent. I said, ‘She has a problem with people.’

‘A chip on her shoulder,’ Julianne said.

‘We know her, you see.’

‘What language does she speak?’ Lynette asked.

‘English.’

‘Yes, but with her parents – what did she talk at home?’

‘English.’ I explained the situation, so far as I could.

Lynette frowned. She had been looking forward, she said, to trying out a smattering of this and that, in the cause of making Karina feel more at home. She had done an exchange year, and her Russian was quite fluent. ‘I don’t think she’s Russian,’ I said. ‘Her father was frightened of Russians, my mother said. He used to take precautions against them.’

Julianne stared at me. ‘Like what?’

‘Double-locking the door.’ At one time I’d been able to come and go freely from Karina’s house, but since her mother had taken ill that had changed. Karina’s father, never a man to respond to a greeting with more than a grunt, was now as sociable as a corpse. The gas man and the district nurse were let in, if it suited him; they could not rely on it. If old habit drove me to Karina’s door in the morning, I had to stand in the street, while mechanisms grated and clanked and chains were lifted from their grooves; when the door opened a crack, Karina had skilfully extruded her body on to Curzon Street without permitting me even a glimpse of the vestibule.

‘Well – ’ Lynette threw out a hand – ‘don’t ask me to write you a letter in Romanian, but other than that . . .’ She shrugged. She could do the basics in many Eastern-bloc tongues, she said. ‘The civilities. The small-talk of the bread queue.’ The turn of her sable head was eloquent; it was she who seemed to me a real refugee, one of the glamorous kind who might have diamonds in a silk roll thrust into a lizard-skin vanity-case. When I said this to her she agreed: ‘People are always surprised that I grew up in Harrow.’

Julianne offered to go down the corridor to the kitchen to refill our mugs of coffee. We used to drink it black, because the rooms were too hot for us to keep milk. Lynette tore open the bonbons; leaving the room, Jule scooped up a marzipan peach and thrust it into her cheek. Lynette leant forward. ‘Please, explain to me while she’s out – why does Karina hate her?’