An Experiment in Love: A Novel (14 page)

Mary hoisted up her tartan shopping bag and unzipped it. The sound of the zip, like God farting, seemed to fill the shop. She plunged in her hands like a woman plunging them into the washing-up bowl, and drew out two fistfuls of one-pound notes. She thrust them at the saleslady and dived back in for more.

Hands full, the saleslady recoiled. I noticed that a smudge of her orange lipstick had come off on her predatory tooth. Karina reached out and pulled the tartan bag from her mother’s grasp. I heard from inside it a deep jangle of loose change, half-crowns and two-shilling pieces and big change of that sort. Karina scooped the notes back from the salewoman’s hands, and began to count them out, one by one, into her ready palm, counting out loud with deliberation, as though she were at school and this were a test. Then she dipped back into the bag, brought out some more pound notes, and continued the process, until the saleswoman purred and was satisfied, and advanced on the till licking her lips, and left us alone to start stacking our gains into each other’s arms.

On the way back to the bus, Karina said to me, ‘Are those sapphires, actual gemstones, that your mother is wearing?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re glass.’

‘I wonder why she bothers,’ Karina said thoughtfully. ‘Embarrassing, really, isn’t it?’

I never thought the day could come, but it did; or at least the eve. On the 11th of September my mother sent me to bed at eight o’clock. It was light outside, and a blackbird trilled in Curzon Street’s one bush. I lay between the sheets trying to compel sleep and yet to deny it; I did not want to lie awake the whole long night, and yet I was afraid of the morning. I had heard of knights who, wishing to keep a vigil without nodding, slit the ball of their thumb and rubbed salt into the cut; formerly, my curl-rags had served this function. But the rules of the Holy Redeemer, which my mother and I had both studied, stated that hair was to be worn tied back and off the face, in a neat and restrained style; my mother could see that luxuriant ringlets would not fit this brief. Instead she had set my hair in kirby grips in a series of well-regulated corrugations all over my skull; the rest she was proposing to clamp back in a big plastic-toothed pony-tail comb. As an alternative, she said, I could have plaits. She had bought three yards of approved maroon ribbon from Constantine & Co. Even she could see that I might need a change, from time to time.

I turned over, cheek against the pillow. Kirby grips swivelled and upended themselves and probed my tender scalp. My blouse and tunic were hanging outside the wardrobe, as if to heighten their state of readiness, and mine. Music crept up, from the sitting-room below; we
had a TV set now, and I knew my father was seated before it, his jigsaw puzzle unattended on the table, while my mother rampaged about in the kitchen. I would have liked to throw aside the blankets and creep down to them, embrace their knees and say I am one of you: offer my father to fill in the sky, on this puzzle and any to come. But I had seen the pitiless state of my mother’s face: pitiless and proud and full of tension, as if it were she herself who were going to the Holy Redeemer in the morning.

I thought of Jane Eyre, the night before her wedding. She thought it was presumptuous to label her effects as Mrs Rochester; she would not anticipate the event. Then the real Mrs Rochester with her blood-congested face and psychotic eyes came down from the attic and ripped her veil in two. Every item purchased from Constantine & Co. was now sewed with a name-tape; for better or worse, it belonged to me. I wished something would come down from the garret and rend my tunic, which glowed like an old corpse in the darkening room.

I must have slept. At six o’clock, when Curzon Street was empty and the air was the colour of a dove, my mother was at my bedroom door, shouting at me to get out of bed
this very minute
. My grey wool socks, striped at the turn-down with two rows of maroon, tugged over my feet and rolled up to my knees; my outdoor shoes clamped on to my feet. My mother plucked out each kirby grip with a flourish. My corrugated hair rolled back from my forehead, reeking of setting-lotion.

My mother looked at me fearfully, as if I were a
prodigy, a monster. She watched me eat, each mouthful. My mouth was dry and my toast rolled up into little pellets in my mouth. ‘A pity you could never eat breakfast,’ she said. I thought of the likely scene in Karina’s house; half a dozen eggs spitting in a pan, Mary gripping a butcher’s knife and smiting slices from a side of bacon which dangled on an iron hook from the ceiling.

I pushed my plate aside, with the cold remains of the rubber bread. ‘Martin, do up her tie for her,’ my mother said.

My father said, ‘Doesn’t she know how?’

My mother said, ‘What do you think she is, Vesta Tilley?’

‘Vesta Tilley! That was a bow-tie she wore,’ my father said.

My heart had sunk down into my stomach; it felt soft and spongy and as if it were folding up on itself, like a bedroom slipper doubled in two.

The moment came. My mother flung open the door. She clamped my hat on my head and thrust me out into Curzon Street. The morning was mild. Through it a grim shape moved towards me, solid like a tank. It was Karina. Like me, she carried her empty satchel slung over her shoulder; like me, she wore a donkey-coloured coat that came down below her calves. ‘Have you ever heard of somebody called Vesta Tilley?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Karina said surprisingly. ‘She is in music-halls. She sings she’s Burlington Bertie.’

We turned on to Bismarck Street. The Prince of Connaught swung above our heads. ‘Remember when we used to play him?’ I said to Karina. I was half-smiling, indulgent, as if this folly were a world away.

‘Yes,’ Karina said. ‘Daft, weren’t we?’ Her tone was the same as mine; she turned her head, smiled slowly, and put out her hand towards me. We were frightened not to wear our prescribed woollen gloves; our palms brushed and squeaked against each other, then snagged together, then stuck in a clammy fastness. We passed our old school – shuttered, unpopulated at this hour, the playground bare except for blowing litter, the double doors locked fast; this autumn it would go on without us, bursting with screaming children sucking up their milk and spilling their ink and knuckling each other’s heads and being searched for lice, chanting their times tables and feeling the cane bruise their frozen fingertips. ‘It looks so small, doesn’t it?,’ Karina said. ‘Pathetic.’ We turned downhill towards the bus station, cast our satchels on to our outer shoulders, and began to link.

When we arrived at the bus-stop near the market place, Susan Millington was there, standing at the head of the queue. She was in her Holy Redeemer summer uniform, her striped blazer and boater, and this shocked me slightly; obviously, some concession was made to the sun, and I thought that, if my mother were in charge at the Holy Redeemer, no concession of any sort would be made. Susan Millington leant on her hockey stick, which was turned inwards between her feet. Her hands were bare, clothed neither in white cotton gloves nor grey woollen gloves; and they were brown because – as everyone was aware – she had recently returned from a family holiday in Portugal.

‘Susan,’ I said. ‘Hello there.’

Susan Millington turned to me her long horse-face. She looked down at me and moved her lip, as if she were whinnying. Then she turned away, and spoke to her companion, and both of them laughed in a long hectic gust of horse-laughter.

Karina pulled at my coat sleeve. ‘You can’t speak to her! Her dad’s a dentist.’

Both of us licked our teeth, as if we were licking blood from them. Dentistry was done in large houses by the park; Mr Millington’s had stained-glass in the windows and a laurel hedge. They’d had a bathroom, my mother said, when such things were undreamt of in this vicinity; they also took shower-baths, because Mr Millington believed it was more hygienic. She could dress well, my mother claimed, on a quarter of what Mrs Millington spent in Manchester, at Kendal Milne and in those madam shops round St Ann’s Square.

That morning, as every school day for the next seven years, we crawled away through the grimy terraces, lurching to a halt at traffic lights, snarling and revving past Woolworths and the fire station and the mini-marts with bargain posters in their windows, past net-curtain emporia and pet shops where single goldfish swam hopelessly in their bowls: by Methodist churches and cinemas that before a year was out would be turned into bingo halls. As we reached the outskirts of the town there were shops selling blocks of foam that you cut up for cushions and mattresses; there were coal merchants and scrap-yards, and weed-ridden vacant lots with standing pools of black water. Our town did not end but simply, after
spreading and diluting itself, washed into the next town, where we ground into the Victoria bus station and changed to the Number 64. Then we would lurch off again, under a viaduct, alongside a river running black; by now the streets would be full of men and women hurrying to work, and among the monochrome of their overcoats and mackintoshes you would see the fuchsia or bluebird-coloured flash of a sari or shalwar-kameez.

In winter the bus’s windows would be opaque with filth, but on my first morning, golden by now, I was able to watch this second town run out in a sweep of dual-carriageway; I saw tree tops appear above the roofs of neat semi-detached houses, and watched grime give way to green, to tree-lined roads and striped lawns and mellow walls of rosy brick: to mock-Tudor public houses, bowls clubs, shopping parades, a public park with a floral clock and a bandstand with peeling paint.

This was where we would be educated, Karina and I, among girls whose fathers were solicitors, factory managers, small businessmen and the more prosperous sort of shopkeeper. Their mothers stayed at home to construct Battenburg cakes and cut back hydrangeas. Their first memories were of garden ponds and weeping willows, of the wrought-iron balconies of Scarborough hotels, of the slippery leather of the back seat of the family car. When I think of the early lives of these girls – of Julianne, let us say – I think of starched sun-bonnets, Beatrix Potter, of mossy garden paths, regular bedtime, regular bowels: I see them frozen for ever in that unreclaimable oasis between the war and the 196os, between the end of rationing and the beginning of the end: fixed in time,
their bodies scented with clover honey and Bramley apples: one foot daintily poised, one hand – as their ballet teacher prescribed – gesturing a charming invitation to the years to come. Life, do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe: we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.

That night my mother said, ‘Did Susan Millington speak to you?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t she?’ My mother was irritated. ‘Well, no doubt she’ll speak to you tomorrow.’

Our first morning was not much of a disaster. We marched in lines a lot, and answered to our names: in Karina’s case, to an approximation of it. We were led up and down the cramped and creaking staircases of the Holy Redeemer, glimpsing the convent’s lawns through lustreless Gothic lights, to an echoing cloakroom where we were allocated pegs and where we hung our grey velour hats and changed our shoes. I was reluctant to take my hat off, because of my new hairstyle; when Karina saw it she popped her eyes but reined in her snigger, perhaps as a sign of solidarity. We threaded back to our classroom in the silence prescribed for corridors at all times, our huge feet preceding us, our pullovers reeking of Constantine & Co., our faces stiff with unease. We saw that every other girl except us wore narrow almond-toed sandals, neat and light, in a smart shade of tan. We saw that none of them had a satchel, and all had a briefcase with a gleaming brass lock.

Such support as we offered each other was silent. Karina just whispered, when she got the chance: ‘That saleswoman, she saw us coming.’ It was the first time I had heard this expression, but I understood what she meant, and I nodded. We never spoke of the matter again. But that night as we were going up Curzon Street, our first homework in our despicable bags, we swung them from side to side and sang ‘Herring boxes without soxes, / Sandals were for Clementine.’

In our first week at the Holy Redeemer we learnt several stanzas of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the difference between ‘will’ and ‘shall’. I took all my textbooks home to have protective covers put on them, and my mother covered them in wallpaper, offcuts of the blue-and-white Chinese wallpaper I had in my bedroom; so the caged bird sang like Lesbia’s sparrow on the back of
A Course in Latin
, and the Chinawoman winced on her bound feet across the spine of
First Steps in Algebra
.

‘Did Susan Millington speak to you?’ my mother said.

‘No.’

‘Well, did you speak to her?’

‘One day I did.’

‘What did you say?

‘Hello, Susan.’

‘Does she think she’s too good?’ my mother burst out. ‘You’re as good as her now. Yes, and as good as anybody.’ I wondered what she would think if she could hear Karina on that topic. Now that we were studying the feudal system I was in a better position to understand Karina’s outlook on life. She believed in hierarchy and
degree and disbelieved profoundly in the equality of man. She believed in self-preservation by scheming, by squirrelling away, by conserving her efforts and never wasting her breath. She did not believe in justice, or at least she acted as if justice were a luxury; she did not believe in speaking her mind. She was slow and steady and she put her shoulder to the wheel.

She was, as Julianne would say later, a peasant. I saw this, but I never thought she would revolt.

The Holy Redeemer was an academy well-thought-of in the district where it was situated – that is to say, it valued the social manner of its girls above their originality or wit. The girls themselves were lively, boastful, vain; a few were shy, a few snobbish, a few rebellious. In the seven years between our arrival as first formers and our departure from the Upper Sixth, characters changed of course – but they didn’t change much. It was the girls’ appearance that was subject to volcanic, dismaying alterations. Little gilt girls grew coarse and dark, gangling girls grew svelte; modest girls grew great bosoms and dragged them about like the sorrows of Young Werther. Others, pale and self-effacing as novices, whispered unnoticed through their days, hardly embodied inside their solid maroon-and-clay uniforms, creeping out of the school at eighteen on the same mouse feet that had brought them in at eleven. A number of such girls secured lovers and husbands at once, without the trouble of looking for them, and began upon tumultuous and dazzling erotic careers. Some needed just a year or two to blossom into women who occupied the normal amount of space and
breathed their ration of air. Some of them blossomed at thirty, no doubt, and some will find themselves at forty; some will creep on those mouse feet into old age.