An Experiment in Love: A Novel (15 page)

In my first year at school I learnt a great deal of poetry by heart, and recited it in my bedroom at night to improve my diction. My vowels remained long and slow, but – though I continued to wear the shoes with the running boards, and to drag my satchel after me – I became indistinguishable, in a year or two, from my companions who had more privileged home-lives. The nuns and lay teachers, though blinkered and inadequate in some respects, were not so snobbish that they made distinctions between Karina, myself and the others: not to our faces, anyway. Who knows – perhaps they regarded us with interest? We were the first girls from our school – from any school like ours – to go to the Holy Redeemer, and perhaps we were thought of as a worthy social experiment.

In my first-year exams I performed with competence in each subject, and was placed fifteenth in a class of thirty-four girls. I was very satisfied with my modest success; it was unlikely to tempt fate, unlikely to attract envy or spite. But then in my second year – in spite of myself, it seemed – I was placed near the top of the class. A year later, only Julianne and I were serious contenders for the Third-Year Prize. She began to notice me, her blue eyes sliding dubiously over me from beneath the lemony froth of her fringe.

Julianne was a doctor’s daughter. She was tall, strong, athletic and fast. She never minded what she said and she never minded what she did. If this were a school
story for girls, of the kind that have gone out of fashion now, I would be telling you that she was the most popular girl in the form. In fact, I have to report that she was not particularly popular at all. She never exerted herself on anyone’s behalf, never exerted herself on her own. Her academic successes came to her without apparent effort; on the tennis court, she would skid to retrieve a wayward ball and thump it down in an unreachable corner of the far court, without loss of poise or loss of breath. Julianne was perhaps too sardonic to wish to be a leader, too deep: that is what I think now. Nothing about her – her beauty, her confidence, her brilliance – did I admire. To begin admiring Julianne would have been to dig myself a bottomless pit. I did not think there was any hope for me if once I fell into it.

Our convent was not like the convents that are generally described in novels. We were not told that Our Lady would blush every time we crossed our legs. We were not forbidden patent-leather shoes in case boys saw our knickers reflected in them. It was not a hotbed of lesbianism; indeed we were unaware of that tendency or vice, until the books we read – uncensored – informed us of it. No one recruited for the order. I did not know any girl – except myself – who wanted to be a nun.

Still, our lives were neither free nor pleasant. There was an agenda. We were to be useful to society. We would graduate, then marry, then be mothers, also nurses and teachers, brainy, dowdy, overstretched: selfless breeders with aching calves, speaking well of support stockings by the age of thirty-five, finding our comfort in strong
tea with one sugar. We would be women who never sat down, women with rough hands and a social conscience, women with a prayer in their heart and a tight smile on their lips; women who, seeing an extra burden offered, would always step forward and suggest ‘Try me.’ You have heard of schools that train life’s officers: this was a school that trained life’s foolish volunteers.

We were not physically chastised, at the Holy Redeemer. Frigid courtesy was extended to us, as an example of how to conduct ourselves when we were adults. Our excesses and errors were kept in check by sarcasm. We were never praised. We understood we did well if we were not blamed or held up to ridicule. Discouragement was wielded like an intangible baton; when you had tried your hardest, you would be told with a civil brutality that it was not enough. To court notice – even by excellent work – was to run the risk of a snub. Many of us – I do not say Karina, or Julianne – became anxious, painfully scrupulous and striving beings, always trying to out-best our best, to squeeze out one word or look of approbation, to please those who could never be pleased: who would never be pleased on principle. It was a practical education, an education in a certain old-fashioned virtue. We were not
told
to be humble. We were
made
to be.

We were very curious about the details of the nuns’ daily lives, but these details were guarded from us. We did not visit the House unless we were sent on a message, or unless we were suddenly taken ill; we stepped inside it, just, as we processed to chapel for the daily rosary, which was voluntary, or for compulsory Friday afternoon
Benediction. Benediction was incense, plainchant and bump-heads: two or three pupils overcome by religiosity or post-lunch hypoglycaemia, bundled out into the corridor to be offered sips of cold water from a plastic beaker.

When I visited the House I always noticed what I had noticed that first time, when we came for our entrance exams. There was the same smell of incense and custard, blended, I later discerned, with the smell of stewed plums and moth-balls. There was the broken tile, the terracotta tile, that gave under the foot: tock-tock. So acute now is my nostalgia and my desire, that if I had such a room with such a tile I would break it to hear the sound: to remind myself of Karina following behind me – tock-tock – ten years old, innocent then of any sin except the Original one. But in those days, I flashed my eyes into the corners of rooms, to pick up any evidence, crumb, of what a nun’s life might be like: where were their baths, lavatories, what would they eat that night? I learnt nothing. It was a blank.

The evidence of their spiritual life was equally guarded from me. In our presence they offered the same prayers as us – the formulations anyone can employ – with a conspicuous lack of fuss or fervour. They spoke in a prosaic way of God’s glory, and if their private prayers got results they never told us about them. Why were they nuns then? Did they have a faith that was more faithful, a hope that was more hopeful than ours? They certainly didn’t excel in charity. They must have cultivated their virtues in private, after we had gone home; in their dealings with us they were grumpy and exacting, petty and cold.

I did not see this at once. When I was eleven years old, I understood that I also was meant to be a nun. Where does one acquire a sense of vocation? In the chapel after a school dinner, a queasy mass of processed peas and tinned apricots rolling slowly through the gut: great girls whooping in the playground with the cold stinging their cheeks, and inside, silence and the scent of winter flowers: the frozen oily touch of holy water: the creak and snap of a knee joint as a sister rises from genuflection. If you stare for a long time at a candle flame you lose all sense of self. I found this: I felt my thin, hungry essence flit upwards towards the gilded roof. I thought that was what holiness was – this loss, this flitting – and I may have been right.

The only jewellery permitted to Holy Redeemer girls was of a Catholic nature – a Lourdes medal, a cross and chain. Karina wore a sharp silver crucifix, over-sized, that was always edging up over the top button of her blouse or summer frock. She used to thrust it back with ostentation – impatient yet reverent – and glance up at the teacher of the moment to see if she was watching. She did novenas, First Fridays, rosaries: obligations over and above weekly Mass and regular confession. When the sacred host was in her mouth she looked as if she were sucking a stone.

One thinks of the loss of faith as a gradual process, a seeping and trickling. In my case it was sudden. I woke up one day, in my Chinese room; I was twelve, and the torpor of adolescence was seeping through me, and I hated mornings. There was a prayer, that Sister Monica had told us to say on waking: Holy Mother Mary, I
humbly thank you for preserving your hand-maiden from the perils of the night. Downstairs, my mother was already gushing water into the kettle; soon she would be yelling for me. I sat up and slid to the edge of the bed. Now I beseech you preserve your hand-maiden from the snares and temptations of the day to come. My feet were cold on the linoleum: I looked down at them, narrow and blue. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord – just as I was about to add ‘Amen’, something made me look up. Perhaps it was God, climbing out through my window, absconding. I looked around the room. What perils? I wondered. My satchel rolled fatly on the floor, stuffed with maths textbooks. My outdoor shoes stood obediently side by side, waiting for my feet. What temptations? I moved to the window and opened it a crack. The sullen morning slid its fingers inside. So I’m doing today on my own, I thought. In that pendant second before my feet touched the lino, God had become
de trop;
I felt vaguely embarrassed that I had ever believed anything.

Soon after this I had a short conversation – my first – with Julianne. It was about God’s existence. She took a Voltairean view, that if he did not exist it would be necessary to invent him: ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘even if it were not necessary, it would be profitable.’ She had the placid air of someone who would never let Popes interfere with her pleasures. Not a wrinkle – of doubt, or anything – marred her broad white brow. She might have had perfect faith: might have been one of those unspotted souls we heard about, shining with the purity of a recently cleaned window.

In Curzon Street, these were years of home improvements – in some ways if not in others. Some people on the street bought cars, but my father said he didn’t see why they’d want to bother. ‘If only they realized the worry a car causes. The road tax alone. The traffic jams.’ Public transport was good enough for us, he said; always had been, always would be.

But in a car, I thought, you can go precisely where you like. You’re the driver. You can even go where there isn’t a road.

Our coal fire was abolished, and in the sitting-room an electric fire threw out a vitiating heat, pierced by whistling drafts. The house was showing its age. The back wall was freezing to the touch, icy as the pack of six fish fingers that served the three of us on a Friday evening. My mother never went near a church these days, but she did believe devoutly in fish on Fridays.

It can’t just have been the menopause that made her so angry – with life, with me? When I was eleven years old, she seemed to enter on a twenty-year temper tantrum. All her discourse was of disappointment and loss, of let-downs and deceits. If I proposed to go on a school outing, she would say, What do you want to go there for? You won’t enjoy it. If I was asked to someone’s house, she would say, Why do you want to go bothering with her? Your parents, she would say; that’s who you should be bothering with. Nobody else will help you, when it comes down to it. You’ve only your own family.

I see her saying these things; her face hollow and her eyes without light. At other times she would urge on me the virtues of the outside world: of getting on, getting
out, getting out of Curzon Street and getting away for good and all. ‘It’s not
what
you know, it’s
who
you know,’ she’d say: if this were true, my homework efforts were useless. She talked as if everything were stacked against me – the money of others, their good looks and breeding and social graces – stacked up into a Matterhorn of prejudice and denial; and yet at the same time it was my job to push at this mountain, to topple it, to bulldoze it with my will. The task in life that she set for me was to build my own mountain, build a step-by-step success: the kind didn’t matter as long as it was high and it shone. And as she had told me that it is ruthless people who rise highest in this life, I would slash through the ropes of anyone who tried to climb after me; I would prize out their pitons, and jump about on the summit alone.

But then, twenty years on, when I stood on the heights I had erected for myself, there would be a crumbling, she seemed to say, an inner decay, a collapse: and once again I would realize that she was my only friend.

My father did increasingly complex jigsaws. There was an elaborate still-life with grapes, roses and shellfish. There was an Alma-Tadema picture, of soft-eyed women with marble limbs. There was a jigsaw of the Last Supper; it took him days and days, and then a piece of Judas proved to be missing. My mother turned the chairs up and trounced the cushions; the gap remained, a worm-shaped hiatus in the traitor’s ribcage.