An Experiment in Love: A Novel (17 page)

It is a mistake, of course, to think that convent girls wait until they’re adults to disappoint the expectations of
the nuns. In our generation, growing up through the sixties, we quickly developed our double lives. We were women inside children’s clothes, atheists at Mass, official virgins and
de facto
rakes. It was not deceit; it was dualism. We had grown up with it. Flesh and spirit, ambition and humility. It was time to make plans for the future; I swung between thinking I could do anything with my life, and that I could do nothing. I still fitted into the blazer bought for my first summer at the Holy Redeemer. My mouse feet had hardly grown, so my indoor shoes were still going strong, and had perhaps acquired a perverse chic. But my satchel was scuffed and battered, and inside it at the bottom corner there was a big ink stain, like the map of a new continent.

Maybe the act of love came too late. As a career move, I should have lost my burdensome virginity at thirteen or fourteen, when there would have been no question of a lasting attachment and no desire for one. As it was, I shook when I removed my clothes and I cried after it was done, not out of pain or disappointment but out of an up-rush of muddling emotion which twenty-four hours later I was ready to call love.

So we formed an attachment, Niall and I, and after three or four months were spoken of by our friends as if we were an old married couple.

Niall said really sensible things to me. He said, Why don’t you get a Saturday job? It would give you some freedom. My mother said, no daughter of mine. What, in a shop or a café! What would Mother Benedict say!

Saturdays were for homework: getting into Oxbridge. My mother had heard this term ‘Oxbridge’ and had
begun to use it, and it was making me uneasy. I was afraid she thought it was a real place; when the time came, Oxford or Cambridge would not be good enough, only Oxbridge would be good enough for a daughter of hers.

‘Just tell her,’ Julianne said. ‘Tell her you’ve no wish to spend three years locked in some musty quadrangle with people who will laugh at your accent.’

We were closer, now we were sixth formers – no longer academic rivals because Julianne was in the science stream and I was doing the girls’ stuff. All the advice she gave me was of this twist-in-the-tail kind; but you didn’t go to her to feed your self-esteem.

What helped my case was the news that Susan Millington had accepted a place at London University. ‘She’s going to read law,’ my mother said ‘She’s going to be a barrister, like you see on the television.’

As I became more acceptable to Julianne and her friends, I grew away from Karina. We still travelled together, and sometimes in a burst of irritability she would confide in me: it was always when she was angry or jealous or otherwise caught up with strong emotion that her language would seem to slip sideways and you would remember that she was not English, for all her insistence. Her mother infuriated her these days, she said, by talking about her long-dead, her missing relatives. ‘I say the past is over and done with, forget it. Why does she keep harking on about it?’

Karina had changed a lot over the last couple of years – to look at, anyway. At twelve she was one of those matronly little girls, who remind you of the well-upholstered
women of sixty who stand at bus-stops with baskets on wheels. Her girdle – in house-colour – would ride up over her non-existent waist, giving her tunic an Empire line; but despite this she was still a handsome child, her blonde hair shining, her cheeks still dimpled and pinkly scrubbed. Adults still smiled on her; ‘None of that slimming nonsense with Karina,’ they would say.

But by the time she was seventeen, she had become a dark, forceful presence, strong and sulky. Her hair had dimmed to a nondescript brown, her skin thickened and become muddy. Her long disapproval of the world had become overt, and stamped a frown-line between her eyes. Her strength seemed ridiculously disproportionate to the day-to-day demands our schoolgirl life placed on it; she might have been a formidable games player, except that she despised games of any kind. When she followed me on to the bus in the mornings, I felt as if my conscience were coming after me, ready to fell me with one blow. ‘Karina runs that house single-handed,’ my mother would say. Just as when we were children, she always had money in her purse.

One day in my fifth year, when I was coming home along Curzon Street – late, because I’d stayed behind at school to audition for a part in a play – I saw my mother hammering on the door of Karina’s house. ‘Mary! Mary! Come down, love, and let me in.’

I turned around, shrugged my satchel on to my shoulder, and went straight back down to the town to meet Niall. It was always easier to meet him without telling my mother where I was going. Of course, there would be a row when I got home; but that was preferable to two
rows, one when I got home and one before I went.

It turned out that someone had told my mother that Mary had been taken poorly. An ambulance carried her off, but then returned her a day or two later. Karina’s father wouldn’t let anybody in the house. I said, ‘I’m sure Karina will cope. She’s always so capable, isn’t she?’

My mother looked at me reproachfully. ‘She’s got her exams coming up, same as you.’

‘Exams? Oh, exams are nothing, to somebody as capable as Karina.’

Rehearsals for the play kept me back at school; in the mornings, Karina yawned her way through our journey, and sometimes sunk her head into a textbook. One day she said grudgingly, ‘She’s got a wasting disease.’

‘A what?’ I was looking for something more precise, a scientific label. Karina only repeated what she’d said.

‘And what’s the prognosis?’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Doesn’t your father want help?’

‘I help him.’

‘Don’t you want help?’

‘Are you offering?’

‘Would you take the offer?’

No reply.

Academically, Karina was not the kind of girl who shone; you could not accuse her of that. Sometimes we looked at each other’s homework; her answers were like an expanded set of notes covering all the important points, just the kind of answers your teachers urge you to give. She used short words which followed each other in
the expected order and in the accepted cadence. Her paragraphs were two sentences long, like those in tabloid newspapers. At sixteen her writing was as clear and legible as that of a neat ten-year-old. She never read a book she didn’t have to read. I had the impression that she never forgot anything.

Well . . . these schematic virtues must have commended themselves to the examiners. Despite her problems at home, she passed eight O-levels and went into the sixth form on the science side. One gusty day in March, in our final year at school, Julianne came bowling into the common room, seeming propelled by the wind outside. Her face, normally so placid, was aglow with affront. ‘You’ll never guess what
SHE
– what
SHE
has done now.’

‘I will never guess,’ I said, looking up from my work. In those days Karina was not a topic between us; but from the violence of Julianne’s tone I knew exactly who she was talking about.

‘She’s only gone and got an offer from London.’

Julianne and I had already applied for a place in a hall of residence. She had said, We could share a room: why not, you won’t be in my way.

‘Has she? Which college?’ I said.

Julianne snorted. ‘Somewhere in the East End.’

I said, ‘Perhaps she won’t get the grades.’

‘Oh,
HER
,’ Julianne said. ‘She’ll get ’em.’

‘Perhaps she’ll go and live somewhere else. There are other halls.’

‘Oh no,’ Julianne said. ‘She will come and live in our hall. She will come and live in our room. In our wardrobe. We’ll find her bacon rind in our shoes and her
toast crumbs in our beds, and cold chips in our textbooks and Cornish pasties stuck to our mirror, and she’ll use our nail scissors to trim pork chops and she’ll steal our lipsticks and suck the ends and then they’ll taste of suet.’

Later that day I stopped Karina in the corridor. ‘I hear you’ve some good news.’

Karina was wearing a white lab coat. She squeezed the cardboard file under her arm. ‘It’ll be good news when I’ve got the grades.’

‘Will you be . . . I mean, had you thought you might apply to Tonbridge Hall?’

‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. Her eyes were cold. ‘Unless you think it’s too good for me?’

‘How’s your mum?’ I said.

She said, ‘What do you care?’

One day, two years before this, I had been travelling home late from school – a choir practice, I think – and it was almost dark when I got off the 64 at the Victoria bus station, the mid-way point of our journey. I began to pick my way through the litter and oil and filth towards the queue for my bus home, and out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of our colours, of the clay-and-maroon stripe of our scarf. I turned my head and saw Karina.

She was leaning against a wall, and not wearing her hat. She was smoking a cigarette, and three boys, none of whom I knew, were leaning and cavorting and smoking and foot-swivelling and kicking and lounging in her vicinity. They were not boys from St Augustine’s Catholic grammar school; they were bus-station boys. They had
white peaky faces, full of bones; they had lax lips and bendy legs and zipper jackets. I remembered the boys from our primary school, with their elastic belts and scarred knees and grey flapping shorts: and I realized, with a sense of shock, that these were the youths that they would have grown into.

I drew back into the shadows. In those days I was easily intimidated by men, especially young ones, especially young ones at bus stations, who would jeer at my uniform and laugh in my little pale face. It wasn’t so much the men themselves who scared me, but the impulses of rage that leapt inside me at their jeers and leers and off-hand remarks, at the knowledge that they owned the streets. I would have liked to strike them dead with a stare; I wanted to beckon them, let them approach, and then stick them with a hidden knife.

Karina looked perfectly at ease. She barely seemed to notice the boys, yet it was obvious that they were trying hard to attract her attention, that they knew her, that they were tied up with her in some way. Her eyes rested on the shuddering sides of green double-deckers and the tired working people toiling home. She touched her cigarette to her lips.

I was cold, tired and hungry, and this state must have made me invisible, or at least translucent: because though I saw Karina she didn’t see me.

One evening my mother hurried down to the corner shop on Eliza Street, to try and get some bread before they shut. She managed to get the last small sliced, and was carrying it back when she looked up at Karina’s
house and saw a face at the bedroom window. It was a face like a white puffy ball: at first she hardly recognized it, but it was Mary, all the same. She waved, but no one waved back.

In the fifth week of term at Tonbridge Hall three things occurred. I shall describe them to you in ascending order of complexity.

The first, simplest thing was that the miniskirt fell totally and decisively out of favour. For some months the fashion had been on the wane, but that October a few of the old guard were out on the streets; by November, the maxi-skirts had won, and there was not a knee to be seen between Heathrow airport and the Essex coast.

Women became – suddenly – poised, mysterious and difficult. They wore long belted trenchcoats, like spies, and put on lipstick in public places. Twenty-six became a more fashionable age than sixteen. What could I do? I looked sixteen. And I could not afford a new skirt. Fleetingly, I wondered if I would have used my five pounds emergency money, if I’d still had it. But what would one skirt have accomplished? The cotton shower-proof came only half-way down my thighs; what extended below was to be showered upon freely, like lamp-posts against which any dog can piss. Even the duffle coat passed on by my cousin did not go much below the knee. I began to attract quizzical glances, as winter drew on, and I came down to breakfast in my pelmet skirts and strange stretched brown-black tights. I heard someone say, ‘Carmel’s so obvious, don’t you think?’

Julianne heard the remark too. Afterwards she
bounced across the room, repeating it, extending it, embellishing it. ‘Yes, well, you see, where she comes from they do probably still wear such things, and after all, what is she?’ A second voice chimed in, just as well-bred. ‘A little shop girl, m’dear, a little shop girl.’

What was to compensate me? Admiration in men’s eyes? Not really. In previous eras my legs had been admired openly, by Rogers for whom I cared nothing. But now men seemed not to see me. I knew I had lost a few pounds – well, more than a few – but was there really so little left?

The second thing happened on Tuesday at eight-thirty in the evening – at which point you may picture us, the girls of Tonbridge Hall, gross and sated from troughing, lolling like sultanas each upon her divan. In an instant, a vast howling began, a terrible skull-piercing wail. I leapt up from my desk, believing my head would burst. Julianne’s textbook slid from her fingers and flapped open on the floor, its leaves fanning over and displaying cut sections of heart, lung, brain.