An Experiment in Love: A Novel (18 page)

We were unstrung, terribly agitated; Julianne screamed, ‘The devil’s tone, what is it, are we at war?’ We flung open our door. In the corridor what met our view was a procession of young women, faces screwed up against the din, tramping towards the nearest fire exit. ‘Oh, if only they wouldn’t,’ Sue said, hands clawing her hair. ‘If only they bloody wouldn’t!’ The noise was visceral and sickening, as if someone were scraping your guts with their fingernails.

Sophy passed us, marching, her crimped fair hair drifting: trailing in her wake some respectable perfume,
possibly the sugar and orange notes of Je Reviens. We heard Claire’s voice, rising, swooping above and below the hideous racket: ‘Ladies, do please remember, especially first-year ladies, please do remember, that in the event of fire the lifts will not be working.’ Claire, it turned out, was some kind of official fire-minder; they were appointed by the warden, one to each floor, and their job was to boss us down the echoing back stairs that no one ever used, to shoulder open fire-doors that no one had ever seen, to shepherd us into the street, and to count us.

As we skittered down the stairs, Julianne began to cough. ‘Why are you doing that?’ I demanded.

‘Authenticity. We really ought to be down at floor level gasping in the air. We ought to crawl.’

The impact of these absurd words was so powerful that when I look back at this scene I seem to catch a whiff of smoke indeed. I seem to see it curling under the corridor’s closed doors, and gradually rising into the air to form a haze at the level of our shoulders; I seem to hear the crackle and spit of threatened timbers deep in the building’s heart. But in fact, on that night, there was nothing but the cold air and the siren’s wail and our indignant chatter as we poured out into a damp, misty street; the lamplight was fuzzy, like the drowned moon in water. The warden herself – forewarned and sensibly clad in a tweed coat – went from group to group: ‘Remember, girls, in the event of fire, don’t stop to pick up your handbags or any possessions whatever – property may be replaced, but human life is sacred.’

By my side, Julianne still hacked and spluttered, her
shoulders hunched and knees buckling. ‘What is it, Miss Lipcott?’ the warden said.

‘Consumption, I think.’ The warden’s face showed a moment’s dismay, then with an impatient click of her tongue she moved on to another huddled band.

In the next couple of days two rumours swept the building. One: that there would be another fire-practice next term, and that it would be held in the middle of the night. Two, that the fire-doors – which we had noticed for the first time this week, and which some of us had immediately perceived to be useful – were locked unless there was a drill scheduled. There was no mystery about the motive for this. It was a way of keeping out boyfriends.

Or keeping them in, of course, to be burnt to a crisp. If you had a man stay overnight at Tonbridge Hall, and you were caught, the penalty was expulsion – expulsion into the hard world of the freezing bedsit at the end of a tube line, or the sordid flat-share in an area known for its prostitutes. Strangely, no one went to check, to see if the fire-doors actually were locked; the rumour, the dilemma it presented, was too delicious to refute. We talked about it and we all agreed – if you had a man in your room and the siren went, you would just have to put him in the wardrobe and leave him to take his chance, leave him crouching on top of your shoes and hope it was only a practice. If it wasn’t . . . ‘Yes, Mrs Smith, I’m afraid this is all that’s left of your son Roger: just this molar. Here are his textbooks, brought from his digs, and one or two little mementos we thought you’d like to have. The rest of him? They didn’t find much, I’m afraid. His
anorak had gone up in the blaze. And his condom. A pity. He was so young!’

The third thing that happened was that I wrote to my parents to say that at Christmas I’d been invited to stay with Niall’s family. It was true that I was already becoming very nervous about the invitation, but I saw the advantages of it. Why nervous? Well, how would I go on? What was their bathroom etiquette? I did not possess a dressing-gown. I was accustomed, at Tonbridge Hall, to go into the bathroom fully dressed, and come out fully dressed; slightly damp, but very proper. I imagined that, in a private house, this might be seen as strange. I rehearsed, once again, a little speech, to explain myself to the world: I’d left my bathrobe behind at Tonbridge Hall because it took up so much space in my suitcase, it was really thick, you see, fluffy, you know those towelling ones?

I was beginning to convince myself, as I rehearsed this excuse; my fingers smoothed its pastel pile, which would be (variably) peach, pure white, mint green. So I’ll borrow Niall’s, I heard myself say, and . . . well, I supposed Niall must have a dressing-gown. I had never seen such an article. We walked about before each other naked, as if we were the fount and origin of the world. If he had a dressing-gown I imagined it to be made of a hairy plaid, brown and white, its collar edged with smooth-twisted cord and its belt tasselled, suggestively swinging, at the centre of each tassel a blunt silken knob. Such a dressing-gown to me seemed far less safe than nakedness; far less acceptable in the family home.

Then again, what about food? I had eaten my Sunday lunch at Niall’s house every week for two years. We ate, working by rota, roast lamb, roast beef, roast pork. In my own home, I was still not considered capable in the kitchen. My mother sighed and implied that it was one of the results of thinking too much, that I could not burn a carrot in quite the way she could; ‘She’s academic,’ she would say, ‘and I dare say you can’t expect anything else . . .’

Niall’s mother, though, was eager for any help she could get; her cooking was enthusiastic, and left the kitchen plastered with grease, with vast roasting pans of scalding fat, with snails of pastry sticking to their boards. Every pudding she made required the boosting up of the oven to 5oo°F: the kitchen would fill with fug and steam, and we would open the windows and lean out, gasping, into the garden where Niall’s father was imposing stripes on the handkerchief lawn. Lemon meringue pie: the Everest peaks pale beige and studiedly crisp, the meringue beneath a soft lather of whipped sweetness. Then, even more triumphant, there was Baked Alaska: the oven now so hot that blue wisps seemed to issue from its every orifice, and when the door was opened, the heat knocked us back, laughing, and I would wrap a tea-towel around my hands like a surgeon dons his gloves, and I’d go in, and I’d fetch it out . . . speed was of the essence then, so that we could sink our teeth together, our family teeth, into the hot sweet froth on top and the oily frozen block of vanilla ice beneath.

But . . . stay for three weeks? What would we eat at family meals, routine meals? Bread and cheese? I imagined
butter on proper bread, laid like golden pavements. Milk? Yes, Niall’s mother would never mind at all if I said to her that I liked to drink milk, could I order some, would she get me an extra pint? But three weeks – would she not glance up one day, see my greedy mouth at work, and notice my relish for the flesh of her only son? After Sunday lunch I always washed up, and Niall would stand behind me, a damp Irish linen towel in his hand, and lick the nape of my neck as I scrubbed and scoured away the gravy and the fat and those burnt-on bits that require you to thrust out an elbow and frown. If I leant forward, to get a better purchase on the grease, he would creep his hands up beneath my skirt and pull down my pants. Three weeks . . . how could we hope to get away with this sort of thing? I knew no other way to do the washing-up.

However: I had made the decision. I could not think how I would survive, otherwise: what, go home to the quartering of a quarter of boiled ham, the meat-paste dole, the three bananas that stood in for a bowl of fruit? I would visit my parents, of course, we would only be five or six miles away.

My mother replied to my letter by return of post. The reply was very long and very bitter, denouncing my ingratitude, my improvidence, the laxity of my morals. As an unmarried girl, she said, I should be under my parents’ roof, not under the roof of people they did not know, whose manners and outlook were no doubt frivolous, degenerate and the talk of the district; and there could be no good reason for my wanting to be away from home unless I was planning to conduct myself in a
way which she hoped no daughter of hers would ever think of in a thousand years.

I shook my head over the letter, as I read it; as if there were someone in the room to see me do it. I dimly remembered a time before she had been angry . . . the spring days when we had walked up to the hills, the twilit afternoons when she had told me of her youthful triumphs in dance halls, the day when she had sat me on the table and taught me to sing a rude song about Karina. But after that there was nothing but snarling, and the dull pressure of her finger ends as she pinned and fitted clothes on me; the stutter and hum of her sewing-machine, the swearing and rending of cloth: the reiterated question, ‘If this Julianne Lipcott can come top of the class, why can’t you?’

The letter was written, I perceived, not on what came to hand – not Basildon Bond, not the back of the milk bill, but on writing-paper that someone must have given her for a Christmas present: white paper bordered with roses, cut roses, pink ones, drooping on their stems, frilled and framed by pale thornless leaves. The envelope, I remember, was embellished in this way: the Queen’s head in the right-hand corner, and on the left another rose. The burden of the letter was this, when the verbiage was stripped away: if you’re not coming home for Christmas, don’t bother to come home ever again.

I was in my room when I read this letter, alone. I felt dazed, and was tempted to sit down on my bed, but I had a ten o’clock lecture and it was already, let me see, it must be . . . I picked up Julianne’s travelling clock and stared at it. I had come away from home, you remember,
without a lot of ordinary things that people have, and one of those things was a watch. I fed my arms into my duffle coat, picked up my bag of books and somehow arrived in Houghton Street, not having noticed the journey.

Someone asked me was I all right, and I nodded; I had no tutorials, and as far as I remember I didn’t speak for the rest of the day. It didn’t occur to me that the letter might have been written in haste, that perhaps she was already regretting it. I had grown up believing – indeed, seeing – that my mother was a very powerful woman. She was not someone who changed her mind. Her edicts were handed down and I obeyed them.

I went to the library, took my familiar chair, and read the case of
Donoghue v. Stevenson
(1932) which as every lawyer knows concerns a Mrs May Donoghue, who four years earlier had visited an ice-cream parlour in Paisley, had accepted a bottle of ginger-beer from her friend, and had discovered inside it the remains of a decomposing snail. Was the manufacturer responsible? Had he a duty of care to Mrs Donoghue, with whom he had no contractual relationship? Across the page floated images of roses, of blushing petals and bending stems. I asked myself with a kind of horror, was it possible that I loved my parents? If I did not, why should this matter to me? I felt small, very young, hollow at my centre. And verses, more verses ran through my head: Under the water it rumbled on, / Still louder and more dread: / It reached the ship, it split the bay; / The ship went down like lead.

When it was six o’clock – a wet evening, pavements slick and gleaming – I left the library and returned to
Tonbridge Hall. I didn’t go down to dinner. Julianne was not in and there.was no sign that she had been in all day and no sign that she would come back. I sat on my bed. The feeling returned, from my first evening at Tonbridge Hall: that I would just go on sitting in this room, that hours would spin into weeks and here I would be, in a bubble of silence, with my verses for company and the feeble ticking of the travelling clock. I got up and put out the light, electing to sit in the dark.

When Julianne came back next day I decided not to tell her about my letter, still less to show it to her. I was deeply ashamed of it, ashamed to belong to a family from which such a communication could issue. Not that I did belong to it, any more. I was cut adrift.

The ship went down like lead.

Now it is time to tell you about our housekeeping arrangements at Tonbridge Hall; this will lead me naturally to the matter of love. You must appreciate that we lived in a townscape, built to an unnatural scale: institutional, impersonal. We had come from our suburbs, villages and market towns, from stockbroker Tudor and inter-war semi with laburnum tree, from cosy terrace or mansion flat, to live in a public landscape of grey brick and Coade stone, the iron railings marching on, the brutal Senate House, the boastful British Museum. We walked to our colleges through streets with famous names, by statues and monuments, and we passed most of our lives in public rooms, seedy or grand, under strip lights or chandeliers. In. the evenings we came back, it is true, to our own narrow rooms, but even they recalled the felon’s
accommodation, maintained at public expense, in some enlightened Scandinavian prison.

So it is not surprising that we tried to set up our own housekeeping routines, to recreate the domesticity of which (I suppose) we must have felt deprived. Our rooms were cleaned for us, and fresh bed linen was placed in our rooms each Thursday. We had very little to do except look after ourselves.

Each corridor had a poky kitchen, hardly more than a broom cupboard, with two gas-rings and a sink. Some girls would use the kitchens to heat milk or soup, but they were good for little else, and not pleasant places to congregate. A better place for pretending to a normal woman’s life was the laundry-room on the sixth floor; we would stand about and chat while washing-machines whirred and glugged. You never saw Karina up there. She washed her clothes – hairy jumpers and woollen tights – in the wash-basin in C21. Then she hung them over the radiators.

This did not please Lynette; when you called by she would indicate the dripping garments with a poke of her chin, and roll her dark eyes, but she didn’t say anything to Karina. Wet, the clothes looked bigger; the sweaters were elongated, their arms swinging and cuffs groping as if in search of a handhold.