An Experiment in Love: A Novel (19 page)

Up in the laundry-room across from the machines there were a half-dozen ironing boards, where a half-dozen girls toiled: not always the same six, I mean, but girls with identical expressions, intent and methodical, martyred yet victorious. What were they ironing? Party dresses? Not at all. Shirts. Men’s shirts. Boyfriends’ shirts.
Flattening the collar. Pressing the cuffs, easing and turning, finally lifting the garment with a flourish, high into the air like a flag, like a banner of triumph: a banner that told the whole world that I, a Tonbridge Hall girl, have got my man. I have got my man and I know how to look after him. I’m not just a pretty brain, you see; not just a pretty brain.

If I could time-travel I would fly back, back in time to the ironing-room; I would fly back to those girls and slap them. I would like to bring them to their senses; say, how can it be, that after all these years of education, all you want is the wash-tub? Leave this, and go and run the country. And yet I see that what they were up to, these surrogate housewives, was not so spiritless; it was a small rebellion against the lives they had led since puberty.

When men decided women could be educated – this is what I think – they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them wear collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it. And this is what we were, when we grew up at the Holy Redeemer; not so much little nuns, but little chappies, little chappies with breasts. At ‘bad’ schools the girls turned up in the mornings with streaks of mascara under their eyes, they talked dirty and flirted and sipped mixed drinks in violent colours. At ‘good’ schools the girls had plain faces and thick tights, stout shoes and bulging briefcases. They
forfeited today for the promise of tomorrow, but the promise wasn’t fulfilled; they were reduced to middle-sexes, neuters, without the powers of men or the duties of women. Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.

But we were released from the collars and ties now. All at once it happened, without preparation or warning, in the course of a day. No wonder we were confused, torn by conflicts no one had hinted at. We were eighteen, nineteen; we wanted high marks, because that was what we were trained to get. We were trained to defer gratification, to pamper and exercise and flaunt our mental powers, but now our bodies were registering their demands. We’d had sex; sex bred the desire for its consequences. The little women inside were looking out through our eyes and waving to the world.

We wanted homes. Houses of our own. Babies, even: the milky drool of saliva to replace the smooth flow of ink. We did not speak of it, but each corridor of Tonbridge Hall seethed with fertility-panic. In the groups who gathered for coffee after dinner, there was always one girl who thought she might be pregnant, one who was celebrating the fact that she wasn’t: celebrating outwardly, anyway. When friends met in the morning, or after a weekend away, there was always an undertone, a buzz-note of inquiry, an eyebrow raised – you are? You could be? You’re not? Late again! was the distraught mutter; we took the contraceptive pill, most of us, but we acted as if we didn’t believe it worked. Our doubts spoke of our desires, of our ambivalence. A blip of the bubblepack,
a sip of water, the tiny taste of sweetness on the tongue; how could these prevail against the huge, mechanic workings of nature? Nature had been driven out with a pitchfork, and was creeping her way back in.

Of course, not everybody shared the fertility panics. I was celibate, though not through choice. Julianne seemed to have her body under control. And Claire, our next door neighbour: ‘I do worry about Sue,’ she said to me. ‘This new boyfriend of hers, you know, she has sexual relations with him.’

I wanted to murmur, that is usual nowadays, but I decided to listen with attention to Claire’s fears. ‘I don’t think Sue knows what she wants,’ she complained. ‘She – takes risks. She tells me she does.’

‘Isn’t she on the Pill?’

‘Oh, have a word with her, Carmel,’ Claire begged. ‘You’re more a woman of the world than I am.’

Poor Claire, I said to myself. When she spoke of Sue, her head sunk into her pasty hands; the pose showed her to advantage. Her spots were sprinkled over her cheeks as if somebody had worked on her flesh with a red-tipped drill. Her hair had been permed recently, in the round style that had been favoured by the mothers of my friends at the Holy Redeemer; the lustreless curls looked brittle, as if you could snap them away from her skull. The way the world was moving, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find an unattractive woman. I wondered about the girls at school, the ones who’d been big girls when I was a shrimp of eleven. I remembered moustaches, manly chests, sinewy torsos; I thought, they probably look quite acceptable now. Frights like Claire were
a dying breed. Even Karina, with her increasingly thickening figure and baleful expression, was not actively ugly. Lynette said she could think of lots of ways in which Karina could be improved. ‘Not chew her nails like that. A decent bra, to stop her flopping. Colours to suit her – imagine, say, a clear coral pink. Or a strong blue – not navy. And no, Carmel, not royal.’

Karina came and went, and resisted improvement. About Lynette, she said, ‘I cannot be doing with women who paint their toenails. I’ve no time for that sort at all.’

In the seventh week of term Sue’s problematical boyfriend paid her a visit. ‘She insists I move out of our room for them,’ Claire said. She sat on Julianne’s bed. Her voice was frayed and her hands washed together.

‘It’s the usual arrangement,’ I said. I grinned maliciously. ‘She’ll do the same for you, when the occasion arises.’

She looked up, amazed. ‘You don’t think that I – oh, no, Carmel. That’s for marriage. That’s what I believe.’

‘Yes, love.’ My fingers crept into my hair; she made me anxious, northern, almost kind. ‘But before people marry, you know, these days, they expect to try each other out. Like cars. You go for a test drive.’

‘I don’t
think . . .’
she spoke carefully, picking through the English language as if it were strange to her, ‘I don’t
think
I’ll marry . . . One never knows of course.’

Are you a lesbian, then? I wanted to ask. I was building up in my head a library of the looks I had seen her give Sue. As if answering me, she said, ‘I don’t say I wouldn’t like to, if the circumstances were right. But you can’t count on someone asking you, can you?’

I saw a moonlit garden, and Claire in white satin, bias cut; a suitor kneeling in evening dress, proffering a rose. ‘I don’t think you wait to be asked,’ I said. ‘I think you sort of tell them.’ I considered. ‘Perhaps you could marry a missionary,’ I said. ‘Someone like St John Rivers. And go and aid the poor on the streets of Bombay.’

She looked up. ‘You’ve lost me there.’

‘Oh,
Jane Eyre,’
I said. ‘Sorry. He wasn’t going to marry her because she was pretty or anything, but because she was quick on the uptake and he thought she had a strong constitution. You know, this thing with Sue and her boyfriend, how can you be sure it’s wrong, how can you be sure? I know what’s in the Bible but has God told you personally?’

It was a serious question. Yet Claire managed a smile. ‘Of course not. He doesn’t need to. Anyway, however you look at it, it’s against all the regulations.’ I studied her face; she was soon frowning again. ‘If we’re thrown out, what will my parents say? Look, Carmel, I don’t know what’s going through your head, you’ve probably read several books I haven’t come across, the point is I don’t mind her having a boyfriend, she used to have a nice boyfriend, she met him at a gospel weekend – ’

I didn’t ask her what a gospel weekend was; I didn’t like to think about it. I just interrupted her: ‘Claire, if you were to go away for a day or two, wouldn’t it solve your problem? I’m sure your parents would be glad to have you home.’

‘Oh no.’ She blushed. ‘They’re divorced, you see.’

‘You could go and see a friend.’

‘But then I’d just be shirking, wouldn’t I? I’d be shirking the responsibility.’

‘You’re not responsible for Sue.’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘Who then, in law, is my neighbour?’
Claire looked closely at me. ‘The snail in the ginger-beer bottle,’ I explained. ‘It’s a case I’ve learnt. 1932. “Who then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be – persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.” Lacks resonance, doesn’t it?’

‘Do you have to learn it off by heart, like that?’

‘No. I just prefer to.’

Claire shook her head. ‘We’re all responsible for each other. Don’t you think, Carmel? Don’t you think we ought to be?’

Sue had given her boyfriend a big build-up. There was an unspoken agreement that in our conclaves we could talk about our boyfriends just so much; everybody, more or less, should get equal time, when the others would listen or pretend to. Some people, like Lynette, never talked about their private lives. Some, like me, had nothing against it on principle, but found it too difficult in practice: because of all the things I loved about Niall, how could I select just one or two for public delectation? But Sue could talk and did, rattled on unchecked by good taste or any notion of self-protection; ‘I am sick of the topic of Sue’s Roger,’ Julianne snapped one evening. He was handsome, he was thoughtful, he was romantic and sensitive; we did not at first associate him with the
lanky, frowning figure who appeared on the corridor, loping furtively between C2 and the bathrooms. ‘He’s so old,’ Julianne complained. ‘She never told us that, did she? He must be twenty-six at least. Married, do you think? He can’t be any good, can he? Or else at that age he’d have money for a hotel.’

Lynette gave a delicate shiver. ‘It’s so sordid,’ she said. ‘This signing-in business.’

The signing-in book was kept at the reception desk inside the main door. It was guarded by a sharp-eyed middle-aged woman called Jacqueline, of whom it was said that she never forgot a name and never forgot a face. We were allowed male visitors in our rooms, at any time up to eleven at night, but when they entered the hall they had to sign themselves in and when they left they had to sign themselves out.

So the art of keeping a man overnight was this: he must be signed out by someone else’s departing boyfriend. No point even trying it when Jacqueline was in charge and on form; but she could be distracted sometimes, she had to go to the lavatory, and sometimes, even, she took a day off. The system was for the departing boyfriend to stand far below in the street, signalling: thumbs up for ‘You’re signed out’, thumbs down for ‘I didn’t manage it’. I wonder if passers-by ever saw this ritual, and paused to ask themselves what was going on.

It was a sport for boys, not for grown men. Sue’s Roger endured it sullenly. Claire – grim-faced – hauled her mattress to another room, and Sue and her man stayed in bed for most of the weekend. ‘Wouldn’t you think they’d like to vary their programme of activities
just a little?’ Julianne said. Each one of us, even though she had a man of her own, was violently jealous of anyone who had a man at that very moment.

‘We’re getting married as soon as I graduate,’ Sue said on Monday morning. ‘Roger says so.’ She was enrobed in smugness, wrapped in self-satisfaction as if in a cobweb shawl. ‘It’s a long time to wait, but – well . . .’ She tried an optimistic little shrug. I saw the invisible shawl move on her shoulders.

‘Will he give you an engagement ring?’ Lynette asked.

‘Oh, we won’t bother with that,’ Sue said. ‘It’s bourgeois.’

There was a strange note in her voice, as if she were lurching off course. Claire stared at her, uncomprehending. ‘Is he political?’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

At intervals that week I would take out the letter from my mother and read it. I hoped that it would be different, that the words would somehow unwrite themselves while they lay in the darkness of the drawer, or the flowers at least erase themselves from the edges of the page. When I was little and she went out cleaning, her employers would sometimes try to give her things: surplus food and cast-off clothing. ‘I flung it back in her face,’ she’d say. At Christmas she did accept gifts of money; otherwise, the only thing she’d ever brought home were roses, ten inches long with flexible stems and plastic thorns. They came free for some months with a certain brand of washing powder, and by the time she lost interest we must have had four dozen of these artefacts in all colours, many of them unknown to nature. My fingers still remember the slimy, pliable plastic; I dipped and
twisted the flower-heads, turning them to a pleasant angle. Even the folded petals could be moved, so you could elect the bud or the full-blown rose. You could cram them in the same vase, crimson and stippled apricot, youth and age, the whisper of promise and the rose past its prime; they were scentless, accreting to themselves a sticky grey dust, as if they leaked something that would attract it. Arranging them was my hobby, for quite some time.

There was a hairdressing-room up on the sixth floor, with wash-basins and hand-held showers over them. Some of us used to go up there and experimentally dye our hair with solutions that called themselves ‘shampoo in, shampoo out’. They didn’t, of course, and one day in this seventh week of term, by some accident of mistiming and absent-mindedness, I coloured my hair a flaming red. What I had been after was a discreet enhancement of my moth-wing tufts: when I looked in the mirror I was appalled, but secretly gratified. A frail wisp crept in, a sad little scholar who missed her straw hat; an incendiary woman swept out.

‘Singular!’ Julianne said, when we met that evening. ‘What will Niall say? When will he be visiting you? I’ll make myself scarce, you know.’ She came up to me and buffeted my boxer’s head with her big soft hands. ‘I worry about you. You used to have sex every weekend. You must be frustrated. I worry will you run amok.’