An Experiment in Love: A Novel (26 page)

The following day, Sue was up and about: uncertain, looking drained and ill, but no worse than people do look in the course of a London winter. There was an unspoken agreement that we would never again refer to what had taken place. Her child must vanish into the blank badlands of never-was: very different, of course, from the glittering realm of might-have-been.

That evening Lynette came to our room with a bottle of whisky. ‘Not one of my more elegant offerings,’ she said. ‘But now the crisis is over, I think we all need a proper drink.’

Julia slapped her book shut, and so did I. Claire was with us; she had brought her evening’s work in, because Sue had been ready for bed and wanted the lights out by eight o’clock. When Claire saw the bottle she excused herself, and said she would go downstairs and sit in the room off the hall that was called the Quiet Room; quiet
was what she needed, she said. ‘Oh, Claire, come on, loosen up, have a drink . . .’ we said; but our pleas tailed off, we weren’t convincing. She went, we breathed a sigh, we smiled.

We brought our tooth-glasses; but Lynette had a cut-glass tumbler in her hand, heavy-based and glinting. Julia leant forward and flicked her nail against its rim. A thin melodious note shivered in the air. Julia and I both tried out our tumblers; there was nothing but a dull clink. ‘So,’ Julia said, ‘you are a serious spirits drinker. I knew your vices could not remain hidden for ever.’

Lynette’s blackberry eyes sharpened. ‘I wouldn’t have said they were hidden at all.’

‘What do you do for sex?’ Julia asked.

‘Oh, I get it in Harrow,’ Lynette said. ‘We go on, you know, pretty much as the rest of the world, but I do have a person back there, and I really don’t want to get him mixed up in all this.’

All this: the atmosphere of bath water and parsnips, talc and blood. Some hideous girls used to shave their legs and leave the hairs in the bath. Is it surprising that Tonbridge Hall saw the death of love?

The three of us grew cynical, and perhaps a little drunk. ‘The question is, who’s next?’ Lynette said. ‘Would you like to place a bet on my room-mate?’

For a moment the two of us spluttered out our whisky down our noses. Julia said, ‘Lynette, I know she’s put on weight, but you must understand that she’s naturally gross. I mean, imagine, who would look twice – she doesn’t bring anyone back, does she?’

‘Not that I know. Of course, I’ve had weekends away.’

‘You’ve never seen her with anybody, have you, Carmel?’

‘No.’ I fell silent, cherishing my whisky, trying to imagine Karina and her beau – any possible beau – running the gauntlet of the signing-in system. Karina just wouldn’t go for it, I felt. If she wanted to bring a boy in, and anybody tried to stop her, she’d square up and curl her lip and then –
BIFF!!!
– that would be the warden laid out, blood springing from her nose in fountains. I said faintly, ‘I suppose she could have met someone outside.’

Julia began to laugh. She fell back on her bed and kicked her legs; this was extravagance, I felt. ‘Carmel, you’re a riot,’ she said. ‘Outside? In a park, you mean? You think she did it in a shelter, or under a bush?’

‘Not that sort of outside,’ I said severely. ‘I mean out of here, somebody else, not even a student. Honestly, Jule, this is no laughing matter.’

I felt a thrill of fear.

Julia wiped her eyes. ‘I find it so.’

That was a long night. I had to catch up on what I’d missed, but the whisky had flown straight to my head and it was hard to keep awake. I read the case of
Thomas v. Bradbury
(1906) in which an author sued a malicious book reviewer, and won. I rubbed my eyes and adjusted the desk lamp to cast a better light. Julia snored discreetly behind me, the covers flung back and one arm flopping out of bed.

Next I read the case of
Carlill v. Carbolic Smokeball Co
. (1883). This was a case of a quack remedy, backed up
by ritzy claims: the smoke ball claimed to prevent influenza and to cure coughs, colds, asthma, croup, neuralgia and a mysterious condition called throat deafness. ‘Oh, and snoring,’ I said out loud. ‘Cures snoring, within a week.’ It occurred to me that I hadn’t been down to dinner that evening. No particular reason, I’d just been immersed in my work; when Julia said, ‘Are you coming?’ I’d waved her to go on ahead.

The heating was off; I rubbed my upper arms, and groped for my cardigan. The travelling alarm showed three o’clock. Thoughts of Karina kept sliding into my head. How pathetic if we’d all been so absorbed in Sue – and let’s face it, if I’d been so
self
-absorbed – that we had missed, or simply misinterpreted, the fact that Karina was swelling before our eyes . . . But no. Don’t be frightened, I said to myself, it’s just the macaroni, just the macaroni and the powdered soup and gristle pies and ogres’ penises. It’s the sheer quantity of food ingested that makes her get bigger and bigger.

I tried to imagine Karina in a man’s arms: a romantic encounter, a lace pillow, an orchid. I could imagine only the Victoria bus station. It was engraved on my mind, the day long ago when I’d seen her on the way home from school, smoking with a crowd of boys. I knew – I’d known for years – that Karina had another life, one hidden from me. I just didn’t understand the nature of it, and she didn’t mean me to.

Now: I ran my fingers through my short hair, I tugged it hard to make myself concentrate. The Smoke Ball Co. offered a reward of one hundred pounds to anyone who contracted influenza after using their product.
It claimed that one smoke ball would last a family for months; it produced testimonials. The Bishop of London said the invention had benefited him greatly. The Duke of Portland wrote that he found it most efficacious. Lady Mostyn said she would have pleasure in recommending it to her friends.

I was hungry; it could not be ignored. I had to wait a moment to place the sensation, it was so unfamiliar. When I thought about it, I couldn’t remember eating a meal since the day of Niall and the roast-lamb dinner; not positively. I must have done, of course; consumed toast, the odd yoghurt, an egg here and there, a bar of chocolate. But if you asked me what I ate yesterday, or the day before – I had no idea. I thought, I could go downstairs and read the menu by the warden’s office; that would give me a clue.

I groped in my bedside cupboard, to see if by chance there was a forgotten half-packet of biscuits. Nothing: there were crumbs, that’s all, grit under my fingers. I tiptoed across the room to look in Julia’s cupboard. There was an orange, a luminous disc in the darkness. She would not mind my taking this, I thought. After all, she knows I have to sit up and work all night. I dug my fingers into its skin, and the pulp gave beneath them, and the juice ran; I licked it from my fingertips. Mrs Carlill used the smoke ball, but went down with flu just the same. She sued the company for the hundred pounds.

I noticed that my heart was beating very fast: a skipping rhythm. My chest felt tight: perhaps because I was trying to imagine the smoke ball, work out what
kind of thing it could be. Some juice dripped on to my file paper. I will talk to Karina tomorrow, I thought. I will go to her room and be friendly, we will sit down and chat, I will have the opportunity to look at her closely and if there’s anything she wants to tell me she’ll have the chance. After all, I am her oldest friend.

Dawn came. I could sense rather than hear or smell the preparations for breakfast going on below. I shifted in my chair; my legs were stiff, and I had the beginnings of a headache. The whisky, I thought; I’m not used to it. My desk lamp still burnt feebly. I heard Julia stir. I turned, stood up shakily, and saw myself in the mirror that hung beneath Mrs Webster’s shelf; I was narrow, a bar of darkness, a shade.

Julia sat up, yawning. ‘Is this Wednesday?’ she asked. Our faces looked bruised, half in shadow and half in weary light.

I had three tutorials that morning. Getting from floor to floor seemed more difficult than usual, and crossing the narrow street from building to building. At one o’clock I sat in one of the coffee bars over a cup of weak tea and a roll filled with grated cheese. The first oily filament of cheese on my tongue, my heart began to skip again; I put the roll back on my plate. An odd thing had happened that morning. My tutor asked me a question to which I knew the answer – but when I opened my mouth to reply, something completely different came out.

My tutor gave me an impatient smile. ‘No, no, no . . . hardly
Hartley v. Ponsonby
. That is the case of 1857, where
a sailor obtained remuneration in excess of the terms of his contract because nineteen persons of thirty-six had deserted, leaving only some four or five able seamen. No: I was adverting rather to
Hadley v. Baxendale
. Late delivery of replacement crankshaft for a mill, remember? Your very diligence is defeating you, Miss McBain. You look exhausted. Shall we pass on?’

It must be throat deafness, I thought. What might it be like to inhale a smoke ball . . . perhaps some mixture of disinfectant and steam – my tutor’s face altered slightly, slipped out of focus as if its planes had slid and subtly realigned themselves. I blinked. His face returned to normal. Another student was answering the question.

And now – it was another odd thing – I was not convinced that the canteen table was quite solid. When I touched its surface, it felt like last night’s orange pulp beneath my fingers: sticky of course, but also yielding. I stood up. I’d better get back to Tonbridge Hall, I thought; I knew that on a Wednesday Karina was home early.

I can dash back to the library later, I said to myself. Perhaps it would be better to miss dinner, as eating didn’t seem to suit me. I drank off the dregs of the weak tea; it was a comfort.

My walk home then became a journey; not just a trek, but a voyage full of surprises. As soon as I got out into the street I saw that nothing was solid, not the pavements, not the walls; everything I saw seemed created of waves, water, pure motion. I sailed along the Aldwych, around the bend in the river; paddled the shallows of
Drury Lane until I reached the wide, shining expanse of Holborn. The traffic was hushed and muted, cars become gondolas; Londoners bobbed and floated towards me, buoyant despite their February clothes.

Bloomsbury Street was a rank canal, with green weeds that pulled at my ankles, impeded me, exhausted me. By the time I dripped into Montague Place, my chest was crushed, my limbs quivering: my breathing was harsh and audible. Blood roared in my ears: or maybe it was the sea?

When I swum into Tonbridge Hall, the foyer was deserted and there was no one at the reception desk. Usually I ran up the stairs to C Floor, but today I decided to use the lift. But its door was wedged open, a scrawled ‘
OUT OF ORDER
’ notice taped to the wood. I began to walk upstairs. A sound, a certain noise, a rhythmic noise, began to thud in my ears. Surely I must be close to the sea now; I could hear the waves, I could hear the crash and roll of breakers. I have sailed away, for a year and a day, on a boat with a skeleton crew . . .

Somewhere between B Floor and C Floor, I sat down on the stairs. Not at once, but gradually, the sound of the sea diminished; but the world remained liquid, diffuse, unstable. My bag of books floated by my side. I didn’t think I would move again; wouldn’t ever bother. Just keep my head up, butting for the necessary air.

I grew cold, very cold. After a time, I wondered if I had fallen through ice; if so, the dying was not instantaneous, as I would have expected, but ridiculously prolonged. My head at least was still above the ice-line; while my body froze I engaged my mind in debate,
and my still-unfrozen mouth in badinage with would-be rescuers and passers by.

No one came, though. And time passed. Not much, perhaps; but this was early in the year, and soon there was a change, light to dark. I struggled for air, throwing out one arm to get a purchase on the banister. I gripped the wood, but my muscles had no strength any more. My hand slid away. I went under.

I had slipped beneath the sea. I had thought there would be starfish, castles of coral; I saw only wetter, deeper darkness. For a moment I fought. I wanted a spar, a piece of jetsam to save myself. But now I was drowning, and the current was tugging me away: the salt, the oil, the wrecking wave.

The next thing I heard was Karina’s voice; and when I breathed, I gulped in not water, but the hot re-used and re-circulated air I had breathed since last October. ‘Slumped on the stairs,’ she said. ‘Lucky I came along, really. She could have rolled right down and broken her neck.’ There was an interval of nothingness. I heard a door slam.

I had a dim memory of someone – it must have been Karina, I suppose – diving through the waters that had closed over my head. I remembered hands under my arms, and a terrible, implacable hauling . . . and my feet trailing after me, lifeless and numb. It was something that happened years ago, years ago when I was a child . . . so I told myself. My mouth had gaped, drowned by air; from deep inside came a wailing, panic-stricken, starved, unappeasable.

Now I was on my bed. Julia was leaning over me. She took my hand. It rose up on the end of my arm, floating into the air. She held it in hers for a long time, and felt each separate bone, so that I was hideously conscious of my own mortality.

‘Why starve?’ Lynette said. ‘You wonder.’

‘There are many reasons,’ Julia said. ‘Twisted religiosity. Poverty. Sexual disturbance. Inheritance. Zinc deficiency. Deficiency.’

‘I have honey in my room,’ Lynette said. ‘Unless Karina has eaten it.’

‘Yes, honey, that would be good. Do you have milk?’

‘No, it was off this morning, I forgot to put it out.’ I saw that Lynette was holding her purse. It was a little Italian change-purse, a draw-string bag as soft as skin, soft and puckered and weighted: she bounced it in her hand, waiting for instructions. ‘I’ll go to the milk machine on Store Street,’ she said.

‘Get two packets,’ Julia said. ‘Let’s hope she’ll keep it down.’

There was an interval of vacancy. The world might have stopped; I don’t know. The next thing I remember was that Julia was leaning over me again. She had stacked up three pillows behind me, and now she helped me to sit up, and put a mug of milk into my hand, letting go of it herself only when she was sure I had taken a grip. I began to cry. The tears were painful, as if they were washing gravel from under my eyelids. Iser, rolling rapidly.