An Experiment in Love

by Hilary Mantel

  Midnight again: I came back from the kitchen at the end of the corridor with our clean plates stacked in my hands and our butter knife balanced on top. Julianne was standing at our wash-basin, legs apart, enthusiastically soaping her genitals. I put the plates into her bedside cupboard; she towelled herself, floated damply into her nightdress, and ran a hand through her curls. ‘Carmel, about you and Niall. Shouldn’t you ever branch out? Explore the options? Is there only one cock in the world?’

  ‘I love Niall,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you do. Hardly a reason not to sleep with anyone else, is it?’

  ‘I couldn’t do that. Why would I want to?’ My flesh would revolt, I thought.

  ‘Experience.’ She plumped down on the end of her bed, her large breasts jumping once. Her tongue crept out, its tip cherry red, and smoothed a flake of rough skin on her upper lip; January was proving cold. ‘I don’t think I knew you, Carmel, when we were at the Holy Redeemer. All this . . . intensity.’

  Intensity: it is a word of abuse flung at thin women, at thin women who have any pretence at an inner life. It is a label, less costly than the kind I had put on my suitcase.

  ‘Is experience good for its own sake?’ I asked.

  I felt Julianne’s greedy gaze fasten on me: as if she were going to dissect me. Her eyes stripped me down for a moment, down to the bone. Then she flopped back on the bed and stretched, easing her round ample limbs inside her lawn nightdress: abundant, generous, superbly amoral. It occurred to me that perhaps I was the subject of an experiment, an experiment, let us say, in love; that I lived my life under Julianne’s gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them herself. But how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don’t teach you how to live, you learn it from books; and clever people watch you, to learn from your mistakes.

  Niall had said he would like to buy me roses; I myself thought how nice it would be to have a pot-plant to enliven C3, with its magnolia walls and grinning skull and cheap teak-veneer desks. It was this fleeting desire that gave me the idea for my sweater.

  Perhaps a russet-brown is not the best colour for a newly red-headed girl. But I dreamt one night of the Holy Redeemer, of the hall at the House, of the broken tile that would give under the foot, tock-tock. The next day I went out and bought some wool the colour of a mellow old flowerpot. I made it up in a plain stocking-stitch, narrow at the waist, wide and square at the shoulder, with a turn-over to give a double thickness at the neck: like a flowerpot’s top. Every spare moment I knitted, sometimes far into the night. I thought that if I flew at it in this way, maintained the tension and momentum, I wouldn’t suffer my old problems of mangled wool and loss of confidence. I dreamt of when it would be finished.

  ‘I’m going to sew things on it,’ I told Lynette. ‘Drooping stems. Felt leaves. And flowers.’

  ‘It will be strikingly original,’ she said. ‘It will need to be dry-cleaned.’

  ‘I know that. I won’t wear it often. But I shall wear it on Guest Night.’

  At Tonbridge Hall, Guest Night came three times in the term. One table – where the warden and staff and Hall President normally dined – was described for the evening as High Table, and two others – also highish – were fitted to its ends, so that one had the familiar wedding reception pattern, an ‘E’ without its middle. The chief guest was someone distinguished, and the other three or four guests – who would be scattered on the wing-tables – would be cheerful, stoical women dons from various colleges, who were willing – for no payment – to spend the evening among us. Floor by floor, in our turn, we girls were allocated places among the guests; and now it was the turn of C Floor, and the Secretary of State for Education was to visit us. The kitchens made special efforts, of course, and a girl we knew from B Floor who had been at High Table last term said that you got given food in ordinary amounts, approximately twice as much as you would get if you were dining in the body of the hall.

  I had to work fast on the sweater. Lynette pored over the pattern and advised, but it was Karina whose practical skills came into their own when I had to press it and sew the pieces together. Her hair drooped over the ironing board, and there was a faint oily smell of singed wool. ‘Not too hot,’ I said nervously.

  ‘Look, relax, I know what I’m doing,’ she said. ‘Though I still think it’s ridiculous. I do, Carmel.’

  We hadn’t spoken so much in months. We had the ironing-room to ourselves; a window was open, and faint late-January sunlight filtered through the smoggy air. ‘Those silver beads you’ve got to sew on it, they’re going to look very peculiar.’

  ‘They’re for the centre of the daisies. I’ve got some gold ones too.’

  ‘Nobody grows daisies in flowerpots.’

  ‘It’s not an ordinary flowerpot. It’s a surreal one.’

  ‘You can excuse any ridiculous thing by calling it that.’

  ‘It will be unique.’ I put my hands on either side of my waist and squeezed. She looked up at me. ‘Carmel,’ she said, ‘why are you such a show-off?’

  ‘Show off? Me?’ A sour spurt of anger, like stomach acid, rose up into my throat. I reached across and tore my segments of sweater from under her hands. In doing so I knocked aside the iron, which she was holding loosely in her right hand, and it skimmed the knuckles of her left. I watched the mark appear, blue against the bone. Taking her own time, Karina placed the iron on its heel and raised the back of her hand to her lips and sucked it. ‘God, stop it,’ I said. ‘Rinse it under the cold tap.’

  ‘Saliva’s antiseptic,’ she said.

  I knew. I remembered learning that in biology, Form Four. ‘I haven’t killed you,’ I said. ‘It was only on bloody wool setting. Or it ought to have been.’

  When I got out into the corridor my knitting was still a hot parcel in my hands, tenuous and floppy; premature. Sabotage! I thought. She might have terminally scorched it, if her big mouth hadn’t made me intervene.

  When I got back to my room I felt shaky. I had lost my temper, and it was news to me that I had a temper to lose.

  That evening, my head bent over my task, I said to Julianne, ‘There’s something about Karina that makes me damage her.’

  Julianne gave me a blue-eyed, glazed look; disengaged herself from my remark. ‘Let’s see, then. Oh yes, I like the twisty stems.’

  I was sewing. My flowerpot sweater was assembled and I was applying its fantastical felt daisies, petal by petal. There were embroidered flowers too, less specific in type, and even the daisies were not the colours they are in life. I had remembered chain stitch, stem stitch and satin stitch, and my fingers moved more cleverly than they’d ever moved under a teacher’s eye. I had spilt my little beads out of their paper bags, and corralled them in Jule’s ashtray. They looked sinister, as they rolled: like the vital parts of a missile system.

  I spread out my work on the end of my bed, so that Julianne could finger it and politely exclaim, with a simple kindness I might have thought foreign to her. ‘Vine leaves,’ she said, ‘couldn’t you do vine leaves? It would add a touch of the exotic.’

  It struck me that perhaps Tonbridge Hall was drawing us together: who is my neighbour? ‘Wake me up tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I want to come to breakfast.’

  I woke at four o’clock and lay in the dark. The bedspread, under my hand, was like gritty sand. Twice I got up to check the travel alarm. For three days I had not heard from Niall. Since Christmas there had been these gaps, of a day here and a day there – but never a gap of three days together.

  By seven I was drowsing: too late. I forced myself out of bed and opened the window a crack. The cold entered the room like an intruded knife. Standing over Julianne, I touched her elbow. ‘Scrambled,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Egg.’

  Her eyes were closed, her breathing even; her upper lip curled back, as if she might draw blood. Nevertheless, twenty minutes later she stumbled
down the stairs with me, pretending to be an invalid and slumping on my arm. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘I have to check my post.’

  ‘Post? Does it come at this time?’

  My hand plunged into the pigeonhole. ‘It’s my letter. I’ve been waiting. It’s come.’

  Julianne seemed dazed. I slid a bank statement and a postcard from her pigeonhole and pressed them into her fist. I carried Niall’s letter into breakfast; I wanted to rip it open at once, but I knew I would not get the best out of it if I read it in public. I wanted to be able to dwell on every word, and at intervals press the paper to my cheek, pretending it was his skin. This effort of imagination could only be made in private.

  I put the letter on my chair, collected my breakfast from the hatch, picked up the letter again and put it on my lap. Weak tea was poured. There was a patter of rain against the long windows. Lynette had not yet put on her lipstick; her face seemed only half-formed. Karina sat rubbing her eyes. ‘Toast, Carmel?’ cried Claire. There was a grating cheeriness in her voice.

  Sue sat at the end of the table, yawning hugely. ‘Don’t you think we ought to be allowed to come down in our dressing-gowns?’

  ‘There would be some melancholy sights,’ Lynette said.

  Claire said crossly, ‘Really, if people can’t make the effort – ’

  ‘What’s the matter with you this morning?’ Julianne asked her.

  ‘And what’s the matter with you?’ Claire snapped back. ‘We never see you at breakfast. What have we done to deserve this honour?’

  ‘Think of it as a rehearsal for Guest Night,’ Lynette murmured.

  I looked down the table at Claire: irate, her wood-shaving curls leaping away from her scalp. Sue looked jaundiced, and as if she had not slept. She kept her place when the rest of us trooped up for our scrambled egg. It slid through the tines of our forks, pale and perplexing as ever. Sue began to butter a half-slice of rubber toast, and then lost interest. She dropped her knife rather ostentatiously, let it clatter on to her plate. I glanced at her, sympathizing.

  Julianne picked up her teaspoon and tapped it against the rim of her cup. ‘Young ladies, if I may have your attention? You may well ask what I’m doing at breakfast. If this pap is the standard, I’ve been well out of it, and as for the grace, wit and civility of the conversation – ’

  ‘Go and eat worms,’ I said.

  ‘They would be a most acceptable substitute: but first I wish to make an announcement.’ I noticed a little stir at an adjacent table; they thought it was an engagement, and that soon a diamond would be passed around. ‘I thought it was better to do it all at once,’ Julianne said. ‘I’m going to change my name. I don’t want to be called Julianne any more.’

  ‘Why not?’ Lynette said. ‘It’s . . . sweet.’

  ‘So it is,’ Julianne said. ‘And so I’m not. It’s a doll’s name. A baby name. I don’t want it. From now on you can simply call me Julia.’

  There was a short silence. Then, ‘Fine,’ Claire said. ‘If you like.’

  Lynette said, ‘Perhaps I, myself, should consider . . .’

  Karina said, ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re called. It doesn’t change what you are.’

  This made Julia smile. ‘Anyone else want to join in? Carmel?’

  ‘Definitely,’ I said. ‘Call me Zsa-Zsa.’

  ‘Make me Fifi,’ Sue said. Her voice was wobbly. Our heads flicked in her direction. She stood up, gripped the back of her chair; she hung on to it for a second, then blundered towards the door.

  I was quickest on my feet, sprinting out after her. She let the heavy half-glazed door swing back in my face, and she was crouching on the floor outside the diningroom when I reached her. I had brought my letter with me of course, but I dropped it so that I had both hands free to scoop her floppy fair hair back from her face. Her hand clawed at my shoulder for support. She was sick on the floor, my right shoe and my letter.

  The shoe could be salvaged. Had to be, really. But my letter was illegible and smelt noxious. It was by an act of omission, not commission, that I understood its contents. I heard nothing from Niall for the rest of the week, and on Sunday I took the extreme, panicky step of telephoning him at his lodgings.

  There was a delay before he came to the phone, and his voice was reluctant. I burst into tears when I heard it. ‘I thought you were dead under a truck,’ I said. ‘I thought you must be.’

  ‘You didn’t get my letter?’

  I couldn’t seem to make him understand that Sue had been sick on it. ‘Why was she?’

  ‘Because she’s pregnant,’ I said. ‘Why else?’

  A long breath. It was a bad line, but in time I understood that we were finished, that he wanted – what did he say? I can’t remember now. The phrases fade. It seemed to have something to do with the fox fur. That he was afraid of what I’d be like, in ten or twenty years, if that was what I deemed to be the proper solace for a cold night.

  The next day I didn’t go to lectures. It was the first time I had missed. Sue came to my room mid-morning. Her face was swollen from crying. She had been home for the weekend, and given Roger her news. Her account of events was sketchy, jarring and not entirely coherent, but it was obvious to me that Roger was stringing her along. I worked at embroidering my sweater, because while my face was hidden from her I could evade the task of assuming a suitable expression.

  ‘Want another coffee?’ she said. Her voice was blurred, thickened with mucus. All morning she had been walking up and down to the kitchen at the end of the corridor, just for something to do: the grey thin liquid overflowing the beakers, slopping over oblivious hands. She did not drink it, I did not drink it; it sat beside us and went cold, until Sue suggested more.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘You get yourself one.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t, I feel bloated.’ Sitting on Julia’s bed, she leant back against the wall, her hands resting above her navel.

  ‘So what did he say then? What did he really say?’

  ‘Well, he seemed – pleased. Not exactly. Pleased in a way, as if, you know, he hadn’t expected it, but – well, he didn’t say much, really.’

  ‘So he wants you to have it?’

  ‘We didn’t talk – I mean, I think it was pretty much of a shock – ’

  ‘Are you going to have it?’

  ‘God, I don’t know. My parents will be livid. They’ll chuck me out.’

  In that year, parents still did. For Catholic girls there were small hospitals run by nuns, in discreet rural areas. Parents paid the train fare, and gave a donation; their daughter returned home when her stomach was flat, and the baby was never seen again. Folklore insisted that the experience was penitential: schoolgirls screaming in a twenty-four-hour agony, while Sister pottered serenely in another room.

  Head still bent, I considered Sue’s phraseology. ‘Livid’ – that was a word she’d got from Claire. ‘Chuck me out’ – could be natural to her, or could be one of those pseudo-robust phrases that boarding-school girls employ. It seemed not surprising to me that, out of all of us, this fate had chosen Sue. She had a partial, permeable quality. Words penetrated her; bits of other people’s experience intruded themselves into her, like needles picking up the skin. As she talked I heard all the dislocations in her speech, the strange gaps between word and word, the shift from her lurching southern consonants to Claire’s posh rounded vowels. She is a thing of shreds and patches, I thought. A stem grew under my hands. I heard the tiny rasp of wool against wool, as I slid my needle through; the silver beads under my fingertips felt like ball-bearings.

  ‘So . . . it doesn’t look as if you’re setting up house with Roger, then?’

  Sue put up her knuckles and pressed them against her mouth. For a moment I thought that she was going to vomit, then I saw that she was thinking. Her eyes moved, once, in their sockets. ‘What would you do?’ she mumbled through her fists.

  I wouldn’t be in your situation, I thought. You must be one of those nice girls, that my
mother told me about; the nice girls who don’t know what’s what. ‘I’d probably get rid of it,’ I said.

  She took her hands away. ‘Is that your advice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you give advice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘You go to the Student Health Service.’

  ‘Would it cost anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Roger hasn’t got any money.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’ve only got my grant.’

  ‘Were you on the Pill?’

  ‘At first.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I wanted to know if I could have one.’

  I looked up, from the delicate terminal frill of a petal extravagantly curled. ‘You wanted what?’

  Sue’s face had the tint and dullness of well-boiled cauliflower. It couldn’t be said that pregnancy suited her. ‘Help me, Carmel,’ she said. ‘Don’t blame me. Why should anybody blame me? I just wanted to know, you see, to be sure. It’s natural. It’s natural to want to know. Natural.’

  ‘Natural,’ I repeated. I reached for my scissors. I had inserted my final stitch. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art.

  Lynette had an easy day on Mondays, and was always home by mid-afternoon. ‘Zsa-Zsa!’ she said. She had bought a toaster, too; out of habit, she leapt to it.

  ‘No, no toast! By Guest Night I want to be perfectly triangular.’ I whipped out my sweater from under my arm. ‘That belt that you said perhaps – ’

  Lynette was already reaching for it. It was a wide belt, crushing and severe, made of stiff leather in an interesting shade of glossy deep green. ‘Can’t think why I bought it,’ Lynette had said earlier. ‘The colour, it seemed special. I suppose it was foresight.’