In summer, when I was a small girl, we would take a bus to the outskirts of the town, and walk in the hills, rambling along the bridle paths in clear green air. We were above the line of the mill chimneys; like angels, we skimmed their frail tops.
Once you have begun remembering – isn’t this so? – one image springs another; they run through your head in all directions, scampering animals flushed from coverts. Memory’s not a reel, not a film you can run backwards and forwards at will: it’s that flash of startled fur, the slither of silk between the fingers, the duplicated texture of hair or bone. It’s an image blurring, caught on the move: as if in one of my family snapshots, taken before cameras got so foolproof that any fool could capture the moment.
I remember this.
I am six years old, and I have been ill. After this illness I am returning to school. It is a spring morning, water gurgling in the gutters, a keen wind. I am still shaky, unused to going out, and I have to hold tight to my mother’s hand as she leads me through the school gate. Perhaps I don’t want to go; I don’t know. There is one tree in our school playground, and the scud and dapple of sun across its leaves is like the feeling in my limbs, now heavy, now light. Everything is new to me. My eyes are clear and cold, as if they have been rinsed in ice water.
Inside the classroom the air is hot and fusty. It smells of damp and wool and of our playtime milk cooking in its bottles beside the radiator pipes, growing glutinous and clotted. Perhaps in summer, when we have our holidays, this smell goes away? In detail: chalk smells of peaches, or I think the word ‘chalk’ is like the word ‘peaches’, because of the texture both sounds share, the plushness and the grain. Rulers smell of their wood, of their varnish, and of the salt and flesh of the hand which has warmed them: as you draw them beneath your nose you feel each dividing notch, so that each fraction of an inch has its measured segment of scent. My teacher will snarl – her eyes popping at me – that in all the time I’ve been off sick she thinks I might have learnt to draw a straight line. But that’s later; for this morning there’s an element of sweetness, and this shivering light. It is as if my teacher has forgotten who I am, and that when she last saw me she threatened to hit me for singing. My renaissance has called out of her a vague good-will. ‘Let me see,’ she says, looking around the classroom. ‘Where would you like to sit?’
The luxury of choice. My fingers curl into my palms like snails. I know what I would like: to sit next to someone who has a certificate to show that there are no insects in their hair. Eggs, my mother says, eggs are what you find, but I cannot imagine eggs unless they are hens’ eggs. While she scrapes my scalp with the steel comb she always emphasizes that lice are democratic, that they visit the rich as well as the poor – though we don’t, I think, know anyone who is rich – and that they like, they positively prefer, clean heads over dirty ones. I come into the category of clean heads, and she tells me this so that I will not look down on the insects’ victims, or taunt them in the playground, or chant at them.
I look around the room. Under their pullovers – which might be maroon, or a mottled grey – the boys wear grey shirts, their collars springing upwards, twisted and wrung as though they’ve tucked down their chins and chewed them. They wear striped elastic belts with buckles like two snakes in a headlock. Their hair is either chopped straight across their foreheads or it is shorn off to stubble. When they go home, in bad weather – which is to say, in most weather – they wear knitted balaclava helmets, and one boy has an even more terrible item, a leather helmet, thin black leather like a saurian skin, tight to his skull and fastening under his chin with a tarnished buckle. When I look at the boys I see bristles and snouts, rubber faces always contorting and meemowing. They are always lolling their tongues and wriggling their ears, or polishing their noses with the flats of their palms, working the cartilage violently round and round. Their not-yet-hairy limbs are pliable as ruddy clay, as a doll I have called a Bendy Toy; I can almost smell the rubber and feel the boneless twist I give its legs. I think I will not sit next to a boy.
I look at the girls and the girls look back at me, various expressions of dullness or spite on their faces. Their hair is braided tightly into stubby plaits, or chopped short below their ears; if the latter, it is parted at one side, and pinned off their faces with a great black grip. They have an assortment of navy cardigans, some of them washed out and shrunken, with the buttons through the wrong holes. Some have pleated skirts, or gym-slips like blue-black cardboard, like solid ink; some have cotton frocks under their cardigans, frocks that are limp and soft and pastel. I think, as the lesser evil, I will sit next to a girl.
But there are two difficulties here. One is that I have been away so long that I do not have a friend. The other is that my mother has embroidered a gambolling lamb and a frieze of spring flowers right over the skirt of my blue cotton dress. It is a sky-blue dress, and otherwise plain; I see them looking into my sky. They both want and don’t want it. I can expect no mercy.
I sway on the spot. The hem of the dress brushes the tender skin at the back of my knees.
‘Well . . . make up your mind,’ my teacher says.
Miss Whittaker, who teaches the next class, is said to make a speciality of hitting pupils on the backs of their knees. Knuckle-rapping has gone quite out of style.
I look around, and see Karina. There is a chair empty next to her. She lifts her broad face to the light, and gives me a benevolent smile. She is wearing a yellow cardigan, yellow and fluffy, the colour of a new chicken in a picture book. Her plaits are fat and bound with white ribbons looped into flamboyant bows. From the braids and all around her head tiny threads or wires of hair stand out, white-blonde, quivering. Her face is like the sun.
‘There, please,’ I say.
Complacently, Karina begins to rearrange her possessions on the table: square up her ruler, her pencil, the cardboard box in which (at this tender age) we keep our lined paper for writing, and our squared paper for sums.
Next day when Julianne arrived, I was lying on my bed smoking a cigarette. ‘My God!’ she said, shrieking inside the doorway. ‘Your hair! My God!’
I sat up, smiling solemnly. My hair, which had been down to my waist at the end of the school term, was now clipped close to my head, scarcely an inch long all over. Glimpsing myself in shop windows this last week, I had whirled around to confront the stranger who seemed always at my shoulder; it was myself. My head felt light and full of possibilities, like a dandelion clock.
Julianne crossed the room, picked up my packet of cigarettes, and fitted one into her full red mouth. ‘Why did you do it? Did you have nits, or is it a symbol?’ She caught sight of herself in the mirror. Put up a large hand to touch her own hair, silky hanks the colour of butterscotch. ‘This mirror is useless,’ she grumbled.
‘Duck.’
She bent her knees. ‘Useless. It’s not the top of my head I need to see, it’s the rest of me.’
‘Perhaps we might rehang it.’
‘And knock a lump out of the bloody wall.’
There was an oblong coffee-table in the middle of the room, centred on the striped cotton rug that was centred on the polished floor. Julianne tested the table with her hand and then stepped up on it. A piece of her came into view through the mirror: her knees, coloured tights, the swish of her short skirt. The table groaned. ‘Careful!’ I said. She stretched out a hand, palm forth, like an orator. We were stuffed with education, replete with it: ‘Make a speech,’ I suggested.
‘Gaul is divided into three parts,’ she proffered, in Latin.
‘That isn’t a speech.’
‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ She studied her reflection. ‘Not bad.’ She stepped down, glowing.
‘Your case,’ I asked. ‘Where is it?’
‘I left it for the porter.’
‘Lawdy me!’ I thought of my dislocated limb. ‘Now he will carry it up for you, and you’ll have to give him a tip. That will be embarrassing for you.’
�
��You don’t have to tip this kind – ’ She broke off. She smirked. She saw how it was going to be. We were free now, to enjoy each other’s company; free and equal, to be as silly and as sharp as we liked. ‘I smelt soup,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid you did.’
‘Christ.’ She said it with a volume of disgust.
‘Do you remember at school, when Laura took that message over to the kitchens, and they were putting the cabbage on at half-past nine?’
A further blank distaste fell into Julianne’s eyes. ‘We’ll not discuss our academy,’ she said. Tut I must say for it, that at least at the end of the day they let us go to our own homes to eat and have baths.’
‘There are communal arrangements,’ I said.
‘Are there mirrors?’
‘What?’
‘Are there full-length mirrors? In the bathrooms?’
‘No. Only pipes. Steam. The water is hot. There are white tiles, not much cracked, and scouring powder on a ledge, for when you’ve done.’
‘I don’t see how you’re expected to manage it. To take a bath without a mirror.’
I kept quiet. It had never seemed to me essential. Even important at all. ‘They’re only along the corridor,’ I said. ‘Three bathrooms in a row. There’s no reason why I should describe them to you.’
‘I like to have you describe things,’ she said moodily. ‘Descriptions are your strong point. God knows why you want to be reading law. Vanity, I suppose. You want to show your frightful grinding omnicompetence.’ She looked about her. ‘I see you’ve taken the best desk. The best bed.’
She sat down on her own bed, and began to simper. ‘At the hair,’ she explained. ‘Come now, Carmel, how can you bear to leave the old country behind? A girl like you, brought up with every advantage . . . the rag rugs, the flying ducks on the wall . . .’
‘We don’t, actually, have any flying ducks. Though my aunt has them.’
‘Maybe not, but I expect you have one of those fireside sets, do you, with little gilt tongs and a gilt shovel?’
I smiled, in spite of myself.
‘Shingled,’ she said. ‘Would that be the word? Cropped. Shaved.’ She pointed. ‘Do you know how that head of yours affects me? Sitting behind your straggly pigtails year in, year out, with your ribbons with the ends cut in Vs like they do them on wreaths – ’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘ – and then to walk in here, Miss, to a room in London in this Hall of Residence, where we are confined at Her Majesty’s Pleasure . . .What do you think, would they let us move out and get a flat?’
‘Together?’
‘Why not?’
‘What about my lower-class ways?’
She blew smoke at me. ‘I have an urge to say to you, Bejasus!’
‘Is that so?’
‘It would be nice if we went about and talked like an Edna O’Brien novel. It would suit us.’
‘Yes, it would become us,’ I said. ‘We haven’t the class for Girls of Slender Means.’
‘Speak for yourself. You charwoman’s daughter.’ Julianne wiped her eyes, but then she began to laugh again almost at once.
I told her about the poems that ran around in my head. She said, ‘You need to be taken out of yourself. We should go out and do some living. We could go to some students’ union or other, we must belong to them now. We will have a bottle or two of Guinness, will we? To build us up?’
There was a sound of revelry by night, I said to myself. I could have bitten the secret tongue in my brain that said it. Why did I think I was preparing for the Battle of Waterloo? Julianne made everything seem normal, but it was not normal for me. Her home was recoverable; she could travel to it next weekend, if she wished, and tumble into her frilly bed in her familiar room. I could not return until Christmas – at which point I could reclaim a fare from my local authority. Her parents, she had said, had offered to drive her down, see her installed, inspect her room and add a luxury or two; but she thought it better to make the break, get clean away on the Euston train, and besides, they must realize her accommodation was shared, and I might have brought my own luxuries with me.
I fought off self-pity: which Julianne’s words, on the whole, seemed designed to stimulate. I felt homesick already, and poor, more with the apprehension of poverty than with an actual lack in my purse; my right arm, that racked limb, did not feel as if it would support the weight of a bag of textbooks. If only the work would begin: the ink, the files, the grit behind sleepless eyes, the muffled tread of the invigilators. That was what I had come here for: to make my way, to make my living.
There was a knock on the door. Julianne bounced across the room. It was the porter, bringing her suitcase. ‘Put it there!’ she sang. She stretched her arms wide – Lady Bountiful. There was a plum cake inside her travelling bags, baked at home and sealed in a tin. She knew how to manage her life, how to go away from home. I thought of her father, the doctor; of her three brothers, who at their school played lacrosse. Brothers are an advantage, in the great world; they give a girl the faculty of easy contempt for men. Julianne’s skin seemed polished; she was altogether more apt for adventure, more translatable.
‘Julianne,’ I said, ‘you haven’t mentioned the obvious fact.’
She stretched her eyes. ‘Where is it obvious, where, the obvious fact?’
‘You know I mean Karina.’
‘Spare me,’ Julianne said.
‘She hasn’t got here yet, at least so far as I . . .’
‘Even so. Spare me.’
‘They asked if you wanted to share with her.’
Julianne stared at me. ‘Where in God’s name did they get that idea?’
I smiled inside. ‘They only asked. I think it was a formality.’
‘I hope you requested them to put her very far away, in the lowest, highest – ’
‘In fact she’s next door.’
‘You’re not telling me you let them – ’
‘No, OK. I’m lying. She’s on this corridor. C21.’ For I had seen the warden’s pencil moving swiftly over the lists, allocating numbers and floors. ‘Quite far away.’
‘Who with?’
‘A stranger.’
‘It would have to be. A stranger, it would have to be. If you had pulled some trick,’ she said, ‘and left me with Karina, I would never have spoken to you again.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I would have run up to you in the street with a specially made snagger and laddered your best tights. I would have got a packet of Durex and written on them “From Carmel to Niall, in anticipation,” and I would have taken them out of the packet and stuck pins in them all over and then folded them back in and sealed up the seal and posted them to your boyfriend and written SWALK on the envelope.’
‘Finished now?’
‘Sealed With A Loving Kiss,’ she said.
I wanted to plead, and say, but Karina, we are going to, you know, be friends with her? Aren’t we? But I couldn’t. It sounded too childish. As if we hadn’t moved on. I picked up my packet of Players and tossed it on to Julianne’s bed. ‘There you are. I’ve given up smoking,’
She gaped at me. ‘You’ve only just begun it.’
‘Even in my habits I mean to be fickle.’
Julianne laughed. Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes.
two
I never knew what nationality Karina was: or, as I believe, what mixture of nationalities. ‘I’m English,’ she would say defiantly. Perhaps this hurt her parents. When she was ten or so they wanted to send her off to a Saturday school, so that she could learn to read and write in her native languages, and learn folk-songs and folk-dances, and have national costumes. Stoutly, dumbly, she resisted this. ‘Wear a stupid apron!’ was all she said. ‘Wear a stupid bonnet!’
It torments me now, that I am so vague: were her parents Polish, Ukrainian, Estonian? If they themselves didn’t share a native tongue, that would explain why in their household communicat
ion was often in rudimentary English. I remember them as shapeless, silent people, in woollen clothes which they wore in many layers. They both worked in the mills, in jobs that required no verbal facility, in rooms where the clatter of the machines was so loud that speech was impossible anyway.
Karina’s house was just up the street from mine, just up Curzon Street. The houses on Curzon Street were made of red brick, like the houses in all the streets around. When you went in there was a vestibule and a sitting-room and behind it a kitchen of the same size. There were two bedrooms and no bathroom. The lavatory was outside in the yard. When I was a small child we had a rent man who called every Friday, and who stood filling the vestibule while cash was handed over and an entry was made in our rent book. Every year or so, the landlady would call to look over her property. She owned the whole of Curzon Street, every house, and all of Eliza Street too. She wore a heavy pink dusting of face powder, a dashing trilby with a feather, and a coat and skirt, which people then called a costume. ‘Did you see that costume?’ my mother would say. Every year she said this. She did not specify what it was about the costume that startled her: just ‘Did you see that costume?’ Then one year, in a violent outburst, she added, ‘I could have made it myself. Run it up for a guinea, on the machine.’
Until I was nine or so, my mother and father and I washed by rota at the kitchen sink, using a pink cake of soap my mother kept in an enamel dish, and sharing a towel that looped on a hook in the cupboard beneath. Mornings were slow work, because of modesty. My mother went first; by the time I was shouted to come downstairs, the mysteries of her bust were preserved beneath hasty pearl-buttoning, only the rough flushed skin of her throat suggesting that she had scrubbed herself half-naked just minutes before. Standing before the mirror, she would swipe the bridge of her nose with her powder-puff; it distributed a different dust from our landlady’s, and I would watch her slice down and across and down, practised and ruthless as a man wiping mortar over bricks, obliterating her mottled bits with an overlay of khaki, and slicing off the surplus with the edge of the puff. I would sit at the kitchen table, shivering sometimes, my feet dangling in mid-air below the hem of my nightdress; I watched while my father shaved. His mouth was stopped by soap, his face tilted as though he were communing with saints; the humiliating female reek of the pink soap leaked from the skin of his freckled shoulders.
An Experiment in Love: A Novel Page 2