I almost thumped her. ‘You’re not doing it proper.’ You have to be that person, I wanted to say to her, put their skin on your back. Grown-up words came bubbling into my mouth: rouge, piano stool, niece. I felt my face blossoming out, round as the full moon, and I smelt the fragrance of pink face powder: I had become Lady Smith. ‘I returned home last night,’ I enunciated carefully, ‘to find my favourite niece seated on the piano stool.’
‘Did she have pneumonia?’ Karina asked. Her voice was nothing like the Prince of Connaught’s: she wasn’t even trying. I thought, if I had scissors I could cut her string bag, and her loaves would tumble out and slide down the hill and then she’d catch it from her mother. But this was not the sort of thing I did to Karina, more the sort of thing she did to me. ‘Dumb insolence,’ she would sometimes say. ‘That’s bad. Very bad.’ It was a whole year since my run-in with Sister Basil; but Karina had appointed herself my spiritual guardian. ‘Did you say your morning prayers?’ she would ask me, when we met in the street at half-past eight. ‘What did you pray for?’
I pictured the loaves picking up speed, losing their tissue paper and collecting dry leaves and bubble-gum wrappers, rolling in at the shop doorway and bouncing back on to the shelves.
‘Your father and me have been talking,’ my mother said.
That woke me up. I’d never heard them talking. Not in months.
My mother had just come in. She’d been out cleaning. Other cleaning women might come and go in an old coat and a turban, but my mother wore a coat that was no more than medium-old, and a proper scarf, and she put lipstick on, Tan Fantasy. Once when she was in a good mood she let me try it. People take you at your own valuation, she said. Always remember that.
‘Can I have a biscuit?’ I asked. I thought it might be better not to know what they had been talking about.
‘All right, but one, mind, or you’ll spoil your tea.’ For a moment she was diverted; then, unknotting her scarf, she said, ‘We’ve decided we’ll let you sit for the Holy Redeemer.’
I had heard of the Holy Redeemer. It was an academy that Sister Basil often referred to, with a pious, grieving note in her voice, as if it were her land of lost content; though I am sure, now, that she had never set foot inside its portals. I said, ‘Sister Basil says the likes of us would never be fit for it in a thousand years.’
My mother snorted. ‘Sister Basil? That old nanny goat? What does she know? If you can pass your scholarship you can go. Why shouldn’t you? But you have to take their entrance exam as well.’
‘Is that harder than my scholarship?’
‘Not so hard that you won’t manage it, if you apply yourself.’
This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon.
‘Will I have a uniform like Susan Millington?’
‘Certainly you will.’
Susan Millington was a big girl who lived near the park in a detached house. She was the only person I had ever seen who went to the Holy Redeemer. She had passed her scholarship and then she had passed the entrance exam, I said to myself; that was how it was done.
The scholarship was the Eleven Plus. Almost everybody didn’t pass it. If boys failed, they sank below my horizon for a few years, then cropped up in a wedding photo, suit sleeves hiding any tattoos; oh, it’s a pity, my mother would say, he was a bright little lad, and now look at that trollop he’s landed with. If girls failed, they went to St Theresa’s up Pennyworth Brow, where they wore navy berets and laddered nylons. Sister Monica, who was in charge of us in the top class, was already priming us for it. ‘You will find there is first-rate equipment for domestic science,’ she said. ‘Electrical sewing-machines. A fully equipped laundry with steam-presses, and a model kitchen fitted out with a range of electrical cooking ranges. In point of fact, everything the heart could desire.’
A thought occurred to me: ‘If I go to the Holy Redeemer, I’ll have to go on the bus.’ A needle of anxiety probed my ribs; a bus, I thought, could get a child lost.
‘Two buses, at least,’ my mother said. ‘Three, if you’d like to save a long walk.’ She sounded proud, as if I had already been exalted. ‘It’ll be worth it, mark my words. Make no mistake about it. An honour and a privilege.’
I wanted to run and put my hand over her mouth. I didn’t know why she was saying such things.
It was nearly Bonfire Night. The evenings were dry and cold, and smelt of the fires to come. If you’re a Catholic you don’t burn Guy Fawkes; the Pope says you mustn’t.
We went from house to house, cob-coaling.
‘We come a cob-coaling for Bonfire Night,
Tally-ho, tally-ho . . .’
Some children hoped that after two lines the person would come out with money in their hand ready, because they didn’t know any more words. If the householder was slow they had to stand there just shuffling their feet and droning ‘Tally-ho’.
But I liked the words, the complete set. They had no meaning and yet they were crawling with it. I would have sung them for no money at all.
‘Down in yon cellar there’s an old umberella
And in yonder corner there’s an old pepper box.
Pepper box, pepper box, morning till night:
If you give us nowt we’ll steal nowt
We wish you good-night.’
By the time it came to the 5th of November, the weather was cloudy, damp and unseasonably warm. The Catherine wheels, nailed to coalhouse doors, twirled brokenly as if they were burning under a towel. Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius sputtered and coughed, giving a poor impression of their lethal past, and rockets shot into skies ready to receive and extinguish them. My grandad would always give a good firework display, whatever the prevailing conditions: Karina and I stood side by side in his backyard, two among a small crowd, cramming our mouths with parkin. I whispered, through the crumbs, ‘I’m going to sit for the Holy Redeemer.’
She turned on me, her eyes narrowed. If she had been less greedy she would have spat out her softening mass of oatmeal and treacle; but as it was she chewed vigorously till most of her cake was gone. ‘You - ARE - A - LIAR,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll have to tell it in confession.’
‘I am not a liar,’ I hissed back. ‘Susan Millington passed her scholarship and then she passed her entrance exam. I’m going on two buses, if not three. I’ll be getting a tennis racquet.’
‘If you believe that, you’re even dafter than you look.’
The lethargic bonfire put out its tongues: reaching, dull crimson, into heavy air. It was built nice and high – Joan of Arc, I thought – and I could see figures moving against its light; I could see Karina, as she swung her face away. One plait swayed out from under her pixie hood, like a sucker reaching for food. Envy, I thought. One of the Deadly Sins. We were having them in catechism. Cardinal Virtues: Justice, Fortitude, Temperance . . . My memory failed. There was grey smoke going up my nose. Four Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance. Murder. Sodomy. Oppression of the Poor. Defrauding the Labourer of his Wages.
My grandad gave me a sparkler, from a bunch sparking already in his own hand; he passed one to Karina, saying, ‘There you are, my duck.’ Turning a little to allow room, we wrote our names on the nearest air. My vast final loop threatened to set Karina’s sleeve on fire. As the tip of the sparkler drooped to ash, I wanted to challenge Karina to duel me with what remained, but I knew that duels – swordplay in general – were beyond her poor spirit. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ I was happy, even so; frightened, but getting reconciled to being frightened. I sang out: untuneful, smoke-captive: ‘Pepper box, pepper box, morning till night . . .’
‘STAND BACK,’ my grandad yelled.
On our left, a roman candle began to sputter and start, crackling pink and blue hyphens away from itself and by way of an arch into the ground. Another rocket rose, flipped, shot out a trail of subdued white stars and subsided in stifling mid-heaven.
. . . pepper box, morning till night: / If you give us nowt we’
ll steal nowt / We wish you good-night.’
The next thing I clearly remember, it was Christmas Eve. We were having visitors from Leeds, and my mother was neatly forking mixed pickles into her cut-glass dish that had been left her in a will. ‘If I see you messing with that dish,’ she said, ‘it’ll be a good slap and straight off to bed.’
Earlier, when my mother was milder, we had glued an angel to the window. Frail and phosphorescent, gauzy wings edged thinly with tinsel, she glittered out at Curzon Street. Silent night. Holy Night. From the Ladysmith came the sound of breaking glass. ‘Round yon virgin, mother and child . . .’ Karina always sang ‘Round John Virgin’. One of these years I would tell her: gently, of course. Unless next year I no longer knew Karina; but that seemed hardly possible, as whatever happened about the Holy Redeemer she and I would go on living six doors away from each other. I pictured myself, one year from now, wearing a velour hat like Susan Millington’s and gazing out through the angel’s wings at Curzon Street: waiting for snow to fall.
four
Tonbridge Hall: when it came to the night of the roast parsnips, my digestive system rebelled. ‘What’s the matter?’ Lynette said.
‘I just can’t, that’s all. They look like ogres’ penises.’
There was a small ripple of shock from the Sophies at the table.
Karina said, ‘You were always picky about your food.’
‘Not a fault anyone could lay at your door,’ Julianne said mildly.
‘Just leave it on your plate,’ Lynette urged. ‘Here, do you want to get rid of it? Give it to me. I’ll vanish it from your sight.’
It was too late. A kind of stricture had set in, a tightening in my throat, so that I could not eat the stewed beef that came with the parsnips, and would not be able to manage my square piece of sponge adorned with half an apricot. I do not mean to say that the food at Tonbridge Hall was bad – not bad like school dinners – it was just that some of it, for me personally, was impossible. Since we had got our fridge, our vegetables at home had been Bird’s Eye frozen peas; before we got our fridge, our vegetables had been carrots. But these woody things – broccoli – things with great uncooked stems – seemed to me fit only for cattle. The potatoes were hard too, sometimes bullet-hard, doled out sparingly, two per young lady; as if they were bullets indeed, and we were the sheriff’s men, who might easily get out of hand.
Now, I would not want you to think that this is a story about anorexia. There have been too many of those, whole novels about moony girls, spoilt girls, girls who dwindle away to wraiths and then blow up like party balloons. No: and yet partly it is a story about flesh, about the bodies that contained our minds. On the whole, during the years when we were educated, we were persuaded into thinking that bodies were an encumbrance, a necessary evil. At least that was the word put out at the Holy Redeemer, where I would first meet Julianne. But we were not so simple, not so tractable, by the time we were sixteen; we knew we lived in the era of the contraceptive pill, and that we had bodies, and that society expected us to get some use out of them. Let us say then it is a story about appetite: appetite in its many aspects and dimensions, its perversions and falling off, its strange reversals and refusals. That will do for now.
When I returned to my desk after dinner, these evenings at Tonbridge Hall, my foot would ruck up the cotton rug on the polished floor, and I would imagine sliding lightly on my back across the room and through the wall, floating out, weightless, over Bloomsbury. Some evenings I took a spoonful or two of soup, made my apologies, pulled on my coat and sped out again into the autumn evening, and I see myself now as if – FLASH – an inner camera has caught me forever, hand flung up before a white face, Carmel McBain, on her way to a meeting of the student Labour Club.
In Drury Lane, in the Aldwych, the theatres were opening their doors; in Houghton Street, a hot little café steamed its fumes over the pavement. I would run up the steps, into my place of work, my palace of wonders; the half-deserted building came with its echo, its ever-burning strip lights, its tar-smell of typewriter ribbons and smoke; in the mazes and catacombs you could sniff out your meeting, guided by your nose towards the dusty scent of composite resolutions, sub-sections and sub-clauses, stacking chairs, tobacco: the reek of Afghan coats and flying jackets, the vaporous traces left in the air they inhabit by weak heads and fainter hearts.
I do not remember that political philosophy was ever discussed, or political issues: only organization, personalities, how the Labour student movement should be run. In Paris, the ashes of the événements were hardly cool. Here in London, we discussed whether to go by coach (collectively) or to set out (individually) to some all-day-Saturday students’ meeting in some seedy provincial hall; and how much the coach would cost per seat. Whether there should be a joint social evening with the Women’s Liberation Group: would that be profitable to both, or end in some ideological and financial disaster?
It was men who spoke; not young and fresh ones, but crease-browed and leather-jacketed elders, men with bad teeth from obscure post-graduate specialities. They would shuffle or lurch to their feet; then would come nose-rubbing, throat-clearing; then their voices would rumble just audibly, like spent thunder in a distant valley. Some would speak slumped in their seats, eyes fixed on the ceiling, ash dripping from a cigarette. Their manner was weary, as if they knew everything and had seen everything, and they paused often, perhaps in the middle of a phrase, to blow their noses or make a snickering sound that must have been laughter. Their remarks reached no conclusion; at a certain point, they would become slower, more sporadic, and finally peter out. Then another would draw attention to himself, with the bare flutter of an agenda in the stale air: and grunting, shrugging, turning down his mouth, begin in the middle of a sentence . . . Dave and Mike and Phil were their names, Phil and Dave and Mike. Young women carried them drinks from the vending-machine, black coffee’s frail white shell hardly dented by their light fingertips.
I would put my head in my hands, sometimes, for even I must yawn; I would with delicacy track my fingertips back through my inch of hair, and say to myself, am I, can I be, she who so lately at the Holy Redeemer wore an air of purpose and expectation, and a prefect’s deep blue gown? So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this? Were these meetings as aimless as they appeared, or was I too untutored to see the importance of what was going on, or was I, in some deeper way, missing the point? Yes: that must be it.
As the clock ticked away, a fantasy would creep up and possess me: that if you could stay on and on – if you could stay at the meeting till midnight or the hour beyond – then the masks would slip, the falsity be laid aside, the real business would begin. For it seemed to me that my fellow socialists were talking in code, a code designed perhaps to freeze out strangers and weed out the dilettante. Only the pure of heart were welcome here. They must submit to a new version of the medieval ordeal: instead of poison, water, fire, a Trial by Pointlessness. Once you had passed it – once you had endured the full rigours of a full debate on a revitalized constitution for a revitalized Labour students’ movement – then, in the hour after midnight, the chatter would cease – glances be exchanged – the talk begin, hesitant at first, half-smiling, people near-apologetic about their passions and their expertise, quoting Engels, Nye Bevan, Daniel Cohn-Bendit; we would exchange our intuitions and half-perceptions, pass on our visions and dreams, each vision and each dream justified by some reference, recondite or popular. Comrades would say, ‘This is what makes me a socialist . . .’ and speak from the heart; perhaps someone would mention Lenin, and wages councils, and coal-miners, and the withering away of the state. Dawn would break: gentle humming of the Red Flag.
But in real life, nothing like this occurred at all. By ten-thirty the men would be looking at their watches, drifting and grumbling towards the union bar. I would hover a little, in the corners of rooms, on the edges of groups, hoping that someone would turn to me and begin a real conversation, one I co
uld join in. Stacking chairs squeaked on a dirty floor, the women of the socialists stooped to haul up their fringed and scruffy shoulder bags; in the bar the women stood in a huddle, excluded by the ramparts of turned shoulders, with tepid glasses of pineapple juice clenched in bony white hands. Their eyes avoided mine; they smoked, and muttered to each other in code.
Disillusioned, I would trail back up Drury Lane. The theatres would have turned out already, and the stage doors would be barred. An empty Malteser box bowling towards the Thames would bear witness to the evening passed. My eyes would be heavy and stinging with cigarette smoke and lack of sleep. Behind my ribs was a weight of disappointment. Still the lines ran through my head, distressing, irrelevent: Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? / Is this mine own countree? The irresponsive silence of the land, / The irresponsive sounding of the sea.
‘Why, why,’ Julianne said, ‘if you were going to have your hair cut, did you have it so stubbled?’
‘To last me,’ I said. ‘Till Christmas.’
‘Did you think there were no hairdressers in London?’
‘I thought they might be expensive.’
‘You really shouldn’t be so poor, should you?’ Julianne said.
Each morning she flicked her white coat from its hanger, in case they were taken on the wards; her eyes large, soft, alert. She told some Sophies that I had run away from a convent, where my hair had been chopped off; she told others that I was a victim of the IRA, shorn for collaboration after a romance with a squaddie. ‘Caught in the Falls Road,’ she said, ‘her pantyhose around her ankles; her poor mother, if she were dead, would be turning in her grave.’
Pretending to be Irish was a great diversion for Julianne. Lancashire, Ireland, it’s all the same to girls called Sophy.
Sophies liked to be engaged to be married by the end of their final year. At breakfast they showed each other their solitaire diamonds. Facets winked as they passed them across the Thursday rasher and the side-plate of baked beans: exchanging them so that they could feel the fatness or looseness of a finger-joint, try on another future.
An Experiment in Love: A Novel Page 6