It was playtime, and it was only raining a bit. We were leaning against the wall at the back of our schoolyard, looking down over the railway embankment. Karina was finishing her bottle of milk, slurping noisily at the clotted half-inch at the bottom, chasing the last drops around with her straw. ‘You still owe me for that comic,’ she said.
‘I’m saving up to pay you.’
Karina sang, ‘When will that be, Say the bells of Stepneee.’
‘I’ve got threepence. My grandad gave it me. You can have it. Here.’
‘Put it away,’ Karina said. ‘I don’t want your money.’
‘You can have my milk every playtime.’ A thought struck me. ‘But do you think they’ll have milk at the Holy Redeemer?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know, Said the great bell of Bow. Anyway, I told you. We’ll not be going. We’ll never pass.’
‘But you do want to, don’t you?’ I said tentatively. Because I did; I had made my mind up on it.
Karina said, ‘If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.’
I knew the meaning of that. It had been in English yesterday: explain these proverbs. A stitch in time saves nine. Too many cooks spoil the broth. I thought of St Theresa’s and the model kitchen, and the girls with their laddered nylons crowded around, clutching wooden spoons in fingers blighted by flaking nail-varnish. I did not want to be like that; I wanted to be like Susan Millington, solemn and horse-faced beneath a winter velour, a summer boater; I wanted to have big legs like Susan Millington, and stride to the bus-stop in mid-brown thick tights. ‘Oranges and lemons . . .’ droned Karina. Oh, no; she was going to start at the beginning and sing straight through. ‘You owe me five farthings . . .’ She broke off, and said, ‘Well, considerably more, actually.’ She had begun to use big words, I noticed, on occasion; it was called Vocabulary. ‘Considerably more.’
I thought, here comes a chopper to chop off your head. Behind my back I made a covert gesture of violence.
On the day of the entrance exam our mothers escorted us on the two buses, dressed in their best coats, which in the case of Karina’s mother was best but not very good. My mother had a handbag with a shiny clasp, and as she sat in the bus with the bag on her knees she kept snapping it open, snapping it shut. The mothers sat on one seat; we sat on the seat in front, whispering and nudging.
‘My mother called Sister Basil an old nanny goat,’ I said, boasting.
‘Your mother will burn in hell,’ Karina said.
‘Not if she repents.’
‘She will burn in hell anyway. She wears lipstick.’
‘That’s not a sin.’
‘It is so. Fornication.’
I kept quiet. I didn’t know what fornication was, so she might be right. I felt I needed education, needed it very badly.
‘Stop that giggling and messing, Carmel,’ my mother said. ‘You ought to be thinking about what lies before you.’
‘I am,’ I said.
I had been thinking about it for weeks, months. Sister Monica, when she broke off her disquisition about the laundry-room at St Theresa’s, would address the subject of the Holy Redeemer; like Sister Basil, she seemed to know everything about it.
‘The girls’ skirts are measured each week with a dressmaker’s rule,’ she would say, ‘to see that they conform to the length prescribed. Woe betide any girl whose skirt does not.’
Woe betide. But I did not see much to fear. They wouldn’t go shooting up and down, would they, your hem-lines, unpredictable, beyond your control?
‘No jewellery is allowed,’ Sister Monica would say, ‘but a wristwatch of the plainest type. Hair is to be worn neat at all times and off the face. The speech of the girls is never careless and always refined.’
Then, a little later, while we were labouring over our fractions or decimals, she would begin again, her long, pale, acned face turned up to the spring sunlight, her pointer tapping the blackboard for emphasis. ‘Periods of silence are observed, and running in the corridors is utterly forbidden. Footwear is to be of the approved type, and a fringe, if worn, should be above the eyebrows.’ Her eyes, shining beneath the limpid pools of her spectacles, fell on myself and Karina, isolated in a front desk. ‘There’ll be none of your nonsense should you be among the fortunate few who find a place at the Holy Redeemer. Let any girl step out of line and she is put up at the morning assembly to apologize to Mother Superior before the whole school and the staff, both nuns and lay teachers.’
My finger and thumb squeezed my pencil, rolled it back into my palm and clenched it there. What would I say? I was bound to step out of line, if only because I did not know where the line was: if only because I did not know anything. ‘I’m sorry, Mother Superior. I apologize.’ Would that be enough? Sister Monica approached and stood over us. ‘And if that girl does not speak clearly and distinctly, or employs a poor accent, they will mock her and ridicule her until she mends the fault.’
Forty minutes into our journey to the entrance exam, the bus ground into a bus station, and we disembarked. Mary followed my mother, lugging with her the grimy tartan shopping bag she always carried. It was windy in the bus station, oily underfoot, pigeons swooping low under the shelters; my mother shielded her eyes with her hand as if she were looking into the sun, as a way of showing Mary that she was in charge and she would soon hit upon our next bus. ‘Over here,’ my mother cried, and marched us across the litter-blown tarmac, ducking round the big frames of panting buses, through the diesel fumes and a smell of boiled onions. But it wasn’t over there, and she marched us back, and marshalled us into line to wait for the Number 64. ‘Oh, if only it were to get a cup of tea,’ Mary said, breaking her accustomed silence.
‘No time. No time. Tea later,’ my mother yelled. I thought I had been to this place before – its name was the Victoria bus station – but I hardly knew what lay beyond it; I was beginning to feel very far from home. When the 64 juddered to a halt before us, I felt a moment of panic. My mother seized me by the arm and I tore my arm away. ‘For heaven’s sake, just look at you,’ she said. She took out her handkerchief, licked it, and worked it round and round on my cheek. It came away filthy; I had been baptized in flying smuts. Two by two, we mounted the 64.
‘Since you are the only two girls from your area,’ the nun said, ‘a special arrangement has been made for you. The entrance exam proper was held last month, but Sister – Monica, is she called? – couldn’t seem to complete the paperwork on time.’ The nun sniffed. Her speech was certainly never careless and always refined.
Outside the studded door of the convent – ‘It’s medieval, isn’t it?’ Karina whispered – we had lurked fearfully, until the bell was answered. ‘Come in, we are waiting for you,’ the nun said. We stepped into a wide corridor that smelt of incense and custard. There were red tiles underfoot, and I stepped on one that was loose or broken; the tile gave under my foot, and made a little sound, tock-tock.
For the entrance exam I was wearing my Scotch kilt, and a white lacy sweater with a frill for a collar, and a narrow scarlet ribbon piercing in and out of the frill’s edge. Sometimes my hand would go up to touch it, to feel the confiding smoothness against the bobbly wool; my mother would slap my hand away and snap, Stop that, you’ll get it filthy. Karina wore one of her royal-blue pleated skirts and a fluffy jumper made by a factory. It was tighter than it should be, and seemed pasted across her protruding stomach. And – I looked hard – could it be? On her chest there were two pouches, twin flaps where there should be nothing but smoothness, nothing but chest. The nun looked down at us. ‘You could have worn school uniform,’ she said. ‘That is usual.’
‘Sister, we don’t have a school uniform,’ I said.
‘Don’t you? Oh, dear me. Now that is a sad state of affairs.’ She switched her attention to our mothers.
‘Please wait here. Tea will be provided.’ My mother glanced at Mary, as if to say, I told you so. ‘You little ones come with me.’
She led us through that first corridor, and round c
orners, down three steps and up two, by a drawing-room where we glimpsed a cheerful electric fire twinkling in a grate: under pale arches, by windows and glazed doors that looked out on to lawns, to a fine cedar of Lebanon which acknowledged a light breeze. We had left home in rain and wind; here the sun was fighting through, and the skies were patchily blue. The nun turned to us, and almost smiled: ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘this is not the school. This is the House, where we live.’
Our voyage ended in a long cool room, where two desks, widely spaced, stood waiting for us. Sometimes in dreams I’d been in rooms like this, rooms full of pallid light: the floor of blond wood, the walls as smooth as the icing on a wedding cake. Every movement echoed in its vastness, every breath seemed consequential; I turned my eyes to Karina, to see how she liked it, but as usual her face yielded nothing.
We were standing close together; we continued to stand, stupidly, because we did not know if the desks had been designated to us by name. ‘Each sit where you please,’ the nun said, recognizing what was the matter: said it not unkindly, not at all how Sister Monica would have said it. We took our places. Above us was infinite air, the ceiling gilded, high high above us; from the great windows, lawns ran away into a misty distance. I could see a flight of stone steps flanked by cold graceful urns; closer at hand, turned not quite in profile, a statue of Our Blessed Lady, a white statue shining as if in the dusk. Her palms were uplifted, and her robes fell away from them, into a U-shaped valley of compassionate folds.
The nun took two papers out of a big brown envelope and laid them face down, one on Karina’s desk and one on mine. My fingers played with the pin of my Scotch kilt; my mouth was dry. ‘Sister Gabriel?’ the nun said. ‘Oh, there you are.’ From a door I had not noticed, tucked away in a corner of the room, a young nun appeared, and seemed to glide over the pale polished floor. She wore a white veil, and an expression of uncomprehending serenity. ‘I leave you with Sister Gabriel to invigilate,’ the first nun said. ‘The time allowed is one hour and a half. Turn over your papers and begin.’
Holy Mother of God, I prayed, take pity on me. Make me pass my entrance exam. I directed my prayer to the statue outside the window, its mossy plinth and stone drapery. I undid the pin of my kilt, and stabbed its thick point into the cushion of the little finger of my left hand. A worry doubled is a worry halved, and now I had the pain to think about, as well as the terror: I turned over my paper and began.
I hardly remember the rest of that day. I don’t know what I said when I came out of the beautiful room, or how I was escorted by a nun back to our starting point at the studded door; or what Karina said, or whether our mothers wanted to know how it had been, or whether I was slapped for having got blood on my handkerchief. I do recall that the journey home took many hours, owing to a blunder at the Victoria bus station, and that Mary said once again, ‘Oh, if only it were to get a cup of tea.’ She seemed small and beaten and baffled as she trailed in my mother’s wake, and she nodded sadly when Karina said to her, ‘If you’re that bothered, you could have brought a flask, couldn’t you?’
I turned my head and looked out of the corner of my eye to see if my mother was taking in the way Karina spoke to her mother, but she wasn’t taking in anything at all. ‘Did you see Carmel’s new pen?’ she cried, in a high, strung-up, scraping voice. Her handbag’s clasp continued to snap, open and shut, open and shut.
‘No. What new pen?’ Karina said.
‘Carmel, didn’t you show Karina your new pen?’
‘No, I did not,’ I said, from the seat in front.
‘Well then, take it out and show it to her at once.’
Reluctant, I reached into my bag. I drew forth, slowly, my new fountain-pen. ‘Pass it to me so I can show Karina’s mother.’ A hand swarmed over the seat back. It fastened on my pen and swiped it out of my sight. ‘What do you think, Mary?’ my mother said. ‘I got it for her specially to sit the entrance exam. It cost five shillings.’
Mary made a noise of appreciation. It was not enough.
‘Just look at this mechanism – ’ my mother began.
‘Don’t start unscrewing it,’ I said in alarm. ‘You’ll get ink spattering.’
‘Indeed ink will not spatter,’ my mother said. ‘This is a first-rate pen. The very top quality. Here. Show it to Karina.’
This was what I had been trying to avoid. I did like my pen and I was proud of it, but I knew that now my pride would be humbled. I slid the smooth burgundy cylinder into Karina’s fingers. ‘Here,’ I said, toneless. Karina scrutinized it, pulling the cap off and squinting at the nib. ‘It’s gorgeous, Mrs McBain,’ she said, her face hidden. ‘I think you must be very wealthy to afford a pen like that.’
Behind us, my mother gave a surprised laugh; I suppose it was a laugh, I can’t think what else it could have been. ‘Well, I’d not say that exactly. We’re just doing our best for Carmel, that’s all.’
‘Gorgeous,’ Karina repeated. ‘Simply top quality.’ Very low, so that the mothers had no chance of hearing, she murmured to me: ‘I could get better pens for one and ninepence.’
When we arrived home my father was waiting by the door. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘Come and look at this.’ His face was aglow. His new jigsaw lay complete on the table. ‘The Cutty Sark,’ he said.
My mother said, ‘Put the kettle on and don’t be such a fool.’
Next day in school, our classmates looked at us fearfully, as if we were survivors of an ordeal or disaster. ‘Let us hope those two girls gave a good account of themselves,’ Sister Monica said, tapping the blackboard and staring into space: as if those two girls were only notional, and out there somewhere in the great beyond. ‘Let us hope those two girls gave a good account of themselves and did not disgrace the name of this school.’
I put up my hand. ‘Sister, I need to know what fornication means.’
Sister Monica swept her eyes around to my face. ‘Why do you need to know, Carmel?’ Her voice was steady and cool.
‘It’s General Knowledge,’ I said.
‘Fornication is any type of bad behaviour with the other sex. Outside of marriage. Those two boys at the back may stop sniggering. Perhaps they would care to stand up and give us their definition of the term, or otherwise they may come out here and have the cane.’
The sniggering stopped.
‘Is it to do with wearing lipstick?’ I said.
‘That could be contributory, in certain circumstances,’ Sister Monica said.
It was that night, on our way home, that Karina and I began to talk about the entrance exam. All day we had preserved a silence, a no man’s land between us; partly tact, partly squeamishness. ‘What did you pick for the home of a badger?’ Karina said.
‘Set.’
‘Oh, right. What did you pick for the female type of sheep?’
‘Ewe.’
Karina jumped violently. ‘What?’
‘You,’ I said. ‘Ewe.’ I realized we didn’t speak the same language, after all. Karina didn’t read books, and perhaps that was her trouble. She called for me after school on a Thursday, and we would troop off to the library together, me with my own two books on my orange junior tickets and my mother’s six Jean Plaidys on buff tickets. I would go swarming in and see what I could get, but we had only one bookcase called ‘Junior’, and I had read everything in it by now. Karina didn’t come into the library at all, but stood outside by the bus-stop, as if she were going somewhere. She had handed me her own orange tickets, and wanted me to be grateful; attempted to turn it into more money I owed her. ‘Ewe,’ I said. ‘You-oo-oo-oo.’
‘Oh yes.’ Karina trudged on, her jaw set. ‘What composition did you pick?’
We were under the pub sign, the Prince of Connaught. He creaked in the breeze, above our heads: a stiff breeze, but the herald of fine weather. It was time for skipping ropes to come out, and for all the summer games to begin.
‘I did “My Hobbies”,’ I said. If all went well, I would be beyond skipping
ropes soon. Susan Millington, you may be sure, was never caught skipping.
Karina sneered at me. ‘You haven’t got any hobbies.’
‘I put, reading books.’
‘That’s not hobbies. Hobbies is stamp-collecting.’
‘I put that.’
‘You did not.’
‘I did because my father collects stamps, so it’s the same as me doing it. I put jigsaw puzzles.’
‘You lied,’ she said. ‘They’ll know.’
‘I did not lie, and I put knitting a jumper.’
‘What, that green thing you’ve been mangling? It looks more like a fishing-net.’
I was angry. How dare she malign my knitting? ‘What composition did you do, then?’
‘I did “The Person I Would Most Like to Meet”.’
‘Who did you put?’ The possibilities ran though my head. She might have put Cliff Richard. Adam Faith. Marty Wilde.
Karina smiled. ‘I put, the Pope.’
‘You did what?’ I stopped in my tracks. ‘The Pope?’
‘You should really say, His Holiness the Pope,’ Karina pointed out.
I did not have the words for the anger I felt, and the disgust. Disgust and fear: because I knew now that Karina would pass the entrance exam. A small part of me suspected those Holy Redeemer nuns would see through her; a much larger part knew that anyone as smart and smooth as Karina would pass anything she set her mind to. And I had passed too, I felt it in my bones; Karina’s piece of hypocrisy spread its great black wings over me, and wafted me towards my future, protected by its stretching shadow. She had vouched for me, in a perverse way, because even though we did not have a uniform, even though we did not know what desk to sit at, she had shown that we were the right stuff: she had not disgraced the name of our school.
So we would go to the Holy Redeemer, shackled together, and I would never have a pen or a book or a piece of knitting or anything else in my whole life that I could like, that Karina would not take away and pass comment on and spoil. It came into my mind that perhaps one day I might want to get married, if I did not become a Sister Superior or lady explorer. If I did obtain a husband, I must be sure Karina did not see him, and spoil my wedding day. I must be sure that if I was ever sent a baby she was not there when it was christened; I pictured her screwing its little fat legs in and out of its hip-joints, and saying she could get a better baby for one and ninepence.
An Experiment in Love: A Novel Page 9