An Experiment in Love: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  We stretched out my flowerpot sweater on the bed and laid the belt against it. ‘Yes! Now try on,’ Lynette said. I eased my creation over my head. Lynette took the sleeves and helped the cuffs over my hands. She slid the belt around my waist, drawing it in until the silver tongue snagged in the last hole. ‘Mirror,’ she said.

  I had to jump to see myself in it. ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘Perfect if it were an inch tighter. The belt needs one more hole.’ She looked cast down. ‘But how to make it? I suppose there must be a way. We’ve got till Wednesday. Do you know, I expect Karina, she’s so practical . . . But no. Not worth it. Jealous little madam, she is.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  Lynette shook her head. ‘I hardly see her. She never speaks . . . Well, you’ve seen how she is at breakfast. I come home in the afternoon and I always seem to have missed her. But I know she’s been in because there’s a Mussolini.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A sweater. Clammy and like a corpse and hanging upside down. And at dinner, of course, she can’t speak, for eating. Then she’s off across the corridor, making soup.’

  I remembered Niall’s advice. ‘She has always had a pathological appetite,’ I said.

  ‘We could make a hole with a big nail,’ Julia said.

  ‘Yes, but we don’t have one about our person.’

  Julia put her head into C2. ‘Have you got a big nail? Or have you got a pair of scissors, a really huge, powerful pair?’

  Claire and Sue were sitting on their beds. They looked up and stared. Both of them were white-faced. Slowly, they shook their heads. Julia drew the door shut.

  ‘What’s up with them?’ she said.

  ‘Claire says that as a Christian she can’t connive at the taking of an unborn baby’s life.’

  Julia snorted. ‘Who’s asking her to?’

  ‘Sue might need people to cover for her while she’s away for a few days. Tell a story for her.’

  ‘She should have it done on a Saturday,’ Julia said. ‘She’ll be discharged on Sunday, and then she can stay out of sight and say she’s got twenty-four-hour flu. That will cover it. Has she seen somebody yet?’

  ‘I think she might want to have it.’

  Julia gave me one of her looks, what I called her rapacious looks: plundering the thoughts out of people’s hearts. ‘Tell me everything,’ she demanded.

  ‘Not in the corridor,’ I said.

  We went from door to door, saying to the Sophies, ‘Has anyone got a corkscrew we could borrow?’

  ‘What! Celebrating?’ the Sophies trilled.

  The next morning, on my way down Drury Lane, I called at the shoe-repairers. I drew Lynette’s belt out of my bag. It lay on the counter like an intractable serpent. ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘could you make me another hole in this?’

  It was done in a second. I took out my purse. ‘We wouldn’t charge for that, Miss,’ the man said. I thanked him. The smell of the shop – feet, leather, tobacco – made me slightly faint, but I felt pleased at getting something for nothing. It was unprecedented.

  That evening, as everyone sat in C3 drinking coffee, I tried out the effect. Neither Sue nor I had been down to dinner. ‘A thing called beef cobbler,’ Lynette said. ‘The last word in grossness. Brown-coloured cartilage in gravy, with some sort of hard pastry islands foundering in viscous mud, a reptilian – oh, sorry, Fifi!’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Sue said. Her fingers padded the place below her cheekbones, like an anxious woman in an operetta; tenderly, she felt the bones of her face, as if seeking a pressure-point that would postpone nausea and her decision.

  Julia sat on her bed with her knees beneath her chin and her arms looped around her shins. I realized that she was trying to be as small as possible so that she could observe Sue without scaring her. The worst had happened, and to one of us; the Tonbridge Hall nightmare had come true, and naturally it was of interest. Julia was still and quiet; myself, I wanted to scream. Mrs Webster sat on her shelf, looking jocular.

  ‘Turn round,’ Lynette said to me. ‘Good. Yes. The flowers are spectacular, and you are achieving triangulation.’

  The belt sat below my ribs, its hard edge seeming to elevate them. I tried to slip my finger between wool and leather: I couldn’t. ‘And yet . . .’ I said. ‘A half-inch . . .’ Sue clasped her hands against her diaphragm, and moaned.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Claire said. ‘It’s stupid, Sue, all this agonizing and attention-seeking. You know the answer, you know the right thing to do. The right thing for you, and for everybody concerned. Just make up your mind – have the courage of your convictions.’

  Sue whimpered.

  ‘It’s taking a life,’ Claire said. ‘It is, you know it is.’ Her face reddened, her spots glowed. ‘Talk to Roger. Sit down and talk to him. Talk to your parents. A family conference, that’s what you need.’

  ‘I cannot believe,’ Lynette said idly, ‘that this advice is sound.’

  ‘Everybody will rally round. You’ll see. Listen, Sue, you know the selfish choice is never the right one. Think of the baby. It’s part of you. Part of him.’

  Julia raised her head. Her cheeks flushed, and her lip curled. I didn’t think she would condescend to argue with Claire. Nor did she. ‘You get fucked first,’ she said. ‘Give advice after.’

  Next morning – a mild bright day – I went back to the shoe-repairers. ‘I’m presuming on your good-will,’ I said.

  I showed with my finger where the next hole should be punched. ‘There you are, my darling,’ the man said. ‘If it weren’t for the wife I’d take you home and fatten you up myself.’

  I blushed. I wasn’t used to Londoners then. I’m still not. They talk so much. I always want to smash their jaws shut; I realize the reaction may be excessive.

  Guest Night.

  Sue, as if magnetized, as if drawn by some invisible force that did not consult her will, went glassy-eyed along the streets to a gynaecologist’s consulting-room. The liberalized abortion law was still in its running-in phase, and nobody ever knew quite how to play it. You had to be prepared, at the least, to swear that if you had the baby you’d go insane; I’d always assumed that you must be ready to loosen your hair, sing, ramble on in verse and scatter some flowers, by way of indication that even after ten weeks you weren’t feeling yourself.

  Whatever acting was required, Sue didn’t manage it. ‘I’ll be back at three,’ she’d said that morning. ‘Please, Carmel, you will be here, won’t you?’

  ‘OK,’ I’d said. I’d have to miss a lecture, but I’d missed a few already, in the shocked dumb days after Niall left me. I worked during the night to catch up; I could do another night. ‘OK.’

  Three o’clock came. Somehow, as soon as I heard the lift doors crunching open – for Sue had taken to using the lift – I knew there had been a complication. I opened the door of C3. Sue sailed down the corridor. It seemed to me that the way she walked had altered; God, I thought, soon it will start to show. ‘Come in. What happened?’

  There was a wordless, bovine triumph on Sue’s face. ‘He says,’ she told me, ‘that I’m in very good health. He says I’m in fine shape to have a very healthy baby.’

  Guest Night.

  I said to Julia, as we dressed before the revels, ‘She seems to have talked past the point somehow. She forgot why she went, I suppose.’

  Julia snorted. ‘Two months from now, then she’ll remember.’

  ‘Obviously she wants to have it. So what can you say?’

  ‘You can tell her not to indulge herself.’

  ‘She said she wanted to know if she was fertile.’

  Julia was pinning on her medal – the one she’d got for A Promising Start in Anatomy. ‘You,’ she said, ‘have you ever felt that need?’

  ‘No.’ I was startled. ‘Anyway, my experience is academic, now.’

  I couldn’t imagine sex. It was something I’d done in a previous life. I felt sealed up again. I was a virgin. My flowerpot sweater slid over
my head, stretched over my ribs; its fantastical flowers spilt to my waist, and as I turned to show Julia I am sure that the gold and silver beads caught the light. I cinched it with the broad strong belt; no trouble, as I breathed in, to snag the bar in its new hole. My rib cage was lifted, my diaphragm was constrained, it would be difficult to take a very deep breath . . . but why would I need to? I wasn’t going to drown.

  ‘Anyway,’ Julia said, ‘she’s messed it up good and proper. She’ll change her mind in a week or two, and then you can bet your life she won’t want to turn up to the Student Health Service again. What will she say? “Oh yes, I saw the man you sent me to, yes, I gave him the letter, no, I’m still pregnant, he said I was doing nicely.” ’ Julia snorted. ‘She’ll have to start again, go private. Where will she get the money?’

  An hour before, Claire had caught me in the corridor. ‘Please, Carmel,’ she hissed at me. ‘Just a word.’

  I went into C2, closed the door and stood with my back against it. Their decor was not like ours. They had cushions on their beds with buttons in the centre, and a fringed bath mat by the wash-basin. There were soft toys piled on Sue’s bed: a pink-and-white mini-elephant, a monkey with pliable limbs and a face of almost satanic ugliness. On the wall above Claire’s bed was a poster with a prayer on it in fancy script. It said, Where there is hatred, let me sow love. ‘Carmel,’ she said, ‘I wanted to talk to you because I know you have influence with her.’

  ‘Everybody has influence with Sue.’

  ‘Yes, but you have experience.’

  I understood. Because I came from the north of England, Claire credited me with an earthy maturity. As if I had experienced many upheavals in life, and an early sexual initiation: incest, possibly, caused by overcrowding in the cellar where I was brought up.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you know what she wants, in her heart. And now she’s seen this chap, gynaecologist, he’s put her mind at rest.’

  ‘Yes. But it wasn’t what she went there for.’

  ‘None the less – she’s seen sense. So now I want you and Julia and Lynette to rally round and stop her having second thoughts. If she has an abortion it could do her endless damage.’ Claire was solemn, her tone ponderous. ‘Endless,’ she said. ‘Psychological. Damage.’

  ‘Yes. I can see that. I can see.’ Restless, I deferred to the pieties of the age. My imagination worked; I couldn’t think what damage would be greater than that inflicted by an innocent wailing itself into the world, from between my unprepared thighs. ‘But I don’t think she’s really decided, has she? She’s only interested in her present situation, just how she feels today. It’s a novelty, isn’t it? But soon she might regret – either way, she might regret it.’

  ‘But a life would be spared,’ Claire pleaded. ‘For heaven’s sake, Carmel, I thought you were a Catholic.’

  ‘No. Who told you that?’

  ‘Oh, so you’re not any more?’

  ‘They’d be different kinds of regrets, wouldn’t they, very different? I mean she’d have to feed and clothe it, worry about it all the time – ’ Her life would be over, I thought. ‘You could argue, you know, that having the baby would be just giving into a whim – and it’s not a baby yet, is it, it’s just cells, and you shouldn’t turn cells into a person just for the sake of a whim?’

  Claire was not shrewd, but she was shrewd enough to see that I was in mental turmoil. ‘But what do you think? What do you really think?’

  ‘Oh, I think she should have the baby.’ I studied the prayer on the wall. ‘I think maybe you should do what your body wants, while you can.’

  I thought of the jelly blob sealed inside Sue’s body, quivering with its own life: watery, warm, budding. I thought of the jaundiced cavities of the skull on our shelf: vacant, stony and null. I was at some point in between: in transit. I shuddered.

  In the drawing-room, under a bright chandelier, the warden dispensed sherry – tepid – in specially small sherry glasses. ‘Miss McBain!’ Her voice was cheery. Her eyes descended, ran down to my waist, then more slowly climbed up again. ‘How extraordinary,’ she said.

  ‘I made it myself.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You certainly couldn’t get it in the shops.’

  Julia and Lynette were both wearing boots, as if they might need to whistle up a horse and make an escape; they exchanged glances that suggested this. Julia’s were comfortable, scuffed, baggy boots with stacked heels; Lynette’s were her guardsman’s boots, tall and correct and burnished. Lynette wore a sweeping skirt of indeterminate darkness, and a soft mohair sweater the colour of charcoal; on her left hand, a huge emerald. She twisted it apologetically about her finger. ‘Grandma’s,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d flash it. At our guest, because after all, didn’t I read she married a millionaire?’

  The Secretary of State put forth fingers, and accepted a glass of sherry from the warden. Her eye was bright and sharp and small; she tilted her head, the better to see. Her dress was of the shape that is called ageless, and of a length that is called safe; it was sewn all over with little crystal beads. Her pale hair lay against her head in doughy curves, like unbaked sausage rolls.

  When we came into proximity, Lynette began to laugh politely into her hand; some of her sherry came out through her nose. ‘Very nice cocktail dress,’ she spluttered. ‘My mother had one of those, but she gave it to a charity shop.’

  The warden surged up to us, to give us our designated places at table. I felt that these had been changed, at the last minute. ‘Miss McBain,’ she said, staring hard at my chest and waving me away to the last place on a wing. ‘Miss Lipcott . . .’ She banished Julia – whose medal bounced over her left breast – to an equally remote spot.

  We took our places. Soup was served – non-standard soup – and rolls which were hot and definitely not yesterday’s. At our highish table, we didn’t have to prise out the frozen tiny chippings from their foil; we had butter shaved especially for us, curled into glass dishes.

  Just as the guests were putting down their soup spoons, Sue rose from her chair, as if it were time for the speeches. She looked wildly up and down the table; then, holding her napkin to her mouth, she bolted. ‘Fifi!’ Julia cried.

  For a micro-second our guest looked up. Lynette smiled down at me from High Table; I nodded, rose and slid unobtrusively into Sue’s place near the Secretary of State. The warden glanced at me and nodded, as if she believed some breach in etiquette had been mended.

  And really, it would have looked bad, an empty chair so close; as if we were expecting Banquo. Our guest was not eating, even though she had been served with a voluminous chicken breast; her knife toyed with it. She was leaning over the table, talking urgently to the warden and to the section of High Table on her right. The crystals on her dress seemed to quiver; so did her voice, with the effort of restraint. She spoke slowly; she spoke as if she knew everyone except herself was stupid. She leant forward and smiled, and her hair moved with her, as if it were not just hair but a hat made of hair.

  I imagined leaning forward, taking her wrist. Put your cutlery down, please. Turn and study this. I wanted her to see my sweater, examine it, envy it. See these flowers! My mother would be proud.

  She turned her head in my direction; she opened her lips to speak, and shards of glass fell out.

  That night I dreamt of the food I used to eat when I was three years old, when my grandmother was alive: food with the tint and the perfume of living flesh and skin. I dreamt of the rich dark smell of nutmeg that rose from rice pudding, the straw-coloured sweetness of long-baked milk: of sponge rich as egg-yolk, and the trembling speckled surface of baked custard.

  I dreamt that I was dead and that I had become a ghost, and that I sat in my grandmother’s kitchen and ate honey from a spoon. I saw my ghost spindle legs dangling down in front of me, and I felt the metal handle of the spoon press against my stripped fingerbones.

  ‘At least she wasn’t sick on the Guest,’ Julia said. ‘I wonder will she ever know h
ow lucky she was.’

  nine

  January passed. A man sailed the Atlantic single-handed. A woman didn’t.

  At breakfast I sat with Karina, after the others had left. We took discarded toast from the racks, and avoided each other’s eyes as we chewed it. ‘Karina,’ I said, ‘do you remember when I used to do dumb insolence?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You got away with it.’

  I looked at her in surprise. How could she think that? I’d had to live ever since with the knowledge of my own temerity; I’d had to live up to it, and find new situations to test it out. Didn’t she know that the winner of one game simply goes on to another, harder game?

  ‘ “Do you remember?” ’ Karina said. ‘That’s all you ever say to me. You wish you didn’t know me.’

  I was startled. ‘No – I’ve never wished that.’

  ‘You’ve always wished it. When we were at school.’

  ‘But I used to sit next to you. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I don’t mean then. I mean when we were at the Holy Redeemer. You know when I mean.’ Her voice was even. She wiped her fingers on her napkin. Long greasy marks appeared. ‘Don’t you think it’s dirty?’ she said. ‘Having to roll up these napkins and put them in rings?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘Paper would be cleaner.’

  ‘I embarrass you,’ she said. ‘You wanted to get in with Julianne and that set. Oh, pardon me. Julia, I should say.’

  ‘I’m going.’ I scraped my chair back. There was enough truth in what she said.

  ‘Sue’s not too well, I notice.’

  I looked hard at her. I glimpsed a vestige of her old look – downcast eyes, gloating. Did she know, then? We’d tried to keep it quiet.

  ‘Pity you can’t eat her breakfast for her, isn’t it?’ I said.

  I’d developed a habit, I suppose, of flouncing out on Karina. I said to myself, when I was a child I was afraid, I was torn between pity and fear, and besides, I was told to be her friend, I was made to be. Now I’m grown up and I don’t have to take it; especially since I don’t, actually, owe her money. I never thought she was dangerous, except to me: I didn’t know that her stubby fingers would tie my past to my future, so that now if I wake in the night, my mind goes right back there, to the narrow beds, the dry heat, the broken heart.