An Experiment in Love

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. ‘But 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 Player’s 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 communication 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.

But then the landlady yielded to pressure to install baths and hot-water systems for her tenants. Half my bedroom disappeared behind a partition, and became a white, unheated box. On the first day after the installation was finished, I climbed into the tub in my clothes—without the water in, of course—just to see what it would feel like. It felt frozen, glazed, slippery; enamelled cold struck into my bones.

The rent was increased, but shortly afterwards the landlady began to sell off her houses. She must have wanted to be rid of them quickly, because her asking price was only five hundred pounds. My parents went into their bedroom and hissed at each other. A heavy thumping came from the floorboards above. I loitered at the window in our front room, admiring dogs that came and went; I hoped to get a dog, but my mother said the very limit of her tolerance would be a small and perfectly house-trained cat. I strained my ears for the words ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’.

My parents came downstairs after two hours. There was a high colour in my mother’s cheeks. ‘We are to become owner-occupiers,’ she said.

Karina’s parents did not have five hundred pounds, so they continued to rent their house from the new landlord. ‘You think you’re so swanky,’ Karina said. ‘You think you’re so well-off.’

Every day Karina and I used to walk to school together. We toddled down Curzon Street towards the town centre, turning left down Eliza Street at the pub called the Ladysmith. Most streets had a pub on the corner, and they were usually named after the younger children of Queen Victoria, or dead generals, or victories in colonial wars; we were too young to know this. We rolled downhill, guided by the mill chimneys and their strange Italianate architecture—yellow brick and pink brick and grimy brick—and everywhere black vistas fell away, railway embankments and waste ground, war damage and smoke; at the end of Bismarck Street we looked down on the puffing chimneys of houses below, ranged in their rows, marching down and down into the murky valley.

We passed the Irish club, and the florist’s with its small stiff pink-and-white carnations in a bucket, and the drapers called ‘Elvina’s’, which displayed in its window Bear Brand stockings and knife-pleated skirts like cloth concertinas and pasty-shaped hats on false heads. We passed the confectioner’s—or failed to pass it; the window attracted Karina. She balled her hands into her pockets, and leant back, her feet apart; she looked rooted, immovable. The cakes were stacked on decks of sloping shelves, set out on pink doilies whitened by falls of icing sugar. There were vanilla slices, their airy tiers of pastry glued together with confectioners’ custard, fat and lolling like a yellow tongue. There were bubbling jam puffs and ballooning Eccles cakes, slashed to show their plump currant insides. There were jam tarts the size of traffic lights; there were whinberry pies oozing juice like black blood.

‘Look at them buns,’ Karina would say. ‘Look.’ I would turn sideways and see her intent face. Sometimes the tip of her tongue would appear, and slide slowly upwards towards her flat nose. There were sponge buns shaped like fat mushrooms, topped with pink icing and half a glacé cherry. There were coconut pyramids, and low square house-shaped chocolate buns, finished with a big roll of chocolate-wrapped marzipan which was solid as the barrel of a cannon.

I waited for Karina to choose one, to go in and buy it, because I knew that her parents gave her money every day, at least 3d. and sometimes as much as 6d. But after examining the cakes for some time, after discussing them, after speculating on their likely taste and texture until my mouth was full of saliva, Karina would fall silent, and turn away, with something obstinate in her face, something puzzled and pained, some expression which was too complicated for me to identify. And so we would go to school.

Two years went by, marked less by scholastic achievement than by crazes. There was a yo-yo craze, and a fashion for paper games. There were whole weeks when we did nothing but beg stiff plain paper to fold and crease and manufacture things we called ‘Quackers’, disembodied palm-sized beaks that you snapped at people’s noses. There were skipping outbreaks and new rhymes, new rhymes and amalgamations and blends of old ones:

‘Manchester Guardian, Evening News

Here comes a cat in high-heel shoes.

Clock strikes one, Clock strikes two, Clock has a finger and it’s pointing at you.

Mother mother I am sick, Send for the doctor quick quick quick.

Doctor doctor

Will I die?

Course you will and so will I…’

Karina was an efficient skipper. Her feet thundered into the pavement. Up, down, her knees drawn up to her chest; her face wore no expression at all.

We passed through the hands of Miss Whittaker, who hit us on the backs of our knees as everyone had said she would; into the hands of Sister Basil, whose malevolence was tempered by absent-mindedness. I picture her always with her arm upraised, her black sleeve falling away, as she chalks on the blackboard in her flowing cursive script the word ‘Problems’. And underneath, a complex sum, a sum spelt out in words, like a composition, with no plus signs or minus signs: a discursive sum, with no suggested means of working it. ‘If a man buys apples to the value of is. 3d., and pears to the value of 2s. 8d., and hands the shopkeeper 10s. in payment…’ Always these problems were about fruit, coal, the perimeters of fields, railway journeys. If Karina would buy a vanilla slice to the value of 4d., and a chocolate bun to the value of 3d., how many girls could have a nice time?

I was glad when skipping ended. In the middle of the rhyme my mind wandered, and my feet went their own way; the girls who turned the rope set the rhythm, and I couldn’t pick it up. I was glad when it was marbles, because I had my marbles in a grubby white draw-string bag given me by my grandad, and anything my grandad gave me was better than a medal blessed by the Pope. I rolled them towards other marbles with great accuracy, as if I were turning a cold eye on their owners. My favourite marble was a cold colour, its iris pebble-grey with the merest hint of blue. In my mind I called this marble ‘Connemara’.

Karina still wore white ribbons to seal her short thick plaits, but otherwise her dress had become like that now adopted by the other girls: a skirt and a jersey and a shirt-style blouse that was meant to be white but which looked yellow under the classroom’s lights and the cloud-packed skies outside. Her pleated skirt was royal blue—superior to navy, she told me. It settled somewhere under her armpits, for Karina had no waist. She was a big girl, people said—said it approvingly—a big girl, and always very clean. We had no washing-machines, and as bathrooms and hot water were so new, cleanliness was a rugged, effortful virtue. A woman with every vice might be granted absolution with one grudging phrase: ‘She’s very clean, I will say that for her.’ To describe someone as ‘not clean’ was a more dire reproach than to describe them simply as ‘dirty’. Dirt might be a transient phenomenon, but being not clean was a spiritual sickness.

Perhaps, in that ghetto beyond language where she lived, Karina’s mother had understood this, because there was a scrubbed, scoured quality about her daughter’s plump hands and big square white teeth. Karina’s skin was like a pink peach, and she seemed to fill it to bursting; if you had touched her cheek, you would have felt it like ripe fruit ready to split. She was a head taller than me and her shoulders were broad, her bones large and raw.

Later, Julianne used to say, ‘Karina’s a peasant. Well now, isn’t she? In England we don’t have peasants. Why not? Complex socio-economic factors. But in Europe, to be a peasant is normal. And Karina is normal. For a peasant.’

At the first approach of cold weather, Karina would emerge from her house in the morning in stiff suede boots with a zip up the centre. Over her head she would wear a tartan hood called a pixie hood, or sometimes a kind of nylon fur bonnet with extrusions like nylon fur powder-puffs which nestled over her fleshy ears. If it snowed, she would come to school with tartan trews under her pleated skirt, that part of the trews which is below the knee swirled thickly around her calves and crammed into Wellington boots. She had, at the age of eight—and perhaps this was what drew us together—a marked indifference to public opinion.

That I should look nice, that I should look different: this was my mother’s aim in life. On my skirts she embroidered whole fantastic landscapes; on my collars she sewed red admiral butterflies, and on my cardigans she set the stars and the crescent moon. I had no truck with navy or even royal-blue pleats, with anything usual, washed-up, faded or thin. I had sashes; I had petticoats with hoops, belling and swaying around my calves. I had bumblebees hovering over clover flowers on a background of grass green, and a jersey specially knitted in the colour of my eyes. My hair, unloosed, was a thin curtain of pale shadow; an indecipherable grey-gold, a colour with no name. ‘Can you sit on it?’ girls would sometimes say: their grieved fascination edging aside, for a moment, their envy and fright and spite.

You must not think that Karina was kind about my clothes: or that she was any sweeter about my hair than, in our Tonbridge Hall days, Julianne would be. I think again of that sun-shattered, windy morning when I was six years old, and I made my way down the classroom to take my place at the table next to Karina: invited there by her sumptuous smile, and her yellow cardigan.

Small chairs we had, miniaturized; I hitched mine to the table and turned to Karina, smiling in pleasure. Out went my hand, my fingertips, to touch the fluffy egg-volk wool, which I had convinced myself would be damp to the touch. ‘Did you get this for an Easter present?’ I asked her.

Karina said, ‘Don’t talk daft.’

I didn’t at once take my fingers away.

‘At Easter you get eggs.’ She turned her dimpled face towards me, and the fuzzy halo around her hair cast itself into a bobbing disc against the classroom wall. ‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been poorly.’

‘You’re weak,’ she said.

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s your hair. Being that long. All down your back. Your strength goes into it.’