An Experiment in Love

  Claire and Sue, the churchgoers, lived next door to us in C2. ‘Come in for a coffee,’ Sue would say, fluttering, as we leapt upstairs after dinner: I’d say sorry, got to work, and Julianne would growl, ‘They want our souls.’

  In C4 was Sophy, the original Sophy: a strapping girl who took fencing lessons, whose big feet lightly danced through Julianne’s dream-life as she pranced down the corridor each morning towards her breakfast. Sophy was straight-backed and sound in wind and limb, a girl with large pale eyes and a heavy drift of crimped, dirty-blonde hair; by the side of her mouth there was a mole, flat, definite, a beauty-spot. She looked as if she could stare down a persistent man and bend a useful one to her will. Sometimes she stalked the corridors in her tunic and breeches, with her mesh head tucked beneath her arm; then up in the four-person lift would come Roger, her boyfriend.

  I was beginning to puzzle about this sort of thing. I had seen them about the place, various boyfriends: some – like Roger – with purple and throbbing acne, some – like Roger – with hair in their ears, some – like Roger – with vaguely defined middles held in by sagging waistbands, and in their eyes the pallid cast of mother-worship, and a desperation to put their erections inside some nice girl who would propagate their expectations.

  Sometimes, under my desk lamp, when grey morning would filter in though the curtains, and I would rub my eyes, there would pass before me a procession of Sophies and Rogers, brides and grooms. ‘What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?’ I began to imagine the donors of the breakfast solitaires; their grease-spiked mousy hair, their patronizing attitudes, their welling guts. What was the matter with them, the girls who lived with me on C Floor? Did they think these were the only men they could get? Inferiority was working away inside these girls, guilt at being so clever, wanting so much, taking so much from the world. If they were to have a man as well, it seemed to them right that he should be a very poor specimen.

  All this is hindsight of course. FEMINISM HASN’T FAILED, IT’S JUST NEVER BEEN TRIED. If you knew at twenty what you know at thirty-five, what a marvellous life you could have; on the other hand, you might find that you couldn’t be bothered to have any life at all.

  Every night, or perhaps every second night, Sue’s fair head would come bobbing in at the door: ‘Carmel, godsake, come on!’ I’d become aware that Sue had a struggle with her accent, her lingo, her diction; she was by no means a real Sophy, but Claire had helped her no end, she said, and she had quite a sense of humour when you got to know her, and what with one thing or another she really depended on Claire. ‘Honest,’ she’d say, ‘you really ought to slap those books shut and come on out with us.’

  I looked up, my eyes drugged and glazed from the effort of understanding the British legal system. ‘Where? Where are you going?’

  ‘Well, dinner was so frightful . . . we thought we might go for a Chinese meal . . .’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Sue.’

  She looked at me and gave a great sigh. Sweet blue-eyed girl, Sue. I didn’t think I could spare the energy to understand her; let Claire do it. I had got a name for studying, a name for dedication. I didn’t deserve it, for I daydreamed sometimes, and doodled in the margins of my work. Still, I put in long hours, because I had realized in my second week in London that while I was sitting at my desk in Tonbridge Hall, breathing in the stuffy and recirculated air, bending my gaze beneath the prepaid beam of my lamp, I was not actually spending money.

  I had quickly discovered that I would have to count every penny. The fees of Tonbridge Hall were very high, and were deducted from our grants before we received them; they had to cover not just our food but our starched bed linen, the wages of the monosyllabic foreign women who cleaned our rooms, and the ferocious heat chuffed out by the central-heating boiler deep in the bowels of the place. There was no room for negotiation. You could not say, I’ll be ten degrees colder please, and get a refund; or say that, being bred to it, you would clean your room yourself. I had sat down with pen and paper, during the first week of the term; though the sums were easy enough to do in your head, pen and paper showed you were putting effort in, and provided against a calamitous mistake. I had deducted my fare for my Christmas ticket home, then divided what was left of my grant into weekly segments, working first on the supposition that I would leave five pounds over for an emergency. The sum per week that was left for me was so impossibly small that I decided I would lump in the reserve with the rest. After all, I said to myself, what kind of emergency costs five pounds?

  Each Friday I took the allotted sum out of my bank, which was situated in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was a pleasant enough place, though later it became home to tramps and derelicts who lived in cardboard houses of their own design. If they’d been in residence then, I might have lost my nerve entirely, brought face-to-face with the consequences of folly or improvidence; but my own imagination yielded such examples that I hardly needed any in the outer world.

  My money in my purse, I would sit on a bench, and begin a letter to Niall. I wrote on file paper, letters too fat for normal envelopes to contain, so that I had to buy big tough brown ones; I wrote fast, and I wrote everything, everything that happened and every thought that passed through my head. Each day I sent one of these letters, dropping it into a post-box as I walked down Drury Lane. Each morning, in the pigeonholes of Tonbridge Hall, there was a letter for me, the envelope addressed in the careful writing of a first-year engineer; the numbers as if printed by a machine, the black script upright, precise, as thin as if a pin had traced it. Each morning. Without fail.

  Once my letter was fairly begun I would bundle it into my bag and walk down to the students’ union, and go into the shop. There were two purchases I had to make, each Friday; a pair of tights, and a pad of file paper for my lecture notes and letters in the week to come.

  As an economy measure, I was training my wild hand to be small, so that I could use narrow feint and get in more words per week. This was easy enough, but the tights were more of a problem. The union sold the cheapest in London, so there was no question of obtaining them elsewhere. There was only one size, and, only one colour, a near black.

  They were very strange, stretchy garments; it did not matter how carefully you washed them, you could not help the legs getting longer and longer, so that when you drew them from the basin and squeezed them gently they sprang from your palms and lolled about the room like serpents. When you hung them up they dangled obscenely. If the parsnips were ogres’ cocks, these were the foreskins of giants: taken as trophies in battle, by an Amazonian band.

  At this stage in her life, Julianne had two boyfriends, neither of them ugly. Both of them were somewhere above her in the complex hierarchy of medical students, and both of them had rooms in flats of their own. ‘My advice to you,’ she said, ‘is to get on the Pill.’

  I went along to the Student Health Service, where I saw a woman doctor. She didn’t sit behind her desk; she had it wedged sideways in the small consulting-room, and gestured to me to sit beside her, as if we were friends. As her chair creaked round towards me, I saw her heavy bursting legs, the lilac veins butting through the stretch of her tights. Dear God, I thought, she must be forty, to have legs like that.

  ‘How many boyfriends do you have?’ she asked pleasantly.

  ‘Only one.’

  She frowned; that is to say, face powder creased in the line above one eye.

  ‘How long have you known him?’ She was already reaching for her prescription pad.

  ‘Two years,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a long time. He must be a boyfriend from home, then. You really should be careful.’

  ‘I am careful. That’s why I came to see you.’

  She wrote something. ‘No. Contraception is one thing.’ Dull hair, over-streaked, worn loose, brushed her desk. ‘What I mean is, you ought not to get into a pressure-cooker relationship.’

  I went out into the street, pondering. Was that what I had?
A pressure-cooker relationship? Here I’d been, calling it love. She thought I was too young to love a man, but old enough for screwing. I supposed that she had passed on to me, with her prescription, her malediction: the residue of her disappointment, her let-downs, her sad half-hours under station clocks waiting for men who never came. But how dare she try to sour my life? I imagined myself leaning forward – as in primary-school days – and taking hold of a handful of the woman’s denatured hair; then leaning back, firm and leisurely, until a part of her scalp was in my hand and her desk was awash and her notes were bobbing in a sea of blood. The wine-dark sea.

  Sometimes my mother had pressure-cooked. Carrots, of course. Quartered potatoes. I remembered the action – packed metal drum, the stacked weights that rolled in your palm before you threaded them on to the dangerous lid; the muttering that rose from inside, as carrot sang to carrot like mutinous slaves below deck. The hiss of steam into cold air, it frightened me . . . I thought the weights might burst up like Annie Oakley’s bullets and pierce the ceiling and that our roof might fall in. What did people do for a metaphor, before the pressure-cooker was invented?

  Each morning – each morning when she woke up at Tonbridge Hall – Julianne would stand before the mirror looking at her breasts. ‘They are, you know.’ She’d knead them, look at them narrowly. ‘They are. Most definitely. Getting. Bigger. Oh, good old Pill! What did a girl do for tits, before it was invented?’

  I collected my prescription from the chemist in Store Street, thinking, Well now, I’m ready for Christmas.

  The ludicrous notion stopped me dead in the chemist’s doorway. I’ve got the tinsel, the contraceptives, the roast goose and the holly; I’m ready for Christmas.

  The term was almost half-way through. I felt a desolate, excruciating loneliness. Still, I thought, there will come a time . . . and then no more Roman roulette, no more counting the Durex. Already I felt perverse nostalgia for that strange condom texture, slippery and elusive, backed by the firm spike of flesh.

  When had we found the opportunity, Niall and I, two good schoolchildren? At his parents’ house when his parents were on holiday. (My parents never went on holiday.) On Sundays, when his parents were visiting their relations, or going to see National Trust properties or gardens open to the public. We had been fucking for years; we were old in fucking. Like me, Niall was an only child; there were no siblings whooping up the stairs to catch us on the job.

  No more marking the calendar, I thought. Or that fear. That way of listening to the body, as if you could gauge the peregrinations of each cell; the sick gladness each month as you woke to feel a tension behind the eyes, perhaps a soreness in the breasts, a little tentative cramp. The long breath released; the fingers groping in the drawer for Tampax, of which my mother disapproved.

  I could not say that the new dispensation was having much effect on my figure. I was as slim as ever. If anything, more so.

  You won’t mind, will you, if I call Niall by his real name, and call the other Tonbridge boyfriends by the composite name of Roger? It may seem a confusing technique, but the truth is that all these years on I can’t separate them in my mind. One of Julianne’s gang – who filled the room, drinking coffee and making a noise, while I worked at my desk with my back to them – inquired of Julianne whether I was, you know, fixed up? She replied that I was practically married, but that the man was in prison. Doing a stretch, she said. It’s a shame, but she’s very loyal, is Carmel.

  Up and down the corrider, the Sophies began to say, ‘Have you heard, Miss McBain has a fiancé who’s in gaol?’

  ‘Really?’ the second Sophy would gasp.

  And the first, frowning, careful, ‘Oh yes, he’s “doing a stretch”.’

  Claire came tapping at the door. ‘Look I – Carmel . . .’ Inside her jolly jumper – striped, like a burglar’s in a cartoon – she was turning a deep crimson.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I heard. Well, you know, I couldn’t help . . . I’m so sorry. It must be hell for you. Sue told me not to come, but I thought I must just say a word.’

  ‘Ah now, Claire,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you kind?’

  Perhaps I wouldn’t have to wait till Christmas. Perhaps one weekend Niall would visit me, when he was in funds. Please God he would visit me, and not let this weary ten weeks stretch out in fretful celibacy and a big hole where my heart used to be. I relished the thought of the dark glitter around him as he trod the corridors. Already I was preparing my little speech . . . Oh, you know, they call it parole . . . The Sophies wanted to ask what his crime was, but they were too polite.

  It’s a long way to London from the University of Glasgow, and Niall was too proud to hitch-hike.

  The day after Claire’s visit, I ran into Sue at breakfast. It was fried-egg morning. It blinked up from my plate like a septic eye. Sue gave me a big wink.

  Let me go back now to my former life, to 1963. Spring came to the north of England; you wait long enough, and it always does. Timid and experimental buds appeared, high on the black trees in the park. Sister Monica, my class teacher, began to tack sheets of tough blue paper on to a trestle table, and to call it the nature table; in time, we were told, we would have the opportunity to observe the Life of the Frog. The florist that we passed on our way to school began to file daffodils in buckets on the pavement outside the shop. They were brassy trumpets, they were brazen instruments; I touched their leaves, and feared they would slice my finger open.

  St Patrick’s day was dry but blustery, and the wind bowled us downhill towards school. Twenty minutes to nine, Karina stopped before the florist’s. I stopped too; this was something out of the ordinary. She moved from foot to foot, staring into the window, then said to me roughly, ‘Are you coming or not?’

  I followed her in. The shop bell jangled. I had never been into a flower shop before. It seemed colder than the street outside; wetly, it seemed to breathe. The stone floor was running with water, water swished through recently with a yard brush; the marks were still in it, and the brush stood in the corner, up-ended to give its bristles a chance to dry. There was a smell of torn stems and damp newspaper. A woman came out of the back, pinched and blue and wearing a plastic pinny. On the counter was a box of shamrock, fresh in. Karina pointed to an ostentatious bunch. ‘I’ll have that,’ she said.

  ‘Karina,’ I whispered. ‘You can’t. You’re not qualified. You’re foreign.’

  ‘I’m English,’ she said stonily.

  ‘Yes, but you’ve got to be Irish.’

  ‘There’s no law,’ the woman behind the counter said. She plucked out the bunch Karina had indicated, and shook it gently; silver drops of water scattered into the air. ‘I’ll pin it on for you, love, shall I?’

  ‘Does it cost extra for the pin?’ Karina asked.

  ‘No, the pin’s free.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Karina said. She stood with her chin raised, stock-still, like a soldier listening to lies before a battle, while the woman fastened the shamrock to her coat. Out of her pocket Karina took a stitched leather purse, a grown-up woman’s purse. I gaped at it. The popper, as she opened it, made a muffled explosion. ‘How much is that?’ Karina inquired.

  She peered into the purse. Among the coins she had was a whole shilling piece. She put the money, bit by bit, into the florist’s cupped palm, then closed the purse with another thunderous snap.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ the florist said. ‘Watch the road when you cross.’ All grown-up people said that: watch the road. I looked forward to being grown up so I could say it myself. The wind gently rippled the shamrock as we stepped back into the street.

  ‘Karina . . .’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can I have a bit?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m Irish.’

  ‘Why don’t you buy your own?’

  ‘I’ve got no money.’

  ‘What, none at all?’

  ‘A penny.’

  ‘A penny!’ she repeated.

&n
bsp; ‘Could I buy a pennyworth off you?’

  ‘That’d be about one leaf.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘It’d be about fifteen stalks with full shamrocks on.’

  Just before the school gates, Karina stopped and reached up to her corsage; plucked a single head of shamrock, and placed it in my open and respectful palm.

  About a week after that, my mother went down to school to see Sister Monica. As I’ve said, Karina and I were in the top class now. Every morning we did sums, followed by English, followed by Intelligence. Intelligence was about picking the odd one out: beetroot, asparagus, cabbage, pea. Hen, cow, jaguar, pig; pilot, fireman, engineer, nurse. I hesitated for hours over these questions, sucking the end of my pencil till it was pulp. ‘Carmel McBain,’ Sister Monica would say, ‘if the education committee was disposed to give a bursary for the slowest girl in this class, I’d say you’d get it every time. Don’t you realize this will be a timed test, girl, a timed test? You don’t pass your scholarship by sucking your pencil, my lady, and if you give me that look once again you’ll be out here and have the cane.’

  Intelligence was about shapes; about the next number in the sequence. My mother had come to ask Sister Monica to give me extra homework, to increase my chances of passing my scholarship. She returned triumphant. ‘And I’m stopping your comics,’ she said. ‘You’ll have no time for all that folderol. Besides, we’ve to save up now. There’ll be your uniform and bus fares. Me and your father will have to scrimp and save.’

  My comics were Judy, Bunty, Princess and Diana. ‘Belle of the Ballet’ was my favourite story. Sometimes when I was alone in my bedroom I hung on to the head of the bed and rose on my toes and teetered forward, a hand flailing at the mantelpiece for support; I did this until the bones crumpled, until tears of effort leapt into my eyes and my calves sang with pain. ‘Karina,’ I said, ‘do you get Princess?’