An Experiment in Love

  ‘Do I get it?’ Karina said. ‘Princess? It’s soft.’

  Coming back that day from school, my mother had looked thoughtful. ‘I’ve been talking to Sister Monica about Karina. Sister Monica tells me that she’s very bright.’

  I looked up. I saw that some comment was called for. I remembered Karina’s exercise books, besprinkled with red ticks by Sister Monica. Karina was neat, and Sister often said so: not to praise her, but to blame the rest of us. Karina wrote slowly, forming big deliberate letters like house bricks, square at the corners and evenly spaced. She did her numbers the same, and though when she wrote a composition Sister Monica would often scrawl ‘More effort required’, she usually got nine out of ten for her sums and sometimes nine and a half. Even if she got all the sums right she didn’t get ten out of ten, because that was impossible; among human beings, perfection belongs to Our Holy Mother and Our Holy Mother alone.

  ‘Well?’ my mother said.

  I nodded. ‘She’s good at sums. Fractions.’

  ‘Better than you?’ my mother said. There was an anxious, greedy edge to her voice.

  ‘Yes. But I’m better at compositions.’

  ‘You’ll have to work hard at your arithmetic,’ my mother said. ‘Say your times tables at night before you go to sleep, after you’ve said your night prayers.’ She gnawed her lip and then nodded, as if resolved. ‘There’s nothing like a good education,’ she said, ‘of which I personally didn’t have the chance.’

  Night came. I was a good child and an ambitious one, and I did what I was told, though when I was sleepy the prayers and the times tables got mixed up. Three sevens are twenty-one. Hail, holy queen, mother of mercy. Four sevens are twenty-eight. Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope. Five sevens are thirty-five. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

  The other story I liked in my comics was ‘Sue Day of the Happy Days’. The Days were her family; that was their name. Sue had a snobby elder sister who wore tight skirts and ironed her blouses in the kitchen before she went on dates, but that was really the only disadvantage to Sue’s life. Sometimes she got a new classmate who was snobby or unpopular, but it usually turned out there was a good reason for that. Sue Day’s mother had a round perm and made gravy and her father was kind in a detached way, like Dr Carr in What Katy Did. Her best friend was called . . . Edie Potter? Sue wore a school blazer, and had fair hair that flicked up at the ends. She must have been at least thirteen. Her lips were constantly parted, to show that she was speaking.

  Nine sevens are sixty-three. Turn then, O gracious advocate, thine eyes of pity towards us, and after this our exile . . . Ten sevens are seventy.

  The next day, when I was coming home from school, I saw my mother and Karina’s mother walking together down Eliza Street. They had their heads together. They were deep in conversation; at least, my mother was. And they were linking.

  five

  In the first few weeks of term at Tonbridge Hall, we didn’t see as much of Karina as I’d imagined we would. Sometimes when I was going in to breakfast she would be leaving, setting off for Euston Square and her college on Mile End Road. ‘The mysterious East’, Julianne called it. Karina would grunt a good morning, and I’d say, ‘Everything all right?’ and of course she wouldn’t reply, because why should she reply to a question as daft as that?

  One night Lynette came to our room, looking defeated and carrying a box of bonbons and candied fruits from Fortnum and Mason. She popped the box on to our coffee table, sat down on Julianne’s bed, massaged her tired calves and sighed. ‘I’ve tried to break the ice,’ she complained. ‘But Karina, it’s like – oh, go on, let’s have a mixed metaphor – it’s like pounding my head on a bleedin’ brick wall.’

  She finished her sentence with a flourish, a brilliant imitation of Sue’s peculiar accent. I said, ‘She has a problem with people.’

  ‘A chip on her shoulder,’ Julianne said.

  ‘We know her, you see.’

  ‘What language does she speak?’ Lynette asked.

  ‘English.’

  ‘Yes, but with her parents – what did she talk at home?’

  ‘English.’ I explained the situation, so far as I could.

  Lynette frowned. She had been looking forward, she said, to trying out a smattering of this and that, in the cause of making Karina feel more at home. She had done an exchange year, and her Russian was quite fluent. ‘I don’t think she’s Russian,’ I said. ‘Her father was frightened of Russians, my mother said. He used to take precautions against them.’

  Julianne stared at me. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Double-locking the door.’ At one time I’d been able to come and go freely from Karina’s house, but since her mother had taken ill that had changed. Karina’s father, never a man to respond to a greeting with more than a grunt, was now as sociable as a corpse. The gas man and the district nurse were let in, if it suited him; they could not rely on it. If old habit drove me to Karina’s door in the morning, I had to stand in the street, while mechanisms grated and clanked and chains were lifted from their grooves; when the door opened a crack, Karina had skilfully extruded her body on to Curzon Street without permitting me even a glimpse of the vestibule.

  ‘Well – ’ Lynette threw out a hand – ‘don’t ask me to write you a letter in Romanian, but other than that . . .’ She shrugged. She could do the basics in many Eastern-bloc tongues, she said. ‘The civilities. The small-talk of the bread queue.’ The turn of her sable head was eloquent; it was she who seemed to me a real refugee, one of the glamorous kind who might have diamonds in a silk roll thrust into a lizard-skin vanity-case. When I said this to her she agreed: ‘People are always surprised that I grew up in Harrow.’

  Julianne offered to go down the corridor to the kitchen to refill our mugs of coffee. We used to drink it black, because the rooms were too hot for us to keep milk. Lynette tore open the bonbons; leaving the room, Jule scooped up a marzipan peach and thrust it into her cheek. Lynette leant forward. ‘Please, explain to me while she’s out – why does Karina hate her?’

  ‘No special reason.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lynette flicked up an eyebrow. ‘Fine. But I notice Julianne can be sharp with her.’

  ‘Sharp? That’s mild.’ I must have grinned. ‘You know, Julianne’s not what she was. Her character’s softening.’

  Lynette selected a sugared almond. ‘Not a pleasant topic, this. I have to say that Karina doesn’t seem to like you either. Not in the least.’

  ‘I’m not sure we can do anything about that.’ I bounced a little on my bed. ‘Look, Lynette, we’re not in a school story. It’s not Mallory Towers. We don’t have to be . . .’ I groped for the word, ‘ . . . chums.’

  ‘Of course not. It’s just that I have to live with her.’

  ‘You do, don’t you? Can’t you apply for a transfer?’

  ‘No, because who would she find herself sharing with next? You see, I may not be the best person in the world, but I do try to be kind, in so far as one . . .’

  ‘Why?’ I said. I was examining the world of motives in those days, trying to find for myself a new place in it.

  ‘Why? I suppose . . . No, I can’t think why.’

  ‘We always used to be good in hope of eternal reward. And we were told that every time we said an unkind word, it was another thorn in Jesus’ crown. If we committed an unkind action, it drove the nails deeper into his wounds. Well, it won’t do, will it? Won’t wash.’

  Lynette smiled. ‘Not really. It’s not for grown-ups, is it? I suppose a person . . . a person dislikes confrontation and tries to ease . . . her own way through the world, and that means easing other people’s. Inevitably.’

  ‘So being kind is a sort of selfishness?’

  ‘You know the phrase, enlightened self-interest?’

  ‘I thought it meant money-grubbing.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s used that way.’ The tip of her tongue touched the vanilla-cream ce
ntre of a dark chocolate. Julianne was coming back down the corridor, her feet squelching on the parquet. ‘Karina’s unhappiness is no profit to anyone. And I’m afraid that if she got a new roommate she might be treated worse than I allow myself to treat her.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It’s just that. That’s all.’

  Jule handed around the coffee. ‘I see we’re on the perennial topic.’ Her fingers dipped into the Fortnum’s box. ‘Lynette, you must try to understand that though I know Karina I don’t know her. She comes from a social background quite alien to me in every way, and at school if I spoke to her once a year it was as much.’

  Lynette laughed, a small gurgle of sarcastic joy. ‘What a snob you are, Lipcott, I didn’t think – ’

  ‘That we had them in Lancashire?’ Julianne said coolly. She licked a sugar crystal from her lower lip. ‘Anyway, don’t ask me about her, ask Carmel. Carmel’s known her since they were at infant school.’

  Lynette turned to me. A miniature Florentine was poised at her painted lips. ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes, I knew her.’

  ‘She was your friend?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘So what did you do to her?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘I kicked her baby,’ I said. I glanced up and saw their two faces side by side, gazing at me in uncomprehending shock.

  I didn’t explain. Or only lamely and partially. Why should I? I had, by this stage of the term, very few words to spare; they were all going into my letters to Niall. And yet the proximity of Karina, the sight of her stumping out into the London traffic and dirt, the presence of her name in our mouths – all these things led me helpless back into the past, memories pulling at me strong and smooth as a steel chain, each link hard and bright and obdurate, so that I was hauled out of my frail, pallid, eighteen-year-old body, and forced to live, as I live today as I write, within my ten-year-old self, rosy-skinned but rigid with fear, on my way by bus to take my entrance exam for the Holy Redeemer.

  The surprise – if it was a surprise – had already occurred; I’d known something was up that day I’d seen my mum with Karina’s mum, linking each other on Eliza Street. ‘I’m sitting for the Holy Redeemer too,’ Karina had said boldly, one morning as we went through the school gates.

  ‘You are not!’ I said.

  ‘I am so! You can like it or lump it.’

  That same night my mother said: I am determined that child should have her chance in life. Why not? She’s as good as anybody, isn’t she? My father grunted. He was doing a jigsaw puzzle; he did them many evenings now. She has to be a bright girl, my mother reasoned, she must be: running on in her most decisive tone, convincing the empty air. Look at the way she helps Mary in the house. Does all the shopping. Poor Mary doesn’t know the price of an egg.

  ‘Why doesn’t she?’ I said.

  My mother frowned. ‘Mary has enough to do, working shifts. She has a good capable girl to do her shopping for her.’

  I had lost half a crown, once, when I had been sent out on a Sunday for a block of Neapolitan ice-cream. This had never been forgotten, it never would be.

  ‘And she’s capable enough to roll up her sleeves when she comes in from school and get her own tea and her father’s as well if he’s there for it.’

  I could get the tea, I thought. My mother didn’t need much food – she ran on wrath – and she didn’t see that other people might need what she herself didn’t. Getting our tea only involved slapping corned beef on a plate, and quartering a tomato. But there was a special way of slapping, a special way of quartering, and any modifications of it I might introduce were subject to my mother’s scorn. If I were to fail my Eleven Plus and go to St Theresa’s up Pennyworth Brow, with the model kitchen Sister Monica had told us about, I would be doing domestic science. That’ll show her, I thought. ‘Do they have domestic science at the Holy Redeemer?’ I asked.

  ‘Domestic science?’ My mother’s eyebrows – or the pencil marks which represented them – flew up into her hair. ‘Latin and Greek, that’s what you’ll be doing. Physics and chemistry.’

  We had received a booklet, called a prospectus. Among the lines of grey print there were some grey photographs, of two big girls handling test-tubes, supervised by a nun in spectacles; of a hockey team, grinning widely, arranged in a row with their sticks at a regulated angle, and the girl at the centre hoisting a beribboned cup. ‘How will I learn to play hockey?’ I said. ‘I don’t know how to do it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ my mother said. ‘It’ll come to you. When the time is ripe.’

  I went to look over my father’s shoulder. He was in the early stages of his jigsaw, so you had to look at the lid of the box to see that it represented a thatched cottage on a village green. There was a church spire, and some rambling roses and a bicycle leaning against a gate. ‘Be a good girl and you can help me fill in the sky,’ he said.

  ‘I’d rather do the duck pond.’

  ‘We’re not up to the duck pond yet. We’ve got to get the edges in first. Can’t run before we can walk.’

  ‘Well, will you give me a shout when you’re up to the duck pond?’

  ‘Get upstairs, lady,’ my mother said, ‘and get your homework done, never mind duck ponds. And don’t let me come up and catch you gawping out of the window, neither.’

  My father looked at his work, just a gap fringed with blue: ‘A happy home,’ he said, unemphatically.

  I went without looking back, up the steep stairs to my room. I closed the door and sat down at the table my mother had lugged up some weeks previously. My homework was already laid out; it was Intelligence tonight. I glanced – just glanced – out of the window, bespattered with spring rain; it was April, still very cold in the house, and as I worked I would sometimes have to put down my pencil and rub my fingers to get some life back into them. My room was papered blue and white, though the white in places was yellow with age; blue Chinamen went to and fro, crossing small bridges over invisible streams. A Chinawoman held up a bird in a cage, her eyes mere slits: strange combs, like knitting needles, stuck out of her hair. Was the caged bird singing? If you got very close you could see that its tiny mouth was open to emit sound, like the mouth of Sue Day of the Happy Days. I imagined its warble, repeated again and again as the pattern repeated, as the Chinamen crossed their bridges, as the pavilion door creaked open, as the string of lanterns swayed.

  I sat down, took up my pencil, began to work away at Intelligence: fill in the next letter in this sequence. To help me I had written out the alphabet on a piece of scrap paper. It made it easier to count backwards and forwards, though I would not, as Sister Monica pointed out, be able to have such an aid when I came to sit my exam. Sister Monica was not a very old nun, but rather young; she had spots, which were a sign of youth, and goggly glasses whose arms slotted away somewhere within the starchy mysteries of her caps and coifs and veils.

  Twenty minutes passed. Underline the correct word: As calf to cow, so leveret to hare. As flock to deer, so school to whales. I had circled a number of triangles and squared some circles, done underlining and filled in the answer on the dotted line. Now I put down my pencil and glanced over my shoulder. I wished there had been a lock on my door, but such a thing would have been unthinkable. Stooping down, I reached into my schoolbag, and drew out a copy of Princess.

  Karina had bought it for me; although she had sneered at me and said it was soft, she had read it herself first, so that the pages were scuffed and grimy and blurred with lard-soaked fingerprints. ‘You can owe me the money,’ Karina had said; but I was afraid I would never be able to pay her back. I did not get pocket-money; my mother had bought my comics for me, until the day when she turned against them. I did not need money of my own, because I was provided for; everything I needed was provided for my comfort, my mother said. And what did I do in return? She’d like to know that, she said. Very much she’d like to know. She would.

  I folded the comic, and held it on my knee, thinking that if she came in I might be abl
e to drag my chair right up to the table and conceal my sin underneath. I wondered what sort of a sin it was: venial, not mortal, I knew that much, but what category of venial? Disobedience to my mother? Stealing from Karina? Or what?

  Belle of the Ballet was going through a very exciting stage. The snobby prima ballerina had twisted her ankle, tottering to the floor in a gauzy heap, with a scream of ‘Oh – OUCH – help me!’ Belle had to step into her role at short notice. What a good thing the special spangled tutu fitted her! Belle was so young, yet for her it was maybe a once-in-a-lifetime chance. In the final frame she would get a bouquet, I expected; but since I had to keep the comic folded I could only have a bit at a time. ‘Eet izz a triumph!’ some foreign person would enthuse: perhaps a man in a coat with a fur collar, and a cigarette in a holder. But he would probably turn out not to be good for Belle’s career in the long run.

  I looked up, my vision clouded with glory, the creak of red plush seats and the rustle of silk, the abbreviated moan of the violins as the orchestra tuned up . . . My eyes, resting on the wall, encountered the Chinawoman, her deep sleeve and her wicker cage. My mother’s foot was on the stair. I doubled up in my chair, panic-stricken, and thrust the comic back into my bag. My face burned and pulsed. I felt contaminated, sick with guilt.

  As it was now common knowledge that Karina and I were going to sit for the Holy Redeemer, we were ostracized by our classmates, who considered we were getting above ourselves. This threw us increasingly into each other’s company, whether we liked it or not. Privately, Karina was gloomy about our prospects; she did not think we would pass our Eleven Plus, let alone our entrance exam. ‘Get away,’ she said. ‘We’ll fail. Everybody fails.’ I had not encountered pessimism before – not that deep, ingrained, organic pessimism which was part of Karina, and which of course I have often met in adult life.

  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.