An Experiment in Love: A Novel

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 centre 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 able 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.

‘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 corners, 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.

There’s a time when childhood ends, and it was then, under the swaying grandee on Eliza Street, under Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught. I put down my schoolbag so that I had two hands free, and gave Karina a shove into the gutter. She shoved me in turn against the wall, and we went on like that round the corner on to Curzon Street, pushing and grunting and trying to fend each other off, until we reached my front door which was on the latch and I went in and slammed it behind me. I wanted to bawl up the stairs, ‘Guess what Karina’s done now,’ but I knew that my mother was always on her side, and would think the pontiff a smart move, and want to know why I hadn’t written something similar.

Nowadays, when the word ‘child’ comes into my mind, I can never see a particular child, any single flesh-and-blood entity. I can only see one of the plaster cripples that in those days stood outside shops, effigies the height of a two-year-old, their outstretched hands supporting collecting boxes. Some of these effigies were boys and some girls, but their features were the same and their plaster-coloured curls; the only difference was that the boys wore short trousers and the girls a frill of skirt, and beneath this there was a cruel leg-iron, clamped to the lower limb. It was the leg-iron that caused people to drop pennies into the box; that, and the upturned, painted blue eyes.

You’re only young once, they say, but doesn’t it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.