An Experiment in Love: A Novel

six

I must now tell you about our life at the Holy Redeemer; but first of all I must tell you how we came to be outfitted for it.

We had a list of what we had to get, and these were some of the things on it.

Outdoor shoes

Indoor shoes

Gym shoes

Shoe bag

Aertex blouse

Winter tunic

Girdle – girdle! ‘Martin,’ my mother said, ‘she’s required to have a girdle!’

‘Girdle!’ my father said. This had become his favoured method of communication: repeating what my mother said, as if it were alarming, far-fetched or intrinsically ludicrous.

‘A foundation garment,’ my mother said.

‘She seems very young for corsets.’

‘After all, they’re nuns, they don’t want young women going round . . . sticking out.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘It says “girdle in house colour”.’

Words came into my mouth and stuck there: backed up against my hard palate. I knew these girdles were the kind worn by princesses in distress. They were the kind you used to tether a unicorn, or to throw a lifeline to a gallant knight some ogre had cast from a tower. They were not whalebone, they were not elastic, they were more like ropes or strings, sewn with seed pearls or knitted from your own golden hair.

‘You can really only get white,’ my mother said. ‘Or flesh.’ She sucked her lip. Ankle socks white, winter knee socks grey. Underwear as regulation – the approved outfitter will be pleased to advise. ‘They don’t want to go into detail,’ my mother said. ‘Not in print. You can understand it.’

Winter hat, grey velour

Summer straw, school colours

Hockey stick

Tennis racquet

TENNIS RACQUET! I said

In summer, white gloves will be worn.

I was precipitated into Constantine & Co. by a push in the small of my back. I was in for a slap when I got home, this had been made clear to me: ‘Giggling and fidgeting like that in the bus; you ought to know better at your age!’ My mother was wearing a very big daub of Tan Fantastic, which Karina had been mocking. She was wearing a costume with a tight skirt, and pinned to the jacket her best brooch, a gilt wheel of big deep blue stones, deep as the sea. Karina’s mother lurched through the swinging glass doors behind us. Her coat came nearly down to her ankles and as usual she was lugging her tartan shopping bag.

This was the first time I had ever been taken to a shop for clothes. Everything I had needed until this point had been manufactured by my mother. I looked at Karina to see if she was any more at ease in this situation. She was standing with her eyes closed, breathing in the deep scent of leather and polish. A saleswoman dressed in black minced towards us over the polished floor, like a panther who has spotted something juicy: like a panther who has spotted something slow.

My mother unclasped her handbag with a big snap and withdrew the uniform list, folded in four.

‘The Holy Redeemer,’ the saleswoman murmured. She seemed to curtsey as she took it from my mother’s hand and opened it. Her fingers brushed her smiling throat as she ushered us towards the curtained cubicles of her choice. The room was built up to its lofty ceiling in glass cabinets and deep wooden drawers, some of which other salesladies slid open enticingly, to reveal stacks of stiff shirts bound in Cellophane; from which they lifted jerseys with their arms strait-jacketed by cardboard, in every size from dwarf to gross.

‘In here if you please,’ the saleswoman said, as if she were threatening us. The curtain swept behind her. I was shut up with my mother in my own cubicle, at dangerously close quarters. But she was all simpering smiles now: for the duration, I was her darling. She took off her coat and hung it on one of the hooks supplied, and at once her woman smell gushed out and filled the air: chemical tang of primitive deodorant, scent and grease of Tan Fantastic, flowery scent of face powder, emanation of armpit and cervix, milk duct and scalp.

I removed my clothes. I was pale as paper, my body without scent or flavour of its own. Each of my ribs could be counted; each vertebra was accessible to a casual eye. Around my nipples was a puffiness which looked like a disease. I had been worrying that I would have to undress in front of Karina, who was in advance of me, gently but definitely swollen. I knew I had to get a bosom, but I hoped it wouldn’t come on too quickly, because when it did I’d need an ‘A’ cup, size 32 broderie anglaise bra. And my mother would say, All this costs money, and as we are scrimping and saving for your education . . . The flatter my chest stayed, the cheaper I’d be.

The items required for the Holy Redeemer were brought in one by one, stiff on their glossy wooden hangers, by the saleswoman in black. Only the winter tunic was an exception; she carried it across her arms, palms spread beneath it, as in certain statues and paintings Our Lady bears the weight of the body of her crucified son. The tunic was clay coloured, a stiff deep grey-brown. In the uniform of the Holy Redeemer this colour predominated, but it was offset by a solid purple-red called maroon: and sometimes where you would least expect it, these two colours would collide and form stripes.

I slid my arms inside the chilly sleeves of a cream shirt blouse. My mother twitched the stiff collar into position and began to button it up; she was attending to me as if I were a three-year-old, impressing the saleslady with her maternal skills. When the blouse was fastened it came to mid-thigh. The cuffs hung below my hands as if I’d climbed into the body of an ape. ‘I’ll move the button,’ my mother said. The saleslady made an approving noise, and picked up the tunic. She dropped it over my head and it engulfed me. Daylight vanished. I took a breath inside its clay folds. My arms moved outwards as if I were trying to swim. My mother tugged, and the daylight reappeared. I stood with my arms out from my sides, looking down at my feet, which were visible under the tunic.

‘She’s bound to grow,’ my mother said. ‘Bound to.’

‘You’ll find,’ said the saleslady, ‘that they have very strict requirements about length at the Holy Redeemer. We may have to adjust a little, upwards.’ All three of us stared at my feet. ‘Indoor shoes.’ the saleslady said. ‘I shall be but one moment.’

She came back with a box. On the outside of it was a picture of what looked like a coracle. ‘We call this “The Diana”,’ the saleswoman said. ‘Wonderfully durable and absolutely recommended.’

When the shoe was revealed and lifted from its tissue paper, even my mother was taken aback: even she, who for the next seven years would hear not a word spoken against the Holy Redeemer and its dress codes and rules and strange demands. ‘Well, it is old-fashioned,’ she said, taking it unwillingly from the saleslady’s hand. The saleslady smiled, and showed one tooth. The shoe was brown, its toe was round, it had a bar across like an infant’s shoe. It had a sort of shelf around it, a running board; its sole looked an inch thick.

‘Sit down,’ my mother said. She grappled with my ankle. I wanted to curl my toes like a baby, squirm my soles so she couldn’t ram them into The Diana. When I stood up again I felt as if the floorboards had been fastened to my feet.

We heard, from outside the cubicle, a rush and clatter as an adjacent curtain was drawn back. ‘Show Mary,’ my mother said. She manoeuvred me out under the cruel strip lights. Karina and I stood side by side. We were clad, we were uniformed. We did not look at each other. Karina’s hands were bunched at her sides.

Karina’s mother said, ‘She must have vests.’

‘There is no mention of an approved vest-style on the Holy Redeemer’s list,’ the saleswoman said. ‘However, we do stock various excellent types which I shall show you without delay.’

‘Warm, solid vests,’ Karina’s mother insisted.

‘You’ll be needing vests, too,’ my mother said reprovingly. I understood that she had to match Karina’s mother item for item; never would it be said of a daughter of hers that she went to the Holy Redeemer ill-equipped.

An hour later Karina and I were back in our own clothes, with parcels about our feet, bolsters and boulders which contained the equipment for our new lives. We had yellow woolly vests with three buttons at the neck and big navy knickers of soft furry cloth, and ankle boots for severe weather and tan leather satchels; also grey woollen gloves and lace-up outdoor shoes and presses for our tennis racquets and maroon and clay-colour striped scarves. My mother took out her bulging purse.

I averted my eyes. It seemed to me the cost of this was almost as much as the cost of our house. And I bit my lips, thinking of the humiliation of Karina’s mother, who surely would not have planned for this, would not have seen so much money in her whole life. I pictured the knickers and the racquet press confiscated, stacked back on the shelves, the pullover re-imprisoned in its cardboard and Cellophane and consigned again to one of the varnished drawers, and Karina herself sleeving away a tear as she recognized that she would never go to the Holy Redeemer now . . .

Mary hoisted up her tartan shopping bag and unzipped it. The sound of the zip, like God farting, seemed to fill the shop. She plunged in her hands like a woman plunging them into the washing-up bowl, and drew out two fistfuls of one-pound notes. She thrust them at the saleslady and dived back in for more.

Hands full, the saleslady recoiled. I noticed that a smudge of her orange lipstick had come off on her predatory tooth. Karina reached out and pulled the tartan bag from her mother’s grasp. I heard from inside it a deep jangle of loose change, half-crowns and two-shilling pieces and big change of that sort. Karina scooped the notes back from the salewoman’s hands, and began to count them out, one by one, into her ready palm, counting out loud with deliberation, as though she were at school and this were a test. Then she dipped back into the bag, brought out some more pound notes, and continued the process, until the saleswoman purred and was satisfied, and advanced on the till licking her lips, and left us alone to start stacking our gains into each other’s arms.

On the way back to the bus, Karina said to me, ‘Are those sapphires, actual gemstones, that your mother is wearing?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re glass.’

‘I wonder why she bothers,’ Karina said thoughtfully. ‘Embarrassing, really, isn’t it?’

I never thought the day could come, but it did; or at least the eve. On the 11th of September my mother sent me to bed at eight o’clock. It was light outside, and a blackbird trilled in Curzon Street’s one bush. I lay between the sheets trying to compel sleep and yet to deny it; I did not want to lie awake the whole long night, and yet I was afraid of the morning. I had heard of knights who, wishing to keep a vigil without nodding, slit the ball of their thumb and rubbed salt into the cut; formerly, my curl-rags had served this function. But the rules of the Holy Redeemer, which my mother and I had both studied, stated that hair was to be worn tied back and off the face, in a neat and restrained style; my mother could see that luxuriant ringlets would not fit this brief. Instead she had set my hair in kirby grips in a series of well-regulated corrugations all over my skull; the rest she was proposing to clamp back in a big plastic-toothed pony-tail comb. As an alternative, she said, I could have plaits. She had bought three yards of approved maroon ribbon from Constantine & Co. Even she could see that I might need a change, from time to time.

I turned over, cheek against the pillow. Kirby grips swivelled and upended themselves and probed my tender scalp. My blouse and tunic were hanging outside the wardrobe, as if to heighten their state of readiness, and mine. Music crept up, from the sitting-room below; we had a TV set now, and I knew my father was seated before it, his jigsaw puzzle unattended on the table, while my mother rampaged about in the kitchen. I would have liked to throw aside the blankets and creep down to them, embrace their knees and say I am one of you: offer my father to fill in the sky, on this puzzle and any to come. But I had seen the pitiless state of my mother’s face: pitiless and proud and full of tension, as if it were she herself who were going to the Holy Redeemer in the morning.

I thought of Jane Eyre, the night before her wedding. She thought it was presumptuous to label her effects as Mrs Rochester; she would not anticipate the event. Then the real Mrs Rochester with her blood-congested face and psychotic eyes came down from the attic and ripped her veil in two. Every item purchased from Constantine & Co. was now sewed with a name-tape; for better or worse, it belonged to me. I wished something would come down from the garret and rend my tunic, which glowed like an old corpse in the darkening room.

I must have slept. At six o’clock, when Curzon Street was empty and the air was the colour of a dove, my mother was at my bedroom door, shouting at me to get out of bed this very minute. My grey wool socks, striped at the turn-down with two rows of maroon, tugged over my feet and rolled up to my knees; my outdoor shoes clamped on to my feet. My mother plucked out each kirby grip with a flourish. My corrugated hair rolled back from my forehead, reeking of setting-lotion.

My mother looked at me fearfully, as if I were a prodigy, a monster. She watched me eat, each mouthful. My mouth was dry and my toast rolled up into little pellets in my mouth. ‘A pity you could never eat breakfast,’ she said. I thought of the likely scene in Karina’s house; half a dozen eggs spitting in a pan, Mary gripping a butcher’s knife and smiting slices from a side of bacon which dangled on an iron hook from the ceiling.

I pushed my plate aside, with the cold remains of the rubber bread. ‘Martin, do up her tie for her,’ my mother said.

My father said, ‘Doesn’t she know how?’

My mother said, ‘What do you think she is, Vesta Tilley?’

‘Vesta Tilley! That was a bow-tie she wore,’ my father said.

My heart had sunk down into my stomach; it felt soft and spongy and as if it were folding up on itself, like a bedroom slipper doubled in two.

The moment came. My mother flung open the door. She clamped my hat on my head and thrust me out into Curzon Street. The morning was mild. Through it a grim shape moved towards me, solid like a tank. It was Karina. Like me, she carried her empty satchel slung over her shoulder; like me, she wore a donkey-coloured coat that came down below her calves. ‘Have you ever heard of somebody called Vesta Tilley?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Karina said surprisingly. ‘She is in music-halls. She sings she’s Burlington Bertie.’

We turned on to Bismarck Street. The Prince of Connaught swung above our heads. ‘Remember when we used to play him?’ I said to Karina. I was half-smiling, indulgent, as if this folly were a world away.

‘Yes,’ Karina said. ‘Daft, weren’t we?’ Her tone was the same as mine; she turned her head, smiled slowly, and put out her hand towards me. We were frightened not to wear our prescribed woollen gloves; our palms brushed and squeaked against each other, then snagged together, then stuck in a clammy fastness. We passed our old school – shuttered, unpopulated at this hour, the playground bare except for blowing litter, the double doors locked fast; this autumn it would go on without us, bursting with screaming children sucking up their milk and spilling their ink and knuckling each other’s heads and being searched for lice, chanting their times tables and feeling the cane bruise their frozen fingertips. ‘It looks so small, doesn’t it?,’ Karina said. ‘Pathetic.’ We turned downhill towards the bus station, cast our satchels on to our outer shoulders, and began to link.

When we arrived at the bus-stop near the market place, Susan Millington was there, standing at the head of the queue. She was in her Holy Redeemer summer uniform, her striped blazer and boater, and this shocked me slightly; obviously, some concession was made to the sun, and I thought that, if my mother were in charge at the Holy Redeemer, no concession of any sort would be made. Susan Millington leant on her hockey stick, which was turned inwards between her feet. Her hands were bare, clothed neither in white cotton gloves nor grey woollen gloves; and they were brown because – as everyone was aware – she had recently returned from a family holiday in Portugal.

‘Susan,’ I said. ‘Hello there.’

Susan Millington turned to me her long horse-face. She looked down at me and moved her lip, as if she were whinnying. Then she turned away, and spoke to her companion, and both of them laughed in a long hectic gust of horse-laughter.

Karina pulled at my coat sleeve. ‘You can’t speak to her! Her dad’s a dentist.’

Both of us licked our teeth, as if we were licking blood from them. Dentistry was done in large houses by the park; Mr Millington’s had stained-glass in the windows and a laurel hedge. They’d had a bathroom, my mother said, when such things were undreamt of in this vicinity; they also took shower-baths, because Mr Millington believed it was more hygienic. She could dress well, my mother claimed, on a quarter of what Mrs Millington spent in Manchester, at Kendal Milne and in those madam shops round St Ann’s Square.

That morning, as every school day for the next seven years, we crawled away through the grimy terraces, lurching to a halt at traffic lights, snarling and revving past Woolworths and the fire station and the mini-marts with bargain posters in their windows, past net-curtain emporia and pet shops where single goldfish swam hopelessly in their bowls: by Methodist churches and cinemas that before a year was out would be turned into bingo halls. As we reached the outskirts of the town there were shops selling blocks of foam that you cut up for cushions and mattresses; there were coal merchants and scrap-yards, and weed-ridden vacant lots with standing pools of black water. Our town did not end but simply, after spreading and diluting itself, washed into the next town, where we ground into the Victoria bus station and changed to the Number 64. Then we would lurch off again, under a viaduct, alongside a river running black; by now the streets would be full of men and women hurrying to work, and among the monochrome of their overcoats and mackintoshes you would see the fuchsia or bluebird-coloured flash of a sari or shalwar-kameez.

In winter the bus’s windows would be opaque with filth, but on my first morning, golden by now, I was able to watch this second town run out in a sweep of dual-carriageway; I saw tree tops appear above the roofs of neat semi-detached houses, and watched grime give way to green, to tree-lined roads and striped lawns and mellow walls of rosy brick: to mock-Tudor public houses, bowls clubs, shopping parades, a public park with a floral clock and a bandstand with peeling paint.

This was where we would be educated, Karina and I, among girls whose fathers were solicitors, factory managers, small businessmen and the more prosperous sort of shopkeeper. Their mothers stayed at home to construct Battenburg cakes and cut back hydrangeas. Their first memories were of garden ponds and weeping willows, of the wrought-iron balconies of Scarborough hotels, of the slippery leather of the back seat of the family car. When I think of the early lives of these girls – of Julianne, let us say – I think of starched sun-bonnets, Beatrix Potter, of mossy garden paths, regular bedtime, regular bowels: I see them frozen for ever in that unreclaimable oasis between the war and the 196os, between the end of rationing and the beginning of the end: fixed in time, their bodies scented with clover honey and Bramley apples: one foot daintily poised, one hand – as their ballet teacher prescribed – gesturing a charming invitation to the years to come. Life, do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe: we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.

That night my mother said, ‘Did Susan Millington speak to you?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t she?’ My mother was irritated. ‘Well, no doubt she’ll speak to you tomorrow.’

Our first morning was not much of a disaster. We marched in lines a lot, and answered to our names: in Karina’s case, to an approximation of it. We were led up and down the cramped and creaking staircases of the Holy Redeemer, glimpsing the convent’s lawns through lustreless Gothic lights, to an echoing cloakroom where we were allocated pegs and where we hung our grey velour hats and changed our shoes. I was reluctant to take my hat off, because of my new hairstyle; when Karina saw it she popped her eyes but reined in her snigger, perhaps as a sign of solidarity. We threaded back to our classroom in the silence prescribed for corridors at all times, our huge feet preceding us, our pullovers reeking of Constantine & Co., our faces stiff with unease. We saw that every other girl except us wore narrow almond-toed sandals, neat and light, in a smart shade of tan. We saw that none of them had a satchel, and all had a briefcase with a gleaming brass lock.

Such support as we offered each other was silent. Karina just whispered, when she got the chance: ‘That saleswoman, she saw us coming.’ It was the first time I had heard this expression, but I understood what she meant, and I nodded. We never spoke of the matter again. But that night as we were going up Curzon Street, our first homework in our despicable bags, we swung them from side to side and sang ‘Herring boxes without soxes, / Sandals were for Clementine.’

In our first week at the Holy Redeemer we learnt several stanzas of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the difference between ‘will’ and ‘shall’. I took all my textbooks home to have protective covers put on them, and my mother covered them in wallpaper, offcuts of the blue-and-white Chinese wallpaper I had in my bedroom; so the caged bird sang like Lesbia’s sparrow on the back of A Course in Latin, and the Chinawoman winced on her bound feet across the spine of First Steps in Algebra.

‘Did Susan Millington speak to you?’ my mother said.

‘No.’

‘Well, did you speak to her?’

‘One day I did.’

‘What did you say?

‘Hello, Susan.’

‘Does she think she’s too good?’ my mother burst out. ‘You’re as good as her now. Yes, and as good as anybody.’ I wondered what she would think if she could hear Karina on that topic. Now that we were studying the feudal system I was in a better position to understand Karina’s outlook on life. She believed in hierarchy and degree and disbelieved profoundly in the equality of man. She believed in self-preservation by scheming, by squirrelling away, by conserving her efforts and never wasting her breath. She did not believe in justice, or at least she acted as if justice were a luxury; she did not believe in speaking her mind. She was slow and steady and she put her shoulder to the wheel.

She was, as Julianne would say later, a peasant. I saw this, but I never thought she would revolt.

The Holy Redeemer was an academy well-thought-of in the district where it was situated – that is to say, it valued the social manner of its girls above their originality or wit. The girls themselves were lively, boastful, vain; a few were shy, a few snobbish, a few rebellious. In the seven years between our arrival as first formers and our departure from the Upper Sixth, characters changed of course – but they didn’t change much. It was the girls’ appearance that was subject to volcanic, dismaying alterations. Little gilt girls grew coarse and dark, gangling girls grew svelte; modest girls grew great bosoms and dragged them about like the sorrows of Young Werther. Others, pale and self-effacing as novices, whispered unnoticed through their days, hardly embodied inside their solid maroon-and-clay uniforms, creeping out of the school at eighteen on the same mouse feet that had brought them in at eleven. A number of such girls secured lovers and husbands at once, without the trouble of looking for them, and began upon tumultuous and dazzling erotic careers. Some needed just a year or two to blossom into women who occupied the normal amount of space and breathed their ration of air. Some of them blossomed at thirty, no doubt, and some will find themselves at forty; some will creep on those mouse feet into old age.

In my first year at school I learnt a great deal of poetry by heart, and recited it in my bedroom at night to improve my diction. My vowels remained long and slow, but – though I continued to wear the shoes with the running boards, and to drag my satchel after me – I became indistinguishable, in a year or two, from my companions who had more privileged home-lives. The nuns and lay teachers, though blinkered and inadequate in some respects, were not so snobbish that they made distinctions between Karina, myself and the others: not to our faces, anyway. Who knows – perhaps they regarded us with interest? We were the first girls from our school – from any school like ours – to go to the Holy Redeemer, and perhaps we were thought of as a worthy social experiment.

In my first-year exams I performed with competence in each subject, and was placed fifteenth in a class of thirty-four girls. I was very satisfied with my modest success; it was unlikely to tempt fate, unlikely to attract envy or spite. But then in my second year – in spite of myself, it seemed – I was placed near the top of the class. A year later, only Julianne and I were serious contenders for the Third-Year Prize. She began to notice me, her blue eyes sliding dubiously over me from beneath the lemony froth of her fringe.

Julianne was a doctor’s daughter. She was tall, strong, athletic and fast. She never minded what she said and she never minded what she did. If this were a school story for girls, of the kind that have gone out of fashion now, I would be telling you that she was the most popular girl in the form. In fact, I have to report that she was not particularly popular at all. She never exerted herself on anyone’s behalf, never exerted herself on her own. Her academic successes came to her without apparent effort; on the tennis court, she would skid to retrieve a wayward ball and thump it down in an unreachable corner of the far court, without loss of poise or loss of breath. Julianne was perhaps too sardonic to wish to be a leader, too deep: that is what I think now. Nothing about her – her beauty, her confidence, her brilliance – did I admire. To begin admiring Julianne would have been to dig myself a bottomless pit. I did not think there was any hope for me if once I fell into it.

Our convent was not like the convents that are generally described in novels. We were not told that Our Lady would blush every time we crossed our legs. We were not forbidden patent-leather shoes in case boys saw our knickers reflected in them. It was not a hotbed of lesbianism; indeed we were unaware of that tendency or vice, until the books we read – uncensored – informed us of it. No one recruited for the order. I did not know any girl – except myself – who wanted to be a nun.

Still, our lives were neither free nor pleasant. There was an agenda. We were to be useful to society. We would graduate, then marry, then be mothers, also nurses and teachers, brainy, dowdy, overstretched: selfless breeders with aching calves, speaking well of support stockings by the age of thirty-five, finding our comfort in strong tea with one sugar. We would be women who never sat down, women with rough hands and a social conscience, women with a prayer in their heart and a tight smile on their lips; women who, seeing an extra burden offered, would always step forward and suggest ‘Try me.’ You have heard of schools that train life’s officers: this was a school that trained life’s foolish volunteers.

We were not physically chastised, at the Holy Redeemer. Frigid courtesy was extended to us, as an example of how to conduct ourselves when we were adults. Our excesses and errors were kept in check by sarcasm. We were never praised. We understood we did well if we were not blamed or held up to ridicule. Discouragement was wielded like an intangible baton; when you had tried your hardest, you would be told with a civil brutality that it was not enough. To court notice – even by excellent work – was to run the risk of a snub. Many of us – I do not say Karina, or Julianne – became anxious, painfully scrupulous and striving beings, always trying to out-best our best, to squeeze out one word or look of approbation, to please those who could never be pleased: who would never be pleased on principle. It was a practical education, an education in a certain old-fashioned virtue. We were not told to be humble. We were made to be.

We were very curious about the details of the nuns’ daily lives, but these details were guarded from us. We did not visit the House unless we were sent on a message, or unless we were suddenly taken ill; we stepped inside it, just, as we processed to chapel for the daily rosary, which was voluntary, or for compulsory Friday afternoon Benediction. Benediction was incense, plainchant and bump-heads: two or three pupils overcome by religiosity or post-lunch hypoglycaemia, bundled out into the corridor to be offered sips of cold water from a plastic beaker.

When I visited the House I always noticed what I had noticed that first time, when we came for our entrance exams. There was the same smell of incense and custard, blended, I later discerned, with the smell of stewed plums and moth-balls. There was the broken tile, the terracotta tile, that gave under the foot: tock-tock. So acute now is my nostalgia and my desire, that if I had such a room with such a tile I would break it to hear the sound: to remind myself of Karina following behind me – tock-tock – ten years old, innocent then of any sin except the Original one. But in those days, I flashed my eyes into the corners of rooms, to pick up any evidence, crumb, of what a nun’s life might be like: where were their baths, lavatories, what would they eat that night? I learnt nothing. It was a blank.

The evidence of their spiritual life was equally guarded from me. In our presence they offered the same prayers as us – the formulations anyone can employ – with a conspicuous lack of fuss or fervour. They spoke in a prosaic way of God’s glory, and if their private prayers got results they never told us about them. Why were they nuns then? Did they have a faith that was more faithful, a hope that was more hopeful than ours? They certainly didn’t excel in charity. They must have cultivated their virtues in private, after we had gone home; in their dealings with us they were grumpy and exacting, petty and cold.

I did not see this at once. When I was eleven years old, I understood that I also was meant to be a nun. Where does one acquire a sense of vocation? In the chapel after a school dinner, a queasy mass of processed peas and tinned apricots rolling slowly through the gut: great girls whooping in the playground with the cold stinging their cheeks, and inside, silence and the scent of winter flowers: the frozen oily touch of holy water: the creak and snap of a knee joint as a sister rises from genuflection. If you stare for a long time at a candle flame you lose all sense of self. I found this: I felt my thin, hungry essence flit upwards towards the gilded roof. I thought that was what holiness was – this loss, this flitting – and I may have been right.

The only jewellery permitted to Holy Redeemer girls was of a Catholic nature – a Lourdes medal, a cross and chain. Karina wore a sharp silver crucifix, over-sized, that was always edging up over the top button of her blouse or summer frock. She used to thrust it back with ostentation – impatient yet reverent – and glance up at the teacher of the moment to see if she was watching. She did novenas, First Fridays, rosaries: obligations over and above weekly Mass and regular confession. When the sacred host was in her mouth she looked as if she were sucking a stone.

One thinks of the loss of faith as a gradual process, a seeping and trickling. In my case it was sudden. I woke up one day, in my Chinese room; I was twelve, and the torpor of adolescence was seeping through me, and I hated mornings. There was a prayer, that Sister Monica had told us to say on waking: Holy Mother Mary, I humbly thank you for preserving your hand-maiden from the perils of the night. Downstairs, my mother was already gushing water into the kettle; soon she would be yelling for me. I sat up and slid to the edge of the bed. Now I beseech you preserve your hand-maiden from the snares and temptations of the day to come. My feet were cold on the linoleum: I looked down at them, narrow and blue. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord – just as I was about to add ‘Amen’, something made me look up. Perhaps it was God, climbing out through my window, absconding. I looked around the room. What perils? I wondered. My satchel rolled fatly on the floor, stuffed with maths textbooks. My outdoor shoes stood obediently side by side, waiting for my feet. What temptations? I moved to the window and opened it a crack. The sullen morning slid its fingers inside. So I’m doing today on my own, I thought. In that pendant second before my feet touched the lino, God had become de trop; I felt vaguely embarrassed that I had ever believed anything.

Soon after this I had a short conversation – my first – with Julianne. It was about God’s existence. She took a Voltairean view, that if he did not exist it would be necessary to invent him: ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘even if it were not necessary, it would be profitable.’ She had the placid air of someone who would never let Popes interfere with her pleasures. Not a wrinkle – of doubt, or anything – marred her broad white brow. She might have had perfect faith: might have been one of those unspotted souls we heard about, shining with the purity of a recently cleaned window.

In Curzon Street, these were years of home improvements – in some ways if not in others. Some people on the street bought cars, but my father said he didn’t see why they’d want to bother. ‘If only they realized the worry a car causes. The road tax alone. The traffic jams.’ Public transport was good enough for us, he said; always had been, always would be.

But in a car, I thought, you can go precisely where you like. You’re the driver. You can even go where there isn’t a road.

Our coal fire was abolished, and in the sitting-room an electric fire threw out a vitiating heat, pierced by whistling drafts. The house was showing its age. The back wall was freezing to the touch, icy as the pack of six fish fingers that served the three of us on a Friday evening. My mother never went near a church these days, but she did believe devoutly in fish on Fridays.

It can’t just have been the menopause that made her so angry – with life, with me? When I was eleven years old, she seemed to enter on a twenty-year temper tantrum. All her discourse was of disappointment and loss, of let-downs and deceits. If I proposed to go on a school outing, she would say, What do you want to go there for? You won’t enjoy it. If I was asked to someone’s house, she would say, Why do you want to go bothering with her? Your parents, she would say; that’s who you should be bothering with. Nobody else will help you, when it comes down to it. You’ve only your own family.

I see her saying these things; her face hollow and her eyes without light. At other times she would urge on me the virtues of the outside world: of getting on, getting out, getting out of Curzon Street and getting away for good and all. ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,’ she’d say: if this were true, my homework efforts were useless. She talked as if everything were stacked against me – the money of others, their good looks and breeding and social graces – stacked up into a Matterhorn of prejudice and denial; and yet at the same time it was my job to push at this mountain, to topple it, to bulldoze it with my will. The task in life that she set for me was to build my own mountain, build a step-by-step success: the kind didn’t matter as long as it was high and it shone. And as she had told me that it is ruthless people who rise highest in this life, I would slash through the ropes of anyone who tried to climb after me; I would prize out their pitons, and jump about on the summit alone.

But then, twenty years on, when I stood on the heights I had erected for myself, there would be a crumbling, she seemed to say, an inner decay, a collapse: and once again I would realize that she was my only friend.

My father did increasingly complex jigsaws. There was an elaborate still-life with grapes, roses and shellfish. There was an Alma-Tadema picture, of soft-eyed women with marble limbs. There was a jigsaw of the Last Supper; it took him days and days, and then a piece of Judas proved to be missing. My mother turned the chairs up and trounced the cushions; the gap remained, a worm-shaped hiatus in the traitor’s ribcage.

When I look back from myself now at myself then, I believe I was a diligent, quiet, undemanding child; hardly more trouble at sixteen than I was at ten. At the time, though – even after I had stopped going to confession and stopped examining my conscience every day – I believed I was a monster of egotism, an incipient tyrant, a source of trouble and agony of mind. My mother said I was, and I didn’t query it. I never tried to take out of her hands the direction of my life, or questioned why she and not I should have it. Inoffensive though I was, she treated me as what was known in those years as a juvenile delinquent. Everything I did was suspicious – at least, it aroused her suspicion.

My mother kept a tight hand on my social life, posting me upstairs to the Chinese room with orders not to daydream and not to let her catch me looking out of the window. For three hours each evening I kept company with my five-shilling fountain-pen and a bottle of blue-black ink, with maps and protractors, with tables of verbs and ragged lines of blank verse. In severe winters I worked downstairs; the television was turned off, and I was told that she and my father were prepared to sacrifice their evening’s entertainment for the sake of my education. I was seldom let to watch television – not even the news, which my mother did not think of as educational, because after all it was not a subject, and I did not have an exercise book for it. But then, once in the week, I would be told to stop whatever I was doing, and to sit down and watch a quiz show called University Challenge. My mother watched me anxiously to see what answers I knew, to see what progress I was making. I pressed my lips shut on the answers; I would not play. The students who formed the teams were elderly and tried to appear lovably eccentric; they had mascots with them, floppy-eared dogs and stuffed trolls, stitched-up penguins and that sort of thing. They were mostly the kind of people you’d cross the street to avoid.

So it was a thin time, you see: the dining table had to do me for a dance-floor, and the electric coals for the electric glow of teenage romance. In my bedroom I carried on improving my diction. ‘But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.’ But you don’t of course, not when you’re fifteen or so. Perhaps I should regret my misspent youth, pity myself for having so little fun. But carpe diem is an empty sentiment, now that we all live so long.

The seaside-postcard view of convent schools insists that sex intrudes into every lesson, every hour; that there are saucy little novices yearning for a monk, and pigtailed prefects bursting out of their push-up bras. But I must report that our nuns mentioned sex hardly at all: love, never.

Perhaps they were afraid of our superior knowledge. Sometimes they did mention boys – the wary tension in their voices seeming to capitalize them, so that they became Boys of a special type, not the everyday ones that you saw on the street but another kind that you’d meet when the time was ripe. And the time would be ripe at some social occasion, some occasion under Catholic auspices, in a draughty hall . . . I pictured them as awkward poor devils, these Boys, the sleeves of their suits too short and their raw hands hanging down, their round faces shining, their smiles bashful and placatory. They knew their nature – uncontrollable – and were ashamed of it. When my mother stopped my comics – Bunty and Judy, Princess and Diana – I took to reading her magazines instead: Woman, Woman’s Realm. Always they had articles about ‘unmarried mothers’; they seemed written in a lowered tone, eye-rolling and falsely sympathetic. The tone rankled with me; I saw injustice. I said to my mother, ‘People can’t help it, can they, if they have a baby before they’re married? I mean, if they’re sent it? What can they do?’

My mother said, ‘You’ll find it’s usually the nice girls who get into trouble of that sort.’

‘Why?’ I said. There was a gap here, of information not imparted: slipped between the lines, slipped between the years.

‘It’s because they’re too trusting,’ my mother said. She looked severe. ‘Those hard madams, you don’t find them having babies. Oh no, because they know what’s what. It’s the nice girls who fall for it every time.’

I took the problem to my enemy. ‘Karina,’ I said, ‘do you know how people get babies?’

‘God!’ she said. ‘Don’t you know that yet?’ But I could see panic in her face, as if she were a horse being galloped at a fence she would not be able to jump. She hit me, and ran off down the street.

My periods started one Tuesday evening in my first term at the Holy Redeemer. I had just finished writing the character of Cassius – bitter, energetic, ambitious – when I went up to the lavatory and found out what a mess I was in. I did not think I was dying, like girls in novels that pre-date this one; though my ignorance was profound, there must have been some intimation, some hint, some suspicion in the air, that a thing like this might occur. I did not feel afraid, but I felt ashamed. The difficulties seemed practical; I had to lay some plot to get my mother on her own.

My mother was sitting under the standard lamp knitting a Fair Isle pullover. When she was doing Fair Isle she did not like people to speak to her. I went up to her and touched her elbow. She snarled. I looked around, dazed. What if I bled on the carpet? My father was doing a jigsaw of the Tower of London. ‘Can you come up to my bedroom?’ I whispered. ‘Tell you something. I want to. Must, please.’

‘What is it you can’t tell your mother here?’ my father inquired. He slotted into place a fragment of the outer wall of a torture chamber.

‘It’s a surprise,’ I said. I thought it a cool thing to say; I amazed myself.

‘Oh, a surprise,’ he said genially. After all, it was his birthday in a week. He nodded, and fitted in a Beefeater’s knee.

When my mother came up to my bedroom I was already undressing. She gave me a cursory glance. ‘Have you got jam on your underskirt?’

I looked at her in astonishment. How on earth did she think I would manage that? Where would I get the jam from, unless she gave it to me? I shook my head. At the thought of eating unsupervised jam.

Twenty minutes later, trussed up in a harness, I was in bed. I wailed that it was not bedtime, but this cut no ice with my mother. I wailed that I had not done my equations, and she said curtly, ‘I’ll give you a note.’ I wailed how long would it go on for, and when would it happen again? ‘Every month, or twenty-five days in my case,’ my mother snapped. I wailed, how old would I be when it stopped, and my mother said, ‘I’ll get you a book about it.’

‘Will I always have to go to bed early?’ I said.

She said, ‘Don’t be so silly.’

Next day I suffered spasms of pain that left me shaking and winded. I felt as if a big bird – one of the ravens, perhaps, from the Tower of London – had got its claws in my lower back and was rending it apart, prizing flesh from spine. Later the pain moved and I felt as if the dissection were being performed more urgently, surgically; I thought of the skinned corpses of animals hanging in butchers’ shops, neatly split down the mid-line. ‘Exercise is good for period pain,’ my mother said. ‘Scrubbing floors, that helps it.’

So here it is. The women’s realm.

Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers – not that I study her pronouncements, but this one sticks in my mind – that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

Unlike Mrs Thatcher, though, I lost my father as well. My mother must have alerted him to what was the matter, when she came downstairs that evening to take up her Fair Isle. He looked at me with wistful disappointment for a month or so. There – I was a woman after all, not his little jigsaw-puzzle companion, not even a mechanism by which he might extract some revenge on life. I was bound to marry – ‘bound to’, he said one day, in a rare burst of communication. Bound to marry and let some man down; I had passed over to the territory of my mother. He treated me with great politeness after those first few disappointed months, and sometimes discussed with me topics that were in the newspapers, to make sure I was keeping up with current affairs. He let me know, without employing words, that if I were ever in trouble, if there were anything I ever needed, I could not count on him.

Year I, I learnt:

a. The ground plan of a medieval monastery;

b. That it is vulgar to use a ballpoint pen instead of a fountain-pen;

c. That parallel lines meet at infinity.

Year II, I learnt:

a. The products of Ecuador;

b. The mountain sheep are sweeter, / But the valley sheep are fatter;

c. To prefer the active to the passive voice.

Year III, I learnt:

a. The anatomy of a rabbit;

b. That beauty is truth, truth beauty;

c. How to apply liquid eyeliner.

Year IV, I learnt :

a. The ablative absolute;

b. The composition of the blood;

c. Something of the nature of the task before me.

Once, when we were fifteen years old and we were leaving the examination room after our O-level Latin paper, Julianne stepped lightly behind me in the corridor and slid her hand on to my shoulder. She left it there, large and warm and solid, for the briefest possible time. But I remember that her touch was curiously sustaining. It was as if a member of a conspiracy, on her way to interrogation, had met a fellow conspirator by accident, and received a moment’s consolation on the stone and winding stair.

Julianne sat behind me, in every successive class; she had her friends, among the bold and the pretty, and I had mine among the mice. Sometimes I sensed within myself – sometimes I felt it strongly – a will, a pull towards frivolity. I wanted to separate myself from the common fate of girls who are called Carmel, and identify myself with girls with casual names, names which their parents didn’t think about too hard. I wanted to elect pleasure, not duty, and to be happy, and to have an expectation of happiness.

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.

During my years at the Holy Redeemer, it was Karina kept me going, as far as food was concerned. She always brought food to school with her, packed up in greaseproof and bursting out of brown paper bags. She’d have a stack of sandwiches, ox tongue or Cheshire cheese, perhaps buttered scones and some of the heavy sponge cakes she made herself. Sometimes on the bus on the way to school, she’d be in the middle of a sentence and her hand would begin absent-mindedly to fumble into her bag, and she’d draw out a piece of bread spread thick with potted beef, and begin to munch away. At morning break she would give herself another ration, and then she would eat up all her school dinner, even when it was the special fish made entirely of bones, even when it was semolina. She would have packed enough to see her right on the journey home; and it was at this point in the day that she would sometimes turn to me and say, ‘Are you hungry?’ and offer me a sandwich and a cake from one of her bags.

Of course, no girl from the Holy Redeemer was ever permitted to eat in public; there was a prominent paragraph in the school rules, denouncing the practice. So a day came when Mother Benedict hauled me in. ‘Who reported me?’ I asked.

‘Nothing to the point,’ she snapped. ‘God sees all things.’

But I could not help wondering why only I was in trouble, and not Karina, a constant and habitual public muncher. ‘Why did you do this thing, Carmel?’ the nun said passionately. ‘You have never shown an inclination to such distasteful behaviour until now.’

‘I was hungry, Mother,’ I said; I could not think of any other reason.

She looked at me, disconcerted. ‘You’re a healthy girl, aren’t you, Carmel? You can surely withstand the odd pang of hunger without having to make an exhibition of yourself? Think of the poor Indians, starving on the streets of Bombay! What about your lunch, didn’t you eat it?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Be sure to eat up every morsel from now on, and if you don’t like it you can offer it up for the holy souls in purgatory.’

The truth was though that I didn’t think of myself, from day to day, as being hungry. I suppose I knew intellectually that I was, but as far as my body was concerned it was a normal feeling; it was only later, at Tonbridge Hall, that I recognized the hollowness and lightness as being perhaps undesirable.

I found Niall the year before our O-levels, at our town’s central library down by the market-place. The boys from the local Catholic grammar school congregated there in the early evening, when they were not at their various games practices, and scuffed up the pages of the encyclopedias while they covertly scrutinized the girls who came and went. I got into the habit of dropping into the library on my way home; there was nothing in the school rules to prohibit hanging around in a reference section. I can’t have cut much of a figure, with my velour hat like an inverted dish on my head, but we must suppose that I inspired in Niall a wish to see me otherwise.

It is a mistake, of course, to think that convent girls wait until they’re adults to disappoint the expectations of the nuns. In our generation, growing up through the sixties, we quickly developed our double lives. We were women inside children’s clothes, atheists at Mass, official virgins and de facto rakes. It was not deceit; it was dualism. We had grown up with it. Flesh and spirit, ambition and humility. It was time to make plans for the future; I swung between thinking I could do anything with my life, and that I could do nothing. I still fitted into the blazer bought for my first summer at the Holy Redeemer. My mouse feet had hardly grown, so my indoor shoes were still going strong, and had perhaps acquired a perverse chic. But my satchel was scuffed and battered, and inside it at the bottom corner there was a big ink stain, like the map of a new continent.

Maybe the act of love came too late. As a career move, I should have lost my burdensome virginity at thirteen or fourteen, when there would have been no question of a lasting attachment and no desire for one. As it was, I shook when I removed my clothes and I cried after it was done, not out of pain or disappointment but out of an up-rush of muddling emotion which twenty-four hours later I was ready to call love.

So we formed an attachment, Niall and I, and after three or four months were spoken of by our friends as if we were an old married couple.

Niall said really sensible things to me. He said, Why don’t you get a Saturday job? It would give you some freedom. My mother said, no daughter of mine. What, in a shop or a café! What would Mother Benedict say!

Saturdays were for homework: getting into Oxbridge. My mother had heard this term ‘Oxbridge’ and had begun to use it, and it was making me uneasy. I was afraid she thought it was a real place; when the time came, Oxford or Cambridge would not be good enough, only Oxbridge would be good enough for a daughter of hers.

‘Just tell her,’ Julianne said. ‘Tell her you’ve no wish to spend three years locked in some musty quadrangle with people who will laugh at your accent.’

We were closer, now we were sixth formers – no longer academic rivals because Julianne was in the science stream and I was doing the girls’ stuff. All the advice she gave me was of this twist-in-the-tail kind; but you didn’t go to her to feed your self-esteem.

What helped my case was the news that Susan Millington had accepted a place at London University. ‘She’s going to read law,’ my mother said ‘She’s going to be a barrister, like you see on the television.’

As I became more acceptable to Julianne and her friends, I grew away from Karina. We still travelled together, and sometimes in a burst of irritability she would confide in me: it was always when she was angry or jealous or otherwise caught up with strong emotion that her language would seem to slip sideways and you would remember that she was not English, for all her insistence. Her mother infuriated her these days, she said, by talking about her long-dead, her missing relatives. ‘I say the past is over and done with, forget it. Why does she keep harking on about it?’

Karina had changed a lot over the last couple of years – to look at, anyway. At twelve she was one of those matronly little girls, who remind you of the well-upholstered women of sixty who stand at bus-stops with baskets on wheels. Her girdle – in house-colour – would ride up over her non-existent waist, giving her tunic an Empire line; but despite this she was still a handsome child, her blonde hair shining, her cheeks still dimpled and pinkly scrubbed. Adults still smiled on her; ‘None of that slimming nonsense with Karina,’ they would say.

But by the time she was seventeen, she had become a dark, forceful presence, strong and sulky. Her hair had dimmed to a nondescript brown, her skin thickened and become muddy. Her long disapproval of the world had become overt, and stamped a frown-line between her eyes. Her strength seemed ridiculously disproportionate to the day-to-day demands our schoolgirl life placed on it; she might have been a formidable games player, except that she despised games of any kind. When she followed me on to the bus in the mornings, I felt as if my conscience were coming after me, ready to fell me with one blow. ‘Karina runs that house single-handed,’ my mother would say. Just as when we were children, she always had money in her purse.

One day in my fifth year, when I was coming home along Curzon Street – late, because I’d stayed behind at school to audition for a part in a play – I saw my mother hammering on the door of Karina’s house. ‘Mary! Mary! Come down, love, and let me in.’

I turned around, shrugged my satchel on to my shoulder, and went straight back down to the town to meet Niall. It was always easier to meet him without telling my mother where I was going. Of course, there would be a row when I got home; but that was preferable to two rows, one when I got home and one before I went.

It turned out that someone had told my mother that Mary had been taken poorly. An ambulance carried her off, but then returned her a day or two later. Karina’s father wouldn’t let anybody in the house. I said, ‘I’m sure Karina will cope. She’s always so capable, isn’t she?’

My mother looked at me reproachfully. ‘She’s got her exams coming up, same as you.’

‘Exams? Oh, exams are nothing, to somebody as capable as Karina.’

Rehearsals for the play kept me back at school; in the mornings, Karina yawned her way through our journey, and sometimes sunk her head into a textbook. One day she said grudgingly, ‘She’s got a wasting disease.’

‘A what?’ I was looking for something more precise, a scientific label. Karina only repeated what she’d said.

‘And what’s the prognosis?’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Doesn’t your father want help?’

‘I help him.’

‘Don’t you want help?’

‘Are you offering?’

‘Would you take the offer?’

No reply.

Academically, Karina was not the kind of girl who shone; you could not accuse her of that. Sometimes we looked at each other’s homework; her answers were like an expanded set of notes covering all the important points, just the kind of answers your teachers urge you to give. She used short words which followed each other in the expected order and in the accepted cadence. Her paragraphs were two sentences long, like those in tabloid newspapers. At sixteen her writing was as clear and legible as that of a neat ten-year-old. She never read a book she didn’t have to read. I had the impression that she never forgot anything.

Well . . . these schematic virtues must have commended themselves to the examiners. Despite her problems at home, she passed eight O-levels and went into the sixth form on the science side. One gusty day in March, in our final year at school, Julianne came bowling into the common room, seeming propelled by the wind outside. Her face, normally so placid, was aglow with affront. ‘You’ll never guess what SHE – what SHE has done now.’

‘I will never guess,’ I said, looking up from my work. In those days Karina was not a topic between us; but from the violence of Julianne’s tone I knew exactly who she was talking about.

‘She’s only gone and got an offer from London.’

Julianne and I had already applied for a place in a hall of residence. She had said, We could share a room: why not, you won’t be in my way.

‘Has she? Which college?’ I said.

Julianne snorted. ‘Somewhere in the East End.’

I said, ‘Perhaps she won’t get the grades.’

‘Oh, HER,’ Julianne said. ‘She’ll get ’em.’

‘Perhaps she’ll go and live somewhere else. There are other halls.’

‘Oh no,’ Julianne said. ‘She will come and live in our hall. She will come and live in our room. In our wardrobe. We’ll find her bacon rind in our shoes and her toast crumbs in our beds, and cold chips in our textbooks and Cornish pasties stuck to our mirror, and she’ll use our nail scissors to trim pork chops and she’ll steal our lipsticks and suck the ends and then they’ll taste of suet.’

Later that day I stopped Karina in the corridor. ‘I hear you’ve some good news.’

Karina was wearing a white lab coat. She squeezed the cardboard file under her arm. ‘It’ll be good news when I’ve got the grades.’

‘Will you be . . . I mean, had you thought you might apply to Tonbridge Hall?’

‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. Her eyes were cold. ‘Unless you think it’s too good for me?’

‘How’s your mum?’ I said.

She said, ‘What do you care?’

One day, two years before this, I had been travelling home late from school – a choir practice, I think – and it was almost dark when I got off the 64 at the Victoria bus station, the mid-way point of our journey. I began to pick my way through the litter and oil and filth towards the queue for my bus home, and out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of our colours, of the clay-and-maroon stripe of our scarf. I turned my head and saw Karina.

She was leaning against a wall, and not wearing her hat. She was smoking a cigarette, and three boys, none of whom I knew, were leaning and cavorting and smoking and foot-swivelling and kicking and lounging in her vicinity. They were not boys from St Augustine’s Catholic grammar school; they were bus-station boys. They had white peaky faces, full of bones; they had lax lips and bendy legs and zipper jackets. I remembered the boys from our primary school, with their elastic belts and scarred knees and grey flapping shorts: and I realized, with a sense of shock, that these were the youths that they would have grown into.

I drew back into the shadows. In those days I was easily intimidated by men, especially young ones, especially young ones at bus stations, who would jeer at my uniform and laugh in my little pale face. It wasn’t so much the men themselves who scared me, but the impulses of rage that leapt inside me at their jeers and leers and off-hand remarks, at the knowledge that they owned the streets. I would have liked to strike them dead with a stare; I wanted to beckon them, let them approach, and then stick them with a hidden knife.

Karina looked perfectly at ease. She barely seemed to notice the boys, yet it was obvious that they were trying hard to attract her attention, that they knew her, that they were tied up with her in some way. Her eyes rested on the shuddering sides of green double-deckers and the tired working people toiling home. She touched her cigarette to her lips.

I was cold, tired and hungry, and this state must have made me invisible, or at least translucent: because though I saw Karina she didn’t see me.

One evening my mother hurried down to the corner shop on Eliza Street, to try and get some bread before they shut. She managed to get the last small sliced, and was carrying it back when she looked up at Karina’s house and saw a face at the bedroom window. It was a face like a white puffy ball: at first she hardly recognized it, but it was Mary, all the same. She waved, but no one waved back.