An Experiment in Love: A Novel

seven

In the fifth week of term at Tonbridge Hall three things occurred. I shall describe them to you in ascending order of complexity.

The first, simplest thing was that the miniskirt fell totally and decisively out of favour. For some months the fashion had been on the wane, but that October a few of the old guard were out on the streets; by November, the maxi-skirts had won, and there was not a knee to be seen between Heathrow airport and the Essex coast.

Women became – suddenly – poised, mysterious and difficult. They wore long belted trenchcoats, like spies, and put on lipstick in public places. Twenty-six became a more fashionable age than sixteen. What could I do? I looked sixteen. And I could not afford a new skirt. Fleetingly, I wondered if I would have used my five pounds emergency money, if I’d still had it. But what would one skirt have accomplished? The cotton shower-proof came only half-way down my thighs; what extended below was to be showered upon freely, like lamp-posts against which any dog can piss. Even the duffle coat passed on by my cousin did not go much below the knee. I began to attract quizzical glances, as winter drew on, and I came down to breakfast in my pelmet skirts and strange stretched brown-black tights. I heard someone say, ‘Carmel’s so obvious, don’t you think?’

Julianne heard the remark too. Afterwards she bounced across the room, repeating it, extending it, embellishing it. ‘Yes, well, you see, where she comes from they do probably still wear such things, and after all, what is she?’ A second voice chimed in, just as well-bred. ‘A little shop girl, m’dear, a little shop girl.’

What was to compensate me? Admiration in men’s eyes? Not really. In previous eras my legs had been admired openly, by Rogers for whom I cared nothing. But now men seemed not to see me. I knew I had lost a few pounds – well, more than a few – but was there really so little left?

The second thing happened on Tuesday at eight-thirty in the evening – at which point you may picture us, the girls of Tonbridge Hall, gross and sated from troughing, lolling like sultanas each upon her divan. In an instant, a vast howling began, a terrible skull-piercing wail. I leapt up from my desk, believing my head would burst. Julianne’s textbook slid from her fingers and flapped open on the floor, its leaves fanning over and displaying cut sections of heart, lung, brain.

We were unstrung, terribly agitated; Julianne screamed, ‘The devil’s tone, what is it, are we at war?’ We flung open our door. In the corridor what met our view was a procession of young women, faces screwed up against the din, tramping towards the nearest fire exit. ‘Oh, if only they wouldn’t,’ Sue said, hands clawing her hair. ‘If only they bloody wouldn’t!’ The noise was visceral and sickening, as if someone were scraping your guts with their fingernails.

Sophy passed us, marching, her crimped fair hair drifting: trailing in her wake some respectable perfume, possibly the sugar and orange notes of Je Reviens. We heard Claire’s voice, rising, swooping above and below the hideous racket: ‘Ladies, do please remember, especially first-year ladies, please do remember, that in the event of fire the lifts will not be working.’ Claire, it turned out, was some kind of official fire-minder; they were appointed by the warden, one to each floor, and their job was to boss us down the echoing back stairs that no one ever used, to shoulder open fire-doors that no one had ever seen, to shepherd us into the street, and to count us.

As we skittered down the stairs, Julianne began to cough. ‘Why are you doing that?’ I demanded.

‘Authenticity. We really ought to be down at floor level gasping in the air. We ought to crawl.’

The impact of these absurd words was so powerful that when I look back at this scene I seem to catch a whiff of smoke indeed. I seem to see it curling under the corridor’s closed doors, and gradually rising into the air to form a haze at the level of our shoulders; I seem to hear the crackle and spit of threatened timbers deep in the building’s heart. But in fact, on that night, there was nothing but the cold air and the siren’s wail and our indignant chatter as we poured out into a damp, misty street; the lamplight was fuzzy, like the drowned moon in water. The warden herself – forewarned and sensibly clad in a tweed coat – went from group to group: ‘Remember, girls, in the event of fire, don’t stop to pick up your handbags or any possessions whatever – property may be replaced, but human life is sacred.’

By my side, Julianne still hacked and spluttered, her shoulders hunched and knees buckling. ‘What is it, Miss Lipcott?’ the warden said.

‘Consumption, I think.’ The warden’s face showed a moment’s dismay, then with an impatient click of her tongue she moved on to another huddled band.

In the next couple of days two rumours swept the building. One: that there would be another fire-practice next term, and that it would be held in the middle of the night. Two, that the fire-doors – which we had noticed for the first time this week, and which some of us had immediately perceived to be useful – were locked unless there was a drill scheduled. There was no mystery about the motive for this. It was a way of keeping out boyfriends.

Or keeping them in, of course, to be burnt to a crisp. If you had a man stay overnight at Tonbridge Hall, and you were caught, the penalty was expulsion – expulsion into the hard world of the freezing bedsit at the end of a tube line, or the sordid flat-share in an area known for its prostitutes. Strangely, no one went to check, to see if the fire-doors actually were locked; the rumour, the dilemma it presented, was too delicious to refute. We talked about it and we all agreed – if you had a man in your room and the siren went, you would just have to put him in the wardrobe and leave him to take his chance, leave him crouching on top of your shoes and hope it was only a practice. If it wasn’t . . . ‘Yes, Mrs Smith, I’m afraid this is all that’s left of your son Roger: just this molar. Here are his textbooks, brought from his digs, and one or two little mementos we thought you’d like to have. The rest of him? They didn’t find much, I’m afraid. His anorak had gone up in the blaze. And his condom. A pity. He was so young!’

The third thing that happened was that I wrote to my parents to say that at Christmas I’d been invited to stay with Niall’s family. It was true that I was already becoming very nervous about the invitation, but I saw the advantages of it. Why nervous? Well, how would I go on? What was their bathroom etiquette? I did not possess a dressing-gown. I was accustomed, at Tonbridge Hall, to go into the bathroom fully dressed, and come out fully dressed; slightly damp, but very proper. I imagined that, in a private house, this might be seen as strange. I rehearsed, once again, a little speech, to explain myself to the world: I’d left my bathrobe behind at Tonbridge Hall because it took up so much space in my suitcase, it was really thick, you see, fluffy, you know those towelling ones?

I was beginning to convince myself, as I rehearsed this excuse; my fingers smoothed its pastel pile, which would be (variably) peach, pure white, mint green. So I’ll borrow Niall’s, I heard myself say, and . . . well, I supposed Niall must have a dressing-gown. I had never seen such an article. We walked about before each other naked, as if we were the fount and origin of the world. If he had a dressing-gown I imagined it to be made of a hairy plaid, brown and white, its collar edged with smooth-twisted cord and its belt tasselled, suggestively swinging, at the centre of each tassel a blunt silken knob. Such a dressing-gown to me seemed far less safe than nakedness; far less acceptable in the family home.

Then again, what about food? I had eaten my Sunday lunch at Niall’s house every week for two years. We ate, working by rota, roast lamb, roast beef, roast pork. In my own home, I was still not considered capable in the kitchen. My mother sighed and implied that it was one of the results of thinking too much, that I could not burn a carrot in quite the way she could; ‘She’s academic,’ she would say, ‘and I dare say you can’t expect anything else . . .’

Niall’s mother, though, was eager for any help she could get; her cooking was enthusiastic, and left the kitchen plastered with grease, with vast roasting pans of scalding fat, with snails of pastry sticking to their boards. Every pudding she made required the boosting up of the oven to 5oo°F: the kitchen would fill with fug and steam, and we would open the windows and lean out, gasping, into the garden where Niall’s father was imposing stripes on the handkerchief lawn. Lemon meringue pie: the Everest peaks pale beige and studiedly crisp, the meringue beneath a soft lather of whipped sweetness. Then, even more triumphant, there was Baked Alaska: the oven now so hot that blue wisps seemed to issue from its every orifice, and when the door was opened, the heat knocked us back, laughing, and I would wrap a tea-towel around my hands like a surgeon dons his gloves, and I’d go in, and I’d fetch it out . . . speed was of the essence then, so that we could sink our teeth together, our family teeth, into the hot sweet froth on top and the oily frozen block of vanilla ice beneath.

But . . . stay for three weeks? What would we eat at family meals, routine meals? Bread and cheese? I imagined butter on proper bread, laid like golden pavements. Milk? Yes, Niall’s mother would never mind at all if I said to her that I liked to drink milk, could I order some, would she get me an extra pint? But three weeks – would she not glance up one day, see my greedy mouth at work, and notice my relish for the flesh of her only son? After Sunday lunch I always washed up, and Niall would stand behind me, a damp Irish linen towel in his hand, and lick the nape of my neck as I scrubbed and scoured away the gravy and the fat and those burnt-on bits that require you to thrust out an elbow and frown. If I leant forward, to get a better purchase on the grease, he would creep his hands up beneath my skirt and pull down my pants. Three weeks . . . how could we hope to get away with this sort of thing? I knew no other way to do the washing-up.

However: I had made the decision. I could not think how I would survive, otherwise: what, go home to the quartering of a quarter of boiled ham, the meat-paste dole, the three bananas that stood in for a bowl of fruit? I would visit my parents, of course, we would only be five or six miles away.

My mother replied to my letter by return of post. The reply was very long and very bitter, denouncing my ingratitude, my improvidence, the laxity of my morals. As an unmarried girl, she said, I should be under my parents’ roof, not under the roof of people they did not know, whose manners and outlook were no doubt frivolous, degenerate and the talk of the district; and there could be no good reason for my wanting to be away from home unless I was planning to conduct myself in a way which she hoped no daughter of hers would ever think of in a thousand years.

I shook my head over the letter, as I read it; as if there were someone in the room to see me do it. I dimly remembered a time before she had been angry . . . the spring days when we had walked up to the hills, the twilit afternoons when she had told me of her youthful triumphs in dance halls, the day when she had sat me on the table and taught me to sing a rude song about Karina. But after that there was nothing but snarling, and the dull pressure of her finger ends as she pinned and fitted clothes on me; the stutter and hum of her sewing-machine, the swearing and rending of cloth: the reiterated question, ‘If this Julianne Lipcott can come top of the class, why can’t you?’

The letter was written, I perceived, not on what came to hand – not Basildon Bond, not the back of the milk bill, but on writing-paper that someone must have given her for a Christmas present: white paper bordered with roses, cut roses, pink ones, drooping on their stems, frilled and framed by pale thornless leaves. The envelope, I remember, was embellished in this way: the Queen’s head in the right-hand corner, and on the left another rose. The burden of the letter was this, when the verbiage was stripped away: if you’re not coming home for Christmas, don’t bother to come home ever again.

I was in my room when I read this letter, alone. I felt dazed, and was tempted to sit down on my bed, but I had a ten o’clock lecture and it was already, let me see, it must be . . . I picked up Julianne’s travelling clock and stared at it. I had come away from home, you remember, without a lot of ordinary things that people have, and one of those things was a watch. I fed my arms into my duffle coat, picked up my bag of books and somehow arrived in Houghton Street, not having noticed the journey.

Someone asked me was I all right, and I nodded; I had no tutorials, and as far as I remember I didn’t speak for the rest of the day. It didn’t occur to me that the letter might have been written in haste, that perhaps she was already regretting it. I had grown up believing – indeed, seeing – that my mother was a very powerful woman. She was not someone who changed her mind. Her edicts were handed down and I obeyed them.

I went to the library, took my familiar chair, and read the case of Donoghue v. Stevenson (1932) which as every lawyer knows concerns a Mrs May Donoghue, who four years earlier had visited an ice-cream parlour in Paisley, had accepted a bottle of ginger-beer from her friend, and had discovered inside it the remains of a decomposing snail. Was the manufacturer responsible? Had he a duty of care to Mrs Donoghue, with whom he had no contractual relationship? Across the page floated images of roses, of blushing petals and bending stems. I asked myself with a kind of horror, was it possible that I loved my parents? If I did not, why should this matter to me? I felt small, very young, hollow at my centre. And verses, more verses ran through my head: Under the water it rumbled on, / Still louder and more dread: / It reached the ship, it split the bay; / The ship went down like lead.

When it was six o’clock – a wet evening, pavements slick and gleaming – I left the library and returned to Tonbridge Hall. I didn’t go down to dinner. Julianne was not in and there.was no sign that she had been in all day and no sign that she would come back. I sat on my bed. The feeling returned, from my first evening at Tonbridge Hall: that I would just go on sitting in this room, that hours would spin into weeks and here I would be, in a bubble of silence, with my verses for company and the feeble ticking of the travelling clock. I got up and put out the light, electing to sit in the dark.

When Julianne came back next day I decided not to tell her about my letter, still less to show it to her. I was deeply ashamed of it, ashamed to belong to a family from which such a communication could issue. Not that I did belong to it, any more. I was cut adrift.

The ship went down like lead.

Now it is time to tell you about our housekeeping arrangements at Tonbridge Hall; this will lead me naturally to the matter of love. You must appreciate that we lived in a townscape, built to an unnatural scale: institutional, impersonal. We had come from our suburbs, villages and market towns, from stockbroker Tudor and inter-war semi with laburnum tree, from cosy terrace or mansion flat, to live in a public landscape of grey brick and Coade stone, the iron railings marching on, the brutal Senate House, the boastful British Museum. We walked to our colleges through streets with famous names, by statues and monuments, and we passed most of our lives in public rooms, seedy or grand, under strip lights or chandeliers. In. the evenings we came back, it is true, to our own narrow rooms, but even they recalled the felon’s accommodation, maintained at public expense, in some enlightened Scandinavian prison.

So it is not surprising that we tried to set up our own housekeeping routines, to recreate the domesticity of which (I suppose) we must have felt deprived. Our rooms were cleaned for us, and fresh bed linen was placed in our rooms each Thursday. We had very little to do except look after ourselves.

Each corridor had a poky kitchen, hardly more than a broom cupboard, with two gas-rings and a sink. Some girls would use the kitchens to heat milk or soup, but they were good for little else, and not pleasant places to congregate. A better place for pretending to a normal woman’s life was the laundry-room on the sixth floor; we would stand about and chat while washing-machines whirred and glugged. You never saw Karina up there. She washed her clothes – hairy jumpers and woollen tights – in the wash-basin in C21. Then she hung them over the radiators.

This did not please Lynette; when you called by she would indicate the dripping garments with a poke of her chin, and roll her dark eyes, but she didn’t say anything to Karina. Wet, the clothes looked bigger; the sweaters were elongated, their arms swinging and cuffs groping as if in search of a handhold.

Up in the laundry-room across from the machines there were a half-dozen ironing boards, where a half-dozen girls toiled: not always the same six, I mean, but girls with identical expressions, intent and methodical, martyred yet victorious. What were they ironing? Party dresses? Not at all. Shirts. Men’s shirts. Boyfriends’ shirts. Flattening the collar. Pressing the cuffs, easing and turning, finally lifting the garment with a flourish, high into the air like a flag, like a banner of triumph: a banner that told the whole world that I, a Tonbridge Hall girl, have got my man. I have got my man and I know how to look after him. I’m not just a pretty brain, you see; not just a pretty brain.

If I could time-travel I would fly back, back in time to the ironing-room; I would fly back to those girls and slap them. I would like to bring them to their senses; say, how can it be, that after all these years of education, all you want is the wash-tub? Leave this, and go and run the country. And yet I see that what they were up to, these surrogate housewives, was not so spiritless; it was a small rebellion against the lives they had led since puberty.

When men decided women could be educated – this is what I think – they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them wear collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it. And this is what we were, when we grew up at the Holy Redeemer; not so much little nuns, but little chappies, little chappies with breasts. At ‘bad’ schools the girls turned up in the mornings with streaks of mascara under their eyes, they talked dirty and flirted and sipped mixed drinks in violent colours. At ‘good’ schools the girls had plain faces and thick tights, stout shoes and bulging briefcases. They forfeited today for the promise of tomorrow, but the promise wasn’t fulfilled; they were reduced to middle-sexes, neuters, without the powers of men or the duties of women. Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.

But we were released from the collars and ties now. All at once it happened, without preparation or warning, in the course of a day. No wonder we were confused, torn by conflicts no one had hinted at. We were eighteen, nineteen; we wanted high marks, because that was what we were trained to get. We were trained to defer gratification, to pamper and exercise and flaunt our mental powers, but now our bodies were registering their demands. We’d had sex; sex bred the desire for its consequences. The little women inside were looking out through our eyes and waving to the world.

We wanted homes. Houses of our own. Babies, even: the milky drool of saliva to replace the smooth flow of ink. We did not speak of it, but each corridor of Tonbridge Hall seethed with fertility-panic. In the groups who gathered for coffee after dinner, there was always one girl who thought she might be pregnant, one who was celebrating the fact that she wasn’t: celebrating outwardly, anyway. When friends met in the morning, or after a weekend away, there was always an undertone, a buzz-note of inquiry, an eyebrow raised – you are? You could be? You’re not? Late again! was the distraught mutter; we took the contraceptive pill, most of us, but we acted as if we didn’t believe it worked. Our doubts spoke of our desires, of our ambivalence. A blip of the bubblepack, a sip of water, the tiny taste of sweetness on the tongue; how could these prevail against the huge, mechanic workings of nature? Nature had been driven out with a pitchfork, and was creeping her way back in.

Of course, not everybody shared the fertility panics. I was celibate, though not through choice. Julianne seemed to have her body under control. And Claire, our next door neighbour: ‘I do worry about Sue,’ she said to me. ‘This new boyfriend of hers, you know, she has sexual relations with him.’

I wanted to murmur, that is usual nowadays, but I decided to listen with attention to Claire’s fears. ‘I don’t think Sue knows what she wants,’ she complained. ‘She – takes risks. She tells me she does.’

‘Isn’t she on the Pill?’

‘Oh, have a word with her, Carmel,’ Claire begged. ‘You’re more a woman of the world than I am.’

Poor Claire, I said to myself. When she spoke of Sue, her head sunk into her pasty hands; the pose showed her to advantage. Her spots were sprinkled over her cheeks as if somebody had worked on her flesh with a red-tipped drill. Her hair had been permed recently, in the round style that had been favoured by the mothers of my friends at the Holy Redeemer; the lustreless curls looked brittle, as if you could snap them away from her skull. The way the world was moving, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find an unattractive woman. I wondered about the girls at school, the ones who’d been big girls when I was a shrimp of eleven. I remembered moustaches, manly chests, sinewy torsos; I thought, they probably look quite acceptable now. Frights like Claire were a dying breed. Even Karina, with her increasingly thickening figure and baleful expression, was not actively ugly. Lynette said she could think of lots of ways in which Karina could be improved. ‘Not chew her nails like that. A decent bra, to stop her flopping. Colours to suit her – imagine, say, a clear coral pink. Or a strong blue – not navy. And no, Carmel, not royal.’

Karina came and went, and resisted improvement. About Lynette, she said, ‘I cannot be doing with women who paint their toenails. I’ve no time for that sort at all.’

In the seventh week of term Sue’s problematical boyfriend paid her a visit. ‘She insists I move out of our room for them,’ Claire said. She sat on Julianne’s bed. Her voice was frayed and her hands washed together.

‘It’s the usual arrangement,’ I said. I grinned maliciously. ‘She’ll do the same for you, when the occasion arises.’

She looked up, amazed. ‘You don’t think that I – oh, no, Carmel. That’s for marriage. That’s what I believe.’

‘Yes, love.’ My fingers crept into my hair; she made me anxious, northern, almost kind. ‘But before people marry, you know, these days, they expect to try each other out. Like cars. You go for a test drive.’

‘I don’t think . . .’ she spoke carefully, picking through the English language as if it were strange to her, ‘I don’t think I’ll marry . . . One never knows of course.’

Are you a lesbian, then? I wanted to ask. I was building up in my head a library of the looks I had seen her give Sue. As if answering me, she said, ‘I don’t say I wouldn’t like to, if the circumstances were right. But you can’t count on someone asking you, can you?’

I saw a moonlit garden, and Claire in white satin, bias cut; a suitor kneeling in evening dress, proffering a rose. ‘I don’t think you wait to be asked,’ I said. ‘I think you sort of tell them.’ I considered. ‘Perhaps you could marry a missionary,’ I said. ‘Someone like St John Rivers. And go and aid the poor on the streets of Bombay.’

She looked up. ‘You’ve lost me there.’

‘Oh, Jane Eyre,’ I said. ‘Sorry. He wasn’t going to marry her because she was pretty or anything, but because she was quick on the uptake and he thought she had a strong constitution. You know, this thing with Sue and her boyfriend, how can you be sure it’s wrong, how can you be sure? I know what’s in the Bible but has God told you personally?’

It was a serious question. Yet Claire managed a smile. ‘Of course not. He doesn’t need to. Anyway, however you look at it, it’s against all the regulations.’ I studied her face; she was soon frowning again. ‘If we’re thrown out, what will my parents say? Look, Carmel, I don’t know what’s going through your head, you’ve probably read several books I haven’t come across, the point is I don’t mind her having a boyfriend, she used to have a nice boyfriend, she met him at a gospel weekend – ’

I didn’t ask her what a gospel weekend was; I didn’t like to think about it. I just interrupted her: ‘Claire, if you were to go away for a day or two, wouldn’t it solve your problem? I’m sure your parents would be glad to have you home.’

‘Oh no.’ She blushed. ‘They’re divorced, you see.’

‘You could go and see a friend.’

‘But then I’d just be shirking, wouldn’t I? I’d be shirking the responsibility.’

‘You’re not responsible for Sue.’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘Who then, in law, is my neighbour?’ Claire looked closely at me. ‘The snail in the ginger-beer bottle,’ I explained. ‘It’s a case I’ve learnt. 1932. “Who then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be – persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.” Lacks resonance, doesn’t it?’

‘Do you have to learn it off by heart, like that?’

‘No. I just prefer to.’

Claire shook her head. ‘We’re all responsible for each other. Don’t you think, Carmel? Don’t you think we ought to be?’

Sue had given her boyfriend a big build-up. There was an unspoken agreement that in our conclaves we could talk about our boyfriends just so much; everybody, more or less, should get equal time, when the others would listen or pretend to. Some people, like Lynette, never talked about their private lives. Some, like me, had nothing against it on principle, but found it too difficult in practice: because of all the things I loved about Niall, how could I select just one or two for public delectation? But Sue could talk and did, rattled on unchecked by good taste or any notion of self-protection; ‘I am sick of the topic of Sue’s Roger,’ Julianne snapped one evening. He was handsome, he was thoughtful, he was romantic and sensitive; we did not at first associate him with the lanky, frowning figure who appeared on the corridor, loping furtively between C2 and the bathrooms. ‘He’s so old,’ Julianne complained. ‘She never told us that, did she? He must be twenty-six at least. Married, do you think? He can’t be any good, can he? Or else at that age he’d have money for a hotel.’

Lynette gave a delicate shiver. ‘It’s so sordid,’ she said. ‘This signing-in business.’

The signing-in book was kept at the reception desk inside the main door. It was guarded by a sharp-eyed middle-aged woman called Jacqueline, of whom it was said that she never forgot a name and never forgot a face. We were allowed male visitors in our rooms, at any time up to eleven at night, but when they entered the hall they had to sign themselves in and when they left they had to sign themselves out.

So the art of keeping a man overnight was this: he must be signed out by someone else’s departing boyfriend. No point even trying it when Jacqueline was in charge and on form; but she could be distracted sometimes, she had to go to the lavatory, and sometimes, even, she took a day off. The system was for the departing boyfriend to stand far below in the street, signalling: thumbs up for ‘You’re signed out’, thumbs down for ‘I didn’t manage it’. I wonder if passers-by ever saw this ritual, and paused to ask themselves what was going on.

It was a sport for boys, not for grown men. Sue’s Roger endured it sullenly. Claire – grim-faced – hauled her mattress to another room, and Sue and her man stayed in bed for most of the weekend. ‘Wouldn’t you think they’d like to vary their programme of activities just a little?’ Julianne said. Each one of us, even though she had a man of her own, was violently jealous of anyone who had a man at that very moment.

‘We’re getting married as soon as I graduate,’ Sue said on Monday morning. ‘Roger says so.’ She was enrobed in smugness, wrapped in self-satisfaction as if in a cobweb shawl. ‘It’s a long time to wait, but – well . . .’ She tried an optimistic little shrug. I saw the invisible shawl move on her shoulders.

‘Will he give you an engagement ring?’ Lynette asked.

‘Oh, we won’t bother with that,’ Sue said. ‘It’s bourgeois.’

There was a strange note in her voice, as if she were lurching off course. Claire stared at her, uncomprehending. ‘Is he political?’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

At intervals that week I would take out the letter from my mother and read it. I hoped that it would be different, that the words would somehow unwrite themselves while they lay in the darkness of the drawer, or the flowers at least erase themselves from the edges of the page. When I was little and she went out cleaning, her employers would sometimes try to give her things: surplus food and cast-off clothing. ‘I flung it back in her face,’ she’d say. At Christmas she did accept gifts of money; otherwise, the only thing she’d ever brought home were roses, ten inches long with flexible stems and plastic thorns. They came free for some months with a certain brand of washing powder, and by the time she lost interest we must have had four dozen of these artefacts in all colours, many of them unknown to nature. My fingers still remember the slimy, pliable plastic; I dipped and twisted the flower-heads, turning them to a pleasant angle. Even the folded petals could be moved, so you could elect the bud or the full-blown rose. You could cram them in the same vase, crimson and stippled apricot, youth and age, the whisper of promise and the rose past its prime; they were scentless, accreting to themselves a sticky grey dust, as if they leaked something that would attract it. Arranging them was my hobby, for quite some time.

There was a hairdressing-room up on the sixth floor, with wash-basins and hand-held showers over them. Some of us used to go up there and experimentally dye our hair with solutions that called themselves ‘shampoo in, shampoo out’. They didn’t, of course, and one day in this seventh week of term, by some accident of mistiming and absent-mindedness, I coloured my hair a flaming red. What I had been after was a discreet enhancement of my moth-wing tufts: when I looked in the mirror I was appalled, but secretly gratified. A frail wisp crept in, a sad little scholar who missed her straw hat; an incendiary woman swept out.

‘Singular!’ Julianne said, when we met that evening. ‘What will Niall say? When will he be visiting you? I’ll make myself scarce, you know.’ She came up to me and buffeted my boxer’s head with her big soft hands. ‘I worry about you. You used to have sex every weekend. You must be frustrated. I worry will you run amok.’

‘Likely,’ I said. ‘Now I’ve got this red hair.’

‘It’s so extreme,’ Julianne said. I glowed. It was the first time ever that – unequivocally – she had praised me. I saw that there was something to be said, for not being Julianne. She could never change; such blondeness, such generosity, such abundant, buttery charm can never become less than itself, can never transform or pretend; it can only slide and accommodate itself to the earth’s curve.

‘Next week,’ I said. ‘He’s coming next week, Niall.’

Julianne said, ‘I’m so glad.’ Then she stared hard at me. ‘You’re losing weight,’ she accused. ‘I should never have brought that skeleton home. It’s giving you ideas.’

The boarding-school girls gave me strange looks in the corridors, but on the whole I liked my new head. For the first time, I commanded respect from strangers; they reacted to me as if I might have a poisoned dagger in my stocking-top.

Next week came, it came at last; and Lynette was going to lend me the fox fur.

I longed to lie naked and quiet in Niall’s arms; my head on his chest, tell him about my mother and how she had cut me off, how, at this late stage, she had aborted me; I wanted, also, to feel him sink into my flesh, bite my neck, suck my breasts. But I did not intend to keep him hidden away, as if I were ashamed of him. We would go out and eat a meal, for which Niall would have carefully budgeted; when Sunday came, I would repay him by exercising my right to introduce a guest for Sunday lunch at Tonbridge Hall. The shillings for his lunch were building up in the back corner of my desk drawer.

We went in ceremonial force to C21: Sue, still glowing, Claire, still grizzling, myself with my new head and Julianne with her amused smile. Karina was at her desk, shoulders hunched. She didn’t turn when we came in. ‘I hope you’re not going to make a racket,’ she said. ‘I’m doing an essay.’

‘Misery-guts,’ I said to her. I felt light with glee, because I was going to see Niall. ‘Don’t you want to witness my transformation?’

Lynette slid the coat from its satin padded hanger and swung it out into the room; it seemed to writhe with its own animal life. Sue seized it by the neck, held it splayed and poised; my stick arms slithered into the silk. The sleeves were long for me; like a Frenchman’s kiss, the fur brushed the backs of my hands. I turned to the mirror and smiled at myself. I looked like a whippet which had been kitted out in the skin of a well-fed golden retriever. Lynette took my face in her hands and kissed me on the nose.

‘I’m off for the weekend,’ Julianne said. ‘Leave the field clear for you.’

‘What, going home?’

‘Yes.’ She was packing a case already; but looking at her back I sensed a reluctance in her.

‘Don’t feel you must. I mean, you could throw your mattress in Lynette’s room.’

‘Oh no. I’d be afraid Karina would roll out of bed in the middle of the night and fall on me and crush me to death.’

‘You could go in with Sue and Claire.’

‘Oh, God, no! Either it’s a revivalist meeting, or we’re on the topic of bloody Roger and his many wonders.’ She mimicked Sue’s whine: ‘ “We’ve been talking over where we’d like to live, me and Roger, never too early to see estate agents . . . Of course, I want a career . . .” Silly bitch. The only career she’ll get is washing his socks in a council flat.’

‘Jule,’ I said, ‘you’re not taking much for the weekend, are you?’

‘I’ve got what I need. I’ve clothes at home.’

She usually took something special, when she went back north; she’d fall in with her old tennis-club set, and they’d go dancing, drive out to Cheshire restaurants with log fires and prawn cocktails. I thought, is she sick of them, the tennis-club set, is she moving on, or is the devious bitch not going home at all, has she got some secret new man that she’s not telling me about? I could hardly ask to see her train ticket. Jule snapped shut the clasp of her white vanity-case, fastened the strap. Her expression was joyless, remote. ‘Here I go then,’ she said, picking up her handbag. ‘Have a lovely fuck.’ Then at the door – it was quite unlike her – she hesitated: she swung back towards me and kissed my cheek. ‘Take care, Carmel,’ she said. ‘Of course, you always do.’

Niall brought a weekend bag, a solid leather and canvas bag that belonged to his father, with his father’s initials on it; he gripped it in his square cold hand. When I saw him walk in at the door of C3 I felt I would faint with joy; and the room did swim for a moment, the textbooks and files, the grey striped bedspreads, Mrs Webster grinning on her shelf.

I should have warned him to bring a sports bag, a plastic carrier, something that would not indicate so clearly that he was moving in for two nights. Jacqueline would have marked him with her gimlet eye, I felt sure. But then, there was no provisional, makeshift quality about Niall; his natural age was forty, jangling the keys of a Rover, pulling up before a good hotel which he had heard recommended by friends. The deceit would not suit him, the signing-out, the skulking in the corridors. But how else could we be together?

We kissed. It was a black-out kiss, where eyes close and thoughts no longer flow; his hands swam over me. We came up for air. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said. He was not displeased; it was the fashion for women to be as thin as they could manage. ‘Your hair . . .’ He appraised it. ‘It was an accident?’

‘It was an accident.’

Niall went to the wash-basin and ran the taps. He bent over it and splashed water on to his face, reached for the soap and scrubbed and scrubbed. ‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘That this town was so filthy.’

I had ceased to notice, I suppose: the grime that ran out of my hair when I washed it, the grime that edged white underwear with grey. I handed him a towel. ‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘London has changed you. I knew it would.’

On Friday night we stayed in my room, in bed. It wasn’t easy, a big man and a small girl in a single bed; you had to turn together, you had to fit each other, thigh moving with thigh, arm with arm, foot sliding between feet as tongue slid between teeth. Saturday dawn, Niall complained of backache, and I gave him two soluble aspirin in a mug, melted in hot water from the tap. I joined him, though I would have died rather than complain; our hips jostled as we tried to sit up to an angle proper for medicine. Niall handed me his mug, I put it under the bed; we fell across each other, into an aching sleep.

At nine that morning I tripped lightly to the warden’s office, leaving Niall naked and locked in C3. I’d been in too much of a hurry to pull on tights – they’d only have to come off again – but I had jumped into an almost ankle-length skirt I’d borrowed from Lynette, and I thought that nobody would notice I was bare-legged. I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the great shadowy mirrors that peopled the ground floor. My lips flared scarlet, my cheeks blazed and my throat was mottled with an orgasmic flush.

‘A late key, Miss McBain?’ the warden inquired. ‘Another of your political meetings?’

‘No.’ I expect a stupid smile grew on my face. ‘I’m going to a film.’

‘Oh, my dear, I’m so pleased,’ the warden said. ‘There is such a thing, you know, as being too serious.’

‘Is there?’ I said. ‘Too serious for what?’

I was interested; the warden saw I was not being pert.

‘For the taste of the opposite sex, I suppose.’ She gave a brusque little laugh.

‘Yes, but after all,’ I said, ‘it’s not the Dark Ages, I don’t see that they have any right to say how serious you should be.’

‘I agree . . . oh, I do so agree. But – I’ve seen it again and again – they do have a way of making things difficult. Especially for clever girls. Your . . . your young man, are you very fond of him?’

Besotted, I wanted to say. We’ll be together for ever and ever. But then she might run upstairs and search my room. I was aware that a teardrop of semen was creeping down the inside of my left thigh. ‘Well, it’s early days,’ I said.

‘Yes. That’s the attitude,’ the warden said. ‘I like you, Carmel, you’re a very promising gel. You must put yourself first, establish yourself in life before you think of a husband and family. Why, we may see you in parliament one of these days! You’ll be interested to meet our guest next month, our guest at High Table. Have a word with me nearer the time and remind me to seat you near her. Now, there’s a determined lady who knows what she wants!’

I nodded. Smiled. The taste of the opposite sex was on my tongue; salt-jelly, heat and flesh. The last thing I wanted was a party political scrap with the warden; I wanted to run back upstairs, pull off my clothes and climb back into bed with Niall, who would by now be quite ready for me again. But the image came at once to my mind of the Labour Club concubines, trailing after the comrades; at each midnight meeting almost dropping from their seats with boredom, jerking back to wakefulness to fix soft eyes on the face of Dave or Mike or Phil. It wasn’t as if they thought they were Rosa Luxemburg; their role was to fetch packets of cigarettes, to cook stews on one ring in bedsits. Sometimes they were allowed to duplicate an agenda on an inky machine, or crayon a poster to advertise a meeting. They were allowed to stand on street corners, trying to sell Tribune, or rattling a collecting box for whatever worthy body of strikers needed students’ coins at the time.

The drop of semen inched downwards and slunk into my shoe. There’s a few thousand babies that won’t be born, I thought; I wonder if there are any little Beethovens run under my foot, any Tolstoys, any promising England fast bowlers? The warden handed over the key and I signed for it. When I passed the mirror again, my face looked quite pale and severe.

On Saturday evening I put on the fox fur and we went out to eat steak. Niall watched me thoughtfully as I dressed. ‘It’s a nice coat, isn’t it?’ I said, when he did not speak.

‘I’m not sure it’s really you, though.’ His tone was matter of fact. ‘It’s more for somebody glamorous.’

So, if you know anybody glamorous, go out with her, I thought. I was too meek to say it. ‘It’s because I’ve borrowed it,’ I said. ‘That’s what you don’t like.’

‘Yes, that’s it. I prefer you in your own clothes. And really, to be honest, I don’t think you need so much make-up.’

I paused, my lipstick in my hand, and gazed at him through the mirror. What did he prefer then, the stringy-haired girl in the grey velour hat?

In the restaurant: ‘You’re just pushing your food around, Carmel,’ Niall said. ‘Has something upset you? Did I say something wrong?’

‘No.’ I sighed gustily. I leant back in my leatherette banquette. ‘I feel like a fraud,’ I said. I put my knife and fork down. ‘I’ve had dreams about this meal. But now it comes down to it, I’m not really hungry.’

In the small hours of Sunday we crept into Tonbridge Hall. On the reception desk a gooseneck lamp cast a fierce white beam on the box where the late key must be replaced. Niall crouched in the shadows while I crept towards it, then we inched towards the staircase, ascended with breath held, jumping at any noise, at a creak underfoot or a winter cough issuing from behind a locked door. Stopping, starting, heart in mouth: I held my nervous palms flat against Lynette’s coat as we tippytoed all the way to C Floor. It occurred to me that if I were caught and thrown out, Tonbridge Hall might not refund any of the vast accommodation charge that had vanished from my grant before I saw it. I would be destitute.

‘It is humiliating, this,’ Niall said, when we reached C3.

‘I know.’

I cast off the fox fur, letting it slither to the parquet. We made love again in the single bed, its once-crisp sheets now damp and stained and twisting about our bodies like ropes. ‘Carmel,’ Niall said, ‘I can feel all your ribs.’ Later, he said, ‘I wish I could afford to buy you some roses.’ Later still, he asked, ‘Why do we have to be young?’

There was a ripple of interest when Niall appeared in the refectory for Sunday lunch. It was not because of our haggard faces – for two nights we had hardly slept – but because many of the girls had swallowed Julianne’s story that Niall was a convict out on licence. To some she had said he was a bank robber, to others that he was a member of the IRA. Conversation died as we passed.

Perhaps he wondered why. I judged it too complex to explain to him. He looked just what he was and nothing else: a prop forward from a northern grammar school, a family man in the making. In later life, I should think, he has learnt to carve.

On that day he took his seat, conscious of his market value though he did not know what had enhanced it. His hair curled damply, his square hand lay loosely on the table; his flecked hazel eyes were open and aware. Sue simpered at him, and Claire turned her head and blushed a deep and unbecoming shade. At eight o’clock that morning, counting on slug-a-bed habits, he’d tried a sprint to the nearest lavatory, semi-erect in Y-fronts. Nothing had warned him of Sue and Claire on their way to church, heading for the staircase, respectably buttoned into their coats. I’d said to him, ‘We’ll laugh about it, twenty years from now.’

‘Hi there,’ Sue said brightly. ‘We’ve met, haven’t we?’

‘Sue!’ Claire hissed.

‘Hello, Niall,’ Karina said. She smiled. ‘Long time no see. How’s it going?’

Startled, I glanced across at her. Niall looked away. Her face was animated; I saw for a moment the shadow presence of the rosy little girl whom everyone used to praise. Try it, I thought, just try it; any more ogling, and I’ll turn you into best minced steak.

I gripped my knife and fork, and stared at her. It had never occurred to me to wonder if Karina had a boyfriend these days. I could hear her, in my mind, saying, ‘Love? That’s daft. Sex? What do you want that for?’ It was Karina’s deriding voice; it was also, somehow, my mother’s.

As in Niall’s house, so at Tonbridge Hall: there was always roast meat on a Sunday. It was the quantities that were different. I have explained how a third-year student at the head of the table would serve out the meat; and it was Niall’s misfortune that on this particular Sunday she was either a ferociously principled feminist or a girl with a hard heart and no brothers. However it was, I have the impression that she put even less on Niall’s plate than on any other; we’re talking about two mouthfuls of meat, as against two and a nibble.

I have seen people at road accidents, I have seen people sacked – God knows, I’ve sacked them myself. But I have never seen anything to equal the horrified disbelief that grew on Niall’s face when he saw what he had been given to eat: the wafer, the comma, the nail-paring of protein that was meant to constitute a Sunday dinner. For a moment I thought he would DO IT – reach out for the stainless steel platter, and salvage the scrap, the quarter-slice, the leave-a-bit-for-Miss-Manners: but (because we were in love then, you see) he would have thrust it not into his own mouth but into mine.

Still, the moment passed. That afternoon Niall sat fully dressed on the edge of my bed. He looked miserable. ‘Carmel, you must eat,’ he said. ‘That kitchen along the corridor, I know it’s not much but it’s there for your use. You could make eggs. You could buy apples, couldn’t you? Apples are good for you. What you should do is to get some packets of powdered soup, and every night you and Julianne should have a mug of it before you go to bed.’ He said, ‘This is my advice.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Powdered soup. We could do, I suppose.’

‘I mean, Karina – she’s looking well.’

‘She’s looking like a suet pudding, if you want my opinion.’

‘Yes, well – she may not be able to help it.’

At five o’clock Niall had to leave to catch his train. I didn’t want to walk him to the door of Tonbridge Hall, because it would only obtain for me another two minutes of his company, and I had to set that against the risk of Jacqueline on the desk seeing us and spotting that we were a couple: still, even two minutes were hard to forfeit. I leant out of the window and watched his every step, until he vanished around the corner, into the London dark.

Then I lay on my bed, agonized, shaking with sobs, tears baptizing the stained bed linen. No matter how you bleed each month, there is always blood left; no matter how much you cry, the salt water still drags down your body, soaks your tissues, drips into your silly woman’s veins. Niall’s face, when he left, had been set against the deprivation to come. It was three weeks to the Christmas vacation.

Julianne did not return till late the following afternoon. I was sitting at my desk chewing over a knotty problem, and I heard her come in behind me. ‘Oh, there you are,’ I said. ‘Good weekend?’ I heard her put her case down. ‘Family well?’

She made one of those non-committal noises that indicates that this is not an interesting topic. ‘Do anything nice?’ I asked. ‘Cold at home, is it?’

She didn’t answer. Obviously in a mood. Oh well, I’d enough to worry about. I frowned at the column of figures before me. Jule’s bed squeaked as she sat down on it. I added up the figures, bottom to top, then added them up top to bottom, as if that would make the answer different. ‘Did you bring one of your mum’s cakes back?’ I asked. She usually brought home-made biscuits, and an iced ginger loaf, or a fruit cake laced with brandy.

She didn’t reply. I turned to look at her, over my shoulder. She was slumped on the bed still wearing her coat. She brought her eyes round to focus on my face; it seemed to cost her an effort. ‘No, I just brought myself,’ she said.

I wanted to say, of course I know you haven’t really been home. But she looked tired – worn-out, in fact – and I felt sorry for her: the complexity of her life, all the men she had to keep on a string, the wearing business of waking up in different beds. Life was simple for me – except for this matter of the figures.

‘I have to go to the chemist,’ Julianne said. ‘Do you want anything?’

I shook my head. The door clicked behind her. I turned back to my miscalculation.

In my final year at school my father had obtained his tiny, long-plotted promotion. This blip in my parents’ fortunes had raised their income, so that I did not receive a full maintenance grant from the state. All my tuition fees were paid, and most of my living expenses, but my parents were required to contribute twenty pounds a term towards keeping me fed and warm. I had been so careful, so exact, that until this eighth week I had thought I would manage without their money.

But then I learnt for the first time that during vacations we were required to clear everything from our rooms: to empty our wardrobes, our bookshelves, to pack up our lives and disappear till mid-January. I could not possibly carry all my possessions: my files, my books, my Winfield on Tort, my Cheshire and Foote on Contract. I remembered how my arm had ached and my shoulder throbbed, when I had dragged my suitcase from Euston half a lifetime ago. I wondered fleetingly if it would lighten the load if I wore both my coats at once, the duffle over the raincoat: I dismissed it from my mind. There was no choice. I would have to have my effects conveyed by British Rail’s carrier service to Niall’s house. I had already budgeted for my train ticket, of course; I was getting lighter, but I knew I could not fly.

Phone home? Ask for help? We had a telephone, now. I remembered the blushing roses on the letter, and the waxy feel of stems under my nine-year-old fingers. I could not do it.

I did it. My mother was not unfriendly. She told me our cat had died. When I asked about money, she changed the subject.

I could go without lunch, I reasoned. Anyway, I only had a cup of coffee and a yoghurt, or on very hungry days a roll with grated cheese and a slice of tomato. Who could miss that? I would eat extra toast in the mornings, nerve myself to take a third slice under the startled gaze of the Sophies. I would force the hard butter on it and chew and swallow, and that would last me until dinner at Tonbridge Hall. But what would I do on Labour Club nights, when there was seldom time to get back for dinner? There’d be no question of dashing into the college canteen, gulping down a gristle pie and chips; once or twice I had indulged myself in this way. I’d have to choose: the semi-satisfaction of my appetite, or the semi-satisfaction of my conscience.

When one day I ran out of money for stamps, I knew I would have to borrow. I could negotiate my food intake with myself, but I could not negotiate with the GPO a cheap rate for my letters to Niall.

My guts churning, I made my way along the corridor to C21. After all, I thought, we’ve known each other almost all our lives. And I knew that Karina would have a full grant, because her mother was disabled now, their income was cut by half. She would have a little more money than me, and if – I must pay her back before the end of term, but perhaps even Niall, his parents . . .

As I was about to knock on the door, my attention was drawn by a sound from the kitchen just across the corridor. I peeped around the door and saw a cheap enamel saucepan jiggling and popping on one of the gas rings. I stepped in and lifted its lid. There was nothing in it but water, water at a rolling boil. I knew somehow that this pan belonged to Karina.

A moment later the door of C21 opened and Karina crossed the corridor, holding a screwed-up Cellophane packet. ‘Hello, what are you doing here?’ she said incuriously. She lifted the lid of the saucepan, pulling her sleeve down to protect her hand. She frowned at the boiling water. It seemed to be satisfactory. She put down the pan lid and untwisted the Cellophane packet; tubes of cut macaroni plopped into the pan, some catching the rim in their descent and rattling like pebbles. One of them fell by the wayside, on to the scratched and rusting space between the two rings. Steam rising into her face, Karina pinched it in her fingers and dropped it in the pan with the rest. She looked at her watch. ‘Excuse me.’ She left the kitchen. I leant against the wall, watching the macaroni bob and swirl in the pan, turning from yellow to thick white.

Karina recrossed the corridor, carrying a deep soup bowl and paper cylinders of salt and white pepper. ‘Excuse me,’ she said again, speaking to me this time as if I were in her way. I stepped aside. She dangled her spoon into the water, slapping at the contents.

‘Just for you?’ I said.

‘You can have some if you’re hungry. I only have one bowl, you’ll have to fetch your own.’

‘Aren’t you coming to dinner tonight?’

‘I am, but it’s not enough, is it?’

I shook my head. Karina fished again with her spoon, trapping a tube against the side of the pan, dredging it from the water, raising it to her lips, which flinched away from the hot metal; then testing it with her teeth. It was ready. Her tongue coiled around the remnant her bite had left; it flicked into her mouth. She took the pan from the heat and moved to the sink, wedging her soup bowl against the side of the pan to drain off the boiling water. ‘Careful!’ I said. I always said things like this. It came from years of listening to my mother; a concern, reflex or perhaps just assumed, for other people’s flesh.

Her shoulders stiffened. ‘You’re so soft, Carmel,’ she said.

So soft. Not a compliment.

The macaroni lolloped into the waiting dish. A plume of steam rose from it. Karina, her face absorbed, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, then picked up her spoon and began to eat. The dish was too hot for her to hold, so she balanced it on the draining board and leant over, her lips darting at the spoon, sucking up the tubes with a little intake of air.

‘Don’t you have cheese?’ I said, aghast.

She looked up, the spoon half-way to her mouth. ‘I could have. But I won’t be able to afford cheese by the end of term. So I might as well get used to it like this.’

‘Jule and me, we have some butter,’ I offered.

‘I don’t want your butter.’

‘It might be a bit swimmy.’

Karina picked up her dish, held it against her protectively. Her spoon was poised in mid-air. ‘Don’t you understand me? I don’t want to get used to what I can’t afford.’

‘Yes. Of course I understand you.’

‘Julianne, she can afford all sorts of things.’

‘But Karina, how can you possibly . . .’ Choke it down, I was going to say. My sentence faltered, faltered to the point where I couldn’t be bothered with it any more.

‘Look, did you want something?’ Karina said. ‘Otherwise, will you let me get on with my meal in peace? Before it gets cold?’

I made my way unsteadily along the corridor, back towards C3. My key with its big key fob pressed into my palm, and I was just about to put it in my lock when Lynette came through the swing door at the head of the stairs. She was wearing her soft leather coat; it was a claret colour, almost as deep as blackcurrant. The belt was pulled tight at her waist, not buckled but negligently knotted, and the heels of her black boots made a click-click-click on the parquet.

She saw me. Her eyebrows flew up. ‘Carmel, you’re ill.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You look faint.’

‘I went to see Karina. She’s in the kitchen, eating this gross bowl of macaroni.’

Lynette looked merry. ‘Yuk,’ she said. ‘Let me in, I’ll spend five minutes with you, till she’s got through with it. I’ve seen it, honestly. I offered to get her some Parmesan for next time. She said – ’ with a gruesome accuracy, Lynette imitated her accent – “What sort of muck’s that?” ’

‘Oh, Lynette, honestly.’ I turned the key, smiling. I found it difficult to believe that Karina wouldn’t know what Parmesan was, and I wondered, fleetingly, if Lynette’s anecdotes of day-to-day life in C21 sometimes made her seem more ludicrous and disagreeable than she was. But no, hadn’t I just had the evidence of my own eyes?

Lynette took off her coat. I perched on the edge of the bed, she on my desk chair. From her shoulder bag she took a packet of chocolate biscuits, and began to wind off the Cellophane. ‘It’s the sweaters, you know?’ she said. ‘Hairy and grey, like gutted wolves or . . . really, I try all the time to think what they are like. You look done for, sweetheart. Haven’t you had lunch yourself?’

‘No, I never have lunch.’

I ate one biscuit. Any more, and tomorrow would be harder to bear. ‘What did you want Karina for anyway?’ Lynette said.

A crumb of biscuit seemed to fly back up into my throat. I coughed as it scratched my soft palate. I coughed, and began to speak: long pauses between my words. I was bitterly ashamed of my improvidence. Nowadays, of course, students go into debt; indeed, they’re encouraged to. Even in my day, there were overdrafts. But not for people like me; for the daughters of mothers like mine. My mother used to say she had never owed a penny piece, never had and never would. Already I was slipping away from the high standard she had set.

Lynette had never looked more beautiful than at the moment she wrote me a cheque. She slid it to me across the desk, as if willing me to take it without comment and never mention it again. Her thick fringe of black lashes fluttered on a cheekbone frosted by Elizabeth Arden.

‘What about Karina?’ I said. ‘I mean, I know she’s got a full grant but that’s still not very much. I’d hate it if both of us were trying to borrow from you.’

Lynette closed her eyes tight. ‘The grant’s very mean. I couldn’t manage. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If Karina were to ask, of course I’d help out. She hasn’t, so I can’t interfere. Shall we not talk about it? Look, you know that my father gives me an allowance every month. We’re not wealthy people, but I happen to be an only child, and – ’

‘So am I.’

‘Really? I imagined you belonging to this big jolly clan – ’ I saw us with our songs and japes, our makeshift flutes, our donkey parked outside: our thatched roof and the hole cut for a chimney, and us with big patches on our clothes, the patchwork patches that people have in fairytale books. I smiled and looked aside. She paused; her eyes pursued mine. ‘No, Carmel . . . I suppose I knew you were just yourself.’

‘And the cat’s died,’ I said. ‘You know, my mother, she just said that. Oh, by the way, the cat’s died. But why? It wasn’t old.’

‘You make me feel a worthless person,’ Lynette said. ‘Work so hard. Never go out.’

‘Lynette,’ I said, ‘could you please not tell Karina or Julianne that you’ve given me this cheque?’

‘What cheque?’ Lynette said. As if irritated, she shook her packet of chocolate biscuits in my direction.

I was tempted; I forgot my resolve, and took another. It was a wafer with orange cream inside. I chatted for a minute or two, about the things that interest law students: Acts of God, contributory negligence. I rose, rather formally, to see her out. As I did so I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror; a terrible creature with iron teeth, grinding up everything that came in her path.