An Experiment in Love: A Novel

eight

I will not say much about the Christmas holidays, except that they didn’t go quite as I expected. There were strikes that winter and power cuts, so we had to cook when we could, and sometimes we dined by candlelight. Niall’s mother had me in the kitchen peeling potatoes by the sackful; but I could only eat the two small potatoes that were the standard issue at Tonbridge Hall. I fell greedily on steaks that carpeted my plate, but when a quarter of the meat had vanished I would quail and, not liking to put down my knife and fork, spend the rest of the meal transferring vegetables from one side of the plate to the other, raising tiny mounds and making patterns and trying to make the quantity look less.

‘Your stomach’s shrunk,’ Niall’s mother said. ‘I don’t know! How ever will you get to be the first woman prime minister if you don’t eat up your steak?’

On Christmas Eve we went to midnight Mass in the unprepossessing red-brick church down by the marketplace. Susan Millington was there, wearing a tapestry maxi-coat. Her father the dentist showed his teeth at me, and said, ‘Hello, Carmel, how’s the wide world treating you?’

As a substitute for a smile, Susan lifted a corner of her mouth. ‘Whatever have you done to your hair?’

‘It’s for when the red revolution comes,’ I said politely.

‘How’s Julianne?’

‘She’s flourishing. Thriving. She’s been awarded a medal.’

‘A medal? How odd.’

‘It’s for A Promising Start in Anatomy.’

It was true; some old dead doctor had endowed it. For the last two weeks of term it had dangled on our shelf beside Mrs Webster. Julianne’s parents, when they heard the good news, sent her a cheque, and a letter that said she should buy herself something nice.

‘I’ve arranged my pupillage,’ Susan said. ‘A set in Lincoln’s Inn. Did you hear?’

‘No, I don’t think it was noised abroad.’

Mr Millington patted his breast pocket, where his wallet snuggled. ‘It’ll cost me a pretty penny too, while she’s learning the ropes. Your parents have all that to come, young lady. Yes, the cost of living in the metropolis . . . and she’ll have to have her wig and gown.’ He rocked back on his heels. ‘Still, I have every confidence in our Susan. Our Susan will make a woman High Court judge.’

‘You’re intending to be a solicitor, are you?’ Susan said.

‘No, I’m intending . . .’ My voice died in my throat. There was really no limit to my intentions. I turned away, feeling a faint nausea at the thought of the blue-white turkey on the larder shelf, ready for tomorrow’s banquet of flesh. ‘I think I may become a vegetarian,’ I said.

In the New Year Julianne brought a toaster back in her luggage. ‘Why didn’t I think of it!’ Lynette exclaimed. We plugged it in by Julianne’s bedside light.

We were popular now, more popular than ever; Claire and Sue called on a nightly basis, round about ten o’clock, to fill themselves up with white slices tanned a light gold then flipped into the air by this god-like machine; we used to sit watching it, intent, ready to spring forward and catch the hot bread. ‘I hope it doesn’t encourage Karina,’ Julianne growled.

But Karina never came. ‘Do you know,’ Lynette said, ‘she’s put on a terrific amount of weight over Christmas. I do feel sorry for her.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed.’ In the holidays I had not visited Curzon Street. I had not seen Karina until she returned to Tonbridge Hall, so I did not know what she had been doing to expand herself so. ‘I wish I had a photo of her,’ I said. ‘When she was little. You’d not believe . . .’ And it was true; there was no trace of the silvery fairness she’d possessed in the days when she was an Easter chick. When she rolled down the corridors, her calves seemed to expand before my eyes, ballooning out above her shoes; there was a swag of new flesh under her chin, and her small eyes were sunken into a full-moon face. ‘I expect she’s been cooking for herself,’ I said. ‘She always did like cooking.’

‘Dumplings,’ Julianne suggested. ‘Big filthy nasty suet dumplings.’

Lynette sighed. ‘More and more of Karina. Less and less of Carmel. How odd it is, I’m sure.’

I had decided that I would have to restrict my food intake severely in the new term, because it was almost the only head of expenditure I could control. I did not intend to be caught out again without the carrier’s fee, and have to borrow; I must re-jig my budget. I will have one luxury, I thought, just one, I will buy myself a garment; as for my diet, the toast will help, toast in the morning and toast at night. I can still go to my Labour Club meetings if I can come home and have toast.

It was the butter that had always been problematical. Our rooms at Tonbridge Hall were maintained at such a ferocious temperature that it dissolved into fatty yellow streams. We had to keep it out on the windowsill, high above the street. I was putting out the butter one night when I realized that, when I was outside Tonbridge Hall, I was usually cold. I will knit myself a jumper, I thought.

At first I thought in terms of some serviceable object in dark green, plain as possible, knit one purl one, easy for me. But then I thought: no, why? Why should I be bored? I’ll knit a jumper that my mother would have been proud of, if she’d done it herself: one that would have made her gasp. Since the days of kettle-holders, I’m sure my fingers are nimbler. After all, I now have the expectation of success.

In the new term – as in the old – my essays came back from my tutors scrawled with approbation. If there had been a medal for, let us say, A Flying Start in Tort, I’m sure I would have carried it off. My triumphs should have warmed me; but I could not escape the feeling that my application to texts was a despicable zealotry, and that others – like Julianne – achieved the same results with more grace; 1 was afraid that my elbows were out, that my hunger showed on my face. Besides, I missed Niall very much, and while ambition gnawed like a pain behind my ribs I felt another gnawing too, of loneliness; I felt I was being eaten away from the inside out. Six weeks, we’d said, six weeks to endure and then he’d visit me; six weeks, then we’d know it was only four to go until Easter.

Midnight again: I came back from the kitchen at the end of the corridor with our clean plates stacked in my hands and our butter knife balanced on top. Julianne was standing at our wash-basin, legs apart, enthusiastically soaping her genitals. I put the plates into her bedside cupboard; she towelled herself, floated damply into her nightdress, and ran a hand through her curls. ‘Carmel, about you and Niall. Shouldn’t you ever branch out? Explore the options? Is there only one cock in the world?’

‘I love Niall,’ I said.

‘Of course you do. Hardly a reason not to sleep with anyone else, is it?’

‘I couldn’t do that. Why would I want to?’ My flesh would revolt, I thought.

‘Experience.’ She plumped down on the end of her bed, her large breasts jumping once. Her tongue crept out, its tip cherry red, and smoothed a flake of rough skin on her upper lip; January was proving cold. ‘I don’t think I knew you, Carmel, when we were at the Holy Redeemer. All this . . . intensity.’

Intensity: it is a word of abuse flung at thin women, at thin women who have any pretence at an inner life. It is a label, less costly than the kind I had put on my suitcase.

‘Is experience good for its own sake?’ I asked.

I felt Julianne’s greedy gaze fasten on me: as if she were going to dissect me. Her eyes stripped me down for a moment, down to the bone. Then she flopped back on the bed and stretched, easing her round ample limbs inside her lawn nightdress: abundant, generous, superbly amoral. It occurred to me that perhaps I was the subject of an experiment, an experiment, let us say, in love; that I lived my life under Julianne’s gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them herself. But how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don’t teach you how to live, you learn it from books; and clever people watch you, to learn from your mistakes.

Niall had said he would like to buy me roses; I myself thought how nice it would be to have a pot-plant to enliven C3, with its magnolia walls and grinning skull and cheap teak-veneer desks. It was this fleeting desire that gave me the idea for my sweater.

Perhaps a russet-brown is not the best colour for a newly red-headed girl. But I dreamt one night of the Holy Redeemer, of the hall at the House, of the broken tile that would give under the foot, tock-tock. The next day I went out and bought some wool the colour of a mellow old flowerpot. I made it up in a plain stocking-stitch, narrow at the waist, wide and square at the shoulder, with a turn-over to give a double thickness at the neck: like a flowerpot’s top. Every spare moment I knitted, sometimes far into the night. I thought that if I flew at it in this way, maintained the tension and momentum, I wouldn’t suffer my old problems of mangled wool and loss of confidence. I dreamt of when it would be finished.

‘I’m going to sew things on it,’ I told Lynette. ‘Drooping stems. Felt leaves. And flowers.’

‘It will be strikingly original,’ she said. ‘It will need to be dry-cleaned.’

‘I know that. I won’t wear it often. But I shall wear it on Guest Night.’

At Tonbridge Hall, Guest Night came three times in the term. One table – where the warden and staff and Hall President normally dined – was described for the evening as High Table, and two others – also highish – were fitted to its ends, so that one had the familiar wedding reception pattern, an ‘E’ without its middle. The chief guest was someone distinguished, and the other three or four guests – who would be scattered on the wing-tables – would be cheerful, stoical women dons from various colleges, who were willing – for no payment – to spend the evening among us. Floor by floor, in our turn, we girls were allocated places among the guests; and now it was the turn of C Floor, and the Secretary of State for Education was to visit us. The kitchens made special efforts, of course, and a girl we knew from B Floor who had been at High Table last term said that you got given food in ordinary amounts, approximately twice as much as you would get if you were dining in the body of the hall.

I had to work fast on the sweater. Lynette pored over the pattern and advised, but it was Karina whose practical skills came into their own when I had to press it and sew the pieces together. Her hair drooped over the ironing board, and there was a faint oily smell of singed wool. ‘Not too hot,’ I said nervously.

‘Look, relax, I know what I’m doing,’ she said. ‘Though I still think it’s ridiculous. I do, Carmel.’

We hadn’t spoken so much in months. We had the ironing-room to ourselves; a window was open, and faint late-January sunlight filtered through the smoggy air. ‘Those silver beads you’ve got to sew on it, they’re going to look very peculiar.’

‘They’re for the centre of the daisies. I’ve got some gold ones too.’

‘Nobody grows daisies in flowerpots.’

‘It’s not an ordinary flowerpot. It’s a surreal one.’

‘You can excuse any ridiculous thing by calling it that.’

‘It will be unique.’ I put my hands on either side of my waist and squeezed. She looked up at me. ‘Carmel,’ she said, ‘why are you such a show-off?’

‘Show off? Me?’ A sour spurt of anger, like stomach acid, rose up into my throat. I reached across and tore my segments of sweater from under her hands. In doing so I knocked aside the iron, which she was holding loosely in her right hand, and it skimmed the knuckles of her left. I watched the mark appear, blue against the bone. Taking her own time, Karina placed the iron on its heel and raised the back of her hand to her lips and sucked it. ‘God, stop it,’ I said. ‘Rinse it under the cold tap.’

‘Saliva’s antiseptic,’ she said.

I knew. I remembered learning that in biology, Form Four. ‘I haven’t killed you,’ I said. ‘It was only on bloody wool setting. Or it ought to have been.’

When I got out into the corridor my knitting was still a hot parcel in my hands, tenuous and floppy; premature. Sabotage! I thought. She might have terminally scorched it, if her big mouth hadn’t made me intervene.

When I got back to my room I felt shaky. I had lost my temper, and it was news to me that I had a temper to lose.

That evening, my head bent over my task, I said to Julianne, ‘There’s something about Karina that makes me damage her.’

Julianne gave me a blue-eyed, glazed look; disengaged herself from my remark. ‘Let’s see, then. Oh yes, I like the twisty stems.’

I was sewing. My flowerpot sweater was assembled and I was applying its fantastical felt daisies, petal by petal. There were embroidered flowers too, less specific in type, and even the daisies were not the colours they are in life. I had remembered chain stitch, stem stitch and satin stitch, and my fingers moved more cleverly than they’d ever moved under a teacher’s eye. I had spilt my little beads out of their paper bags, and corralled them in Jule’s ashtray. They looked sinister, as they rolled: like the vital parts of a missile system.

I spread out my work on the end of my bed, so that Julianne could finger it and politely exclaim, with a simple kindness I might have thought foreign to her. ‘Vine leaves,’ she said, ‘couldn’t you do vine leaves? It would add a touch of the exotic.’

It struck me that perhaps Tonbridge Hall was drawing us together: who is my neighbour? ‘Wake me up tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I want to come to breakfast.’

I woke at four o’clock and lay in the dark. The bedspread, under my hand, was like gritty sand. Twice I got up to check the travel alarm. For three days I had not heard from Niall. Since Christmas there had been these gaps, of a day here and a day there – but never a gap of three days together.

By seven I was drowsing: too late. I forced myself out of bed and opened the window a crack. The cold entered the room like an intruded knife. Standing over Julianne, I touched her elbow. ‘Scrambled,’ I said.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Egg.’

Her eyes were closed, her breathing even; her upper lip curled back, as if she might draw blood. Nevertheless, twenty minutes later she stumbled down the stairs with me, pretending to be an invalid and slumping on my arm. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘I have to check my post.’

‘Post? Does it come at this time?’

My hand plunged into the pigeonhole. ‘It’s my letter. I’ve been waiting. It’s come.’

Julianne seemed dazed. I slid a bank statement and a postcard from her pigeonhole and pressed them into her fist. I carried Niall’s letter into breakfast; I wanted to rip it open at once, but I knew I would not get the best out of it if I read it in public. I wanted to be able to dwell on every word, and at intervals press the paper to my cheek, pretending it was his skin. This effort of imagination could only be made in private.

I put the letter on my chair, collected my breakfast from the hatch, picked up the letter again and put it on my lap. Weak tea was poured. There was a patter of rain against the long windows. Lynette had not yet put on her lipstick; her face seemed only half-formed. Karina sat rubbing her eyes. ‘Toast, Carmel?’ cried Claire. There was a grating cheeriness in her voice.

Sue sat at the end of the table, yawning hugely. ‘Don’t you think we ought to be allowed to come down in our dressing-gowns?’

‘There would be some melancholy sights,’ Lynette said.

Claire said crossly, ‘Really, if people can’t make the effort – ’

‘What’s the matter with you this morning?’ Julianne asked her.

‘And what’s the matter with you?’ Claire snapped back. ‘We never see you at breakfast. What have we done to deserve this honour?’

‘Think of it as a rehearsal for Guest Night,’ Lynette murmured.

I looked down the table at Claire: irate, her wood-shaving curls leaping away from her scalp. Sue looked jaundiced, and as if she had not slept. She kept her place when the rest of us trooped up for our scrambled egg. It slid through the tines of our forks, pale and perplexing as ever. Sue began to butter a half-slice of rubber toast, and then lost interest. She dropped her knife rather ostentatiously, let it clatter on to her plate. I glanced at her, sympathizing.

Julianne picked up her teaspoon and tapped it against the rim of her cup. ‘Young ladies, if I may have your attention? You may well ask what I’m doing at breakfast. If this pap is the standard, I’ve been well out of it, and as for the grace, wit and civility of the conversation – ’

‘Go and eat worms,’ I said.

‘They would be a most acceptable substitute: but first I wish to make an announcement.’ I noticed a little stir at an adjacent table; they thought it was an engagement, and that soon a diamond would be passed around. ‘I thought it was better to do it all at once,’ Julianne said. ‘I’m going to change my name. I don’t want to be called Julianne any more.’

‘Why not?’ Lynette said. ‘It’s . . . sweet.’

‘So it is,’ Julianne said. ‘And so I’m not. It’s a doll’s name. A baby name. I don’t want it. From now on you can simply call me Julia.’

There was a short silence. Then, ‘Fine,’ Claire said. ‘If you like.’

Lynette said, ‘Perhaps I, myself, should consider . . .’

Karina said, ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re called. It doesn’t change what you are.’

This made Julia smile. ‘Anyone else want to join in? Carmel?’

‘Definitely,’ I said. ‘Call me Zsa-Zsa.’

‘Make me Fifi,’ Sue said. Her voice was wobbly. Our heads flicked in her direction. She stood up, gripped the back of her chair; she hung on to it for a second, then blundered towards the door.

I was quickest on my feet, sprinting out after her. She let the heavy half-glazed door swing back in my face, and she was crouching on the floor outside the diningroom when I reached her. I had brought my letter with me of course, but I dropped it so that I had both hands free to scoop her floppy fair hair back from her face. Her hand clawed at my shoulder for support. She was sick on the floor, my right shoe and my letter.

The shoe could be salvaged. Had to be, really. But my letter was illegible and smelt noxious. It was by an act of omission, not commission, that I understood its contents. I heard nothing from Niall for the rest of the week, and on Sunday I took the extreme, panicky step of telephoning him at his lodgings.

There was a delay before he came to the phone, and his voice was reluctant. I burst into tears when I heard it. ‘I thought you were dead under a truck,’ I said. ‘I thought you must be.’

‘You didn’t get my letter?’

I couldn’t seem to make him understand that Sue had been sick on it. ‘Why was she?’

‘Because she’s pregnant,’ I said. ‘Why else?’

A long breath. It was a bad line, but in time I understood that we were finished, that he wanted – what did he say? I can’t remember now. The phrases fade. It seemed to have something to do with the fox fur. That he was afraid of what I’d be like, in ten or twenty years, if that was what I deemed to be the proper solace for a cold night.

The next day I didn’t go to lectures. It was the first time I had missed. Sue came to my room mid-morning. Her face was swollen from crying. She had been home for the weekend, and given Roger her news. Her account of events was sketchy, jarring and not entirely coherent, but it was obvious to me that Roger was stringing her along. I worked at embroidering my sweater, because while my face was hidden from her I could evade the task of assuming a suitable expression.

‘Want another coffee?’ she said. Her voice was blurred, thickened with mucus. All morning she had been walking up and down to the kitchen at the end of the corridor, just for something to do: the grey thin liquid overflowing the beakers, slopping over oblivious hands. She did not drink it, I did not drink it; it sat beside us and went cold, until Sue suggested more.

‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘You get yourself one.’

‘No, I couldn’t, I feel bloated.’ Sitting on Julia’s bed, she leant back against the wall, her hands resting above her navel.

‘So what did he say then? What did he really say?’

‘Well, he seemed – pleased. Not exactly. Pleased in a way, as if, you know, he hadn’t expected it, but – well, he didn’t say much, really.’

‘So he wants you to have it?’

‘We didn’t talk – I mean, I think it was pretty much of a shock – ’

‘Are you going to have it?’

‘God, I don’t know. My parents will be livid. They’ll chuck me out.’

In that year, parents still did. For Catholic girls there were small hospitals run by nuns, in discreet rural areas. Parents paid the train fare, and gave a donation; their daughter returned home when her stomach was flat, and the baby was never seen again. Folklore insisted that the experience was penitential: schoolgirls screaming in a twenty-four-hour agony, while Sister pottered serenely in another room.

Head still bent, I considered Sue’s phraseology. ‘Livid’ – that was a word she’d got from Claire. ‘Chuck me out’ – could be natural to her, or could be one of those pseudo-robust phrases that boarding-school girls employ. It seemed not surprising to me that, out of all of us, this fate had chosen Sue. She had a partial, permeable quality. Words penetrated her; bits of other people’s experience intruded themselves into her, like needles picking up the skin. As she talked I heard all the dislocations in her speech, the strange gaps between word and word, the shift from her lurching southern consonants to Claire’s posh rounded vowels. She is a thing of shreds and patches, I thought. A stem grew under my hands. I heard the tiny rasp of wool against wool, as I slid my needle through; the silver beads under my fingertips felt like ball-bearings.

‘So . . . it doesn’t look as if you’re setting up house with Roger, then?’

Sue put up her knuckles and pressed them against her mouth. For a moment I thought that she was going to vomit, then I saw that she was thinking. Her eyes moved, once, in their sockets. ‘What would you do?’ she mumbled through her fists.

I wouldn’t be in your situation, I thought. You must be one of those nice girls, that my mother told me about; the nice girls who don’t know what’s what. ‘I’d probably get rid of it,’ I said.

She took her hands away. ‘Is that your advice?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you give advice?’

‘No.’

‘What do I do?’

‘You go to the Student Health Service.’

‘Would it cost anything?’

‘No.’

‘Roger hasn’t got any money.’

‘I see.’

‘I’ve only got my grant.’

‘Were you on the Pill?’

‘At first.’

‘And then?’

‘I wanted to know if I could have one.’

I looked up, from the delicate terminal frill of a petal extravagantly curled. ‘You wanted what?’

Sue’s face had the tint and dullness of well-boiled cauliflower. It couldn’t be said that pregnancy suited her. ‘Help me, Carmel,’ she said. ‘Don’t blame me. Why should anybody blame me? I just wanted to know, you see, to be sure. It’s natural. It’s natural to want to know. Natural.’

‘Natural,’ I repeated. I reached for my scissors. I had inserted my final stitch. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art.

Lynette had an easy day on Mondays, and was always home by mid-afternoon. ‘Zsa-Zsa!’ she said. She had bought a toaster, too; out of habit, she leapt to it.

‘No, no toast! By Guest Night I want to be perfectly triangular.’ I whipped out my sweater from under my arm. ‘That belt that you said perhaps – ’

Lynette was already reaching for it. It was a wide belt, crushing and severe, made of stiff leather in an interesting shade of glossy deep green. ‘Can’t think why I bought it,’ Lynette had said earlier. ‘The colour, it seemed special. I suppose it was foresight.’

We stretched out my flowerpot sweater on the bed and laid the belt against it. ‘Yes! Now try on,’ Lynette said. I eased my creation over my head. Lynette took the sleeves and helped the cuffs over my hands. She slid the belt around my waist, drawing it in until the silver tongue snagged in the last hole. ‘Mirror,’ she said.

I had to jump to see myself in it. ‘Tell me,’ I said.

‘Perfect if it were an inch tighter. The belt needs one more hole.’ She looked cast down. ‘But how to make it? I suppose there must be a way. We’ve got till Wednesday. Do you know, I expect Karina, she’s so practical . . . But no. Not worth it. Jealous little madam, she is.’

‘Is she all right?’

Lynette shook her head. ‘I hardly see her. She never speaks . . . Well, you’ve seen how she is at breakfast. I come home in the afternoon and I always seem to have missed her. But I know she’s been in because there’s a Mussolini.’

‘A what?’

‘A sweater. Clammy and like a corpse and hanging upside down. And at dinner, of course, she can’t speak, for eating. Then she’s off across the corridor, making soup.’

I remembered Niall’s advice. ‘She has always had a pathological appetite,’ I said.

‘We could make a hole with a big nail,’ Julia said.

‘Yes, but we don’t have one about our person.’

Julia put her head into C2. ‘Have you got a big nail? Or have you got a pair of scissors, a really huge, powerful pair?’

Claire and Sue were sitting on their beds. They looked up and stared. Both of them were white-faced. Slowly, they shook their heads. Julia drew the door shut.

‘What’s up with them?’ she said.

‘Claire says that as a Christian she can’t connive at the taking of an unborn baby’s life.’

Julia snorted. ‘Who’s asking her to?’

‘Sue might need people to cover for her while she’s away for a few days. Tell a story for her.’

‘She should have it done on a Saturday,’ Julia said. ‘She’ll be discharged on Sunday, and then she can stay out of sight and say she’s got twenty-four-hour flu. That will cover it. Has she seen somebody yet?’

‘I think she might want to have it.’

Julia gave me one of her looks, what I called her rapacious looks: plundering the thoughts out of people’s hearts. ‘Tell me everything,’ she demanded.

‘Not in the corridor,’ I said.

We went from door to door, saying to the Sophies, ‘Has anyone got a corkscrew we could borrow?’

‘What! Celebrating?’ the Sophies trilled.

The next morning, on my way down Drury Lane, I called at the shoe-repairers. I drew Lynette’s belt out of my bag. It lay on the counter like an intractable serpent. ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘could you make me another hole in this?’

It was done in a second. I took out my purse. ‘We wouldn’t charge for that, Miss,’ the man said. I thanked him. The smell of the shop – feet, leather, tobacco – made me slightly faint, but I felt pleased at getting something for nothing. It was unprecedented.

That evening, as everyone sat in C3 drinking coffee, I tried out the effect. Neither Sue nor I had been down to dinner. ‘A thing called beef cobbler,’ Lynette said. ‘The last word in grossness. Brown-coloured cartilage in gravy, with some sort of hard pastry islands foundering in viscous mud, a reptilian – oh, sorry, Fifi!’

‘It’s OK,’ Sue said. Her fingers padded the place below her cheekbones, like an anxious woman in an operetta; tenderly, she felt the bones of her face, as if seeking a pressure-point that would postpone nausea and her decision.

Julia sat on her bed with her knees beneath her chin and her arms looped around her shins. I realized that she was trying to be as small as possible so that she could observe Sue without scaring her. The worst had happened, and to one of us; the Tonbridge Hall nightmare had come true, and naturally it was of interest. Julia was still and quiet; myself, I wanted to scream. Mrs Webster sat on her shelf, looking jocular.

‘Turn round,’ Lynette said to me. ‘Good. Yes. The flowers are spectacular, and you are achieving triangulation.’

The belt sat below my ribs, its hard edge seeming to elevate them. I tried to slip my finger between wool and leather: I couldn’t. ‘And yet . . .’ I said. ‘A half-inch . . .’ Sue clasped her hands against her diaphragm, and moaned.

‘Oh, come on!’ Claire said. ‘It’s stupid, Sue, all this agonizing and attention-seeking. You know the answer, you know the right thing to do. The right thing for you, and for everybody concerned. Just make up your mind – have the courage of your convictions.’

Sue whimpered.

‘It’s taking a life,’ Claire said. ‘It is, you know it is.’ Her face reddened, her spots glowed. ‘Talk to Roger. Sit down and talk to him. Talk to your parents. A family conference, that’s what you need.’

‘I cannot believe,’ Lynette said idly, ‘that this advice is sound.’

‘Everybody will rally round. You’ll see. Listen, Sue, you know the selfish choice is never the right one. Think of the baby. It’s part of you. Part of him.’

Julia raised her head. Her cheeks flushed, and her lip curled. I didn’t think she would condescend to argue with Claire. Nor did she. ‘You get fucked first,’ she said. ‘Give advice after.’

Next morning – a mild bright day – I went back to the shoe-repairers. ‘I’m presuming on your good-will,’ I said.

I showed with my finger where the next hole should be punched. ‘There you are, my darling,’ the man said. ‘If it weren’t for the wife I’d take you home and fatten you up myself.’

I blushed. I wasn’t used to Londoners then. I’m still not. They talk so much. I always want to smash their jaws shut; I realize the reaction may be excessive.

Guest Night.

Sue, as if magnetized, as if drawn by some invisible force that did not consult her will, went glassy-eyed along the streets to a gynaecologist’s consulting-room. The liberalized abortion law was still in its running-in phase, and nobody ever knew quite how to play it. You had to be prepared, at the least, to swear that if you had the baby you’d go insane; I’d always assumed that you must be ready to loosen your hair, sing, ramble on in verse and scatter some flowers, by way of indication that even after ten weeks you weren’t feeling yourself.

Whatever acting was required, Sue didn’t manage it. ‘I’ll be back at three,’ she’d said that morning. ‘Please, Carmel, you will be here, won’t you?’

‘OK,’ I’d said. I’d have to miss a lecture, but I’d missed a few already, in the shocked dumb days after Niall left me. I worked during the night to catch up; I could do another night. ‘OK.’

Three o’clock came. Somehow, as soon as I heard the lift doors crunching open – for Sue had taken to using the lift – I knew there had been a complication. I opened the door of C3. Sue sailed down the corridor. It seemed to me that the way she walked had altered; God, I thought, soon it will start to show. ‘Come in. What happened?’

There was a wordless, bovine triumph on Sue’s face. ‘He says,’ she told me, ‘that I’m in very good health. He says I’m in fine shape to have a very healthy baby.’

Guest Night.

I said to Julia, as we dressed before the revels, ‘She seems to have talked past the point somehow. She forgot why she went, I suppose.’

Julia snorted. ‘Two months from now, then she’ll remember.’

‘Obviously she wants to have it. So what can you say?’

‘You can tell her not to indulge herself.’

‘She said she wanted to know if she was fertile.’

Julia was pinning on her medal – the one she’d got for A Promising Start in Anatomy. ‘You,’ she said, ‘have you ever felt that need?’

‘No.’ I was startled. ‘Anyway, my experience is academic, now.’

I couldn’t imagine sex. It was something I’d done in a previous life. I felt sealed up again. I was a virgin. My flowerpot sweater slid over my head, stretched over my ribs; its fantastical flowers spilt to my waist, and as I turned to show Julia I am sure that the gold and silver beads caught the light. I cinched it with the broad strong belt; no trouble, as I breathed in, to snag the bar in its new hole. My rib cage was lifted, my diaphragm was constrained, it would be difficult to take a very deep breath . . . but why would I need to? I wasn’t going to drown.

‘Anyway,’ Julia said, ‘she’s messed it up good and proper. She’ll change her mind in a week or two, and then you can bet your life she won’t want to turn up to the Student Health Service again. What will she say? “Oh yes, I saw the man you sent me to, yes, I gave him the letter, no, I’m still pregnant, he said I was doing nicely.” ’ Julia snorted. ‘She’ll have to start again, go private. Where will she get the money?’

An hour before, Claire had caught me in the corridor. ‘Please, Carmel,’ she hissed at me. ‘Just a word.’

I went into C2, closed the door and stood with my back against it. Their decor was not like ours. They had cushions on their beds with buttons in the centre, and a fringed bath mat by the wash-basin. There were soft toys piled on Sue’s bed: a pink-and-white mini-elephant, a monkey with pliable limbs and a face of almost satanic ugliness. On the wall above Claire’s bed was a poster with a prayer on it in fancy script. It said, Where there is hatred, let me sow love. ‘Carmel,’ she said, ‘I wanted to talk to you because I know you have influence with her.’

‘Everybody has influence with Sue.’

‘Yes, but you have experience.’

I understood. Because I came from the north of England, Claire credited me with an earthy maturity. As if I had experienced many upheavals in life, and an early sexual initiation: incest, possibly, caused by overcrowding in the cellar where I was brought up.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you know what she wants, in her heart. And now she’s seen this chap, gynaecologist, he’s put her mind at rest.’

‘Yes. But it wasn’t what she went there for.’

‘None the less – she’s seen sense. So now I want you and Julia and Lynette to rally round and stop her having second thoughts. If she has an abortion it could do her endless damage.’ Claire was solemn, her tone ponderous. ‘Endless,’ she said. ‘Psychological. Damage.’

‘Yes. I can see that. I can see.’ Restless, I deferred to the pieties of the age. My imagination worked; I couldn’t think what damage would be greater than that inflicted by an innocent wailing itself into the world, from between my unprepared thighs. ‘But I don’t think she’s really decided, has she? She’s only interested in her present situation, just how she feels today. It’s a novelty, isn’t it? But soon she might regret – either way, she might regret it.’

‘But a life would be spared,’ Claire pleaded. ‘For heaven’s sake, Carmel, I thought you were a Catholic.’

‘No. Who told you that?’

‘Oh, so you’re not any more?’

‘They’d be different kinds of regrets, wouldn’t they, very different? I mean she’d have to feed and clothe it, worry about it all the time – ’ Her life would be over, I thought. ‘You could argue, you know, that having the baby would be just giving into a whim – and it’s not a baby yet, is it, it’s just cells, and you shouldn’t turn cells into a person just for the sake of a whim?’

Claire was not shrewd, but she was shrewd enough to see that I was in mental turmoil. ‘But what do you think? What do you really think?’

‘Oh, I think she should have the baby.’ I studied the prayer on the wall. ‘I think maybe you should do what your body wants, while you can.’

I thought of the jelly blob sealed inside Sue’s body, quivering with its own life: watery, warm, budding. I thought of the jaundiced cavities of the skull on our shelf: vacant, stony and null. I was at some point in between: in transit. I shuddered.

In the drawing-room, under a bright chandelier, the warden dispensed sherry – tepid – in specially small sherry glasses. ‘Miss McBain!’ Her voice was cheery. Her eyes descended, ran down to my waist, then more slowly climbed up again. ‘How extraordinary,’ she said.

‘I made it myself.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You certainly couldn’t get it in the shops.’

Julia and Lynette were both wearing boots, as if they might need to whistle up a horse and make an escape; they exchanged glances that suggested this. Julia’s were comfortable, scuffed, baggy boots with stacked heels; Lynette’s were her guardsman’s boots, tall and correct and burnished. Lynette wore a sweeping skirt of indeterminate darkness, and a soft mohair sweater the colour of charcoal; on her left hand, a huge emerald. She twisted it apologetically about her finger. ‘Grandma’s,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d flash it. At our guest, because after all, didn’t I read she married a millionaire?’

The Secretary of State put forth fingers, and accepted a glass of sherry from the warden. Her eye was bright and sharp and small; she tilted her head, the better to see. Her dress was of the shape that is called ageless, and of a length that is called safe; it was sewn all over with little crystal beads. Her pale hair lay against her head in doughy curves, like unbaked sausage rolls.

When we came into proximity, Lynette began to laugh politely into her hand; some of her sherry came out through her nose. ‘Very nice cocktail dress,’ she spluttered. ‘My mother had one of those, but she gave it to a charity shop.’

The warden surged up to us, to give us our designated places at table. I felt that these had been changed, at the last minute. ‘Miss McBain,’ she said, staring hard at my chest and waving me away to the last place on a wing. ‘Miss Lipcott . . .’ She banished Julia – whose medal bounced over her left breast – to an equally remote spot.

We took our places. Soup was served – non-standard soup – and rolls which were hot and definitely not yesterday’s. At our highish table, we didn’t have to prise out the frozen tiny chippings from their foil; we had butter shaved especially for us, curled into glass dishes.

Just as the guests were putting down their soup spoons, Sue rose from her chair, as if it were time for the speeches. She looked wildly up and down the table; then, holding her napkin to her mouth, she bolted. ‘Fifi!’ Julia cried.

For a micro-second our guest looked up. Lynette smiled down at me from High Table; I nodded, rose and slid unobtrusively into Sue’s place near the Secretary of State. The warden glanced at me and nodded, as if she believed some breach in etiquette had been mended.

And really, it would have looked bad, an empty chair so close; as if we were expecting Banquo. Our guest was not eating, even though she had been served with a voluminous chicken breast; her knife toyed with it. She was leaning over the table, talking urgently to the warden and to the section of High Table on her right. The crystals on her dress seemed to quiver; so did her voice, with the effort of restraint. She spoke slowly; she spoke as if she knew everyone except herself was stupid. She leant forward and smiled, and her hair moved with her, as if it were not just hair but a hat made of hair.

I imagined leaning forward, taking her wrist. Put your cutlery down, please. Turn and study this. I wanted her to see my sweater, examine it, envy it. See these flowers! My mother would be proud.

She turned her head in my direction; she opened her lips to speak, and shards of glass fell out.

That night I dreamt of the food I used to eat when I was three years old, when my grandmother was alive: food with the tint and the perfume of living flesh and skin. I dreamt of the rich dark smell of nutmeg that rose from rice pudding, the straw-coloured sweetness of long-baked milk: of sponge rich as egg-yolk, and the trembling speckled surface of baked custard.

I dreamt that I was dead and that I had become a ghost, and that I sat in my grandmother’s kitchen and ate honey from a spoon. I saw my ghost spindle legs dangling down in front of me, and I felt the metal handle of the spoon press against my stripped fingerbones.

‘At least she wasn’t sick on the Guest,’ Julia said. ‘I wonder will she ever know how lucky she was.’