An Experiment in Love: A Novel

three

I would like to press on now, to tell you how Karina and I came to meet Julianne Lipcott: to explain how our lives became knotted up beyond hope of severance. But if I hurry I will lose the thread; or the narrative will be like knitting done in a bad temper. The tension goes wrong; you come back later, measure your work, and find that it hasn’t grown as you imagined. Then you must unravel it, row by row, resenting each slick twist and pull that undoes, so easily, what you laboured over; and when you work again you must do it with the used wool, every kink in it reminding you of your failure.

Our autobiographies are similar, I think; I mean the unwritten volumes, the stories for an audience of one. This account we give to ourselves of our life – the shape changes moment by moment. We pick up the thread and we use it once, then we use it again, in a more complex form, in a more useful garment, one that conforms more to fashion and our current shape. I wasn’t much of a knitter, early in my life. I was perpetually doing a kettle-holder. What is a kettle-holder? you’ll ask. It is a kind name for any chewed-looking half-ravelled object of rough oblong shape, knotted up by a day-dreaming nine-year-old on the biggest size of wooden needles: made in an unlikely shade like lavender or bottle-green, in wool left over from some adult’s abandoned project: or perhaps from a garment worn and picked apart, so that the secondhand yarn snakes under your fingertips, fighting to get back to the pattern that it’s already learnt.

Karina was a good steady knitter. You would see her with her elbows pumping, hunched over a massive clotted greyness; it was as if a crusader had come by and thrown his chain-mail in her lap. I never knew whether she finished her garments or whether her mother and father wore them. All their clothes looked alike; winter and summer they were wadded in their layers, blanketed, swaying heavy and unspeaking along Curzon Street.

When Karina got home her parents were usually at work or asleep, depending which shift they were on. She had her own key, and before she took off her coat she used to put on the kettle and build up the fire and poke it, which I was not allowed to do: but I was allowed to watch her. When the kettle whistled she would swing it up – without benefit of holder – and slosh water into the vast brown teapot. I did not like tea; I did not think children liked it. Karina had a big white cup with blue hoops on it. She drank three cupfuls of tea, each with three heaped teaspoons of sugar.

Once the first cup was inside her she would take out the bread knife, which was something else that, at home, I was not allowed to touch. Karina would saw off four slices of bread and toast them in front of the fire, eating while she worked, slithering on to each slice a raft of margarine. One day she gave me a slice, but the fish smell of the margarine made my first bite come back up into my mouth and stick there. I coughed it back into my handkerchief, and asked permission to put it on the fire. Karina said, ‘You’ll never gain strength if you don’t eat.’ She ruminated a while, then said, ‘I’m going to have my tonsils out.’

I gaped at her. ‘Why?’

‘Because our doctor says.’ Her tone was virtuous, sage and elderly.

‘Why does he say?’

‘Because he’s our doctor and he knows.’

‘How do they get them out?’

‘With an operating machine.’

‘Do they put you inside it?’

She nodded. ‘I reckon.’

I imagined the operating machine. The doctor would help you through a black hatch and you would emerge into a pleasant apartment: a sitting-room with armchairs and a semi-circular rug before the fire, pink carnations in a vase, a standard lamp and a television in the corner. There would be a bedroom and a bathroom; I could not see them, but they would be equally airy and well-appointed. The lights would be on all day, because of course there would be no windows; you would put up with that for the short time of your stay.

Panic fluttered in my throat: a dull bird, a sparrow. I put a hand against it and felt the wings beat. If I had to have my tonsils out I would be put in the operating machine by myself, and I did not know how to live in a house alone. Karina said, ‘You get jelly and ice-cream, after it.’

When she had finished her toast she would take her plate into the kitchen, me trailing behind, and roll up her sleeves to peel a sinkful of potatoes. She would tell me what she was going to do later. ‘I have to make a potato pie. I have to roast a piece of meat.’

I knew she was exaggerating, if not lying altogether. No child would be allowed to do these things. I wished they were. But when I went into the kitchen at home I said, ‘Please, Mum, please, Mum, can I make a cake?’ and she’d say, ‘Stop messing there. Get from under my feet.’ Yet somehow, mysteriously, one had to absorb the domestic arts. There are lessons to be learnt early and learnt well. At the table men are served first, with the best of what’s going. It is the woman’s part to take the fatty piece of meat and the egg that broke as it slid into the pan.

It was some time around this year – the year I was nine – that I became conscious of a falsity surrounding Karina, a disjunction. My mother – other mothers too – would dote on her and hold her up as an example. Such a clean girl, always looks lovely. She helps her mother. Doesn’t have a soft life, both of them at work, had to learn to look after herself and stand on her own two feet. Fetches the potatoes uphill from the market for her mother. Not like you, young lady – everything done for you.

‘Don’t I help?’ I would bellow. ‘Don’t I dry the pots every night, every single night? Don’t I do shopping? Don’t I iron – every week, all the straight things?’

‘Karina never gives cheek.’

I tried to explain to my mother once, when I was in a reasoning mood and thought she might listen.

‘Karina, you see, she’s this way and then she’s that. She’s nice to your face, but horrible. She says horrible things to you. She envies you.’

‘I’m not surprised if she envies you. You, with everything provided for you, and nothing to do but get yourself to school and back.’

‘No, but the things you’ve got. Your library book. You think it’s nice. Karina says, I wouldn’t be reading that muck. Then you used to like it but you don’t like it any more.’

My mother looked at me stonily. She did not understand. Soon she would say something about cattle-waggons, as if I were part of the reason for them. I knew it was a waste of time trying to talk to adults; they seemed to miss three-quarters of what was going on in the world. I thought of dogs who smell and hear and never look, cats who just eat and stare at people and creep around till they fall asleep in the sun. Something vital’s left out: but with people, something vital seeps out as they age.

The next time Sister Basil asked me a stupid question, I didn’t answer her. I just folded my arms and I looked back sadly. She was a small nun, old, who looked as if a cobweb had been draped over her face. ‘Come on, come on,’ she said. ‘Either you know or you don’t know, which is it?’ I passed my eyes over her. Suddenly she came to life, spitting and dancing like a cat. Two red spots grew on her grey cheeks. She propped up the lid of her desk with one arm while with the other hand she rummaged around for her cane. She stood over me and shouted that I would be caned for dumb insolence. I looked back, sadder. There was really no chance of her caning me because I would not hold out my hand when she asked me; I had made a decision on this. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Karina watching me. Her big pink face had turned white.

I don’t really remember what happened next – only that Sister Basil backed off, backed down, found a pretext – and I walked out unmolested at the end of the afternoon, everyone silent around me, and Karina shadowing me with her slapping, rolling, puppy’s walk, not offering to link me until she saw which way the wind was blowing. Sister Basil’s question was this: Who invented the telephone? I was sure she had the answer at the back of her book. Why didn’t she ask questions to which she didn’t know the answers? Then she might learn something to her advantage.

I tore a piece of paper out of my rough book. I wrote on it in vast capitals:

ALEXANDER

GRAHAM

BELL

At the end of the day I left it on Sister Basil’s desk. So I knew: and she knew I knew.

Karina arrived at Tonbridge Hall two days after Julianne, and was billeted as arranged in Room C21, with a girl called Lynette Segal, who was a third-year student at the School of East European Studies. We met Lynette just after Karina’s installation, when she tapped at our door after dinner.

I liked her even before she spoke: she was pale, neat and delicate, with a brunette’s glitter and many gold rings. Her eyes were the colour of blackberries. They fell first on the skull on our bookshelf. She said simply, ‘I admire.’

Julianne, sprawled on her bed, looked up. ‘Oh, we do have taste.’

Lynette stood uncertainly, poised almost on her toes. ‘My room-mate says she knows you.’

I nodded.

‘So I said I’d ask you round for coffee.’

‘And petits fours?’ Julianne asked.

Lynette rose a little, as if poised for a balletic spring. ‘Bendicks Bittermints,’ she offered.

Julianne uncoiled her legs. ‘I admire,’ she murmured.

‘Oh, but you must do something,’ Lynette said. She gave a little sideways hop. ‘Or you would die.’

Julianne stood up. Pointed to me. ‘May the prole come too? Only half a mint for her, mind!’

Lynette said to me, ‘How very short your hair is! But it shows off your beautiful eyes.’

I could see that Julianne had also fallen in love. I think women carry this faculty into later life: the faculty for love, I mean. Men will never understand it till they stop confusing love with sex, which will be never. Even today, there are ten or twenty women I love: for a turn of phrase or wrist, for a bruised-looking ankle where the veins have blossomed out, for a squeeze of the hand or for a voice on the end of the phone. I would no more go to bed with any of them than I would drown myself; and drowning is my most feared form of death. Perhaps I love too easily; I can say Lynette has left a mark on my heart.

So: Julianne reached up and took the skull from the shelf. ‘We call her Mrs Webster,’ she said to Lynette. ‘Carmel, she will have her little joke.’ We skipped and slid along the corridor to C21, passing Mrs Webster between us as if she were a rugby ball.

This is how I came to enter a room that now no longer exists, except in my memory: bursting through the door with a skull poised between my hands. The air of C21 was fragrant with spilt talc and splashed cologne. An electric kettle was steaming into the air. The wardrobe doors stood open and I saw Julianne’s eyes pass over crushed silk and cashmere, squeezed over in one half of the wardrobe to leave room for Karina’s clothes. On the floor by one of the desks stood three pairs of beautiful boots, like sentinels whose upper part has been assumed to heaven: slim straight-sided high-heeled boots, their aroma of leather and polish blossoming into the room. One pair burgundy: one pair a deep burnished chestnut: one pair black and fluid as melting tar.

And on one of the beds, there basked a fur, a longhaired fox fur, its colours banded and streaked, strawberry blonde with platinum tips. My eyes were drawn ineluctably towards it, as fingers are drawn to marble or velvet. I stared at it; as I did so, one of its arms slid towards me, as if in languid salute. I watched. The arm flopped itself over and lolled on to the floor. I took a step towards it, genuflected, and lifted it reverently. I tucked it on to the bed, into the body of the coat, feeling as I did so not just the whisper of the fur against my hand but the sleekness of the silk that lined it. ‘I would kill for this coat,’ I said simply.

‘Oh, heavens!’ its mistress said. ‘Don’t murder me. Just borrow it. Any time.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Go on, try it.’ Lynette skipped across the room. The fox fur seemed to leap into her arms and nestle there. Julianne leant against the wall, amused. Lynette whisked my arms into the sleeves. Her supple hands – blue veins and ivory – swept the collar up to my throat. ‘Oh, that’s lovely!’ she said. ‘It suits you. Oh, Karina, don’t you think? Doesn’t it suit her? You’re taller, you see, you can carry it off. My father bought it for me, and I do like it, but I wonder if it makes me look like Baby Bear.’

Karina stood by the window. Though it was dark outside the curtains were not yet drawn; we filled the central pane with our shadow selves, like actors on a lit stage, like lively ghosts tossing their arms and twirling in the void. I glanced into the window and saw Karina’s broad back, her neck bent like the neck of a toiling ox. Then I looked back into the room and saw her face, its flesh self, not the shadow, and I saw – it is easy to persuade myself now, after the event – I saw her patient hatred take root.

Lynette pounced on the kettle. ‘Coffee?’

‘Black,’ said Karina. ‘Please.’

‘Who got here first?’ Jule asked.

‘Oh, I did,’ Lynette said absently, stooping into the steam.

‘She left you the best bed, Karina,’ I said. ‘The best desk.’

‘Mm,’ Lynette said. She hummed to herself, spooning out instant coffee. The obvious bit of T. S. Eliot sprang to my mind. ‘Not much to do, is it, leave someone a bed? Are you going to have your coffee in your coat, Carmel dear?’

I was staring at myself in the mirror. The fur felt alive around me; there was a faint, disturbing vibration beneath my skin, as if I had acquired another pulse.

‘A proper mannequin,’ Karina said. ‘Isn’t she?’

‘Yes, well, she has the figure for it,’ said Lynette. Her tone, very gently, rebuked Karina’s. She caught the coat as it slipped from my shoulders. ‘Modom must remember it’s here when she wants it,’ she said. She curtsied deeply, and cast a glance – abashed – at the wardrobe.

‘I told you,’ Karina said. ‘There’s no need to squash your stuff up like that. I’ve hardly got anything.’

Karina’s suitcase was still fastened, standing against the wall by her bed. It was the kind of suitcase people from Curzon Street used to take to Blackpool, once a year during the fifties, with a whole family’s clothes inside. It had a check design, like a man’s loud suit, though the pattern was faded to fawn, as if summer by summer the rain had washed the colour out; its sharp metal corners were rusty.

‘You’re entitled to your space,’ Lynette insisted. She eased off the lid of the Bittermints. The happy aroma of good chocolate joined the other perfumes in the air.

When autumn came to Curzon Street, the dead leaves blew uphill from the trees in the park, and my father coming home at half-past six brought in on his overcoat the smell of smoke and cold. Our last walk on the hills had been in September. My mother had strode ahead, her coat flapping, leaving my father to make some sort of conversation with me. I knew, though no one mentioned it, that we would not go walking next summer. Their quarrels had changed, and become quieter, more vicious. And I could not keep talking, talking and talking, poulticing the vast bleeding silence. Not without practice; not without a good deal of it.

Karina and I came uphill from school, turned at the pub on the corner; it was half-past four and the street lamps were burning, half-aglow in a wet dusk. ‘Let’s talk like grown-ups,’ I said. ‘I’ll be Lady Smith.’ There was no picture of her on the sign but I thought I knew what she looked like. She would have a tailored costume, like our landlady’s. ‘You can be my husband,’ I told Karina. ‘You can be . . .’ I searched my inner catalogue of painted heads, ‘. . . you can be the Prince of Connaught.’

‘I don’t want to play it,’ Karina said.

‘Why not?’

‘He has got a moustache.’

‘We can pretend that.’

‘What must I do then?’

‘It’s easy. You just talk. You say grown-up words.’

Karina had a bag with her, a string bag stretched out with three large loaves. They were stacked one on top of the other, each with its crackling U-shaped top and its fragments splitting through the tissue paper like broken slate. She carried this bag slung over her shoulder, and it made her sway from side to side on the pavement, so that she would move a half-step towards me, a half-step away. ‘Pneumonia,’ I offered. I didn’t mind giving her a word to get her going.

Karina looked sideways at me. ‘I am the Prince of Connaught. I have pneumonia.’

I almost thumped her. ‘You’re not doing it proper.’ You have to be that person, I wanted to say to her, put their skin on your back. Grown-up words came bubbling into my mouth: rouge, piano stool, niece. I felt my face blossoming out, round as the full moon, and I smelt the fragrance of pink face powder: I had become Lady Smith. ‘I returned home last night,’ I enunciated carefully, ‘to find my favourite niece seated on the piano stool.’

‘Did she have pneumonia?’ Karina asked. Her voice was nothing like the Prince of Connaught’s: she wasn’t even trying. I thought, if I had scissors I could cut her string bag, and her loaves would tumble out and slide down the hill and then she’d catch it from her mother. But this was not the sort of thing I did to Karina, more the sort of thing she did to me. ‘Dumb insolence,’ she would sometimes say. ‘That’s bad. Very bad.’ It was a whole year since my run-in with Sister Basil; but Karina had appointed herself my spiritual guardian. ‘Did you say your morning prayers?’ she would ask me, when we met in the street at half-past eight. ‘What did you pray for?’

I pictured the loaves picking up speed, losing their tissue paper and collecting dry leaves and bubble-gum wrappers, rolling in at the shop doorway and bouncing back on to the shelves.

‘Your father and me have been talking,’ my mother said.

That woke me up. I’d never heard them talking. Not in months.

My mother had just come in. She’d been out cleaning. Other cleaning women might come and go in an old coat and a turban, but my mother wore a coat that was no more than medium-old, and a proper scarf, and she put lipstick on, Tan Fantasy. Once when she was in a good mood she let me try it. People take you at your own valuation, she said. Always remember that.

‘Can I have a biscuit?’ I asked. I thought it might be better not to know what they had been talking about.

‘All right, but one, mind, or you’ll spoil your tea.’ For a moment she was diverted; then, unknotting her scarf, she said, ‘We’ve decided we’ll let you sit for the Holy Redeemer.’

I had heard of the Holy Redeemer. It was an academy that Sister Basil often referred to, with a pious, grieving note in her voice, as if it were her land of lost content; though I am sure, now, that she had never set foot inside its portals. I said, ‘Sister Basil says the likes of us would never be fit for it in a thousand years.’

My mother snorted. ‘Sister Basil? That old nanny goat? What does she know? If you can pass your scholarship you can go. Why shouldn’t you? But you have to take their entrance exam as well.’

‘Is that harder than my scholarship?’

‘Not so hard that you won’t manage it, if you apply yourself.’

This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon.

‘Will I have a uniform like Susan Millington?’

‘Certainly you will.’

Susan Millington was a big girl who lived near the park in a detached house. She was the only person I had ever seen who went to the Holy Redeemer. She had passed her scholarship and then she had passed the entrance exam, I said to myself; that was how it was done.

The scholarship was the Eleven Plus. Almost everybody didn’t pass it. If boys failed, they sank below my horizon for a few years, then cropped up in a wedding photo, suit sleeves hiding any tattoos; oh, it’s a pity, my mother would say, he was a bright little lad, and now look at that trollop he’s landed with. If girls failed, they went to St Theresa’s up Pennyworth Brow, where they wore navy berets and laddered nylons. Sister Monica, who was in charge of us in the top class, was already priming us for it. ‘You will find there is first-rate equipment for domestic science,’ she said. ‘Electrical sewing-machines. A fully equipped laundry with steam-presses, and a model kitchen fitted out with a range of electrical cooking ranges. In point of fact, everything the heart could desire.’

A thought occurred to me: ‘If I go to the Holy Redeemer, I’ll have to go on the bus.’ A needle of anxiety probed my ribs; a bus, I thought, could get a child lost.

‘Two buses, at least,’ my mother said. ‘Three, if you’d like to save a long walk.’ She sounded proud, as if I had already been exalted. ‘It’ll be worth it, mark my words. Make no mistake about it. An honour and a privilege.’

I wanted to run and put my hand over her mouth. I didn’t know why she was saying such things.

It was nearly Bonfire Night. The evenings were dry and cold, and smelt of the fires to come. If you’re a Catholic you don’t burn Guy Fawkes; the Pope says you mustn’t.

We went from house to house, cob-coaling.

‘We come a cob-coaling for Bonfire Night,

Tally-ho, tally-ho . . .’

Some children hoped that after two lines the person would come out with money in their hand ready, because they didn’t know any more words. If the householder was slow they had to stand there just shuffling their feet and droning ‘Tally-ho’.

But I liked the words, the complete set. They had no meaning and yet they were crawling with it. I would have sung them for no money at all.

‘Down in yon cellar there’s an old umberella

And in yonder corner there’s an old pepper box.

Pepper box, pepper box, morning till night:

If you give us nowt we’ll steal nowt

We wish you good-night.’

By the time it came to the 5th of November, the weather was cloudy, damp and unseasonably warm. The Catherine wheels, nailed to coalhouse doors, twirled brokenly as if they were burning under a towel. Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius sputtered and coughed, giving a poor impression of their lethal past, and rockets shot into skies ready to receive and extinguish them. My grandad would always give a good firework display, whatever the prevailing conditions: Karina and I stood side by side in his backyard, two among a small crowd, cramming our mouths with parkin. I whispered, through the crumbs, ‘I’m going to sit for the Holy Redeemer.’

She turned on me, her eyes narrowed. If she had been less greedy she would have spat out her softening mass of oatmeal and treacle; but as it was she chewed vigorously till most of her cake was gone. ‘You - ARE - A - LIAR,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll have to tell it in confession.’

‘I am not a liar,’ I hissed back. ‘Susan Millington passed her scholarship and then she passed her entrance exam. I’m going on two buses, if not three. I’ll be getting a tennis racquet.’

‘If you believe that, you’re even dafter than you look.’

The lethargic bonfire put out its tongues: reaching, dull crimson, into heavy air. It was built nice and high – Joan of Arc, I thought – and I could see figures moving against its light; I could see Karina, as she swung her face away. One plait swayed out from under her pixie hood, like a sucker reaching for food. Envy, I thought. One of the Deadly Sins. We were having them in catechism. Cardinal Virtues: Justice, Fortitude, Temperance . . . My memory failed. There was grey smoke going up my nose. Four Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance. Murder. Sodomy. Oppression of the Poor. Defrauding the Labourer of his Wages.

My grandad gave me a sparkler, from a bunch sparking already in his own hand; he passed one to Karina, saying, ‘There you are, my duck.’ Turning a little to allow room, we wrote our names on the nearest air. My vast final loop threatened to set Karina’s sleeve on fire. As the tip of the sparkler drooped to ash, I wanted to challenge Karina to duel me with what remained, but I knew that duels – swordplay in general – were beyond her poor spirit. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ I was happy, even so; frightened, but getting reconciled to being frightened. I sang out: untuneful, smoke-captive: ‘Pepper box, pepper box, morning till night . . .’

‘STAND BACK,’ my grandad yelled.

On our left, a roman candle began to sputter and start, crackling pink and blue hyphens away from itself and by way of an arch into the ground. Another rocket rose, flipped, shot out a trail of subdued white stars and subsided in stifling mid-heaven.

. . . pepper box, morning till night: / If you give us nowt we’ll steal nowt / We wish you good-night.’

The next thing I clearly remember, it was Christmas Eve. We were having visitors from Leeds, and my mother was neatly forking mixed pickles into her cut-glass dish that had been left her in a will. ‘If I see you messing with that dish,’ she said, ‘it’ll be a good slap and straight off to bed.’

Earlier, when my mother was milder, we had glued an angel to the window. Frail and phosphorescent, gauzy wings edged thinly with tinsel, she glittered out at Curzon Street. Silent night. Holy Night. From the Ladysmith came the sound of breaking glass. ‘Round yon virgin, mother and child . . .’ Karina always sang ‘Round John Virgin’. One of these years I would tell her: gently, of course. Unless next year I no longer knew Karina; but that seemed hardly possible, as whatever happened about the Holy Redeemer she and I would go on living six doors away from each other. I pictured myself, one year from now, wearing a velour hat like Susan Millington’s and gazing out through the angel’s wings at Curzon Street: waiting for snow to fall.