But then, twenty years on, when I stood on the heights I had erected for myself, there would be a crumbling, she seemed to say, an inner decay, a collapse: and once again I would realize that she was my only friend.
My father did increasingly complex jigsaws. There was an elaborate still-life with grapes, roses and shellfish. There was an Alma-Tadema picture, of soft-eyed women with marble limbs. There was a jigsaw of the Last Supper; it took him days and days, and then a piece of Judas proved to be missing. My mother turned the chairs up and trounced the cushions; the gap remained, a worm-shaped hiatus in the traitor’s ribcage.
When I look back from myself now at myself then, I believe I was a diligent, quiet, undemanding child; hardly more trouble at sixteen than I was at ten. At the time, though – even after I had stopped going to confession and stopped examining my conscience every day – I believed I was a monster of egotism, an incipient tyrant, a source of trouble and agony of mind. My mother said I was, and I didn’t query it. I never tried to take out of her hands the direction of my life, or questioned why she and not I should have it. Inoffensive though I was, she treated me as what was known in those years as a juvenile delinquent. Everything I did was suspicious – at least, it aroused her suspicion.
My mother kept a tight hand on my social life, posting me upstairs to the Chinese room with orders not to daydream and not to let her catch me looking out of the window. For three hours each evening I kept company with my five-shilling fountain-pen and a bottle of blue-black ink, with maps and protractors, with tables of verbs and ragged lines of blank verse. In severe winters I worked downstairs; the television was turned off, and I was told that she and my father were prepared to sacrifice their evening’s entertainment for the sake of my education. I was seldom let to watch television – not even the news, which my mother did not think of as educational, because after all it was not a subject, and I did not have an exercise book for it. But then, once in the week, I would be told to stop whatever I was doing, and to sit down and watch a quiz show called University Challenge. My mother watched me anxiously to see what answers I knew, to see what progress I was making. I pressed my lips shut on the answers; I would not play. The students who formed the teams were elderly and tried to appear lovably eccentric; they had mascots with them, floppy-eared dogs and stuffed trolls, stitched-up penguins and that sort of thing. They were mostly the kind of people you’d cross the street to avoid.
So it was a thin time, you see: the dining table had to do me for a dance-floor, and the electric coals for the electric glow of teenage romance. In my bedroom I carried on improving my diction. ‘But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.’ But you don’t of course, not when you’re fifteen or so. Perhaps I should regret my misspent youth, pity myself for having so little fun. But carpe diem is an empty sentiment, now that we all live so long.
The seaside-postcard view of convent schools insists that sex intrudes into every lesson, every hour; that there are saucy little novices yearning for a monk, and pigtailed prefects bursting out of their push-up bras. But I must report that our nuns mentioned sex hardly at all: love, never.
Perhaps they were afraid of our superior knowledge. Sometimes they did mention boys – the wary tension in their voices seeming to capitalize them, so that they became Boys of a special type, not the everyday ones that you saw on the street but another kind that you’d meet when the time was ripe. And the time would be ripe at some social occasion, some occasion under Catholic auspices, in a draughty hall . . . I pictured them as awkward poor devils, these Boys, the sleeves of their suits too short and their raw hands hanging down, their round faces shining, their smiles bashful and placatory. They knew their nature – uncontrollable – and were ashamed of it. When my mother stopped my comics – Bunty and Judy, Princess and Diana – I took to reading her magazines instead: Woman, Woman’s Realm. Always they had articles about ‘unmarried mothers’; they seemed written in a lowered tone, eye-rolling and falsely sympathetic. The tone rankled with me; I saw injustice. I said to my mother, ‘People can’t help it, can they, if they have a baby before they’re married? I mean, if they’re sent it? What can they do?’
My mother said, ‘You’ll find it’s usually the nice girls who get into trouble of that sort.’
‘Why?’ I said. There was a gap here, of information not imparted: slipped between the lines, slipped between the years.
‘It’s because they’re too trusting,’ my mother said. She looked severe. ‘Those hard madams, you don’t find them having babies. Oh no, because they know what’s what. It’s the nice girls who fall for it every time.’
I took the problem to my enemy. ‘Karina,’ I said, ‘do you know how people get babies?’
‘God!’ she said. ‘Don’t you know that yet?’ But I could see panic in her face, as if she were a horse being galloped at a fence she would not be able to jump. She hit me, and ran off down the street.
My periods started one Tuesday evening in my first term at the Holy Redeemer. I had just finished writing the character of Cassius – bitter, energetic, ambitious – when I went up to the lavatory and found out what a mess I was in. I did not think I was dying, like girls in novels that pre-date this one; though my ignorance was profound, there must have been some intimation, some hint, some suspicion in the air, that a thing like this might occur. I did not feel afraid, but I felt ashamed. The difficulties seemed practical; I had to lay some plot to get my mother on her own.
My mother was sitting under the standard lamp knitting a Fair Isle pullover. When she was doing Fair Isle she did not like people to speak to her. I went up to her and touched her elbow. She snarled. I looked around, dazed. What if I bled on the carpet? My father was doing a jigsaw of the Tower of London. ‘Can you come up to my bedroom?’ I whispered. ‘Tell you something. I want to. Must, please.’
‘What is it you can’t tell your mother here?’ my father inquired. He slotted into place a fragment of the outer wall of a torture chamber.
‘It’s a surprise,’ I said. I thought it a cool thing to say; I amazed myself.
‘Oh, a surprise,’ he said genially. After all, it was his birthday in a week. He nodded, and fitted in a Beefeater’s knee.
When my mother came up to my bedroom I was already undressing. She gave me a cursory glance. ‘Have you got jam on your underskirt?’
I looked at her in astonishment. How on earth did she think I would manage that? Where would I get the jam from, unless she gave it to me? I shook my head. At the thought of eating unsupervised jam.
Twenty minutes later, trussed up in a harness, I was in bed. I wailed that it was not bedtime, but this cut no ice with my mother. I wailed that I had not done my equations, and she said curtly, ‘I’ll give you a note.’ I wailed how long would it go on for, and when would it happen again? ‘Every month, or twenty-five days in my case,’ my mother snapped. I wailed, how old would I be when it stopped, and my mother said, ‘I’ll get you a book about it.’
‘Will I always have to go to bed early?’ I said.
She said, ‘Don’t be so silly.’
Next day I suffered spasms of pain that left me shaking and winded. I felt as if a big bird – one of the ravens, perhaps, from the Tower of London – had got its claws in my lower back and was rending it apart, prizing flesh from spine. Later the pain moved and I felt as if the dissection were being performed more urgently, surgically; I thought of the skinned corpses of animals hanging in butchers’ shops, neatly split down the mid-line. ‘Exercise is good for period pain,’ my mother said. ‘Scrubbing floors, that helps it.’
So here it is. The women’s realm.
Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers – not that I study her pronouncements, but this one sticks in my mind – that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we l
ose all understanding of what shaped them.
Unlike Mrs Thatcher, though, I lost my father as well. My mother must have alerted him to what was the matter, when she came downstairs that evening to take up her Fair Isle. He looked at me with wistful disappointment for a month or so. There – I was a woman after all, not his little jigsaw-puzzle companion, not even a mechanism by which he might extract some revenge on life. I was bound to marry – ‘bound to’, he said one day, in a rare burst of communication. Bound to marry and let some man down; I had passed over to the territory of my mother. He treated me with great politeness after those first few disappointed months, and sometimes discussed with me topics that were in the newspapers, to make sure I was keeping up with current affairs. He let me know, without employing words, that if I were ever in trouble, if there were anything I ever needed, I could not count on him.
Year I, I learnt:
a. The ground plan of a medieval monastery;
b. That it is vulgar to use a ballpoint pen instead of a fountain-pen;
c. That parallel lines meet at infinity.
Year II, I learnt:
a. The products of Ecuador;
b. The mountain sheep are sweeter, / But the valley sheep are fatter;
c. To prefer the active to the passive voice.
Year III, I learnt:
a. The anatomy of a rabbit;
b. That beauty is truth, truth beauty;
c. How to apply liquid eyeliner.
Year IV, I learnt :
a. The ablative absolute;
b. The composition of the blood;
c. Something of the nature of the task before me.
Once, when we were fifteen years old and we were leaving the examination room after our O-level Latin paper, Julianne stepped lightly behind me in the corridor and slid her hand on to my shoulder. She left it there, large and warm and solid, for the briefest possible time. But I remember that her touch was curiously sustaining. It was as if a member of a conspiracy, on her way to interrogation, had met a fellow conspirator by accident, and received a moment’s consolation on the stone and winding stair.
Julianne sat behind me, in every successive class; she had her friends, among the bold and the pretty, and I had mine among the mice. Sometimes I sensed within myself – sometimes I felt it strongly – a will, a pull towards frivolity. I wanted to separate myself from the common fate of girls who are called Carmel, and identify myself with girls with casual names, names which their parents didn’t think about too hard. I wanted to elect pleasure, not duty, and to be happy, and to have an expectation of happiness.
I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.
During my years at the Holy Redeemer, it was Karina kept me going, as far as food was concerned. She always brought food to school with her, packed up in greaseproof and bursting out of brown paper bags. She’d have a stack of sandwiches, ox tongue or Cheshire cheese, perhaps buttered scones and some of the heavy sponge cakes she made herself. Sometimes on the bus on the way to school, she’d be in the middle of a sentence and her hand would begin absent-mindedly to fumble into her bag, and she’d draw out a piece of bread spread thick with potted beef, and begin to munch away. At morning break she would give herself another ration, and then she would eat up all her school dinner, even when it was the special fish made entirely of bones, even when it was semolina. She would have packed enough to see her right on the journey home; and it was at this point in the day that she would sometimes turn to me and say, ‘Are you hungry?’ and offer me a sandwich and a cake from one of her bags.
Of course, no girl from the Holy Redeemer was ever permitted to eat in public; there was a prominent paragraph in the school rules, denouncing the practice. So a day came when Mother Benedict hauled me in. ‘Who reported me?’ I asked.
‘Nothing to the point,’ she snapped. ‘God sees all things.’
But I could not help wondering why only I was in trouble, and not Karina, a constant and habitual public muncher. ‘Why did you do this thing, Carmel?’ the nun said passionately. ‘You have never shown an inclination to such distasteful behaviour until now.’
‘I was hungry, Mother,’ I said; I could not think of any other reason.
She looked at me, disconcerted. ‘You’re a healthy girl, aren’t you, Carmel? You can surely withstand the odd pang of hunger without having to make an exhibition of yourself? Think of the poor Indians, starving on the streets of Bombay! What about your lunch, didn’t you eat it?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Be sure to eat up every morsel from now on, and if you don’t like it you can offer it up for the holy souls in purgatory.’
The truth was though that I didn’t think of myself, from day to day, as being hungry. I suppose I knew intellectually that I was, but as far as my body was concerned it was a normal feeling; it was only later, at Tonbridge Hall, that I recognized the hollowness and lightness as being perhaps undesirable.
I found Niall the year before our O-levels, at our town’s central library down by the market-place. The boys from the local Catholic grammar school congregated there in the early evening, when they were not at their various games practices, and scuffed up the pages of the encyclopedias while they covertly scrutinized the girls who came and went. I got into the habit of dropping into the library on my way home; there was nothing in the school rules to prohibit hanging around in a reference section. I can’t have cut much of a figure, with my velour hat like an inverted dish on my head, but we must suppose that I inspired in Niall a wish to see me otherwise.
It is a mistake, of course, to think that convent girls wait until they’re adults to disappoint the expectations of the nuns. In our generation, growing up through the sixties, we quickly developed our double lives. We were women inside children’s clothes, atheists at Mass, official virgins and de facto rakes. It was not deceit; it was dualism. We had grown up with it. Flesh and spirit, ambition and humility. It was time to make plans for the future; I swung between thinking I could do anything with my life, and that I could do nothing. I still fitted into the blazer bought for my first summer at the Holy Redeemer. My mouse feet had hardly grown, so my indoor shoes were still going strong, and had perhaps acquired a perverse chic. But my satchel was scuffed and battered, and inside it at the bottom corner there was a big ink stain, like the map of a new continent.
Maybe the act of love came too late. As a career move, I should have lost my burdensome virginity at thirteen or fourteen, when there would have been no question of a lasting attachment and no desire for one. As it was, I shook when I removed my clothes and I cried after it was done, not out of pain or disappointment but out of an up-rush of muddling emotion which twenty-four hours later I was ready to call love.
So we formed an attachment, Niall and I, and after three or four months were spoken of by our friends as if we were an old married couple.
Niall said really sensible things to me. He said, Why don’t you get a Saturday job? It would give you some freedom. My mother said, no daughter of mine. What, in a shop or a café! What would Mother Benedict say!
Saturdays were for homework: getting into Oxbridge. My mother had heard this term ‘Oxbridge’ and had begun to use it, and it was making me uneasy. I was afraid she thought it was a real place; when the time came, Oxford or Cambridge would not be good enough, only Oxbridge would be good enough for a daughter of hers.
‘Just tell her,’ Julianne said. ‘Tell her you’ve no wish to spend three years locked in some musty quadrangle with people who will laugh at your accent.’
We were closer, now we were sixth formers – no longer academic rivals because Julianne was in the science stream and I was doing the girls’ stuff. All the advice she gave me was of this twist-in-the-
tail kind; but you didn’t go to her to feed your self-esteem.
What helped my case was the news that Susan Millington had accepted a place at London University. ‘She’s going to read law,’ my mother said ‘She’s going to be a barrister, like you see on the television.’
As I became more acceptable to Julianne and her friends, I grew away from Karina. We still travelled together, and sometimes in a burst of irritability she would confide in me: it was always when she was angry or jealous or otherwise caught up with strong emotion that her language would seem to slip sideways and you would remember that she was not English, for all her insistence. Her mother infuriated her these days, she said, by talking about her long-dead, her missing relatives. ‘I say the past is over and done with, forget it. Why does she keep harking on about it?’
Karina had changed a lot over the last couple of years – to look at, anyway. At twelve she was one of those matronly little girls, who remind you of the well-upholstered women of sixty who stand at bus-stops with baskets on wheels. Her girdle – in house-colour – would ride up over her non-existent waist, giving her tunic an Empire line; but despite this she was still a handsome child, her blonde hair shining, her cheeks still dimpled and pinkly scrubbed. Adults still smiled on her; ‘None of that slimming nonsense with Karina,’ they would say.
But by the time she was seventeen, she had become a dark, forceful presence, strong and sulky. Her hair had dimmed to a nondescript brown, her skin thickened and become muddy. Her long disapproval of the world had become overt, and stamped a frown-line between her eyes. Her strength seemed ridiculously disproportionate to the day-to-day demands our schoolgirl life placed on it; she might have been a formidable games player, except that she despised games of any kind. When she followed me on to the bus in the mornings, I felt as if my conscience were coming after me, ready to fell me with one blow. ‘Karina runs that house single-handed,’ my mother would say. Just as when we were children, she always had money in her purse.
An Experiment in Love Page 12
