An Experiment in Love: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  Most days, Karina was there already on Curzon Street, waiting and watching for me. Her arm slid through mine, doing what we called linking. I’ll link ye, a woman would say to another, slipping an arm though an arm. It was the way for women to get along the street. Nowadays, you would be presumed to be lesbians, I suppose.

  Nowadays. Oh, nowadays.

  Twenty-four hours after Julianne’s arrival in London, I was putting papers into ring-binders and she was lying on her bed, reading the Evening Standard. There was a tap at our door.

  ‘Herein,’ Jule said, thunderously: she mouthed, ‘They’ll surely think I’m Freud.’

  A voice said, ‘Oh, may we?’

  Two bright faces, one spotty, appeared around the door.

  ‘You may come in entirely,’ Jule said. ‘The invitation is for more than your heads.’

  So in they came: Claire, a large solid-bosomed girl from Bournemouth, and a little sparrow called Sue, who sounded deeply southern but didn’t say where she was from. They wore, the both of them, jolly jumpers; beneath, Claire wore a baggy skirt, and Sue wore decent slacks of a polyester type, the kind of thing people’s mothers buy.

  It was Claire who had the spots. We ran our eyes over them, in that pitiless way girls have at eighteen: to see if there was any battle to be fought. But Jule signalled to me with her big white hand, as if to indicate truce. They were in no case to take our men from us; and there was no man they could possibly attract, that we would care to take from them.

  They stood on the cotton rug, their shins brushing the coffee table; they smiled tolerantly at our bookshelves, at our Marx and Leonard Cohen and Hermann Hesse, and tolerantly at Jule’s ashtray, and tolerantly at my long thin legs below my tiny skirt. ‘I’m at King’s,’ Claire said. ‘And Sue here, she’s at Bedford. You’re medical, aren’t you, Miss Lipcott?’

  ‘Mm,’ Julianne said. ‘But not dissected anything yet.’

  ‘I say.’ Claire laughed. ‘Got all that to come, eh?’ She shifted her feet; almost her spots seemed to redden, as if she were going to come now to something delicate, possibly embarrassing. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘we’ve been going around, we’re old hands, you see, to welcome the newcomers, and the thing is, we’re not an organized group, it’s just informal, but if you’d like to join us . . . you see we . . . we get together . . . and we go to church.’

  I waited for Julianne to say something very shocking, very deep, and most original. But a curtain dropped behind her extravagantly blue eyes. She said in a dead voice, ‘But we’re Catholics.’

  All next day and the day after that I watched them arriving, girls I had never imagined; girls from Brighton, girls from Luton, girls from bonny Dundee. There must have been times when I stopped and frankly, rudely stared at them; for I only knew about girls from Lancashire. What thoughts had they? What had their lives been? I could not imagine.

  I set my accoutrements out on my desk. Pens. Paper. All squared up. Sweet little Sue put her head around the door. ‘What, down to work already? Where’s Julianne?’

  ‘Out getting her skeleton.’

  ‘All alone then?’ She hovered over me, cheeping. ‘Claire and I thought we’d go out for a bite to eat.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m not hungry.’

  Sue fluttered off. Her freckled, beady-eyed face stayed for a moment in my mind; annexed to another companion, a girl prettier than herself instead of plainer, she might rise in the world, look less of a gawk. I wondered if she had a boyfriend, and if he was normal or religious. I wondered what she and Claire had in common, besides God. Claire was a year older, felt perhaps some thwarted maternal urge . . . I punched holes in paper, and stacked another file. White sheets, virgins. The punched-out dots skimmed to the floor, precise confetti. I knelt and dabbed them up, one by one.

  Julianne brought her skeleton home. We put the skull on the top bookshelf, dead centre. The rest came in a polished wooden box, which Julianne pushed under her bed. ‘We need never be bored again,’ she said. ‘Any night we’ve nothing to do, we can be like Juliet, and madly play with our forefathers’ joints.’

  ‘Aren’t they something?’ I said. ‘These girls?’

  ‘They come from boarding-schools.’

  ‘A lot of them do. You see them at breakfast’ (she didn’t go down to breakfast) ‘getting scrambled eggs.’ I thought of how they called to each other down the long dining tables: socialized, fit for the early hour.

  ‘I hear them in the corridor,’ she said. ‘I hear them, preparing to go down. Calling, “Sophy! Sophy!” ’

  I thought: Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.

  ‘By the way, it’s female. The skeleton,’ Julianne said. ‘Women’s bones are more interesting, you know.’

  Breakfasts at Tonbridge Hall were served on side-plates, which were grey: as were the breakfasts themselves, small and grey, and governed by a rota. Most days there was bacon: a streaky rasher, cut in half to make two. On Monday a spoonful of scrambled egg, primrose and liquid; on Tuesday a fried egg, its yolk hard and pale. On Wednesday with the bacon came a tomato halved, reduced by a thorough grilling to seed and skin; on Thursdays a cooling smear of baked beans. On Fridays with the rasher came a tablespoon of mushrooms, finely chopped and well-stewed. On Saturdays, boiled eggs were served to those girls who had not gone away and who could be bothered to get up for them.

  On Sundays there was no cooked breakfast, because the kitchen was preparing for the fiesta of a roast lunch.

  The dining-room at Tonbridge Hall was in the basement of the building, and its tall windows looked out over one of those inner squares, those inner spaces which Bloomsbury houses entrap: lightless in any weather, at any time of day, with etiolated shrubs struggling in raised beds. We took our places on scarred chairs with leatherette seats, and the noises of communal dining – the clatter of stainless steel against cheap plates, the squeak of trolley wheels as they rolled over the floors, the voices of slaveys from the kitchen – flew up and echoed and rebounded in the airy heights, rattled round begrimed light-fittings that no earth-bound cleaner could reach.

  I came down to breakfast every day, and tried to get it inside me. I soon understood why the bacon and mushroom day was tops with the Sophies; every scrap was edible. I would eat a bowl of damp cornflakes, then go to the serving hatch to collect my side-plate. After I had picked over the cooked offering I would take two small square pieces of sliced-bread toast, pale yellow in the centre and raw on the outside. I felt the Sophies were watching me; the toast was palatable, but I dared not take more. I longed to eat it with my bacon, as a northerner always would, but I did not dare that either; if I did not come up to scratch, I felt obscurely, I might be sent back home, my education at an end, and have to get some menial job. Butter came in foil portions: a special small size, that they must have manufactured exclusively for girls’ halls of residence. It was frozen, always. You opened it and pared it with your knife and laid it on the rubber bread, like wood-shavings.

  Dinner at Tonbridge Hall was a very different affair. It was served at seven. At ten minutes to the hour, a mob of inmates would begin to gather outside the locked double doors of the dining-room. Some would lean against the walls, some squat or recline on the lower reaches of the vast dark carved staircase; some would gather in knots, all talking, some laughing, some yelling, so that the volume of noise rose higher and higher and bounced from the walls and echoed in the stairwell: a murmur, then a babble, then a tattered roar, of women in need of their dinner., If the custodians of the doors were a minute late in their unbolting, if they were even a half-minute late, the foremost girls would lean on the glass and peer through and rattle the handles, and a cry would go up, ‘It’s too bad, really! It’s utterly disgraceful! It’s an utter, utter shame.’

  I hung to the back and watched this performance. I tried to detach myself. I was amused, and a little embarrassed for them. I believed, as strictly as any Victorian mamma, that appetite was unbecoming to women. Tha
t girls with the benefit of a university education should hardly need food. My morning battle with myself and the toast – well, at least it was fought in silence, and with dignity.

  Once we were admitted, we moved to our habitual tables: four girls to each side, two senior students at each end, taking our places before an array of cutlery suited to a banquet, splashing into tumblers London tap water from tall glass jugs. Soup was always the same, whatever its description on the weekly menu pinned up by the warden’s office; it was an uncleaned aquarium, where vegetable matter swam. Or – now I think of it – perhaps there were two kinds of soup. There was the kind I have mentioned – where fragments, deep green, lodged in your teeth. There was also cream soup, beige and very peppery.

  Next came the dishes of vegetables, and an oval stainless-steel platter of the evening’s meat or fish, placed before one of the seniors to be divided by ten. Justice must be served, and you must picture to yourself the minute forking, the shuffling and the shredding, of a quantity perhaps reasonable for four. How could they do it? I ask myself now. If we’d been boys, they wouldn’t have dared do it.

  We ate our shred, and our two small potatoes, our vegetables of the root kind; all the time making bright, strained conversation, about our courses, tutors, hopes for the weekend: never high, in my case. It was dark outside now, and we dined in pools of yellow light, and sometimes I would hear the London rain against the windows, and feel bleak and far away from home. Then from the end of the table a plummy voice would be raised: ‘There’s a tiny bit more, if anyone would care to . . .’

  For they were good judges, the shred-monitors, good but not perfect. They always felt they must keep a tiny portion in reserve, in case they had bungled it and the last hungry girl should be short-changed. And there it lay on its platter, and no one could bring herself to speak; for these girls, collectively voracious, were individually all of my opinion, and would rather starve than speak. I used to think, what if, what if a shred-monitor said, Right then, no takers? What if she picked up in her fingers the white sauce or gravy-dripping fragment, and tossed back her head like a sea-lion, and crammed it into her open mouth?

  The platters would be returned to the kitchen, each with a slice of flesh remaining. No doubt they noticed this, our rulers, and convinced themselves that we were adequately fed; that we were satisfied, more than satisfied. Why else return to the kitchen food untouched?

  A month passed. Our new lives had properly begun. My file of lecture notes mounted, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, but I took time off to walk. I walked along the Strand and up Fleet Street and on to the City, I walked through the royal parks and up to Camden Town and Hampstead and saw Hampstead Heath. I trekked through Whitehall and Millbank, noting the monuments and learning the views. I tramped through museums and art galleries – anything that was free. Julianne haunted the cinemas with her friends, and the union bar, and the pubs on Tottenham Court Road, and she would speak quite casually of things she had eaten, of by-the-way omelettes and hamburgers, which were a natural part of her evenings out.

  I was happy, in those early weeks. There were times when I felt holy, lucky, selected. At Tonbridge Hall there was order and warmth, so I did not care if there were regulations too. My tutors spoke to me with respect, as if I were a sentient and sensitive being; this was a relief after the routine sarcasms of nuns. I felt like a feather-light duchess, skimming down Drury Lane in the mornings; but there was an insistent migraine pain behind my left eye, which pricked at my sensibilities, made me clever and sharp, but which left me shaking sometimes, uncertain in the traffic, unsure of the parameters of my own body. That winter was mild, and so I wore my pale shower-proof until Bonfire Night, and after that a duffel coat which had been donated to me before I left home by a distant cousin. Sometimes, extracting coins from my purse, I travelled on the tube late at night, going God knows where: Arsenal, Angel, Kentish Town. Later I would have to make up for my time off by sitting under the lamp at the desk I had reserved for myself, writing very fast in black ink.

  Julianne stayed out all night, every second day. The ponderous front doors of Tonbridge Hall were locked at eleven, and if you wanted to come in after that you had to apply to the warden for what was called a ‘late key’. The warden would hear you out, weigh your application, record your destination in a large bound volume which she kept on her desk. But if you were prepared to go out and stay out, who was to know?

  On the other day – Julianne’s day in – she would go to bed at nine. She fell asleep easily, though my desk lamp burnt far into the night. When she turned she flounced in the bed, making the springs creak and half-waking herself, so that she would mutter a few words and turn again and throw out a bare white arm, to scoop against her breasts a torso of empty air. And I would lean back in my chair, resentful chin on the point of my shoulder, watching her; this easy sleep, I couldn’t learn it, I hardly knew if it was becoming. Sleep-starve is best, I said to myself; think of the hours of the night, just the same in quality as the hours of the day, and so many of them, and so much to be done.

  In the mornings, Julianne turned over again, as if drugged, delirious, dreaming; it was hard to pull herself to the surface of the day. Sometimes when her travelling clock began its tinny drumming she would pluck it from her bedside table and hurl it towards me; heart fluttering under the single blanket, I would claw for it and clutch it and make the bell stop; smiling a dazed smile, Julianne would tumble back into sleep; myself out at eight, feet on the striped mat, then down the stairs, rubber toast, Sophies, the winter roads. In Houghton Street someone would always say hello, and already there was a seat in the library I could think of as mine. I tore into the work set for me, I rent it and devoured it and I ate it all up every scrap. And still these lines of verse ran through my head, as if I had a brain disease, some epilepsy-variant, some repeating blip in my cells:

  I step into my heart and there I meet

  A god-almighty devil singing small,

  Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,

  And squelch the passers flat against the wall;

  If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,

  He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.

  One morning in the autumn, when I was eight, I went on to Curzon Street and there wasn’t Karina: not stumping towards me as usual. Hopefully, I bawled back into the house: ‘Hey, Mum, Karina’s not here.’

  I hoped my mother would say, ‘You go on your own, you mustn’t be late.’

  This damage to routine might free me from Karina, I thought; it would break up the pattern.

  My mother shouted back, ‘Go and call for her.’

  ‘At her house?’

  My mother appeared. ‘Yes, just knock on the door.’

  ‘She might be poorly.’

  ‘Well, go and see.’

  ‘They might all be asleep.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘They might have flitted.’

  ‘What? Moved house? Don’t be silly,’ my mother said.

  I had played my last card. I trudged along Curzon Street and knocked at Karina’s door. Her mother called, ‘Yes, yes, it is open, it is open.’

  I pushed the door and went inside. I had been there many times before and I knew that their house was like our house, with a sideboard and a big black poker for working the fire and a picture of the Pope pinned up on the wall.

  ‘Yes, yes, come on, we are overslept today,’ Karina’s mother said. Her English came in a rush, the consonants rustling and complex. I thought of when you turn the tap on and put your finger underneath to trap the water; it wobbles like a ball-bearing, and then gushes out in a torrent when you take your finger away.

  Karina and her mother were standing in the kitchen. Karina was already belted into her gabardine overcoat, a checked wool scarf tied under her chin. Her mother was not yet dressed to go out but she was wearing thick woollen stockings and a buttoned-up cardigan, with a shawl draped over it. I had ne
ver seen a shawl, except in books; you got them in fairy-tales. Karina’s mother hadn’t a witch face, more the face of a godmother: dough-coloured, unformed, not definitely anything at all. Her eyes were like black grapes, which are not black of course: a dull mobile sheen, purplish, in soft folds of flesh. My mother called Karina’s mother ‘Mary’ when she met her in the street, but I did not think this could possibly be her name.

  Karina’s mother had both hands full. In her right hand she had a ham sandwich made with thick white bread; she was holding it out to her daughter. Karina’s hands were wrapped around her mother’s hand, and she was gnawing at the bread, her head dipping with each bite, and her jaw moving like some greedy animal’s: chewing away, while the scarf’s bunchy knot bobbed up and down under her chin. In her other hand, Karina’s mother held a banana. It was already half-peeled, ready for immediate use. As Karina took the last gulp of ham sandwich she transferred it swiftly to her right hand. Karina closed her own hands again around her mother’s, holding the fruit steady; the banana seemed to vanish in three big bites.

  Karina straightened up and wiped her hands on her coat. Her mother said something to her in another language. Karina didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at her mother, acknowledge that she had spoken. Her mother picked up a fat parcel from the kitchen cabinet, wrapped in greaseproof paper. She thrust it into Karina’s schoolbag. Carefully, she fastened Karina’s coat right up to the neck and twitched her head-scarf forward so that it jutted out, protecting her daughter’s flushed cheeks; then she held up Karina’s mittens for her to plunge her hands inside. She patted her, on the shoulders, chest, arms, patted her as if she wanted to make sure she was solid all through. Then Karina was ready to seize the day.

  I had watched her mother’s face while she fed her. She looked hungry, and as if all the food in the world could never be enough.

  At eight years old, I wear my hair in ringlets, fat tubes that you can put your finger into. Each night at seven o’clock my mother brushes my hair and then combs it and then rakes it again with the steel comb, in case insects have bred since the night before. If I am free from vermin she gets out the curl rags. These are white ropes of cloth. She unrolls and separates them, then picks up the comb again and divides my hair into strands. At the top of each strand she knots a rope. Then round and round we go, tighter and tighter wrapping, myself delirious with pain and rage and she with set face, mummifying my hair. I cry out that I want my hair cut off, short like other people’s and pinned back with a big black kirby grip or a pink plastic slide, and she utters from between her teeth that I don’t know what I want. When she has wrapped to the bottom of a rope she ties another big knot, like a fist, like a knuckle bone. When she has finished my whole head, the bound hair springs away from my skull, stiff and white in its casing, as if I had grown legs out of my head: as if I were an alien from the planet Zog, with these swaying white skeleton limbs, knobbled and rickety and shining in the dusk.