An Experiment in Love: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What, going home?’

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

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

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

  ‘You could go in with Sue and Claire.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘It was an accident.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I know.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Sue!’ Claire hissed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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