An Experiment in Love: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  There was a breath at my shoulder. I felt it. It was familiar. I wanted to hug the breather. ‘Karina,’ I said. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘All right, Carmel?’ Karina was wearing a vast flannel nightdress, a marquee: the kind of nightdress grandmother is wearing in her cottage, when the wolf comes calling. She was holding something over her arm; it was a strange draping softness, something limp and slaughtered. My hand crept out to it: Lynette’s fox fur. In this light, you could not see its colours; it could have been the corpse of a dog. I glanced down. From its pocket there drooped, there depended, a key fob. C21 was written on it. It was the key to the door of their room.

  ‘Why don’t you put it on? Put the coat on, since you’ve saved it?’

  My voice was choked and frail, far away; I hardly recognized it as mine. Karina turned her head, looking where I looked. Her eyes fell on the key fob. She reached to retrieve it. It slithered from its pocket. It clattered to the ground. It lay in the road. I stooped to pick it up. Karina put her foot on it. Crouching, I looked up into her face.

  Then a gust of wind came bowling along the street. It rippled the nightdresses of shivering girls, slapped at bare blue legs. It raised the hairs, the short hairs on my neck. It took Karina’s vast nightgown and pasted it against her body. I looked up, along her bulk. My head was in the shadow of her great belly. She must be five months, six months gone. She must have been pregnant before ever we saw London.

  I squatted at Karina’s feet. I saw the classroom, our first classroom; smelt coal and milk and baby-skin. There was the fat smell of wax crayons, the aroma of pencils, the forbidden coldness of a pencil point against the tongue. Tens and units on the blackboard: a blue worm of Plasticine curled on the floor. I saw Karina with her doll, the baby doll in the back of the lorry. Her tongue between her teeth; mother and baby, out for a tow.

  I saw my foot swing. I saw it catch the lorry’s underside and hurtle it into the air. I saw the rubber trajectory of the pink pseudo-flesh, and the baby face smashed down on to the hard floor.

  Now, I stared up at Karina. She was huge, womanly, brooding. The cold of the night had struck into my bones. Karina’s expression was hooded, complacent. She knew I would not give her away. After all, I said to myself, I don’t know that she is a murderer. Just because she has the key, it doesn’t mean she turned it in the lock.

  Behind us, someone else fainted. It was a girl from B Floor, one of the fire-escape mob. I moved to take the fox fur from Karina’s hands, to throw over the casualty; but I thought better of it. ‘Put it on. Hide yourself.’

  Something which will not be possible for much longer, I thought. Well, that’s your problem. If I speak out, you’ll give birth in Holloway. I saw, in my mind’s eye, Lynette at the window; her flying arms, the flickering of her melting flesh. It will always be in my mind’s eye, of course. I never for a moment doubted that she would die, knew – unlike Claire – that she was ablaze from inside, and that we had caught her in the act of dying, roasted in the wreck of the third floor. I saw Claire’s mad fleecy slippers slapping towards the blaze. Claire did not come back, next term; I did not inquire after her. I remembered what Sue had said once: she’s really, really a Christian. Always doing good unto you. I’d have liked to keep in contact, but, in my situation, it didn’t seem appropriate. Knowing what I did.

  Two men jogged up with a stretcher. Stone-faced, they swept up the fallen girl from the ground; swept her up as if they were sweeping the streets. ‘Back, girls, back,’ called the warden. The street seemed full of swirling smoke. A siren was wailing, getting closer; lights were on in the buildings around, and a forced, yellow day was beginning, a floodlit day, where all motives and deeds would be exposed. There was a tune in my head, at the back of my mind, and then it was in my mouth: before I could stop myself I sang out. I was back in my grandad’s yard, the Catherine wheel fizzing damply, the sparklers swirling our names in the air, Carmel and Karina, Karina and Carmel:

  ‘Pepper box, pepper box,

  Morning till night . . .’

  ‘Let’s run,’ Karina said. ‘Come on, Carmel! Run! Something might blow up.’

  She flung out her hand. I seized it. When the windows blew the noise had knocked us back but when that was over we’d crept forward again; the crowd was eddying, uncertain, confused, unwilling to dramatize, each member of it dreading to appear foolish by a break for safety. But Karina had me by the wrist; she towed me past the barriers, pulling strongly, knowing I was weak. ‘Steady, girl!’ someone said, but she lashed out at him: with her fist I mean, not her tongue. I gasped and begged as we flew along the street; she didn’t hear me.

  We halted at last, under trees, under a deep roof of green. I was half-dead. My chest sobbed, my heart was bursting. I folded up and retched again, producing only stained saliva; my knees gave, but Karina caught me, so I fell not on to scarring pavement but on to London turf. My head dipped towards the pigeon droppings; Karina saved it in her palm. ‘Sit up, lovie,’ she said. We raised our faces; I thought that dew dripped on to them, and into our hair.

  A good many things went up, in the blaze at Tonbridge Hall. My love affair, and my anorexia, and my hopes of being the first woman prime minister: my cousin’s duffle coat, and my notes on the Carbolic Smoke Ball. Julia lost her medal, but has no doubt won another since; the Segals lost their daughter. At the inquest Mr Segal wore a stiff, expensive dark suit; he was dark himself, a squat, vehement man who knocked away one tear with a violent back-of-the-hand. Lynette’s mother did not disappoint us; tall, frail, veiled, she had sharp shins in pale, expensive stockings, and high-heeled shoes and a bag that might have been made of some rare lizard. Her face was chalky, her lips painted red: she said, ‘She was our only, you see. One child only I might have.’ They pressed Karina’s hands, as if some imprint of their daughter might be left there. To me they just nodded, puzzled and bemused by so many young faces without names.

  I would have liked to touch their elbows and say, at least the fox fur got out. Lynette would have liked that; she really would, you know.

  I wake up, these days, some time after my husband has left for the train and the city. My house, my street, is eerily quiet; even when the schoolchildren are on holiday, they make a muffled festival of it, and the cries from their bicycles and skateboards are muted by the expensive distance between the houses and the landscaping of the far-sighted architects who have planted us out here among the pines.

  And so, sitting by myself with my newspaper, nine o’clock in the morning, I become conscious of all the small noises of the house: the purr of the well-stocked freezer, the expansive tick of the long-case clock. Sometimes it occurs to me that I am hungry. I might boil an egg; I believe in protein now. I make some toast, and butter it thickly with the same type of Danish butter that I ate when I was a child, and which, when I was a student, I was ashamed to be unable to afford.

  I put my meal on to a tray – with my small silver teapot, my china cup, my lemon slice – and carry it through to the dining-room, where I sit down with it in great state. The ‘dining-room’, I am aware, is a bourgeois invention; the upper classes (historically) and the lower classes (now, for all I know) preferred and prefer to do everything in an all-purpose room. Sleep, cry, write letters, make love . . . but that reminds me too much of the era of the Slimmer’s Disease.

  I pluck out, as I go, a fresh pale linen table napkin, just for me; I am the one who will wash and iron it, but I have reached the stage in life when I am willing to serve myself.

  My breakfast table is as far as a table can be from the french-polished object at which I toiled at my homework in my parents’ house, on those winter nights when it was too cold for me to be kept upstairs. It is a blond table, a bland table, a table which shows the great beauty of its natural wood, and my touch glides over it with a sensual assurance that I can never feel in the presence of another human being. I trace with my nail the lovely line of the wood’s exposed heart, its graceful curves like the fingerprints of thos
e giants on whose shoulders we stand. I place my forefinger on the knots in the wood, those knots that, though they run against the grain, seem more satin-like, more glassy than the wood itself: I think of my life, and the lives of the women I knew, and I say, tapping softly, tapping decisively on the dark and swirling node, that is where we went wrong, just there, that is the very place.

  But then in the dappled sunlight, filtered through conifers, the wood seems to dissolve beneath my fingers. The angles of the white room soften and melt around me; and the past runs like water through my hands.