One day in my fifth year, when I was coming home along Curzon Street – late, because I’d stayed behind at school to audition for a part in a play – I saw my mother hammering on the door of Karina’s house. ‘Mary! Mary! Come down, love, and let me in.’
I turned around, shrugged my satchel on to my shoulder, and went straight back down to the town to meet Niall. It was always easier to meet him without telling my mother where I was going. Of course, there would be a row when I got home; but that was preferable to two rows, one when I got home and one before I went.
It turned out that someone had told my mother that Mary had been taken poorly. An ambulance carried her off, but then returned her a day or two later. Karina’s father wouldn’t let anybody in the house. I said, ‘I’m sure Karina will cope. She’s always so capable, isn’t she?’
My mother looked at me reproachfully. ‘She’s got her exams coming up, same as you.’
‘Exams? Oh, exams are nothing, to somebody as capable as Karina.’
Rehearsals for the play kept me back at school; in the mornings, Karina yawned her way through our journey, and sometimes sunk her head into a textbook. One day she said grudgingly, ‘She’s got a wasting disease.’
‘A what?’ I was looking for something more precise, a scientific label. Karina only repeated what she’d said.
‘And what’s the prognosis?’
‘What do you reckon?’
‘Doesn’t your father want help?’
‘I help him.’
‘Don’t you want help?’
‘Are you offering?’
‘Would you take the offer?’
No reply.
Academically, Karina was not the kind of girl who shone; you could not accuse her of that. Sometimes we looked at each other’s homework; her answers were like an expanded set of notes covering all the important points, just the kind of answers your teachers urge you to give. She used short words which followed each other in the expected order and in the accepted cadence. Her paragraphs were two sentences long, like those in tabloid newspapers. At sixteen her writing was as clear and legible as that of a neat ten-year-old. She never read a book she didn’t have to read. I had the impression that she never forgot anything.
Well . . . these schematic virtues must have commended themselves to the examiners. Despite her problems at home, she passed eight O-levels and went into the sixth form on the science side. One gusty day in March, in our final year at school, Julianne came bowling into the common room, seeming propelled by the wind outside. Her face, normally so placid, was aglow with affront. ‘You’ll never guess what SHE – what SHE has done now.’
‘I will never guess,’ I said, looking up from my work. In those days Karina was not a topic between us; but from the violence of Julianne’s tone I knew exactly who she was talking about.
‘She’s only gone and got an offer from London.’
Julianne and I had already applied for a place in a hall of residence. She had said, We could share a room: why not, you won’t be in my way.
‘Has she? Which college?’ I said.
Julianne snorted. ‘Somewhere in the East End.’
I said, ‘Perhaps she won’t get the grades.’
‘Oh, HER,’ Julianne said. ‘She’ll get ’em.’
‘Perhaps she’ll go and live somewhere else. There are other halls.’
‘Oh no,’ Julianne said. ‘She will come and live in our hall. She will come and live in our room. In our wardrobe. We’ll find her bacon rind in our shoes and her toast crumbs in our beds, and cold chips in our textbooks and Cornish pasties stuck to our mirror, and she’ll use our nail scissors to trim pork chops and she’ll steal our lipsticks and suck the ends and then they’ll taste of suet.’
Later that day I stopped Karina in the corridor. ‘I hear you’ve some good news.’
Karina was wearing a white lab coat. She squeezed the cardboard file under her arm. ‘It’ll be good news when I’ve got the grades.’
‘Will you be . . . I mean, had you thought you might apply to Tonbridge Hall?’
‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. Her eyes were cold. ‘Unless you think it’s too good for me?’
‘How’s your mum?’ I said.
She said, ‘What do you care?’
One day, two years before this, I had been travelling home late from school – a choir practice, I think – and it was almost dark when I got off the 64 at the Victoria bus station, the mid-way point of our journey. I began to pick my way through the litter and oil and filth towards the queue for my bus home, and out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of our colours, of the clay-and-maroon stripe of our scarf. I turned my head and saw Karina.
She was leaning against a wall, and not wearing her hat. She was smoking a cigarette, and three boys, none of whom I knew, were leaning and cavorting and smoking and foot-swivelling and kicking and lounging in her vicinity. They were not boys from St Augustine’s Catholic grammar school; they were bus-station boys. They had white peaky faces, full of bones; they had lax lips and bendy legs and zipper jackets. I remembered the boys from our primary school, with their elastic belts and scarred knees and grey flapping shorts: and I realized, with a sense of shock, that these were the youths that they would have grown into.
I drew back into the shadows. In those days I was easily intimidated by men, especially young ones, especially young ones at bus stations, who would jeer at my uniform and laugh in my little pale face. It wasn’t so much the men themselves who scared me, but the impulses of rage that leapt inside me at their jeers and leers and off-hand remarks, at the knowledge that they owned the streets. I would have liked to strike them dead with a stare; I wanted to beckon them, let them approach, and then stick them with a hidden knife.
Karina looked perfectly at ease. She barely seemed to notice the boys, yet it was obvious that they were trying hard to attract her attention, that they knew her, that they were tied up with her in some way. Her eyes rested on the shuddering sides of green double-deckers and the tired working people toiling home. She touched her cigarette to her lips.
I was cold, tired and hungry, and this state must have made me invisible, or at least translucent: because though I saw Karina she didn’t see me.
One evening my mother hurried down to the corner shop on Eliza Street, to try and get some bread before they shut. She managed to get the last small sliced, and was carrying it back when she looked up at Karina’s house and saw a face at the bedroom window. It was a face like a white puffy ball: at first she hardly recognized it, but it was Mary, all the same. She waved, but no one waved back.
seven
In the fifth week of term at Tonbridge Hall three things occurred. I shall describe them to you in ascending order of complexity.
The first, simplest thing was that the miniskirt fell totally and decisively out of favour. For some months the fashion had been on the wane, but that October a few of the old guard were out on the streets; by November, the maxi-skirts had won, and there was not a knee to be seen between Heathrow airport and the Essex coast.
Women became – suddenly – poised, mysterious and difficult. They wore long belted trenchcoats, like spies, and put on lipstick in public places. Twenty-six became a more fashionable age than sixteen. What could I do? I looked sixteen. And I could not afford a new skirt. Fleetingly, I wondered if I would have used my five pounds emergency money, if I’d still had it. But what would one skirt have accomplished? The cotton shower-proof came only half-way down my thighs; what extended below was to be showered upon freely, like lamp-posts against which any dog can piss. Even the duffle coat passed on by my cousin did not go much below the knee. I began to attract quizzical glances, as winter drew on, and I came down to breakfast in my pelmet skirts and strange stretched brown-black tights. I heard someone say, ‘Carmel’s so obvious, don’t you think?’
Julianne heard the remark too. Afterwards she bounced across the room, repeating it, extending it, embellishing it. ‘Yes, well, you see, wher
e she comes from they do probably still wear such things, and after all, what is she?’ A second voice chimed in, just as well-bred. ‘A little shop girl, m’dear, a little shop girl.’
What was to compensate me? Admiration in men’s eyes? Not really. In previous eras my legs had been admired openly, by Rogers for whom I cared nothing. But now men seemed not to see me. I knew I had lost a few pounds – well, more than a few – but was there really so little left?
The second thing happened on Tuesday at eight-thirty in the evening – at which point you may picture us, the girls of Tonbridge Hall, gross and sated from troughing, lolling like sultanas each upon her divan. In an instant, a vast howling began, a terrible skull-piercing wail. I leapt up from my desk, believing my head would burst. Julianne’s textbook slid from her fingers and flapped open on the floor, its leaves fanning over and displaying cut sections of heart, lung, brain.
We were unstrung, terribly agitated; Julianne screamed, ‘The devil’s tone, what is it, are we at war?’ We flung open our door. In the corridor what met our view was a procession of young women, faces screwed up against the din, tramping towards the nearest fire exit. ‘Oh, if only they wouldn’t,’ Sue said, hands clawing her hair. ‘If only they bloody wouldn’t!’ The noise was visceral and sickening, as if someone were scraping your guts with their fingernails.
Sophy passed us, marching, her crimped fair hair drifting: trailing in her wake some respectable perfume, possibly the sugar and orange notes of Je Reviens. We heard Claire’s voice, rising, swooping above and below the hideous racket: ‘Ladies, do please remember, especially first-year ladies, please do remember, that in the event of fire the lifts will not be working.’ Claire, it turned out, was some kind of official fire-minder; they were appointed by the warden, one to each floor, and their job was to boss us down the echoing back stairs that no one ever used, to shoulder open fire-doors that no one had ever seen, to shepherd us into the street, and to count us.
As we skittered down the stairs, Julianne began to cough. ‘Why are you doing that?’ I demanded.
‘Authenticity. We really ought to be down at floor level gasping in the air. We ought to crawl.’
The impact of these absurd words was so powerful that when I look back at this scene I seem to catch a whiff of smoke indeed. I seem to see it curling under the corridor’s closed doors, and gradually rising into the air to form a haze at the level of our shoulders; I seem to hear the crackle and spit of threatened timbers deep in the building’s heart. But in fact, on that night, there was nothing but the cold air and the siren’s wail and our indignant chatter as we poured out into a damp, misty street; the lamplight was fuzzy, like the drowned moon in water. The warden herself – forewarned and sensibly clad in a tweed coat – went from group to group: ‘Remember, girls, in the event of fire, don’t stop to pick up your handbags or any possessions whatever – property may be replaced, but human life is sacred.’
By my side, Julianne still hacked and spluttered, her shoulders hunched and knees buckling. ‘What is it, Miss Lipcott?’ the warden said.
‘Consumption, I think.’ The warden’s face showed a moment’s dismay, then with an impatient click of her tongue she moved on to another huddled band.
In the next couple of days two rumours swept the building. One: that there would be another fire-practice next term, and that it would be held in the middle of the night. Two, that the fire-doors – which we had noticed for the first time this week, and which some of us had immediately perceived to be useful – were locked unless there was a drill scheduled. There was no mystery about the motive for this. It was a way of keeping out boyfriends.
Or keeping them in, of course, to be burnt to a crisp. If you had a man stay overnight at Tonbridge Hall, and you were caught, the penalty was expulsion – expulsion into the hard world of the freezing bedsit at the end of a tube line, or the sordid flat-share in an area known for its prostitutes. Strangely, no one went to check, to see if the fire-doors actually were locked; the rumour, the dilemma it presented, was too delicious to refute. We talked about it and we all agreed – if you had a man in your room and the siren went, you would just have to put him in the wardrobe and leave him to take his chance, leave him crouching on top of your shoes and hope it was only a practice. If it wasn’t . . . ‘Yes, Mrs Smith, I’m afraid this is all that’s left of your son Roger: just this molar. Here are his textbooks, brought from his digs, and one or two little mementos we thought you’d like to have. The rest of him? They didn’t find much, I’m afraid. His anorak had gone up in the blaze. And his condom. A pity. He was so young!’
The third thing that happened was that I wrote to my parents to say that at Christmas I’d been invited to stay with Niall’s family. It was true that I was already becoming very nervous about the invitation, but I saw the advantages of it. Why nervous? Well, how would I go on? What was their bathroom etiquette? I did not possess a dressing-gown. I was accustomed, at Tonbridge Hall, to go into the bathroom fully dressed, and come out fully dressed; slightly damp, but very proper. I imagined that, in a private house, this might be seen as strange. I rehearsed, once again, a little speech, to explain myself to the world: I’d left my bathrobe behind at Tonbridge Hall because it took up so much space in my suitcase, it was really thick, you see, fluffy, you know those towelling ones?
I was beginning to convince myself, as I rehearsed this excuse; my fingers smoothed its pastel pile, which would be (variably) peach, pure white, mint green. So I’ll borrow Niall’s, I heard myself say, and . . . well, I supposed Niall must have a dressing-gown. I had never seen such an article. We walked about before each other naked, as if we were the fount and origin of the world. If he had a dressing-gown I imagined it to be made of a hairy plaid, brown and white, its collar edged with smooth-twisted cord and its belt tasselled, suggestively swinging, at the centre of each tassel a blunt silken knob. Such a dressing-gown to me seemed far less safe than nakedness; far less acceptable in the family home.
Then again, what about food? I had eaten my Sunday lunch at Niall’s house every week for two years. We ate, working by rota, roast lamb, roast beef, roast pork. In my own home, I was still not considered capable in the kitchen. My mother sighed and implied that it was one of the results of thinking too much, that I could not burn a carrot in quite the way she could; ‘She’s academic,’ she would say, ‘and I dare say you can’t expect anything else . . .’
Niall’s mother, though, was eager for any help she could get; her cooking was enthusiastic, and left the kitchen plastered with grease, with vast roasting pans of scalding fat, with snails of pastry sticking to their boards. Every pudding she made required the boosting up of the oven to 5oo°F: the kitchen would fill with fug and steam, and we would open the windows and lean out, gasping, into the garden where Niall’s father was imposing stripes on the handkerchief lawn. Lemon meringue pie: the Everest peaks pale beige and studiedly crisp, the meringue beneath a soft lather of whipped sweetness. Then, even more triumphant, there was Baked Alaska: the oven now so hot that blue wisps seemed to issue from its every orifice, and when the door was opened, the heat knocked us back, laughing, and I would wrap a tea-towel around my hands like a surgeon dons his gloves, and I’d go in, and I’d fetch it out . . . speed was of the essence then, so that we could sink our teeth together, our family teeth, into the hot sweet froth on top and the oily frozen block of vanilla ice beneath.
But . . . stay for three weeks? What would we eat at family meals, routine meals? Bread and cheese? I imagined butter on proper bread, laid like golden pavements. Milk? Yes, Niall’s mother would never mind at all if I said to her that I liked to drink milk, could I order some, would she get me an extra pint? But three weeks – would she not glance up one day, see my greedy mouth at work, and notice my relish for the flesh of her only son? After Sunday lunch I always washed up, and Niall would stand behind me, a damp Irish linen towel in his hand, and lick the nape of my neck as I scrubbed and scoured away the gravy and the fat and those burn
t-on bits that require you to thrust out an elbow and frown. If I leant forward, to get a better purchase on the grease, he would creep his hands up beneath my skirt and pull down my pants. Three weeks . . . how could we hope to get away with this sort of thing? I knew no other way to do the washing-up.
However: I had made the decision. I could not think how I would survive, otherwise: what, go home to the quartering of a quarter of boiled ham, the meat-paste dole, the three bananas that stood in for a bowl of fruit? I would visit my parents, of course, we would only be five or six miles away.
My mother replied to my letter by return of post. The reply was very long and very bitter, denouncing my ingratitude, my improvidence, the laxity of my morals. As an unmarried girl, she said, I should be under my parents’ roof, not under the roof of people they did not know, whose manners and outlook were no doubt frivolous, degenerate and the talk of the district; and there could be no good reason for my wanting to be away from home unless I was planning to conduct myself in a way which she hoped no daughter of hers would ever think of in a thousand years.
I shook my head over the letter, as I read it; as if there were someone in the room to see me do it. I dimly remembered a time before she had been angry . . . the spring days when we had walked up to the hills, the twilit afternoons when she had told me of her youthful triumphs in dance halls, the day when she had sat me on the table and taught me to sing a rude song about Karina. But after that there was nothing but snarling, and the dull pressure of her finger ends as she pinned and fitted clothes on me; the stutter and hum of her sewing-machine, the swearing and rending of cloth: the reiterated question, ‘If this Julianne Lipcott can come top of the class, why can’t you?’