An Experiment in Love: A Novel (9 page)

As the clock ticked away, a fantasy would creep up and possess me: that if you could stay on and on – if you could stay at the meeting till midnight or the hour beyond – then the masks would slip, the falsity be laid aside, the real business would begin. For it seemed to me that my fellow socialists were talking in code, a code designed perhaps to freeze out strangers and weed out the dilettante. Only the pure of heart were welcome
here. They must submit to a new version of the medieval ordeal: instead of poison, water, fire, a Trial by Pointlessness. Once you had passed it – once you had endured the full rigours of a full debate on a revitalized constitution for a revitalized Labour students’ movement – then, in the hour after midnight, the chatter would cease – glances be exchanged – the talk begin, hesitant at first, half-smiling, people near-apologetic about their passions and their expertise, quoting Engels, Nye Bevan, Daniel Cohn-Bendit; we would exchange our intuitions and half-perceptions, pass on our visions and dreams, each vision and each dream justified by some reference, recondite or popular. Comrades would say, ‘This is what makes me a socialist . . .’ and speak from the heart; perhaps someone would mention Lenin, and wages councils, and coal-miners, and the withering away of the state. Dawn would break: gentle humming of the Red Flag.

But in real life, nothing like this occurred at all. By ten-thirty the men would be looking at their watches, drifting and grumbling towards the union bar. I would hover a little, in the corners of rooms, on the edges of groups, hoping that someone would turn to me and begin a real conversation, one I could join in. Stacking chairs squeaked on a dirty floor, the women of the socialists stooped to haul up their fringed and scruffy shoulder bags; in the bar the women stood in a huddle, excluded by the ramparts of turned shoulders, with tepid glasses of pineapple juice clenched in bony white hands. Their eyes avoided mine; they smoked, and muttered to each other in code.

Disillusioned, I would trail back up Drury Lane. The
theatres would have turned out already, and the stage doors would be barred. An empty Malteser box bowling towards the Thames would bear witness to the evening passed. My eyes would be heavy and stinging with cigarette smoke and lack of sleep. Behind my ribs was a weight of disappointment. Still the lines ran through my head, distressing, irrelevent: Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? / Is this mine own countree? The irresponsive silence of the land, / The irresponsive sounding of the sea.

‘Why, why,’ Julianne said, ‘if you were going to have your hair cut, did you have it so stubbled?’

‘To last me,’ I said. ‘Till Christmas.’

‘Did you think there were no hairdressers in London?’

‘I thought they might be expensive.’

‘You really shouldn’t be so poor, should you?’ Julianne said.

Each morning she flicked her white coat from its hanger, in case they were taken on the wards; her eyes large, soft, alert. She told some Sophies that I had run away from a convent, where my hair had been chopped off; she told others that I was a victim of the IRA, shorn for collaboration after a romance with a squaddie. ‘Caught in the Falls Road,’ she said, ‘her pantyhose around her ankles; her poor mother, if she were dead, would be turning in her grave.’

Pretending to be Irish was a great diversion for Julianne. Lancashire, Ireland, it’s all the same to girls called Sophy.

Sophies liked to be engaged to be married by the end of their final year. At breakfast they showed each other
their solitaire diamonds. Facets winked as they passed them across the Thursday rasher and the side-plate of baked beans: exchanging them so that they could feel the fatness or looseness of a finger-joint, try on another future.

Claire and Sue, the churchgoers, lived next door to us in C2. ‘Come in for a coffee,’ Sue would say, fluttering, as we leapt upstairs after dinner: I’d say sorry, got to work, and Julianne would growl, ‘They want our souls.’

In C4 was Sophy, the original Sophy: a strapping girl who took fencing lessons, whose big feet lightly danced through Julianne’s dream-life as she pranced down the corridor each morning towards her breakfast. Sophy was straight-backed and sound in wind and limb, a girl with large pale eyes and a heavy drift of crimped, dirty-blonde hair; by the side of her mouth there was a mole, flat, definite, a beauty-spot. She looked as if she could stare down a persistent man and bend a useful one to her will. Sometimes she stalked the corridors in her tunic and breeches, with her mesh head tucked beneath her arm; then up in the four-person lift would come Roger, her boyfriend.

I was beginning to puzzle about this sort of thing. I had seen them about the place, various boyfriends: some – like Roger – with purple and throbbing acne, some – like Roger – with hair in their ears, some – like Roger – with vaguely defined middles held in by sagging waistbands, and in their eyes the pallid cast of mother-worship, and a desperation to put their erections inside some nice girl who would propagate their expectations.

Sometimes, under my desk lamp, when grey morning would filter in though the curtains, and I would rub my eyes, there would pass before me a procession of Sophies and Rogers, brides and grooms. ‘What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?’ I began to imagine the donors of the breakfast solitaires; their grease-spiked mousy hair, their patronizing attitudes, their welling guts. What was the matter with them, the girls who lived with me on C Floor? Did they think these were the only men they could get? Inferiority was working away inside these girls, guilt at being so clever, wanting so much, taking so much from the world. If they were to have a man as well, it seemed to them right that he should be a very poor specimen.

All this is hindsight of course. F
EMINISM HASN’T FAILED, IT’S JUST NEVER BEEN TRIED
. If you knew at twenty what you know at thirty-five, what a marvellous life you could have; on the other hand, you might find that you couldn’t be bothered to have any life at all.

Every night, or perhaps every second night, Sue’s fair head would come bobbing in at the door: ‘Carmel, godsake, come on!’ I’d become aware that Sue had a struggle with her accent, her lingo, her diction; she was by no means a real Sophy, but Claire had helped her no end, she said, and she had quite a sense of humour when you got to know her, and what with one thing or another she really depended on Claire. ‘Honest,’ she’d say, ‘you really ought to slap those books shut and come on out with us.’

I looked up, my eyes drugged and glazed from the effort of understanding the British legal system. ‘Where? Where are you going?’

‘Well, dinner was so frightful . . . we thought we might go for a Chinese meal . . .’

‘I’m not hungry,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Sue.’

She looked at me and gave a great sigh. Sweet blue-eyed girl, Sue. I didn’t think I could spare the energy to understand her; let Claire do it. I had got a name for studying, a name for dedication. I didn’t deserve it, for I daydreamed sometimes, and doodled in the margins of my work. Still, I put in long hours, because I had realized in my second week in London that while I was sitting at my desk in Tonbridge Hall, breathing in the stuffy and recirculated air, bending my gaze beneath the prepaid beam of my lamp, I was not actually spending money.

I had quickly discovered that I would have to count every penny. The fees of Tonbridge Hall were very high, and were deducted from our grants before we received them; they had to cover not just our food but our starched bed linen, the wages of the monosyllabic foreign women who cleaned our rooms, and the ferocious heat chuffed out by the central-heating boiler deep in the bowels of the place. There was no room for negotiation. You could not say, I’ll be ten degrees colder please, and get a refund; or say that, being bred to it, you would clean your room yourself. I had sat down with pen and paper, during the first week of the term; though the sums were easy enough to do in your head, pen and paper showed you were putting effort in, and provided against a calamitous mistake. I had deducted my fare for my Christmas ticket home, then divided what was left of my grant into
weekly segments, working first on the supposition that I would leave five pounds over for an emergency. The sum per week that was left for me was so impossibly small that I decided I would lump in the reserve with the rest. After all, I said to myself, what kind of emergency costs five pounds?

Each Friday I took the allotted sum out of my bank, which was situated in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was a pleasant enough place, though later it became home to tramps and derelicts who lived in cardboard houses of their own design. If they’d been in residence then, I might have lost my nerve entirely, brought face-to-face with the consequences of folly or improvidence; but my own imagination yielded such examples that I hardly needed any in the outer world.

My money in my purse, I would sit on a bench, and begin a letter to Niall. I wrote on file paper, letters too fat for normal envelopes to contain, so that I had to buy big tough brown ones; I wrote fast, and I wrote everything, everything that happened and every thought that passed through my head. Each day I sent one of these letters, dropping it into a post-box as I walked down Drury Lane. Each morning, in the pigeonholes of Tonbridge Hall, there was a letter for me, the envelope addressed in the careful writing of a first-year engineer; the numbers as if printed by a machine, the black script upright, precise, as thin as if a pin had traced it. Each morning. Without fail.

Once my letter was fairly begun I would bundle it into my bag and walk down to the students’ union, and go into the shop. There were two purchases I had to
make, each Friday; a pair of tights, and a pad of file paper for my lecture notes and letters in the week to come.

As an economy measure, I was training my wild hand to be small, so that I could use narrow feint and get in more words per week. This was easy enough, but the tights were more of a problem. The union sold the cheapest in London, so there was no question of obtaining them elsewhere. There was only one size, and, only one colour, a near black.

They were very strange, stretchy garments; it did not matter how carefully you washed them, you could not help the legs getting longer and longer, so that when you drew them from the basin and squeezed them gently they sprang from your palms and lolled about the room like serpents. When you hung them up they dangled obscenely. If the parsnips were ogres’ cocks, these were the foreskins of giants: taken as trophies in battle, by an Amazonian band.

At this stage in her life, Julianne had two boyfriends, neither of them ugly. Both of them were somewhere above her in the complex hierarchy of medical students, and both of them had rooms in flats of their own. ‘My advice to you,’ she said, ‘is to get on the Pill.’

I went along to the Student Health Service, where I saw a woman doctor. She didn’t sit behind her desk; she had it wedged sideways in the small consulting-room, and gestured to me to sit beside her, as if we were friends. As her chair creaked round towards me, I saw her heavy bursting legs, the lilac veins butting through
the stretch of her tights. Dear God, I thought, she must be
forty
, to have legs like that.

‘How many boyfriends do you have?’ she asked pleasantly.

‘Only one.’

She frowned; that is to say, face powder creased in the line above one eye.

‘How long have you known him?’ She was already reaching for her prescription pad.

‘Two years,’ I said.

‘That’s a long time. He must be a boyfriend from home, then. You really should be careful.’

‘I am careful. That’s why I came to see you.’

She wrote something. ‘No. Contraception is one thing.’ Dull hair, over-streaked, worn loose, brushed her desk. ‘What I mean is, you ought not to get into a pressure-cooker relationship.’

I went out into the street, pondering. Was that what I had? A pressure-cooker relationship? Here I’d been, calling it love. She thought I was too young to love a man, but old enough for screwing. I supposed that she had passed on to me, with her prescription, her malediction: the residue of her disappointment, her let-downs, her sad half-hours under station clocks waiting for men who never came. But how dare she try to sour my life? I imagined myself leaning forward – as in primary-school days – and taking hold of a handful of the woman’s denatured hair; then leaning back, firm and leisurely, until a part of her scalp was in my hand and her desk was awash and her notes were bobbing in a sea of blood. The wine-dark sea.

Sometimes my mother had pressure-cooked. Carrots, of course. Quartered potatoes. I remembered the action – packed metal drum, the stacked weights that rolled in your palm before you threaded them on to the dangerous lid; the muttering that rose from inside, as carrot sang to carrot like mutinous slaves below deck. The hiss of steam into cold air, it frightened me . . . I thought the weights might burst up like Annie Oakley’s bullets and pierce the ceiling and that our roof might fall in. What did people do for a metaphor, before the pressure-cooker was invented?

Each morning – each morning when she woke up at Tonbridge Hall – Julianne would stand before the mirror looking at her breasts. ‘They are, you know.’ She’d knead them, look at them narrowly. ‘They are. Most definitely. Getting. Bigger. Oh, good old Pill! What did a girl do for tits, before it was invented?’

I collected my prescription from the chemist in Store Street, thinking, Well now, I’m ready for Christmas.

The ludicrous notion stopped me dead in the chemist’s doorway. I’ve got the tinsel, the contraceptives, the roast goose and the holly; I’m ready for Christmas.

The term was almost half-way through. I felt a desolate, excruciating loneliness. Still, I thought, there will come a time . . . and then no more Roman roulette, no more counting the Durex. Already I felt perverse nostalgia for that strange condom texture, slippery and elusive, backed by the firm spike of flesh.

When had we found the opportunity, Niall and I, two
good schoolchildren? At his parents’ house when his parents were on holiday. (My parents never went on holiday.) On Sundays, when his parents were visiting their relations, or going to see National Trust properties or gardens open to the public. We had been fucking for years; we were old in fucking. Like me, Niall was an only child; there were no siblings whooping up the stairs to catch us on the job.