An Experiment in Love

But there are two difficulties here. One is that I have been away so long that I do not have a friend. The other is that my mother has embroidered a gambolling lamb and a frieze of spring flowers right over the skirt of my blue cotton dress. It is a sky-blue dress, and otherwise plain; I see them looking into my sky. They both want and don’t want it. I can expect no mercy.

I sway on the spot. The hem of the dress brushes the tender skin at the back of my knees.

‘Well…make up your mind,’ my teacher says.

Miss Whittaker, who teaches the next class, is said to make a speciality of hitting pupils on the backs of their knees. Knuckle-rapping has gone quite out of style.

I look around, and see Karina. There is a chair empty next to her. She lifts her broad face to the light, and gives me a benevolent smile. She is wearing a yellow cardigan, yellow and fluffy, the colour of a new chicken in a picture book. Her plaits are fat and bound with white ribbons looped into flamboyant bows. From the braids and all around her head tiny threads or wires of hair stand out, white-blonde, quivering. Her face is like the sun.

‘There, please,’ I say.

Complacently, Karina begins to rearrange her possessions on the table: square up her ruler, her pencil, the cardboard box in which (at this tender age) we keep our lined paper for writing, and our squared paper for sums.

Next day when Julianne arrived, I was lying on my bed smoking a cigarette. ‘My God!’ she said, shrieking inside the doorway. ‘Your hair! My God!’

I sat up, smiling solemnly. My hair, which had been down to my waist at the end of the school term, was now clipped close to my head, scarcely an inch long all over. Glimpsing myself in shop windows this last week, I had whirled around to confront the stranger who seemed always at my shoulder; it was myself. My head felt light and full of possibilities, like a dandelion clock.

Julianne crossed the room, picked up my packet of cigarettes, and fitted one into her full red mouth. ‘Why did you do it? Did you have nits, or is it a symbol?’ She caught sight of herself in the mirror. Put up a large hand to touch her own hair, silky hanks the colour of butterscotch. ‘This mirror is useless,’ she grumbled.

‘Duck.’

She bent her knees. ‘Useless. It’s not the top of my head I need to see, it’s the rest of me.’

‘Perhaps we might rehang it.’

‘And knock a lump out of the bloody wall.’

There was an oblong coffee-table in the middle of the room, centred on the striped cotton rug that was centred on the polished floor. Julianne tested the table with her hand and then stepped up on it. A piece of her came into view through the mirror: her knees, coloured tights, the swish of her short skirt. The table groaned. ‘Careful!’ I said. She stretched out a hand, palm forth, like an orator. We were stuffed with education, replete with it: ‘Make a speech,’ I suggested.

‘Gaul is divided into three parts,’ she proffered, in Latin.

‘That isn’t a speech.’

‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ She studied her reflection. ‘Not bad.’ She stepped down, glowing.

‘Your case,’ I asked. ‘Where is it?’

‘I left it for the porter.’

‘Lawdy me!’ I thought of my dislocated limb. ‘Now he will carry it up for you, and you’ll have to give him a tip. That will be embarrassing for you.’

‘You don’t have to tip this kind –’ She broke off. She smirked. She saw how it was going to be. We were free now, to enjoy each other’s company; free and equal, to be as silly and as sharp as we liked. ‘I smelt soup,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid you did.’

‘Christ.’ She said it with a volume of disgust.

‘Do you remember at school, when Laura took that message over to the kitchens, and they were putting the cabbage on at half-past nine?’

A further blank distaste fell into Julianne’s eyes. ‘We’ll not discuss our academy,’ she said. ‘But I must say for it, that at least at the end of the day they let us go to our own homes to eat and have baths.’

‘There are communal arrangements,’ I said.

‘Are there mirrors?’

‘What?’

‘Are there full-length mirrors? In the bathrooms?’

‘No. Only pipes. Steam. The water is hot. There are white tiles, not much cracked, and scouring powder on a ledge, for when you’ve done.’

‘I don’t see how you’re expected to manage it. To take a bath without a mirror.’

I kept quiet. It had never seemed to me essential. Even important at all. ‘They’re only along the corridor,’ I said. ‘Three bathrooms in a row. There’s no reason why I should describe them to you.’

‘I like to have you describe things,’ she said moodily. ‘Descriptions are your strong point. God knows why you want to be reading law. Vanity, I suppose. You want to show your frightful grinding omnicompetence.’ She looked about her. ‘I see you’ve taken the best desk. The best bed.’

She sat down on her own bed, and began to simper. ‘At the hair,’ she explained. ‘Come now, Carmel, how can you bear to leave the old country behind? A girl like you, brought up with every advantage…the rag rugs, the flying ducks on the wall…’

‘We don’t, actually, have any flying ducks. Though my aunt has them.’

‘Maybe not, but I expect you have one of those fireside sets, do you, with little gilt tongs and a gilt shovel?’

I smiled, in spite of myself.

‘Shingled,’ she said. ‘Would that be the word? Cropped. Shaved.’ She pointed. ‘Do you know how that head of yours affects me? Sitting behind your straggly pigtails year in, year out, with your ribbons with the ends cut in Vs like they do them on wreaths—’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘—and then to walk in here, Miss, to a room in London in this Hall of Residence, where we are confined at Her Majesty’s Pleasure…What do you think, would they let us move out and get a flat?’

‘Together?’

‘Why not?’

‘What about my lower-class ways?’

She blew smoke at me. ‘I have an urge to say to you, Bejasus!’

‘Is that so?’

‘It would be nice if we went about and talked like an Edna O’Brien novel. It would suit us.’

‘Yes, it would become us,’ I said. ‘We haven’t the class for Girls of Slender Means.’

‘Speak for yourself. You charwoman’s daughter.’ Julianne wiped her eyes, but then she began to laugh again almost at once.

I told her about the poems that ran around in my head. She said, ‘You need to be taken out of yourself. We should go out and do some living. We could go to some students’ union or other, we must belong to them now. We will have a bottle or two of Guinness, will we? To build us up?’

There was a sound of revelry by night, I said to myself. I could have bitten the secret tongue in my brain that said it. Why did I think I was preparing for the Battle of Waterloo? Julianne made everything seem normal, but it was not normal for me. Her home was recoverable; she could travel to it next weekend, if she wished, and tumble into her frilly bed in her familiar room. I could not return until Christmas—at which point I could reclaim a fare from my local authority. Her parents, she had said, had offered to drive her down, see her installed, inspect her room and add a luxury or two; but she thought it better to make the break, get clean away on the Euston train, and besides, they must realize her accommodation was shared, and I might have brought my own luxuries with me.

I fought off self-pity: which Julianne’s words, on the whole, seemed designed to stimulate. I felt homesick already, and poor, more with the apprehension of poverty than with an actual lack in my purse; my right arm, that racked limb, did not feel as if it would support the weight of a bag of textbooks. If only the work would begin: the ink, the files, the grit behind sleepless eyes, the muffled tread of the invigilators. That was what I had come here for: to make my way, to make my living.

There was a knock on the door. Julianne bounced across the room. It was the porter, bringing her suitcase. ‘Put it there!’ she sang. She stretched her arms wide—Lady Bountiful. There was a plum cake inside her travelling bags, baked at home and sealed in a tin. She knew how to manage her life, how to go away from home. I thought of her father, the doctor; of her three brothers, who at their school played lacrosse. Brothers are an advantage, in the great world; they give a girl the faculty of easy contempt for men. Julianne’s skin seemed polished; she was altogether more apt for adventure, more translatable.

‘Julianne,’ I said, ‘you haven’t mentioned the obvious fact.’

She stretched her eyes. ‘Where is it obvious, where, the obvious fact?’

‘You know I mean Karina.’

‘Spare me,’ Julianne said.

‘She hasn’t got here yet, at least so far as I…’

‘Even so. Spare me.’

‘They asked if you wanted to share with her.’

Julianne stared at me. ‘Where in God’s name did they get that idea?’

I smiled inside. ‘They only asked. I think it was a formality.’

‘I hope you requested them to put her very far away, in the lowest, highest—’

‘In fact she’s next door.’

‘You’re not telling me you let them—’

‘No, OK. I’m lying. She’s on this corridor. C21.’ For I had seen the warden’s pencil moving swiftly over the lists, allocating numbers and floors. ‘Quite far away.’

‘Who with?’

‘A stranger.’

‘It would have to be. A stranger, it would have to be. If you had pulled some trick,’ she said, ‘and left me with Karina, I would never have spoken to you again.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I would have run up to you in the street with a specially made snagger and laddered your best tights. I would have got a packet of Durex and written on them “From Carmel to Niall, in anticipation,” and I would have taken them out of the packet and stuck pins in them all over and then folded them back in and sealed up the seal and posted them to your boyfriend and written SWALK on the envelope.’

‘Finished now?’

‘Sealed With A Loving Kiss,’ she said.

I wanted to plead, and say, but Karina, we are going to, you know, be friends with her? Aren’t we? But I couldn’t. It sounded too childish. As if we hadn’t moved on. I picked up my packet of Player’s and tossed it on to Julianne’s bed. ‘There you are. I’ve given up smoking,’

She gaped at me. ‘You’ve only just begun it.’

‘Even in my habits I mean to be fickle.’

Julianne laughed. Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes.

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