An Experiment in Love. Hilary Mantel
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An Experiment in Love
Hilary Mantel
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by Viking 1995
Published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2004 Published by Fourth Estate 2010
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1995
PS section copyright © Sarah O’Reilly 2010
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’ are reprinted from Collected Poems 1909-1962, 1974, by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd
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Source ISBN: 9780007172887
Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007354924 Version: 2016-09-08
For Gerald
Table of Contents
Dedication
Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
This morning in the newspaper I saw a picture of Julia. She was standing on the threshold of her house in High-gate, where she receives her patients: a tall woman, wrapped in some kind of Indian shawl. There was a blur where her face should be, and yet I noted the confident set of her arms, and I could imagine her expression: professionally watchful, maternal, with that broad cold smile which I have known since I was eleven years old. In the foreground, a skeletal teenaged child tottered towards her, from a limousine parked at the kerb: Miss Linzi Simon, well-loved family entertainer and junior megastar, victim of the Slimmer’s Disease.
Julia’s therapies, the publicity they have received, have made us aware that people at any age may decide to starve. Ladies of eighty-five see out their lives on tea; infants a few hours old turn their head from the bottle and push away the breast. Just as the people of Africa cannot be kept alive by the bags of grain we send them, so our own practitioners of starvation cannot be sustained by bottles and tubes. They must decide on nourishment, they must choose. Unable to cure famine—uninterested, perhaps, for not everyone has large concerns—Julia treats the children of the rich, whose malaise is tractable. No doubt her patients go to her to avoid the grim behaviourists in the private hospitals, where they take away the children’s toothbrushes and hairbrushes and clothes, and give them back in return for so many calories ingested. In this way, having broken their spirits, they salvage their flesh.
I found myself, this morning, staring so hard at the page that the print seemed to blur; as if somewhere in the fabric of the paper, somewhere in its weave, I might find a thread which would lead me through my life, from where I was then to where I am today. ‘Psychotherapist