An Experiment in Love. Hilary Mantel
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Under their pullovers—which might be maroon, or a mottled grey—the boys wear grey shirts, their collars springing upwards, twisted and wrung as though they’ve tucked down their chins and chewed them. They wear striped elastic belts with buckles like two snakes in a headlock. Their hair is either chopped straight across their foreheads or it is shorn off to stubble. When they go home, in bad weather—which is to say, in most weather—they wear knitted balaclava helmets, and one boy has an even more terrible item, a leather helmet, thin black leather like a saurian skin, tight to his skull and fastening under his chin with a tarnished buckle. When I look at the boys I see bristles and snouts, rubber faces always contorting and meemowing. They are always lolling their tongues and wriggling their ears, or polishing their noses with the flats of their palms, working the cartilage violently round and round. Their not-yet-hairy limbs are pliable as ruddy clay, as a doll I have called a Bendy Toy; I can almost smell the rubber and feel the boneless twist I give its legs. I think I will not sit next to a boy.
I look at the girls and the girls look back at me, various expressions of dullness or spite on their faces. Their hair is braided tightly into stubby plaits, or chopped short below their ears; if the latter, it is parted at one side, and pinned off their faces with a great black grip. They have an assortment of navy cardigans, some of them washed out and shrunken, with the buttons through the wrong holes. Some have pleated skirts, or gym-slips like blue-black cardboard, like solid ink; some have cotton frocks under their cardigans, frocks that are limp and soft and pastel. I think, as the lesser evil, I will sit next to a girl.
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