An Experiment in Love: A Novel

an experiment in love

hilary mantel

AN EXPERIMENT IN LOVE. Copyright © 1995 by Hilary Mantel. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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The lines on page 39 from T. S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality” are reprinted from Collected Poems 1909-62, 1974, by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mantel, Hilary.

An experiment in love / Hilary Mantel.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42687-3

ISBN-10: 0-312-42687-9

I. Title.

PR6063.A438E97    1996

    823'.914—dc20

95-33666

CIP

Originally published in Great Britain by Viking

First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

First Picador Edition: July 2007

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also by hilary mantel

Vacant Possession

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

Fludd

A Place of Greater Safety

A Change of Climate

The Giant, O’Brien

Every Day Is Mother’s Day

Giving Up the Ghost

Beyond Black

Among Hilary Mantel’s major novels are A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. She has also written a highly acclaimed memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she reviews books for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. She lives in England.

for gerald

one

This morning in the newspaper I saw a picture of Julia. She was standing on the threshold of her house in Highgate, 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