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. FEMINISM 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
‘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.’
