up at the ends. She must have been at least thirteen. Her lips were constantly parted, to show that she was speaking.
Nine sevens are sixty-three. Turn then, O gracious advocate, thine eyes of pity towards us, and after this our exile . . . Ten sevens are seventy.
The next day, when I was coming home from school, I saw my mother and Karina’s mother walking together down Eliza Street. They had their heads together. They were deep in conversation; at least, my mother was. And they were linking.
five
In the first few weeks of term at Tonbridge Hall, we didn’t see as much of Karina as I’d imagined we would. Sometimes when I was going in to breakfast she would be leaving, setting off for Euston Square and her college on Mile End Road. ‘The mysterious East’, Julianne called it. Karina would grunt a good morning, and I’d say, ‘Everything all right?’ and of course she wouldn’t reply, because why should she reply to a question as daft as that?
One night Lynette came to our room, looking defeated and carrying a box of bonbons and candied fruits from Fortnum and Mason. She popped the box on to our coffee table, sat down on Julianne’s bed, massaged her tired calves and sighed. ‘I’ve tried to break the ice,’ she complained. ‘But Karina, it’s like – oh, go on, let’s have a mixed metaphor – it’s like pounding my head on a bleedin’ brick wall.’
She finished her sentence with a flourish, a brilliant imitation of Sue’s peculiar accent. I said, ‘She has a problem with people.’
‘A chip on her shoulder,’ Julianne said.
‘We know her, you see.’
‘What language does she speak?’ Lynette asked.
‘English.’
‘Yes, but with her parents – what did she talk at home?’
‘English.’ I explained the situation, so far as I could.
Lynette frowned. She had been looking forward, she said, to trying out a smattering of this and that, in the cause of making Karina feel more at home. She had done an exchange year, and her Russian was quite fluent. ‘I don’t think she’s Russian,’ I said. ‘Her father was frightened of Russians, my mother said. He used to take precautions against them.’
Julianne stared at me. ‘Like what?’
‘Double-locking the door.’ At one time I’d been able to come and go freely from Karina’s house, but since her mother had taken ill that had changed. Karina’s father, never a man to respond to a greeting with more than a grunt, was now as sociable as a corpse. The gas man and the district nurse were let in, if it suited him; they could not rely on it. If old habit drove me to Karina’s door in the morning, I had to stand in the street, while mechanisms grated and clanked and chains were lifted from their grooves; when the door opened a crack, Karina had skilfully extruded her body on to Curzon Street without permitting me even a glimpse of the vestibule.
‘Well – ’ Lynette threw out a hand – ‘don’t ask me to write you a letter in Romanian, but other than that . . .’ She shrugged. She could do the basics in many Eastern-bloc tongues, she said. ‘The civilities. The small-talk of the bread queue.’ The turn of her sable head was eloquent; it was she who seemed to me a real refugee, one of the glamorous kind who might have diamonds in a silk roll thrust into a lizard-skin vanity-case. When I said this to her she agreed: ‘People are always surprised that I grew up in Harrow.’
Julianne offered to go down the corridor to the kitchen to refill our mugs of coffee. We used to drink it black, because the rooms were too hot for us to keep milk. Lynette tore open the bonbons; leaving the room, Jule scooped up a marzipan peach and thrust it into her cheek. Lynette leant forward. ‘Please, explain to me while she’s out – why does Karina hate her?’
‘No special reason.’
‘Oh.’ Lynette flicked up an eyebrow. ‘Fine. But I notice Julianne can be sharp with her.’
‘Sharp? That’s mild.’ I must have grinned. ‘You know, Julianne’s not what she was. Her character’s softening.’
Lynette selected a sugared almond. ‘Not a pleasant topic, this. I have to say that Karina doesn’t seem to like you either. Not in the least.’
‘I’m not sure we can do anything about that.’ I bounced a little on my bed. ‘Look, Lynette, we’re not in a school story. It’s not Mallory Towers. We don’t have to be . . .’ I groped for the word, ‘ . . . chums.’
‘Of course not. It’s just that I have to live with her.’
‘You do, don’t you? Can’t you apply for a transfer?’
‘No, because who would she find herself sharing with next? You see, I may not be the best person in the world, but I do try to be kind, in so far as one . . .’
‘Why?’ I said. I was examining the world of motives in those days, trying to find for myself a new place in it.
‘Why? I suppose . . . No, I can’t think why.’
‘We always used to be good in hope of eternal reward. And we were told that every time we said an unkind word, it was another thorn in Jesus’ crown. If we committed an unkind action, it drove the nails deeper into his wounds. Well, it won’t do, will it? Won’t wash.’
Lynette smiled. ‘Not really. It’s not for grown-ups, is it? I suppose a person . . . a person dislikes confrontation and tries to ease . . . her own way through the world, and that means easing other people’s. Inevitably.’
‘So being kind is a sort of selfishness?’
