‘You know the phrase, enlightened self-interest?’
‘I thought it meant money-grubbing.’
‘Sometimes it’s used that way.’ The tip of her tongue touched the vanilla-cream centre of a dark chocolate. Julianne was coming back down the corridor, her feet squelching on the parquet. ‘Karina’s unhappiness is no profit to anyone. And I’m afraid that if she got a new roommate she might be treated worse than I allow myself to treat her.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It’s just that. That’s all.’
Jule handed around the coffee. ‘I see we’re on the perennial topic.’ Her fingers dipped into the Fortnum’s box. ‘Lynette, you must try to understand that though I know Karina I don’t know her. She comes from a social background quite alien to me in every way, and at school if I spoke to her once a year it was as much.’
Lynette laughed, a small gurgle of sarcastic joy. ‘What a snob you are, Lipcott, I didn’t think – ’
‘That we had them in Lancashire?’ Julianne said coolly. She licked a sugar crystal from her lower lip. ‘Anyway, don’t ask me about her, ask Carmel. Carmel’s known her since they were at infant school.’
Lynette turned to me. A miniature Florentine was poised at her painted lips. ‘Well?’
‘Yes, I knew her.’
‘She was your friend?’
‘Not really.’
‘So what did you do to her?’
I thought for a moment. ‘I kicked her baby,’ I said. I glanced up and saw their two faces side by side, gazing at me in uncomprehending shock.
I didn’t explain. Or only lamely and partially. Why should I? I had, by this stage of the term, very few words to spare; they were all going into my letters to Niall. And yet the proximity of Karina, the sight of her stumping out into the London traffic and dirt, the presence of her name in our mouths – all these things led me helpless back into the past, memories pulling at me strong and smooth as a steel chain, each link hard and bright and obdurate, so that I was hauled out of my frail, pallid, eighteen-year-old body, and forced to live, as I live today as I write, within my ten-year-old self, rosy-skinned but rigid with fear, on my way by bus to take my entrance exam for the Holy Redeemer.
The surprise – if it was a surprise – had already occurred; I’d known something was up that day I’d seen my mum with Karina’s mum, linking each other on Eliza Street. ‘I’m sitting for the Holy Redeemer too,’ Karina had said boldly, one morning as we went through the school gates.
‘You are not!’ I said.
‘I am so! You can like it or lump it.’
That same night my mother said: I am determined that child should have her chance in life. Why not? She’s as good as anybody, isn’t she? My father grunted. He was doing a jigsaw puzzle; he did them many evenings now. She has to be a bright girl, my mother reasoned, she must be: running on in her most decisive tone, convincing the empty air. Look at the way she helps Mary in the house. Does all the shopping. Poor Mary doesn’t know the price of an egg.
‘Why doesn’t she?’ I said.
My mother frowned. ‘Mary has enough to do, working shifts. She has a good capable girl to do her shopping for her.’
I had lost half a crown, once, when I had been sent out on a Sunday for a block of Neapolitan ice-cream. This had never been forgotten, it never would be.
‘And she’s capable enough to roll up her sleeves when she comes in from school and get her own tea and her father’s as well if he’s there for it.’
I could get the tea, I thought. My mother didn’t need much food – she ran on wrath – and she didn’t see that other people might need what she herself didn’t. Getting our tea only involved slapping corned beef on a plate, and quartering a tomato. But there was a special way of slapping, a special way of quartering, and any modifications of it I might introduce were subject to my mother’s scorn. If I were to fail my Eleven Plus and go to St Theresa’s up Pennyworth Brow, with the model kitchen Sister Monica had told us about, I would be doing domestic science. That’ll show her, I thought. ‘Do they have domestic science at the Holy Redeemer?’ I asked.
‘Domestic science?’ My mother’s eyebrows – or the pencil marks which represented them – flew up into her hair. ‘Latin and Greek, that’s what you’ll be doing. Physics and chemistry.’
We had received a booklet, called a prospectus. Among the lines of grey print there were some grey photographs, of two big girls handling test-tubes, supervised by a nun in spectacles; of a hockey team, grinning widely, arranged in a row with their sticks at a regulated angle, and the girl at the centre hoisting a beribboned cup. ‘How will I learn to play hockey?’ I said. ‘I don’t know how to do it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ my mother said. ‘It’ll come to you. When the time is ripe.’
I went to look over my father’s shoulder. He was in the early stages of his jigsaw, so you had to look at the lid of the box to see that it represented a thatched cottage on a village green. There was a church spire, and some rambling roses and a bicycle leaning against a gate. ‘Be a good girl and you can help me fill in the sky,’ he said.
‘I’d rather do the duck pond.’
‘We’re not up to the duck pond yet. We’ve got to get the edges in first. Can’t run before we can walk.’
‘Well, will you give me a shout when you’re up to the duck pond?’
‘Get upstairs, lady,’ my mother said, ‘and get your homework done, never mind duck ponds. And don’t let me come up and catch you gawping out of the window, neither.’
My father looked at his work, just a gap fringed with blue: ‘A happy home,’ he said, unemphatically.
I went without looking back, up the steep stairs to my room. I closed the door and sat down at the table my mother had lugged up some weeks previously. My homework was already laid out; it was Intelligence tonight. I glanced – just glanced – out of the window, bespattered with spring rain; it was April, still very cold in the house, and as I worked I would sometimes have to put down my pencil and rub my fingers to get some life back into them.
