My room was papered blue and white, though the white in places was yellow with age; blue Chinamen went to and fro, crossing small bridges over invisible streams. A Chinawoman held up a bird in a cage, her eyes mere slits: strange combs, like knitting needles, stuck out of her hair. Was the caged bird singing? If you got very close you could see that its tiny mouth was open to emit sound, like the mouth of Sue Day of the Happy Days. I imagined its warble, repeated again and again as the pattern repeated, as the Chinamen crossed their bridges, as the pavilion door creaked open, as the string of lanterns swayed.
I sat down, took up my pencil, began to work away at Intelligence: fill in the next letter in this sequence. To help me I had written out the alphabet on a piece of scrap paper. It made it easier to count backwards and forwards, though I would not, as Sister Monica pointed out, be able to have such an aid when I came to sit my exam. Sister Monica was not a very old nun, but rather young; she had spots, which were a sign of youth, and goggly glasses whose arms slotted away somewhere within the starchy mysteries of her caps and coifs and veils.
Twenty minutes passed. Underline the correct word: As calf to cow, so
Karina had bought it for me; although she had sneered at me and said it was soft, she had read it herself first, so that the pages were scuffed and grimy and blurred with lard-soaked fingerprints. ‘You can owe me the money,’ Karina had said; but I was afraid I would never be able to pay her back. I did not get pocket-money; my mother had bought my comics for me, until the day when she turned against them. I did not need money of my own, because I was provided for; everything I needed was provided for my comfort, my mother said. And what did I do in return? She’d like to know that, she said. Very much she’d like to know. She would.
I folded the comic, and held it on my knee, thinking that if she came in I might be able to drag my chair right up to the table and conceal my sin underneath. I wondered what sort of a sin it was: venial, not mortal, I knew that much, but what category of venial? Disobedience to my mother? Stealing from Karina? Or what?
Belle of the Ballet was going through a very exciting stage. The snobby prima ballerina had twisted her ankle, tottering to the floor in a gauzy heap, with a scream of ‘Oh – OUCH – help me!’ Belle had to step into her role at short notice. What a good thing the special spangled tutu fitted her! Belle was so young, yet for her it was maybe a once-in-a-lifetime chance. In the final frame she would get a bouquet, I expected; but since I had to keep the comic folded I could only have a bit at a time. ‘Eet izz a triumph!’ some foreign person would enthuse: perhaps a man in a coat with a fur collar, and a cigarette in a holder. But he would probably turn out not to be good for Belle’s career in the long run.
I looked up, my vision clouded with glory, the creak of red plush seats and the rustle of silk, the abbreviated moan of the violins as the orchestra tuned up . . . My eyes, resting on the wall, encountered the Chinawoman, her deep sleeve and her wicker cage. My mother’s foot was on the stair. I doubled up in my chair, panic-stricken, and thrust the comic back into my bag. My face burned and pulsed. I felt contaminated, sick with guilt.
As it was now common knowledge that Karina and I were going to sit for the Holy Redeemer, we were ostracized by our classmates, who considered we were getting above ourselves. This threw us increasingly into each other’s company, whether we liked it or not. Privately, Karina was gloomy about our prospects; she did not think we would pass our Eleven Plus, let alone our entrance exam. ‘Get away,’ she said. ‘We’ll fail. Everybody fails.’ I had not encountered pessimism before – not that deep, ingrained, organic pessimism which was part of Karina, and which of course I have often met in adult life.
It was playtime, and it was only raining a bit. We were leaning against the wall at the back of our schoolyard, looking down over the railway embankment. Karina was finishing her bottle of milk, slurping noisily at the clotted half-inch at the bottom, chasing the last drops around with her straw. ‘You still owe me for that comic,’ she said.
‘I’m saving up to pay you.’
Karina sang, ‘When will that be, Say the bells of Stepneee.’
‘I’ve got threepence. My grandad gave it me. You can have it. Here.’
‘Put it away,’ Karina said. ‘I don’t want your money.’
‘You can have my milk every playtime.’ A thought struck me. ‘But do you think they’ll have milk at the Holy Redeemer?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know, Said the great bell of Bow. Anyway, I told you. We’ll not be going. We’ll never pass.’
‘But you do want to, don’t you?’ I said tentatively. Because I did; I had made my mind up on it.
Karina said, ‘If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.’
I knew the meaning of that. It had been in English yesterday: explain these proverbs. A stitch in time saves nine. Too many cooks spoil the broth. I thought of St Theresa’s and the model kitchen, and the girls with their laddered nylons crowded around, clutching wooden spoons in fingers blighted by flaking nail-varnish. I did not want to be like that; I wanted to be like Susan Millington, solemn and horse-faced beneath a winter velour, a summer boater; I wanted to have big legs like Susan Millington, and stride to the bus-stop in mid-brown thick tights. ‘Oranges and lemons . . .’ droned Karina. Oh, no; she was going to start at the beginning and sing straight through. ‘You owe me five farthings . . .’ She broke off, and said, ‘Well, considerably more, actually.’ She had begun to use big words, I noticed, on occasion; it was called Vocabulary. ‘Considerably more.’
I thought, here comes a chopper to chop off your head. Behind my back I made a covert gesture of violence.
On the day of the entrance exam our mothers escorted us on the two buses, dressed in their best coats, which in the case of Karina’s mother was best but not very good. My mother had a handbag with a shiny clasp, and as she sat in the bus with the bag on her knees she kept snapping it open, snapping it shut. The mothers sat on one seat; we sat on the seat in front, whispering and nudging.
‘My mother called Sister Basil an old nanny goat,’ I said, boasting.
‘Your mother will burn in hell,’ Karina said.
‘Not if she repents.’
‘She will burn in hell anyway. She wears lipstick.’
‘That’s not a sin.’
