and squeaked against each other, then snagged together, then stuck in a clammy fastness. We passed our old school – shuttered, unpopulated at this hour, the playground bare except for blowing litter, the double doors locked fast; this autumn it would go on without us, bursting with screaming children sucking up their milk and spilling their ink and knuckling each other’s heads and being searched for lice, chanting their times tables and feeling the cane bruise their frozen fingertips. ‘It looks so small, doesn’t it?,’ Karina said. ‘Pathetic.’ We turned downhill towards the bus station, cast our satchels on to our outer shoulders, and began to link.
When we arrived at the bus-stop near the market place, Susan Millington was there, standing at the head of the queue. She was in her Holy Redeemer summer uniform, her striped blazer and boater, and this shocked me slightly; obviously, some concession was made to the sun, and I thought that, if my mother were in charge at the Holy Redeemer, no concession of any sort would be made. Susan Millington leant on her hockey stick, which was turned inwards between her feet. Her hands were bare, clothed neither in white cotton gloves nor grey woollen gloves; and they were brown because – as everyone was aware – she had recently returned from a family holiday in Portugal.
‘Susan,’ I said. ‘Hello there.’
Susan Millington turned to me her long horse-face. She looked down at me and moved her lip, as if she were whinnying. Then she turned away, and spoke to her companion, and both of them laughed in a long hectic gust of horse-laughter.
Karina pulled at my coat sleeve. ‘You can’t speak to her! Her dad’s a dentist.’
Both of us licked our teeth, as if we were licking blood from them. Dentistry was done in large houses by the park; Mr Millington’s had stained-glass in the windows and a laurel hedge. They’d had a bathroom, my mother said, when such things were undreamt of in this vicinity; they also took shower-baths, because Mr Millington believed it was more hygienic. She could dress well, my mother claimed, on a quarter of what Mrs Millington spent in Manchester, at Kendal Milne and in those madam shops round St Ann’s Square.
That morning, as every school day for the next seven years, we crawled away through the grimy terraces, lurching to a halt at traffic lights, snarling and revving past Woolworths and the fire station and the mini-marts with bargain posters in their windows, past net-curtain emporia and pet shops where single goldfish swam hopelessly in their bowls: by Methodist churches and cinemas that before a year was out would be turned into bingo halls. As we reached the outskirts of the town there were shops selling blocks of foam that you cut up for cushions and mattresses; there were coal merchants and scrap-yards, and weed-ridden vacant lots with standing pools of black water. Our town did not end but simply, after spreading and diluting itself, washed into the next town, where we ground into the Victoria bus station and changed to the Number 64. Then we would lurch off again, under a viaduct, alongside a river running black; by now the streets would be full of men and women hurrying to work, and among the monochrome of their overcoats and mackintoshes you would see the fuchsia or bluebird-coloured flash of a sari or shalwar-kameez.
In winter the bus’s windows would be opaque with filth, but on my first morning, golden by now, I was able to watch this second town run out in a sweep of dual-carriageway; I saw tree tops appear above the roofs of neat semi-detached houses, and watched grime give way to green, to tree-lined roads and striped lawns and mellow walls of rosy brick: to mock-Tudor public houses, bowls clubs, shopping parades, a public park with a floral clock and a bandstand with peeling paint.
This was where we would be educated, Karina and I, among girls whose fathers were solicitors, factory managers, small businessmen and the more prosperous sort of shopkeeper. Their mothers stayed at home to construct Battenburg cakes and cut back hydrangeas. Their first memories were of garden ponds and weeping willows, of the wrought-iron balconies of Scarborough hotels, of the slippery leather of the back seat of the family car. When I think of the early lives of these girls – of Julianne, let us say – I think of starched sun-bonnets, Beatrix Potter, of mossy garden paths, regular bedtime, regular bowels: I see them frozen for ever in that unreclaimable oasis between the war and the 196os, between the end of rationing and the beginning of the end: fixed in time, their bodies scented with clover honey and Bramley apples: one foot daintily poised, one hand – as their ballet teacher prescribed – gesturing a charming invitation to the years to come. Life, do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe: we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.
That night my mother said, ‘Did Susan Millington speak to you?’
‘No.’
‘Didn’t she?’ My mother was irritated. ‘Well, no doubt she’ll speak to you tomorrow.’
Our first morning was not much of a disaster. We marched in lines a lot, and answered to our names: in Karina’s case, to an approximation of it. We were led up and down the cramped and creaking staircases of the Holy Redeemer, glimpsing the convent’s lawns through lustreless Gothic lights, to an echoing cloakroom where we were allocated pegs and where we hung our grey velour hats and changed our shoes. I was reluctant to take my hat off, because of my new hairstyle; when Karina saw it she popped her eyes but reined in her snigger, perhaps as a sign of solidarity. We threaded back to our classroom in the silence prescribed for corridors at all times, our huge feet preceding us, our pullovers reeking of Constantine & Co., our faces stiff with unease. We saw that every other girl except us wore narrow almond-toed sandals, neat and light, in a smart shade of tan. We saw that none of them had a satchel, and all had a briefcase with a gleaming brass lock.
Such support as we offered each other was silent. Karina just whispered, when she got the chance: ‘That saleswoman, she saw us coming.’ It was the first time I had heard this expression, but I understood what she meant, and I nodded. We never spoke of the matter again. But that night as we were going up Curzon Street, our first homework in our despicable bags, we swung them from side to side and sang ‘Herring boxes without soxes, / Sandals were for Clementine.’
In our first week at the Holy Redeemer we learnt several stanzas of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the difference between ‘will’ and ‘shall’. I took all my textbooks home to have protective covers put on them, and my mother covered them in wallpaper, offcuts of the blue-and-white Chinese wallpaper I had in my bedroom; so the caged bird sang like Lesbia’s sparrow on the back of
‘Did Susan Millington speak to you?’ my mother said.
‘No.’
‘Well, did you speak to her?’
‘One day I did.’
‘What did you say?
‘Hello, Susan.’
‘Does she think she’s too good?’ my mother burst out. ‘You’re as good as her now. Yes, and as good as anybody.’ I wondered what she would think if she could hear Karina on that topic. Now that we were studying the feudal system I was in a better position to understand Karina’s outlook on life. She believed in hierarchy and degree and disbelieved profoundly in the equality of man. She believed in self-preservation by scheming, by squirrelling away, by conserving her efforts and never wasting her breath. She did not believe in justice, or at least she acted as if justice were a luxury; she did not believe in speaking her mind. She was slow and steady and she put her shoulder to the wheel.
