She was, as Julianne would say later, a peasant. I saw this, but I never thought she would revolt.
The Holy Redeemer was an academy well-thought-of in the district where it was situated – that is to say, it valued the social manner of its girls above their originality or wit. The girls themselves were lively, boastful, vain; a few were shy, a few snobbish, a few rebellious. In the seven years between our arrival as first formers and our departure from the Upper Sixth, characters changed of course – but they didn’t change much. It was the girls’ appearance that was subject to volcanic, dismaying alterations. Little gilt girls grew coarse and dark, gangling girls grew svelte; modest girls grew great bosoms and dragged them about like the sorrows of Young Werther. Others, pale and self-effacing as novices, whispered unnoticed through their days, hardly embodied inside their solid maroon-and-clay uniforms, creeping out of the school at eighteen on the same mouse feet that had brought them in at eleven. A number of such girls secured lovers and husbands at once, without the trouble of looking for them, and began upon tumultuous and dazzling erotic careers. Some needed just a year or two to blossom into women who occupied the normal amount of space and breathed their ration of air. Some of them blossomed at thirty, no doubt, and some will find themselves at forty; some will creep on those mouse feet into old age.
In my first year at school I learnt a great deal of poetry by heart, and recited it in my bedroom at night to improve my diction. My vowels remained long and slow, but – though I continued to wear the shoes with the running boards, and to drag my satchel after me – I became indistinguishable, in a year or two, from my companions who had more privileged home-lives. The nuns and lay teachers, though blinkered and inadequate in some respects, were not so snobbish that they made distinctions between Karina, myself and the others: not to our faces, anyway. Who knows – perhaps they regarded us with interest? We were the first girls from our school – from any school like ours – to go to the Holy Redeemer, and perhaps we were thought of as a worthy social experiment.
In my first-year exams I performed with competence in each subject, and was placed fifteenth in a class of thirty-four girls. I was very satisfied with my modest success; it was unlikely to tempt fate, unlikely to attract envy or spite. But then in my second year – in spite of myself, it seemed – I was placed near the top of the class. A year later, only Julianne and I were serious contenders for the Third-Year Prize. She began to notice me, her blue eyes sliding dubiously over me from beneath the lemony froth of her fringe.
Julianne was a doctor’s daughter. She was tall, strong, athletic and fast. She never minded what she said and she never minded what she did. If this were a school story for girls, of the kind that have gone out of fashion now, I would be telling you that she was the most popular girl in the form. In fact, I have to report that she was not particularly popular at all. She never exerted herself on anyone’s behalf, never exerted herself on her own. Her academic successes came to her without apparent effort; on the tennis court, she would skid to retrieve a wayward ball and thump it down in an unreachable corner of the far court, without loss of poise or loss of breath. Julianne was perhaps too sardonic to wish to be a leader, too deep: that is what I think now. Nothing about her – her beauty, her confidence, her brilliance – did I admire. To begin admiring Julianne would have been to dig myself a bottomless pit. I did not think there was any hope for me if once I fell into it.
Our convent was not like the convents that are generally described in novels. We were not told that Our Lady would blush every time we crossed our legs. We were not forbidden patent-leather shoes in case boys saw our knickers reflected in them. It was not a hotbed of lesbianism; indeed we were unaware of that tendency or vice, until the books we read – uncensored – informed us of it. No one recruited for the order. I did not know any girl – except myself – who wanted to be a nun.
Still, our lives were neither free nor pleasant. There was an agenda. We were to be useful to society. We would graduate, then marry, then be mothers, also nurses and teachers, brainy, dowdy, overstretched: selfless breeders with aching calves, speaking well of support stockings by the age of thirty-five, finding our comfort in strong tea with one sugar. We would be women who never sat down, women with rough hands and a social conscience, women with a prayer in their heart and a tight smile on their lips; women who, seeing an extra burden offered, would always step forward and suggest ‘Try me.’ You have heard of schools that train life’s officers: this was a school that trained life’s foolish volunteers.
We were not physically chastised, at the Holy Redeemer. Frigid courtesy was extended to us, as an example of how to conduct ourselves when we were adults. Our excesses and errors were kept in check by sarcasm. We were never praised. We understood we did well if we were not blamed or held up to ridicule. Discouragement was wielded like an intangible baton; when you had tried your hardest, you would be told with a civil brutality that it was not enough. To court notice – even by excellent work – was to run the risk of a snub. Many of us – I do not say Karina, or Julianne – became anxious, painfully scrupulous and striving beings, always trying to out-best our best, to squeeze out one word or look of approbation, to please those who could never be pleased: who would never be pleased on principle. It was a practical education, an education in a certain old-fashioned virtue. We were not
We were very curious about the details of the nuns’ daily lives, but these details were guarded from us. We did not visit the House unless we were sent on a message, or unless we were suddenly taken ill; we stepped inside it, just, as we processed to chapel for the daily rosary, which was voluntary, or for compulsory Friday afternoon Benediction. Benediction was incense, plainchant and bump-heads: two or three pupils overcome by religiosity or post-lunch hypoglycaemia, bundled out into the corridor to be offered sips of cold water from a plastic beaker.
When I visited the House I always noticed what I had noticed that first time, when we came for our entrance exams. There was the same smell of incense and custard, blended, I later discerned, with the smell of stewed plums and moth-balls. There was the broken tile, the terracotta tile, that gave under the foot: tock-tock. So acute now is my nostalgia and my desire, that if I had such a room with such a tile I would break it to hear the sound: to remind myself of Karina following behind me – tock-tock – ten years old, innocent then of any sin except the Original one. But in those days, I flashed my eyes into the corners of rooms, to pick up any evidence, crumb, of what a nun’s life might be like: where were their baths, lavatories, what would they eat that night? I learnt nothing. It was a blank.
The evidence of their spiritual life was equally guarded from me. In our presence they offered the same prayers as us – the formulations anyone can employ – with a conspicuous lack of fuss or fervour. They spoke in a prosaic way of God’s glory, and if their private prayers got results they never told us about them. Why were they nuns then? Did they have a faith that was more faithful, a hope that was more hopeful than ours? They certainly didn’t excel in charity. They must have cultivated their virtues in private, after we had gone home; in their dealings with us they were grumpy and exacting, petty and cold.
I did not see this at once. When I was eleven years old, I understood that I also was meant to be a nun. Where does one acquire a sense of vocation? In the chapel after a school dinner, a queasy mass of processed peas and tinned apricots rolling slowly through the gut: great girls whooping in the playground with the cold stinging their cheeks, and inside, silence and the scent of winter flowers: the frozen oily touch of holy water: the creak and snap of a knee joint as a sister rises from genuflection. If you stare for a long time at a candle flame you lose all sense of self. I found this: I felt my thin, hungry essence flit upwards towards the gilded roof. I thought that was what holiness was – this loss, this flitting – and I may have been right.
The only jewellery permitted to Holy Redeemer girls was of a Catholic nature – a Lourdes medal, a cross and chain. Karina wore a sharp silver crucifix, over-sized, that was always edging up over the top button of her blouse or
