An Experiment in Love: A Novel

summer frock. She used to thrust it back with ostentation – impatient yet reverent – and glance up at the teacher of the moment to see if she was watching. She did novenas, First Fridays, rosaries: obligations over and above weekly Mass and regular confession. When the sacred host was in her mouth she looked as if she were sucking a stone.

One thinks of the loss of faith as a gradual process, a seeping and trickling. In my case it was sudden. I woke up one day, in my Chinese room; I was twelve, and the torpor of adolescence was seeping through me, and I hated mornings. There was a prayer, that Sister Monica had told us to say on waking: Holy Mother Mary, I humbly thank you for preserving your hand-maiden from the perils of the night. Downstairs, my mother was already gushing water into the kettle; soon she would be yelling for me. I sat up and slid to the edge of the bed. Now I beseech you preserve your hand-maiden from the snares and temptations of the day to come. My feet were cold on the linoleum: I looked down at them, narrow and blue. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord – just as I was about to add ‘Amen’, something made me look up. Perhaps it was God, climbing out through my window, absconding. I looked around the room. What perils? I wondered. My satchel rolled fatly on the floor, stuffed with maths textbooks. My outdoor shoes stood obediently side by side, waiting for my feet. What temptations? I moved to the window and opened it a crack. The sullen morning slid its fingers inside. So I’m doing today on my own, I thought. In that pendant second before my feet touched the lino, God had become de trop; I felt vaguely embarrassed that I had ever believed anything.

Soon after this I had a short conversation – my first – with Julianne. It was about God’s existence. She took a Voltairean view, that if he did not exist it would be necessary to invent him: ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘even if it were not necessary, it would be profitable.’ She had the placid air of someone who would never let Popes interfere with her pleasures. Not a wrinkle – of doubt, or anything – marred her broad white brow. She might have had perfect faith: might have been one of those unspotted souls we heard about, shining with the purity of a recently cleaned window.

In Curzon Street, these were years of home improvements – in some ways if not in others. Some people on the street bought cars, but my father said he didn’t see why they’d want to bother. ‘If only they realized the worry a car causes. The road tax alone. The traffic jams.’ Public transport was good enough for us, he said; always had been, always would be.

But in a car, I thought, you can go precisely where you like. You’re the driver. You can even go where there isn’t a road.

Our coal fire was abolished, and in the sitting-room an electric fire threw out a vitiating heat, pierced by whistling drafts. The house was showing its age. The back wall was freezing to the touch, icy as the pack of six fish fingers that served the three of us on a Friday evening. My mother never went near a church these days, but she did believe devoutly in fish on Fridays.

It can’t just have been the menopause that made her so angry – with life, with me? When I was eleven years old, she seemed to enter on a twenty-year temper tantrum. All her discourse was of disappointment and loss, of let-downs and deceits. If I proposed to go on a school outing, she would say, What do you want to go there for? You won’t enjoy it. If I was asked to someone’s house, she would say, Why do you want to go bothering with her? Your parents, she would say; that’s who you should be bothering with. Nobody else will help you, when it comes down to it. You’ve only your own family.

I see her saying these things; her face hollow and her eyes without light. At other times she would urge on me the virtues of the outside world: of getting on, getting out, getting out of Curzon Street and getting away for good and all. ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,’ she’d say: if this were true, my homework efforts were useless. She talked as if everything were stacked against me – the money of others, their good looks and breeding and social graces – stacked up into a Matterhorn of prejudice and denial; and yet at the same time it was my job to push at this mountain, to topple it, to bulldoze it with my will. The task in life that she set for me was to build my own mountain, build a step-by-step success: the kind didn’t matter as long as it was high and it shone. And as she had told me that it is ruthless people who rise highest in this life, I would slash through the ropes of anyone who tried to climb after me; I would prize out their pitons, and jump about on the summit alone.

But then, twenty years on, when I stood on the heights I had erected for myself, there would be a crumbling, she seemed to say, an inner decay, a collapse: and once again I would realize that she was my only friend.

My father did increasingly complex jigsaws. There was an elaborate still-life with grapes, roses and shellfish. There was an Alma-Tadema picture, of soft-eyed women with marble limbs. There was a jigsaw of the Last Supper; it took him days and days, and then a piece of Judas proved to be missing. My mother turned the chairs up and trounced the cushions; the gap remained, a worm-shaped hiatus in the traitor’s ribcage.

When I look back from myself now at myself then, I believe I was a diligent, quiet, undemanding child; hardly more trouble at sixteen than I was at ten. At the time, though – even after I had stopped going to confession and stopped examining my conscience every day – I believed I was a monster of egotism, an incipient tyrant, a source of trouble and agony of mind. My mother said I was, and I didn’t query it. I never tried to take out of her hands the direction of my life, or questioned why she and not I should have it. Inoffensive though I was, she treated me as what was known in those years as a juvenile delinquent. Everything I did was suspicious – at least, it aroused her suspicion.

My mother kept a tight hand on my social life, posting me upstairs to the Chinese room with orders not to daydream and not to let her catch me looking out of the window. For three hours each evening I kept company with my five-shilling fountain-pen and a bottle of blue-black ink, with maps and protractors, with tables of verbs and ragged lines of blank verse. In severe winters I worked downstairs; the television was turned off, and I was told that she and my father were prepared to sacrifice their evening’s entertainment for the sake of my education. I was seldom let to watch television – not even the news, which my mother did not think of as educational, because after all it was not a subject, and I did not have an exercise book for it. But then, once in the week, I would be told to stop whatever I was doing, and to sit down and watch a quiz show called University Challenge. My mother watched me anxiously to see what answers I knew, to see what progress I was making. I pressed my lips shut on the answers; I would not play. The students who formed the teams were elderly and tried to appear lovably eccentric; they had mascots with them, floppy-eared dogs and stuffed trolls, stitched-up penguins and that sort of thing. They were mostly the kind of people you’d cross the street to avoid.

So it was a thin time, you see: the dining table had to do me for a dance-floor, and the electric coals for the electric glow of teenage romance. In my bedroom I carried on improving my diction. ‘But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.’ But you don’t of course, not when you’re fifteen or so. Perhaps I should regret my misspent youth, pity myself for having so little fun. But carpe diem is an empty sentiment, now that we all live so long.

The seaside-postcard view of convent schools insists that sex intrudes into every lesson, every hour; that there are saucy little novices yearning for a monk, and pigtailed prefects bursting out of their push-up bras. But I must report that our nuns mentioned sex hardly at all: love, never.

Perhaps they were afraid of our superior knowledge. Sometimes they did mention boys – the wary tension in their voices seeming to capitalize them, so that they became Boys of a special type, not the everyday ones that you