saw on the street but another kind that you’d meet when the time was ripe. And the time would be ripe at some social occasion, some occasion under Catholic auspices, in a draughty hall . . . I pictured them as awkward poor devils, these Boys, the sleeves of their suits too short and their raw hands hanging down, their round faces shining, their smiles bashful and placatory. They knew their nature – uncontrollable – and were ashamed of it. When my mother stopped my comics –
My mother said, ‘You’ll find it’s usually the nice girls who get into trouble of that sort.’
‘Why?’ I said. There was a gap here, of information not imparted: slipped between the lines, slipped between the years.
‘It’s because they’re too trusting,’ my mother said. She looked severe. ‘Those hard madams, you don’t find them having babies. Oh no, because they know what’s what. It’s the nice girls who fall for it every time.’
I took the problem to my enemy. ‘Karina,’ I said, ‘do you know how people get babies?’
‘God!’ she said. ‘Don’t you know that yet?’ But I could see panic in her face, as if she were a horse being galloped at a fence she would not be able to jump. She hit me, and ran off down the street.
My periods started one Tuesday evening in my first term at the Holy Redeemer. I had just finished writing the character of Cassius – bitter, energetic, ambitious – when I went up to the lavatory and found out what a mess I was in. I did not think I was dying, like girls in novels that pre-date this one; though my ignorance was profound, there must have been some intimation, some hint, some suspicion in the air, that a thing like this might occur. I did not feel afraid, but I felt ashamed. The difficulties seemed practical; I had to lay some plot to get my mother on her own.
My mother was sitting under the standard lamp knitting a Fair Isle pullover. When she was doing Fair Isle she did not like people to speak to her. I went up to her and touched her elbow. She snarled. I looked around, dazed. What if I bled on the carpet? My father was doing a jigsaw of the Tower of London. ‘Can you come up to my bedroom?’ I whispered. ‘Tell you something. I want to. Must, please.’
‘What is it you can’t tell your mother here?’ my father inquired. He slotted into place a fragment of the outer wall of a torture chamber.
‘It’s a surprise,’ I said. I thought it a cool thing to say; I amazed myself.
‘Oh, a surprise,’ he said genially. After all, it was his birthday in a week. He nodded, and fitted in a Beefeater’s knee.
When my mother came up to my bedroom I was already undressing. She gave me a cursory glance. ‘Have you got jam on your underskirt?’
I looked at her in astonishment. How on earth did she think I would manage that? Where would I get the jam from, unless she gave it to me? I shook my head. At the thought of eating unsupervised jam.
Twenty minutes later, trussed up in a harness, I was in bed. I wailed that it was not bedtime, but this cut no ice with my mother. I wailed that I had not done my equations, and she said curtly, ‘I’ll give you a note.’ I wailed how long would it go on for, and when would it happen again? ‘Every month, or twenty-five days in my case,’ my mother snapped. I wailed, how old would I be when it stopped, and my mother said, ‘I’ll get you a book about it.’
‘Will I always have to go to bed early?’ I said.
She said, ‘Don’t be so silly.’
Next day I suffered spasms of pain that left me shaking and winded. I felt as if a big bird – one of the ravens, perhaps, from the Tower of London – had got its claws in my lower back and was rending it apart, prizing flesh from spine. Later the pain moved and I felt as if the dissection were being performed more urgently, surgically; I thought of the skinned corpses of animals hanging in butchers’ shops, neatly split down the mid-line. ‘Exercise is good for period pain,’ my mother said. ‘Scrubbing floors, that helps it.’
So here it is. The women’s realm.
Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers – not that I study her pronouncements, but this one sticks in my mind – that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.
Unlike Mrs Thatcher, though, I lost my father as well. My mother must have alerted him to what was the matter, when she came downstairs that evening to take up her Fair Isle. He looked at me with wistful disappointment for a month or so. There – I was a woman after all, not his little jigsaw-puzzle companion, not even a mechanism by which he might extract some revenge on life. I was bound to marry – ‘bound to’, he said one day, in a rare burst of communication. Bound to marry and let some man down; I had passed over to the territory of my mother. He treated me with great politeness after those first few disappointed months, and sometimes discussed with me topics that were in the newspapers, to make sure I was keeping up with current affairs. He let me know, without employing words, that if I were ever in trouble, if there were anything I ever needed, I could not count on him.
Year I, I learnt:
a. The ground plan of a medieval monastery;
b. That it is vulgar to use a ballpoint pen instead of a fountain-pen;
c. That parallel lines meet at infinity.
Year II, I learnt:
a. The products of Ecuador;
b. The mountain sheep are sweeter, / But the valley sheep are fatter;
c. To prefer the active to the passive voice.
Year III, I learnt:
