An Experiment in Love: A Novel

a. The anatomy of a rabbit;

b. That beauty is truth, truth beauty;

c. How to apply liquid eyeliner.

Year IV, I learnt :

a. The ablative absolute;

b. The composition of the blood;

c. Something of the nature of the task before me.

Once, when we were fifteen years old and we were leaving the examination room after our O-level Latin paper, Julianne stepped lightly behind me in the corridor and slid her hand on to my shoulder. She left it there, large and warm and solid, for the briefest possible time. But I remember that her touch was curiously sustaining. It was as if a member of a conspiracy, on her way to interrogation, had met a fellow conspirator by accident, and received a moment’s consolation on the stone and winding stair.

Julianne sat behind me, in every successive class; she had her friends, among the bold and the pretty, and I had mine among the mice. Sometimes I sensed within myself – sometimes I felt it strongly – a will, a pull towards frivolity. I wanted to separate myself from the common fate of girls who are called Carmel, and identify myself with girls with casual names, names which their parents didn’t think about too hard. I wanted to elect pleasure, not duty, and to be happy, and to have an expectation of happiness.

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.

During my years at the Holy Redeemer, it was Karina kept me going, as far as food was concerned. She always brought food to school with her, packed up in greaseproof and bursting out of brown paper bags. She’d have a stack of sandwiches, ox tongue or Cheshire cheese, perhaps buttered scones and some of the heavy sponge cakes she made herself. Sometimes on the bus on the way to school, she’d be in the middle of a sentence and her hand would begin absent-mindedly to fumble into her bag, and she’d draw out a piece of bread spread thick with potted beef, and begin to munch away. At morning break she would give herself another ration, and then she would eat up all her school dinner, even when it was the special fish made entirely of bones, even when it was semolina. She would have packed enough to see her right on the journey home; and it was at this point in the day that she would sometimes turn to me and say, ‘Are you hungry?’ and offer me a sandwich and a cake from one of her bags.

Of course, no girl from the Holy Redeemer was ever permitted to eat in public; there was a prominent paragraph in the school rules, denouncing the practice. So a day came when Mother Benedict hauled me in. ‘Who reported me?’ I asked.

‘Nothing to the point,’ she snapped. ‘God sees all things.’

But I could not help wondering why only I was in trouble, and not Karina, a constant and habitual public muncher. ‘Why did you do this thing, Carmel?’ the nun said passionately. ‘You have never shown an inclination to such distasteful behaviour until now.’

‘I was hungry, Mother,’ I said; I could not think of any other reason.

She looked at me, disconcerted. ‘You’re a healthy girl, aren’t you, Carmel? You can surely withstand the odd pang of hunger without having to make an exhibition of yourself? Think of the poor Indians, starving on the streets of Bombay! What about your lunch, didn’t you eat it?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Be sure to eat up every morsel from now on, and if you don’t like it you can offer it up for the holy souls in purgatory.’

The truth was though that I didn’t think of myself, from day to day, as being hungry. I suppose I knew intellectually that I was, but as far as my body was concerned it was a normal feeling; it was only later, at Tonbridge Hall, that I recognized the hollowness and lightness as being perhaps undesirable.

I found Niall the year before our O-levels, at our town’s central library down by the market-place. The boys from the local Catholic grammar school congregated there in the early evening, when they were not at their various games practices, and scuffed up the pages of the encyclopedias while they covertly scrutinized the girls who came and went. I got into the habit of dropping into the library on my way home; there was nothing in the school rules to prohibit hanging around in a reference section. I can’t have cut much of a figure, with my velour hat like an inverted dish on my head, but we must suppose that I inspired in Niall a wish to see me otherwise.

It is a mistake, of course, to think that convent girls wait until they’re adults to disappoint the expectations of the nuns. In our generation, growing up through the sixties, we quickly developed our double lives. We were women inside children’s clothes, atheists at Mass, official virgins and de facto rakes. It was not deceit; it was dualism. We had grown up with it. Flesh and spirit, ambition and humility. It was time to make plans for the future; I swung between thinking I could do anything with my life, and that I could do nothing. I still fitted into the blazer bought for my first summer at the Holy Redeemer. My mouse feet had hardly grown, so my indoor shoes were still going strong, and had perhaps acquired a perverse chic. But my satchel was scuffed and battered, and inside it at the bottom corner there was a big ink stain, like the map of a new continent.

Maybe the act of love came too late. As a career move, I should have lost my burdensome virginity at thirteen or fourteen, when there would have been no question of a lasting attachment and no desire for one. As it was, I shook when I removed my clothes and I cried after it was done, not out of pain or disappointment but out of an up- rush of muddling emotion which twenty-four hours later I was ready to call love.

So we formed an attachment, Niall and I, and after three or four months were spoken of by our friends as if we were an old married couple.

Niall said really sensible things to me. He said, Why don’t you get a Saturday job? It would give you some freedom. My mother said, no daughter of mine. What, in a shop or a cafe! What would Mother Benedict say!

Saturdays were for homework: getting into Oxbridge. My mother had heard this term ‘Oxbridge’ and had begun to use it, and it was making me uneasy. I was afraid she thought it was a real place; when the time came, Oxford or Cambridge would not be good enough, only Oxbridge would be good enough for a daughter of hers.

‘Just tell her,’ Julianne said. ‘Tell her you’ve no wish to spend three years locked in some musty quadrangle with people who will laugh at your accent.’

We were closer, now we were sixth formers – no longer academic rivals because Julianne was in the science stream and I was doing the girls’ stuff. All the advice she gave me was of this twist-in-the-tail kind; but you didn’t go to her to feed your self-esteem.