if passers-by ever saw this ritual, and paused to ask themselves what was going on.
It was a sport for boys, not for grown men. Sue’s Roger endured it sullenly. Claire – grim-faced – hauled her mattress to another room, and Sue and her man stayed in bed for most of the weekend. ‘Wouldn’t you think they’d like to vary their programme of activities just a little?’ Julianne said. Each one of us, even though she had a man of her own, was violently jealous of anyone who had a man at that very moment.
‘We’re getting married as soon as I graduate,’ Sue said on Monday morning. ‘Roger says so.’ She was enrobed in smugness, wrapped in self-satisfaction as if in a cobweb shawl. ‘It’s a long time to wait, but – well . . .’ She tried an optimistic little shrug. I saw the invisible shawl move on her shoulders.
‘Will he give you an engagement ring?’ Lynette asked.
‘Oh, we won’t bother with that,’ Sue said. ‘It’s bourgeois.’
There was a strange note in her voice, as if she were lurching off course. Claire stared at her, uncomprehending. ‘Is he political?’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
At intervals that week I would take out the letter from my mother and read it. I hoped that it would be different, that the words would somehow unwrite themselves while they lay in the darkness of the drawer, or the flowers at least erase themselves from the edges of the page. When I was little and she went out cleaning, her employers would sometimes try to give her things: surplus food and cast-off clothing. ‘I flung it back in her face,’ she’d say. At Christmas she did accept gifts of money; otherwise, the only thing she’d ever brought home were roses, ten inches long with flexible stems and plastic thorns. They came free for some months with a certain brand of washing powder, and by the time she lost interest we must have had four dozen of these artefacts in all colours, many of them unknown to nature. My fingers still remember the slimy, pliable plastic; I dipped and twisted the flower-heads, turning them to a pleasant angle. Even the folded petals could be moved, so you could elect the bud or the full-blown rose. You could cram them in the same vase, crimson and stippled apricot, youth and age, the whisper of promise and the rose past its prime; they were scentless, accreting to themselves a sticky grey dust, as if they leaked something that would attract it. Arranging them was my hobby, for quite some time.
There was a hairdressing-room up on the sixth floor, with wash-basins and hand-held showers over them. Some of us used to go up there and experimentally dye our hair with solutions that called themselves ‘shampoo in, shampoo out’. They didn’t, of course, and one day in this seventh week of term, by some accident of mistiming and absent-mindedness, I coloured my hair a flaming red. What I had been after was a discreet enhancement of my moth-wing tufts: when I looked in the mirror I was appalled, but secretly gratified. A frail wisp crept in, a sad little scholar who missed her straw hat; an incendiary woman swept out.
‘Singular!’ Julianne said, when we met that evening. ‘What will Niall say? When will he be visiting you? I’ll make myself scarce, you know.’ She came up to me and buffeted my boxer’s head with her big soft hands. ‘I worry about you. You used to have sex every weekend. You must be frustrated. I worry will you run amok.’
‘Likely,’ I said. ‘Now I’ve got this red hair.’
‘It’s so
‘Next week,’ I said. ‘He’s coming next week, Niall.’
Julianne said, ‘I’m so glad.’ Then she stared hard at me. ‘You’re losing weight,’ she accused. ‘I should never have brought that skeleton home. It’s giving you ideas.’
The boarding-school girls gave me strange looks in the corridors, but on the whole I liked my new head. For the first time, I commanded respect from strangers; they reacted to me as if I might have a poisoned dagger in my stocking-top.
Next week came, it came at last; and Lynette was going to lend me the fox fur.
I longed to lie naked and quiet in Niall’s arms; my head on his chest, tell him about my mother and how she had cut me off, how, at this late stage, she had aborted me; I wanted, also, to feel him sink into my flesh, bite my neck, suck my breasts. But I did not intend to keep him hidden away, as if I were ashamed of him. We would go out and eat a meal, for which Niall would have carefully budgeted; when Sunday came, I would repay him by exercising my right to introduce a guest for Sunday lunch at Tonbridge Hall. The shillings for his lunch were building up in the back corner of my desk drawer.
We went in ceremonial force to C21: Sue, still glowing, Claire, still grizzling, myself with my new head and Julianne with her amused smile. Karina was at her desk, shoulders hunched. She didn’t turn when we came in. ‘I hope you’re not going to make a racket,’ she said. ‘I’m doing an essay.’
‘Misery-guts,’ I said to her. I felt light with glee, because I was going to see Niall. ‘Don’t you want to witness my transformation?’
Lynette slid the coat from its satin padded hanger and swung it out into the room; it seemed to writhe with its own animal life. Sue seized it by the neck, held it splayed and poised; my stick arms slithered into the silk. The sleeves were long for me; like a Frenchman’s kiss, the fur brushed the backs of my hands. I turned to the mirror and smiled at myself. I looked like a whippet which had been kitted out in the skin of a well-fed golden retriever. Lynette took my face in her hands and kissed me on the nose.
‘I’m off for the weekend,’ Julianne said. ‘Leave the field clear for you.’
‘What, going home?’
‘Yes.’ She was packing a case already; but looking at her back I sensed a reluctance in her.
‘Don’t feel you must. I mean, you could throw your mattress in Lynette’s room.’
‘Oh no. I’d be afraid Karina would roll out of bed in the middle of the night and fall on me and crush me to death.’
‘You could go in with Sue and Claire.’
‘Oh, God, no! Either it’s a revivalist meeting, or we’re on the topic of bloody Roger and his many wonders.’ She mimicked Sue’s whine: ‘ “We’ve been talking over where we’d like to live, me and Roger, never too early to see estate agents . . . Of course, I want a career . . .” Silly bitch. The only career she’ll get is washing his socks in a council flat.’
‘Jule,’ I said, ‘you’re not taking much for the weekend, are you?’
‘I’ve got what I need. I’ve clothes at home.’
