‘Is experience good for its own sake?’ I asked.
I felt Julianne’s greedy gaze fasten on me: as if she were going to dissect me. Her eyes stripped me down for a moment, down to the bone. Then she flopped back on the bed and stretched, easing her round ample limbs inside her lawn nightdress: abundant, generous, superbly amoral. It occurred to me that perhaps I was the subject of an experiment, an experiment, let us say, in love; that I lived my life under Julianne’s gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them herself. But how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don’t teach you how to live, you learn it from books; and clever people watch you, to learn from your mistakes.
Niall had said he would like to buy me roses; I myself thought how nice it would be to have a pot-plant to enliven C3, with its magnolia walls and grinning skull and cheap teak-veneer desks. It was this fleeting desire that gave me the idea for my sweater.
Perhaps a russet-brown is not the best colour for a newly red-headed girl. But I dreamt one night of the Holy Redeemer, of the hall at the House, of the broken tile that would give under the foot, tock-tock. The next day I went out and bought some wool the colour of a mellow old flowerpot. I made it up in a plain stocking-stitch, narrow at the waist, wide and square at the shoulder, with a turn-over to give a double thickness at the neck: like a flowerpot’s top. Every spare moment I knitted, sometimes far into the night. I thought that if I flew at it in this way, maintained the tension and momentum, I wouldn’t suffer my old problems of mangled wool and loss of confidence. I dreamt of when it would be finished.
‘I’m going to sew things on it,’ I told Lynette. ‘Drooping stems. Felt leaves. And flowers.’
‘It will be strikingly original,’ she said. ‘It will need to be dry-cleaned.’
‘I know that. I won’t wear it often. But I shall wear it on Guest Night.’
At Tonbridge Hall, Guest Night came three times in the term. One table – where the warden and staff and Hall President normally dined – was described for the evening as High Table, and two others – also highish – were fitted to its ends, so that one had the familiar wedding reception pattern, an ‘E’ without its middle. The chief guest was someone distinguished, and the other three or four guests – who would be scattered on the wing-tables – would be cheerful, stoical women dons from various colleges, who were willing – for no payment – to spend the evening among us. Floor by floor, in our turn, we girls were allocated places among the guests; and now it was the turn of C Floor, and the Secretary of State for Education was to visit us. The kitchens made special efforts, of course, and a girl we knew from B Floor who had been at High Table last term said that you got given food in ordinary amounts, approximately twice as much as you would get if you were dining in the body of the hall.
I had to work fast on the sweater. Lynette pored over the pattern and advised, but it was Karina whose practical skills came into their own when I had to press it and sew the pieces together. Her hair drooped over the ironing board, and there was a faint oily smell of singed wool. ‘Not too hot,’ I said nervously.
‘Look, relax, I know what I’m doing,’ she said. ‘Though I still think it’s ridiculous. I do, Carmel.’
We hadn’t spoken so much in months. We had the ironing-room to ourselves; a window was open, and faint late-January sunlight filtered through the smoggy air. ‘Those silver beads you’ve got to sew on it, they’re going to look very peculiar.’
‘They’re for the centre of the daisies. I’ve got some gold ones too.’
‘Nobody grows daisies in flowerpots.’
‘It’s not an ordinary flowerpot. It’s a surreal one.’
‘You can excuse any ridiculous thing by calling it that.’
‘It will be unique.’ I put my hands on either side of my waist and squeezed. She looked up at me. ‘Carmel,’ she said, ‘why are you such a show-off?’
‘Show off? Me?’ A sour spurt of anger, like stomach acid, rose up into my throat. I reached across and tore my segments of sweater from under her hands. In doing so I knocked aside the iron, which she was holding loosely in her right hand, and it skimmed the knuckles of her left. I watched the mark appear, blue against the bone. Taking her own time, Karina placed the iron on its heel and raised the back of her hand to her lips and sucked it. ‘God, stop it,’ I said. ‘Rinse it under the cold tap.’
‘Saliva’s antiseptic,’ she said.
I knew. I remembered learning that in biology, Form Four. ‘I haven’t killed you,’ I said. ‘It was only on bloody wool setting. Or it ought to have been.’
When I got out into the corridor my knitting was still a hot parcel in my hands, tenuous and floppy; premature. Sabotage! I thought. She might have terminally scorched it, if her big mouth hadn’t made me intervene.
When I got back to my room I felt shaky. I had lost my temper, and it was news to me that I had a temper to lose.
That evening, my head bent over my task, I said to Julianne, ‘There’s something about Karina that makes me damage her.’
Julianne gave me a blue-eyed, glazed look; disengaged herself from my remark. ‘Let’s see, then. Oh yes, I like the twisty stems.’
I was sewing. My flowerpot sweater was assembled and I was applying its fantastical felt daisies, petal by petal. There were embroidered flowers too, less specific in type, and even the daisies were not the colours they are in life. I had remembered chain stitch, stem stitch and satin stitch, and my fingers moved more cleverly than they’d ever moved under a teacher’s eye. I had spilt my little beads out of their paper bags, and corralled them in Jule’s ashtray. They looked sinister, as they rolled: like the vital parts of a missile system.
I spread out my work on the end of my bed, so that Julianne could finger it and politely exclaim, with a simple kindness I might have thought foreign to her. ‘Vine leaves,’ she said, ‘couldn’t you do vine leaves? It would add a touch of the exotic.’
It struck me that perhaps Tonbridge Hall was drawing us together: who is my neighbour? ‘Wake me up tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I want to come to breakfast.’
I woke at four o’clock and lay in the dark. The bedspread, under my hand, was like gritty sand. Twice I got up to check the travel alarm. For three days I had not heard from Niall. Since Christmas there had been these gaps, of a day here and a day there – but never a gap of three days together.
By seven I was drowsing: too late. I forced myself out of bed and opened the window a crack. The cold entered
