you through a black hatch and you would emerge into a pleasant apartment: a sitting-room with armchairs and a semi-circular rug before the fire, pink carnations in a vase, a standard lamp and a television in the corner. There would be a bedroom and a bathroom; I could not see them, but they would be equally airy and well-appointed. The lights would be on all day, because of course there would be no windows; you would put up with that for the short time of your stay.
Panic fluttered in my throat: a dull bird, a sparrow. I put a hand against it and felt the wings beat. If I had to have my tonsils out I would be put in the operating machine by myself, and I did not know how to live in a house alone. Karina said, ‘You get jelly and ice-cream, after it.’
When she had finished her toast she would take her plate into the kitchen, me trailing behind, and roll up her sleeves to peel a sinkful of potatoes. She would tell me what she was going to do later. ‘I have to make a potato pie. I have to roast a piece of meat.’
I knew she was exaggerating, if not lying altogether. No child would be allowed to do these things. I wished they were. But when I went into the kitchen at home I said, ‘Please, Mum, please, Mum, can I make a cake?’ and she’d say, ‘Stop messing there. Get from under my feet.’ Yet somehow, mysteriously, one had to absorb the domestic arts. There are lessons to be learnt early and learnt well. At the table men are served first, with the best of what’s going. It is the woman’s part to take the fatty piece of meat and the egg that broke as it slid into the pan.
It was some time around this year—the year I was nine—that I became conscious of a falsity surrounding Karina, a disjunction. My mother—other mothers too—would dote on her and hold her up as an example. Such a clean girl, always looks lovely. She helps her mother. Doesn’t have a soft life, both of them at work, had to learn to look after herself and stand on her own two feet. Fetches the potatoes uphill from the market for her mother. Not like you, young lady—everything done for you.
‘Don’t I help?’ I would bellow. ‘Don’t I dry the pots every night, every single night? Don’t I do shopping? Don’t I iron—every week, all the straight things?’
‘Karina never gives cheek.’
I tried to explain to my mother once, when I was in a reasoning mood and thought she might listen.
‘Karina, you see, she’s this way and then she’s that. She’s nice to your face, but horrible. She says horrible things to you. She envies you.’
‘I’m not surprised if she envies you. You, with everything provided for you, and nothing to do but get yourself to school and back.’
‘No, but the things you’ve got. Your library book. You think it’s nice. Karina says, I wouldn’t be reading that muck. Then you used to like it but you don’t like it any more.’
My mother looked at me stonily. She did not understand. Soon she would say something about cattle-waggons, as if I were part of the reason for them. I knew it was a waste of time trying to talk to adults; they seemed to miss three-quarters of what was going on in the world. I thought of dogs who smell and hear and never look, cats who just eat and stare at people and creep around till they fall asleep in the sun. Something vital’s left out: but with people, something vital seeps out as they age.
The next time Sister Basil asked me a stupid question, I didn’t answer her. I just folded my arms and I looked back sadly. She was a small nun, old, who looked as if a cobweb had been draped over her face. ‘Come on, come on,’ she said. ‘Either you know or you don’t know, which is it?’ I passed my eyes over her. Suddenly she came to life, spitting and dancing like a cat. Two red spots grew on her grey cheeks. She propped up the lid of her desk with one arm while with the other hand she rummaged around for her cane. She stood over me and shouted that I would be caned for dumb insolence. I looked back, sadder. There was really no chance of her caning me because I would not hold out my hand when she asked me; I had made a decision on this. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Karina watching me. Her big pink face had turned white.
I don’t really remember what happened next—only that Sister Basil backed off, backed down, found a pretext—and I walked out unmolested at the end of the afternoon, everyone silent around me, and Karina shadowing me with her slapping, rolling, puppy’s walk, not offering to link me until she saw which way the wind was blowing. Sister Basil’s question was this: Who invented the telephone? I was sure she had the answer at the back of her book. Why didn’t she ask questions to which she didn’t know the answers? Then she might learn something to her advantage.
I tore a piece of paper out of my rough book. I wrote on it in vast capitals:
ALEXANDER
GRAHAM
BELL
At the end of the day I left it on Sister Basil’s desk. So I knew: and she knew I knew.
Karina arrived at Tonbridge Hall two days after Julianne, and was billeted as arranged in Room C21, with a girl called Lynette Segal, who was a third-year student at the School of East European Studies. We met Lynette just after Karina’s installation, when she tapped at our door after dinner.
I liked her even before she spoke: she was pale, neat and delicate, with a brunette’s glitter and many gold rings. Her eyes were the colour of blackberries. They fell first on the skull on our bookshelf. She said simply, ‘I admire.’
Julianne, sprawled on her bed, looked up. ‘Oh, we do have taste.’
Lynette stood uncertainly, poised almost on her toes. ‘My room-mate says she knows you.’
I nodded.
‘So I said I’d ask you round for coffee.’
‘And petits fours?’ Julianne asked.
Lynette rose a little, as if poised for a balletic spring. ‘Bendicks Bittermints,’ she offered.
Julianne uncoiled her legs. ‘I admire,’ she murmured.
‘Oh, but you must do something,’ Lynette said. She gave a little sideways hop. ‘Or you would die.’
Julianne stood up. Pointed to me. ‘May the prole come too? Only half a mint for her, mind!’
Lynette said to me, ‘How very short your hair is! But it shows off your beautiful eyes.’
I could see that Julianne had also fallen in love. I think women carry this faculty into later life: the faculty for love, I mean. Men will never understand it till they stop confusing love with sex, which will be never. Even today, there are ten or twenty women I love: for a turn of phrase or wrist, for a bruised-looking ankle where the veins have blossomed out, for a squeeze of the hand or for a voice on the end of the phone. I would no more go to bed with any of them than I would drown myself; and drowning is my most feared form of death. Perhaps I love too easily; I can say Lynette has left a mark on my heart.
So: Julianne reached up and took the skull from the shelf. ‘We call her Mrs Webster,’ she said to Lynette. ‘Carmel, she will have her little joke.’ We skipped and slid along the corridor to C21, passing Mrs Webster between us as if she were a rugby ball.
This is how I came to enter a room that now no longer exists, except in my memory: bursting through the door with a skull poised between my hands. The air of C21 was fragrant with spilt talc and splashed cologne. An electric kettle was steaming into the air. The wardrobe doors stood open and I saw Julianne’s eyes pass over crushed silk and cashmere, squeezed over in one half of the wardrobe to leave room for Karina’s clothes. On the floor by one of the desks stood three pairs of beautiful boots, like sentinels whose upper part has been assumed to heaven: slim straight-sided high-heeled boots, their aroma of leather and polish blossoming into the room. One pair burgundy: one pair a deep burnished chestnut: one pair black and fluid as melting tar.
And on one of the beds, there basked a fur, a longhaired fox fur, its colours banded and streaked, strawberry blonde with platinum tips. My eyes were drawn ineluctably towards it, as fingers are drawn to marble