Hilary Mantel - An Experiment in Love

We passed the Irish club, and the florist’s with its small stiff pink-and-white carnations in a bucket, and the drapers called ‘Elvina’s’, which displayed in its window Bear Brand stockings and knife-pleated skirts like cloth concertinas and pasty-shaped hats on false heads. We passed the confectioner’s—or failed to pass it; the window attracted Karina. She balled her hands into her pockets, and leant back, her feet apart; she looked rooted, immovable. The cakes were stacked on decks of sloping shelves, set out on pink doilies whitened by falls of icing sugar. There were vanilla slices, their airy tiers of pastry glued together with confectioners’ custard, fat and lolling like a yellow tongue. There were bubbling jam puffs and ballooning Eccles cakes, slashed to show their plump currant insides. There were jam tarts the size of traffic lights; there were whinberry pies oozing juice like black blood.

‘Look at them buns,’ Karina would say. ‘Look.’ I would turn sideways and see her intent face. Sometimes the tip of her tongue would appear, and slide slowly upwards towards her flat nose. There were sponge buns shaped like fat mushrooms, topped with pink icing and half a glacé cherry. There were coconut pyramids, and low square house-shaped chocolate buns, finished with a big roll of chocolate-wrapped marzipan which was solid as the barrel of a cannon.

I waited for Karina to choose one, to go in and buy it, because I knew that her parents gave her money every day, at least 3d. and sometimes as much as 6d. But after examining the cakes for some time, after discussing them, after speculating on their likely taste and texture until my mouth was full of saliva, Karina would fall silent, and turn away, with something obstinate in her face, something puzzled and pained, some expression which was too complicated for me to identify. And so we would go to school.

Two years went by, marked less by scholastic achievement than by crazes. There was a yo-yo craze, and a fashion for paper games. There were whole weeks when we did nothing but beg stiff plain paper to fold and crease and manufacture things we called ‘Quackers’, disembodied palm-sized beaks that you snapped at people’s noses. There were skipping outbreaks and new rhymes, new rhymes and amalgamations and blends of old ones:

‘Manchester Guardian, Evening News

Here comes a cat in high-heel shoes.

Clock strikes one, Clock strikes two, Clock has a finger and it’s pointing at you.

Mother mother I am sick, Send for the doctor quick quick quick.

Doctor doctor

Will I die?

Course you will and so will I…’

Karina was an efficient skipper. Her feet thundered into the pavement. Up, down, her knees drawn up to her chest; her face wore no expression at all.

We passed through the hands of Miss Whittaker, who hit us on the backs of our knees as everyone had said she would; into the hands of Sister Basil, whose malevolence was tempered by absent-mindedness. I picture her always with her arm upraised, her black sleeve falling away, as she chalks on the blackboard in her flowing cursive script the word ‘Problems’. And underneath, a complex sum, a sum spelt out in words, like a composition, with no plus signs or minus signs: a discursive sum, with no suggested means of working it. ‘If a man buys apples to the value of is. 3d., and pears to the value of 2s. 8d., and hands the shopkeeper 10s. in payment…’ Always these problems were about fruit, coal, the perimeters of fields, railway journeys. If Karina would buy a vanilla slice to the value of 4d., and a chocolate bun to the value of 3d., how many girls could have a nice time?

I was glad when skipping ended. In the middle of the rhyme my mind wandered, and my feet went their own way; the girls who turned the rope set the rhythm, and I couldn’t pick it up. I was glad when it was marbles, because I had my marbles in a grubby white draw-string bag given me by my grandad, and anything my grandad gave me was better than a medal blessed by the Pope. I rolled them towards other marbles with great accuracy, as if I were turning a cold eye on their owners. My favourite marble was a cold colour, its iris pebble-grey with the merest hint of blue. In my mind I called this marble ‘Connemara’.

Karina still wore white ribbons to seal her short thick plaits, but otherwise her dress had become like that now adopted by the other girls: a skirt and a jersey and a shirt-style blouse that was meant to be white but which looked yellow under the classroom’s lights and the cloud-packed skies outside. Her pleated skirt was royal blue—superior to navy, she told me. It settled somewhere under her armpits, for Karina had no waist. She was a big girl, people said—said it approvingly—a big girl, and always very clean. We had no washing-machines, and as bathrooms and hot water were so new, cleanliness was a rugged, effortful virtue. A woman with every vice might be granted absolution with one grudging phrase: ‘She’s very clean, I will say that for her.’ To describe someone as ‘not clean’ was a more dire reproach than to describe them simply as ‘dirty’. Dirt might be a transient phenomenon, but being not clean was a spiritual sickness.

Perhaps, in that ghetto beyond language where she lived, Karina’s mother had understood this, because there was a scrubbed, scoured quality about her daughter’s plump hands and big square white teeth. Karina’s skin was like a pink peach, and she seemed to fill it to bursting; if you had touched her cheek, you would have felt it like ripe fruit ready to split. She was a head taller than me and her shoulders were broad, her bones large and raw.

Later, Julianne used to say, ‘Karina’s a peasant. Well now, isn’t she? In England we don’t have peasants. Why not? Complex socio-economic factors. But in Europe, to be a peasant is normal. And Karina is normal. For a peasant.’

At the first approach of cold weather, Karina would emerge from her house in the morning in stiff suede boots with a zip up the centre. Over her head she would wear a tartan hood called a pixie hood, or sometimes a kind of nylon fur bonnet with extrusions like nylon fur powder-puffs which nestled over her fleshy ears. If it snowed, she would come to school with tartan trews under her pleated skirt, that part of the trews which is below the knee swirled thickly around her calves and crammed into Wellington boots. She had, at the age of eight—and perhaps this was what drew us together—a marked indifference to public opinion.

That I should look nice, that I should look different: this was my mother’s aim in life. On my skirts she embroidered whole fantastic landscapes; on my collars she sewed red admiral butterflies, and on my cardigans she set the stars and the crescent moon. I had no truck with navy or even royal-blue pleats, with anything usual, washed-up, faded or thin. I had sashes; I had petticoats with hoops, belling and swaying around my calves. I had bumblebees hovering over clover flowers on a background of grass green, and a jersey specially knitted in the colour of my eyes. My hair, unloosed, was a thin curtain of pale shadow; an indecipherable grey-gold, a colour with no name. ‘Can you sit on it?’ girls would sometimes say: their grieved fascination edging aside, for a moment, their envy and fright and spite.

You must not think that Karina was kind about my clothes: or that she was any sweeter about my hair than, in our Tonbridge Hall days, Julianne would be. I think again of that sun-shattered, windy morning when I was six years old, and I made my way down the classroom to take my place at the table next to Karina: invited there by her sumptuous smile, and her yellow cardigan.

Small chairs we had, miniaturized; I hitched mine to the table and turned to Karina, smiling in pleasure. Out went my hand, my fingertips, to touch the fluffy egg-volk wool, which I had convinced myself would be damp to the touch. ‘Did you get this for an Easter present?’ I asked her.