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 couldnt 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 classrooms lights and the cloud-packed skies outside. Her pleated skirt was royal bluesuperior to navy, she told me. It settled somewhere under her armpits, for Karina had no waist. She was a big girl, people saidsaid it approvinglya 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: Shes 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, Karinas mother had understood this, because there was a scrubbed, scoured quality about her daughters plump hands and big square white teeth. Karinas 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, Karinas a peasant. Well now, isnt she? In England we dont 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 eightand perhaps this was what drew us togethera marked indifference to public opinion.
That I should look nice, that I should look different: this was my mothers 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.
Karina said, Dont talk daft.
I didnt at once take my fingers away.
At Easter you get eggs. She turned her dimpled face towards me, and the fuzzy halo around her hair cast itself into a bobbing disc against the classroom wall. Whereve you been? she asked.
Ive been poorly.
Youre weak, she said.
Im not.
Its your hair. Being that long. All down your back. Your strength goes into it.
It doesnt.
Where else does it go then?
I was silent. I thought over what she had said. She swung her head away and one jutting ribboned braid was outlined for a moment against the wall. This is the cow with the crumpled horn Once again my fingers stole out to graze the fluff of her sleeve. Karina brought her hand down and chopped it across my fingers so hard that I felt the equivalent of a mild electric shock: a small pain, but dull, bruising and deep.
There were three reasons why every day I walked to school with Karina. The first, and most simple, was that I hoped that, odd as my outfit would be, Karina would be wearing something odder.
The second was that my mother said I must.
The third was that I wanted to make restitution.
I dont know if you understand about restitution. I am always aggrievedthough God knows, Ive not set foot in church since my schooldaysby the assumption that Catholics have easy lives: that they sin as and when and where they like, then pop into the confessional and get it wiped off the slate. Im afraid its not so simple as that. First, you have to be sorry for your sin. Second, you have to do your best not to repeat it. Third, if there is anything you can do to make up for it, you must do it. If you steal money, you must give it back. If you slander a person, you must spend the rest of your life writing sonnets in praise of their good character. If you injure someones feelings, you must try to mend the damage.
My tie to Karina had to do with restitution. I had done her a wrong, an injury, and this wrong occurred in the first month after I came to school, when I was four years old.
They say people remember their early years as sunlit. Perhaps this is true for people born in the south, who are richer and have better weather. What I remember largely, is hail and sleet, and the modified excitement when it actually began to snow: neuralgic winds and icicles like stalactites, and poisoned fog in rolling banks of yellow-grey. In one of these climatic exigenciesno doubt in more than one, as they tended to overlapwe were kept in for playtime, and had to work off our baby energies by romping in a cramped and hushed way in our classroom. And there was I, and there Karina was too.
The infants classroom is not laid out quite like the others: into which we only peep, being deterred by legends of the frightful beatings given out to our seniors. It smells the sameof coke and dust and nunsbut also of the mild creamy flesh of us babies, our skin and hair and Wellingtons; and when I think of this, I think of the huge letters in our reading books, which are about a brother and sister called Dick and Dora. I think of the French pleat in the hair of the mother of Dick and Dora, the tweed suit worn by the father of Dick and Dora: and into my mouth seeps the taste, oily and sweet, of welfare-state orange juice. Very well: I am four: I am in the classroom and there is a low cupboard that runs right along one wall. Our paintings are pinned above it: at least, those that are more figurative than abstract.
It is ten-thirty, I suppose. I cant tell the time yet. I know how to chant five past, ten past, and the rest, but I havent realized the relationship between the numbers and the pointing fingers. But lets agree its ten-thirty; its raining and dark. I can see the rain hitting the window in discrete splashes then splitting and widening into the Nile delta, though this is a river of whose existence I am not yet informed; I watch the delta become an ocean, a simple roar, a wall of sound. I am sitting on the cupboard swinging my legs. To, fro, to, fro. Fawn socks and lace-up shoes.
Karina comes by. Her pale blue eyes look straight ahead, and her expression is distant but implacable. She has a toy truck, a lorry she is pulling on a string. The lorry is red. In the back of it is crammed a baby doll, a fair, fat, blubbery baby doll, plastic pink and naked. What a game! A baby in a lorry! I think its stupid.
Before I have time to think anything else, out shoots my foot. Out shoots my foot from the knee. Up sails the lorry, up into the air. Out flies the plastic baby. And smash! Down on the classroom floor, down on its bald pink head. Dead.
Karina drops the string of her lorry. Slowly turns. Sucks in her lips, which are the same pink as her face, between the big square teeth. Then tearsfat tearsbegin to roll silently down her cheeks. I sit with my leg still swinging, as if it is a mechanism over which I have no control. Karina menaces me: she raises her arm from the elbow, in a parody of hitting. She is afraid, I can tell she is. She approaches me; the blow lands on my shoulder, soft as pat-a-cake, and a tear falls on to my hand, scorching me. I rub my hand on my dress, and the tear goes away.
Normally if anybody hits me I hit back. I poke their eyes out. I am four and I am famous as a good fighter. Kick them in the kidneys, Grandad says, theyll not take much of that. I know kidneys: I have seen them on a plate. I know they come from the butcher, and I imagine my enemies toiling up Bismarck Street with a shopping-bag, and their kidneys inside wrapped in bloody paper. In my mind, my leg shoots high and straight, high up to my ear, and I catch them so, on the very point of my toe; I send their kidneys spinning.
The butcher writes his prices on the paper; he does adding up, the sum wobbling and warping round the parcel. How much are kidneys? I hardly care. I kick them in the shins too; thats part of their leg. It doesnt matter what you do, Grandad says, as long as you dont hesitate; he who hesitates is lost. Strike, strike hard, strike home.
But I let Karina get away because I know what I did was wrong, to boot her baby like that. I wonder, in fact, why she didnt hit me harder, why she was so plainly afraid; but I think it must have been the mechanical ruthlessness of my foot, swinging and pinging, shooting and booting in its John Whites lace-up infant school shoe.
Where was Julianne? Not there: ten miles away in the country, at her private prep school. I imagine her playing with bright plastic shapes on a magnetic board: fitting and manipulating, while a sweet-faced nun smiles above her, and feeds her dolly-mixtures, and says, dear little Julianne.
I went home, and said to my mother, Karina hit me.
My mother sat me on the kitchen table. She taught me a song:
Karinas a funny un
Shes a face like a pickled onion
Shes a nose like a squashed tomater
And legs like two sticks.
Will I sing it tomorrow? I cried, beside myself with joy.
No, my mother said. Sing it to yourself. Its just to help you feel better.
I understood this perfectly; that if youve learnt something really insulting and gross, a lot of the pleasure is in keeping it to yourself. OK, I said. Kicked my legs a bit. Oh, I was a bright, happy little soul, in those days.
This was the first and last joke my mother made about Karina. At some time in the next two or three years, my mother and Karinas mother held some sort of colloquy in the street, after which my mother came home and cried and mentioned cattle-waggons. What that young womans life has been, she said, is not to be contemplated, it is not to be contemplated. My father went away and got his model kit out and made a model bomber.
When these grey aeroplanes were done, he would slot them for display on to a Perspex stand, clear thin plastic which was meant to look not there and make you think the planes were flying.
My mother said, Now, when youre off to school, you will always call for Karina, wont you?
Most days, Karina was there already on Curzon Street, waiting and watching for me. Her arm slid through mine, doing what we called linking. Ill link ye, a woman would say to another, slipping an arm through an arm. It was the way for women to get along the street. Nowadays, you would be presumed to be lesbians, I suppose.
Nowadays. Oh, nowadays.
Twenty-four hours after Juliannes arrival in London, I was putting papers into ring-binders and she was lying on her bed, reading the Evening Standard. There was a tap at our door.
Herein, Jule said, thunderously: she mouthed, Theyll surely think Im Freud.
A voice said, Oh, may we?
Two bright faces, one spotty, appeared around the door.
You may come in entirely, Jule said. The invitation is for more than your heads.
So in they came: Claire, a large solid-bosomed girl from Bournemouth, and a little sparrow called Sue, who sounded deeply southern but didnt say where she was from. They wore, the both of them, jolly jumpers; beneath, Claire wore a baggy skirt, and Sue wore decent slacks of a polyester type, the kind of thing peoples mothers buy.
It was Claire who had the spots. We ran our eyes over them, in that pitiless way girls have at eighteen: to see if there was any battle to be fought. But Jule signalled to me with her big white hand, as if to indicate truce. They were in no case to take our men from us; and there was no man they could possibly attract, that we would care to take from them.
They stood on the cotton rug, their shins brushing the coffee table; they smiled tolerantly at our bookshelves, at our Marx and Leonard Cohen and Hermann Hesse, and tolerantly at Jules ashtray, and tolerantly at my long thin legs below my tiny skirt. Im at Kings, Claire said. And Sue here, shes at Bedford. Youre medical, arent you, Miss Lipcott?
Mm, Julianne said. But not dissected anything yet.
I say. Claire laughed. Got all that to come, eh? She shifted her feet; almost her spots seemed to redden, as if she were going to come now to something delicate, possibly embarrassing. Look, she said, weve been going around, were old hands, you see, to welcome the newcomers, and the thing is, were not an organized group, its just informal, but if youd like to join usyou see wewe get togetherand we go to church.