I hung to the back and watched this performance. I tried to detach myself. I was amused, and a little embarrassed for them. I believed, as strictly as any Victorian mamma, that appetite was unbecoming to women. That girls with the benefit of a university education should hardly need food. My morning battle with myself and the toast—well, at least it was fought in silence, and with dignity.
Once we were admitted, we moved to our habitual tables: four girls to each side, two senior students at each end, taking our places before an array of cutlery suited to a banquet, splashing into tumblers London tap water from tall glass jugs. Soup was always the same, whatever its description on the weekly menu pinned up by the warden’s office; it was an uncleaned aquarium, where vegetable matter swam. Or—now I think of it—perhaps there were two kinds of soup. There was the kind I have mentioned—where fragments, deep green, lodged in your teeth. There was also cream soup, beige and very peppery.
Next came the dishes of vegetables, and an oval stainless-steel platter of the evening’s meat or fish, placed before one of the seniors to be divided by ten. Justice must be served, and you must picture to yourself the minute forking, the shuffling and the shredding, of a quantity perhaps reasonable for four. How could they do it? I ask myself now. If we’d been boys, they wouldn’t have dared do it.
We ate our shred, and our two small potatoes, our vegetables of the root kind; all the time making bright, strained conversation, about our courses, tutors, hopes for the weekend: never high, in my case. It was dark outside now, and we dined in pools of yellow light, and sometimes I would hear the London rain against the windows, and feel bleak and far away from home. Then from the end of the table a plummy voice would be raised: ‘There’s a tiny bit more, if anyone would care to…’
For they were good judges, the shred-monitors, good but not perfect. They always felt they must keep a tiny portion in reserve, in case they had bungled it and the last hungry girl should be short-changed. And there it lay on its platter, and no one could bring herself to speak; for these girls, collectively voracious, were individually all of my opinion, and would rather starve than speak. I used to think, what if, what if a shred-monitor said, Right then, no takers? What if she picked up in her fingers the white sauce or gravy-dripping fragment, and tossed back her head like a sea-lion, and crammed it into her open mouth?
The platters would be returned to the kitchen, each with a slice of flesh remaining. No doubt they noticed this, our rulers, and convinced themselves that we were adequately fed; that we were satisfied, more than satisfied. Why else return to the kitchen food untouched?
A month passed. Our new lives had properly begun. My file of lecture notes mounted, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, but I took time off to walk. I walked along the Strand and up Fleet Street and on to the City, I walked through the royal parks and up to Camden Town and Hampstead and saw Hampstead Heath. I trekked through Whitehall and Millbank, noting the monuments and learning the views. I tramped through museums and art galleries—anything that was free. Julianne haunted the cinemas with her friends, and the union bar, and the pubs on Tottenham Court Road, and she would speak quite casually of things she had eaten, of by-the-way omelettes and hamburgers, which were a natural part of her evenings out.
I was happy, in those early weeks. There were times when I felt holy, lucky, selected. At Tonbridge Hall there was order and warmth, so I did not care if there were regulations too. My tutors spoke to me with respect, as if I were a sentient and sensitive being; this was a relief after the routine sarcasms of nuns. I felt like a feather-light duchess, skimming down Drury Lane in the mornings; but there was an insistent migraine pain behind my left eye, which pricked at my sensibilities, made me clever and sharp, but which left me shaking sometimes, uncertain in the traffic, unsure of the parameters of my own body. That winter was mild, and so I wore my pale shower-proof until Bonfire Night, and after that a duffel coat which had been donated to me before I left home by a distant cousin. Sometimes, extracting coins from my purse, I travelled on the tube late at night, going God knows where: Arsenal, Angel, Kentish Town. Later I would have to make up for my time off by sitting under the lamp at the desk I had reserved for myself, writing very fast in black ink.
Julianne stayed out all night, every second day. The ponderous front doors of Tonbridge Hall were locked at eleven, and if you wanted to come in after that you had to apply to the warden for what was called a ‘late key’. The warden would hear you out, weigh your application, record your destination in a large bound volume which she kept on her desk. But if you were prepared to go out and stay out, who was to know?
On the other day—Julianne’s day in—she would go to bed at nine. She fell asleep easily, though my desk lamp burnt far into the night. When she turned she flounced in the bed, making the springs creak and half-waking herself, so that she would mutter a few words and turn again and throw out a bare white arm, to scoop against her breasts a torso of empty air. And I would lean back in my chair, resentful chin on the point of my shoulder, watching her; this easy sleep, I couldn’t learn it, I hardly knew if it was becoming. Sleep-starve is best, I said to myself; think of the hours of the night, just the same in quality as the hours of the day, and so many of them, and so much to be done.
In the mornings, Julianne turned over again, as if drugged, delirious, dreaming; it was hard to pull herself to the surface of the day. Sometimes when her travelling clock began its tinny drumming she would pluck it from her bedside table and hurl it towards me; heart fluttering under the single blanket, I would claw for it and clutch it and make the bell stop; smiling a dazed smile, Julianne would tumble back into sleep; myself out at eight, feet on the striped mat, then down the stairs, rubber toast, Sophies, the winter roads. In Houghton Street someone would always say hello, and already there was a seat in the library I could think of as mine. I tore into the work set for me, I rent it and devoured it and I ate it all up every scrap. And still these lines of verse ran through my head, as if I had a brain disease, some epilepsy-variant, some repeating blip in my cells:
I step into my heart and there I meet
A god-almighty devil singing small,
Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,
And squelch the passers flat against the wall;
If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,
He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.
One morning in the autumn, when I was eight, I went on to Curzon Street and there wasn’t Karina: not stumping towards me as usual. Hopefully, I bawled back into the house: ‘Hey, Mum, Karina’s not here.’
I hoped my mother would say, ‘You go on your own, you mustn’t be late.’
This damage to routine might free me from Karina, I thought; it would break up the pattern.
My mother shouted back, ‘Go and call for her.’
‘At her house?’
My mother appeared. ‘Yes, just knock on the door.’
‘She might be poorly.’
‘Well, go and see.’
‘They might all be asleep.’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘They might have flitted.’
‘What? Moved house? Don’t be silly,’ my mother said.
I had played my last card. I trudged along Curzon Street and knocked at Karina’s door. Her mother called,