An Experiment in Love: A Novel Read Free

and contentiously, the names of strange towns. Colchester was mentioned, so at another time wasStroud, and so was a place my mother pronounced lengthily as Kingston – upon – Hull. Later I realized that these were places to which we might have gone to live, if my father had taken up an offer of promotion. But for one reason or another he never did. When I was in my teens they would take me into rooms separately, and hiss between their teeth – false, in both cases – about who had wanted to go and who hadn’t, who had wrecked whose chances. It was beyond me to make any sense of this: to trap them in a room together and get them to have it out, spit out the truth of the situation. Perhaps I already suspected there was no truth to be had; their fictions were interwoven, depending one on the other.
    In summer, when I was a small girl, we would take a bus to the outskirts of the town, and walk in the hills, rambling along the bridle paths in clear green air. We were above the line of the mill chimneys; like angels, we skimmed their frail tops.
    Once you have begun remembering – isn’t this so? – one image springs another; they run through your head in all directions, scampering animals flushed from coverts. Memory’s not a reel, not a film you can run backwards and forwards at will: it’s that flash of startled fur, the slither of silk between the fingers, the duplicated texture of hair or bone. It’s an image blurring, caught on the move: as if in one of my family snapshots, taken before cameras got so foolproof that any fool could capture the moment.
    I remember this.
    I am six years old, and I have been ill. After thisillness I am returning to school. It is a spring morning, water gurgling in the gutters, a keen wind. I am still shaky, unused to going out, and I have to hold tight to my mother’s hand as she leads me through the school gate. Perhaps I don’t want to go; I don’t know. There is one tree in our school playground, and the scud and dapple of sun across its leaves is like the feeling in my limbs, now heavy, now light. Everything is new to me. My eyes are clear and cold, as if they have been rinsed in ice water.
    Inside the classroom the air is hot and fusty. It smells of damp and wool and of our playtime milk cooking in its bottles beside the radiator pipes, growing glutinous and clotted. Perhaps in summer, when we have our holidays, this smell goes away? In detail: chalk smells of peaches, or I think the word ‘chalk’ is like the word ‘peaches’, because of the texture both sounds share, the plushness and the grain. Rulers smell of their wood, of their varnish, and of the salt and flesh of the hand which has warmed them: as you draw them beneath your nose you feel each dividing notch, so that each fraction of an inch has its measured segment of scent. My teacher will snarl – her eyes popping at me – that in all the time I’ve been off sick she thinks I
might
have learnt to draw a straight line. But that’s later; for this morning there’s an element of sweetness, and this shivering light. It is as if my teacher has forgotten who I am, and that when she last saw me she threatened to hit me for singing. My renaissance has called out of her a vague good-will. ‘Let me see,’ she says, looking around the classroom. ‘Where would you like to sit?’
    The luxury of choice. My fingers curl into my palms like snails. I know what I would like: to sit next to someone who has a certificate to show that there are no insects in their hair. Eggs, my mother says, eggs are what you find, but I cannot imagine eggs unless they are hens’ eggs. While she scrapes my scalp with the steel comb she always emphasizes that lice are democratic, that they visit the rich as well as the poor – though we don’t, I think, know anyone who is rich – and that they like, they positively
prefer
, clean heads over dirty ones. I come into the category of clean heads, and she tells me this so that I will not look