An Experiment in Love: A Novel by Hilary Mantel

Author:Hilary Mantel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780312426873
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2007-06-11T22:00:00+00:00

The Holy Redeemer was an academy well-thought-of in the district where it was situated – that is to say, it valued the social manner of its girls above their originality or wit. The girls themselves were lively, boastful, vain; a few were shy, a few snobbish, a few rebellious. In the seven years between our arrival as first formers and our departure from the Upper Sixth, characters changed of course – but they didn’t change much. It was the girls’ appearance that was subject to volcanic, dismaying alterations. Little gilt girls grew coarse and dark, gangling girls grew svelte; modest girls grew great bosoms and dragged them about like the sorrows of Young Werther. Others, pale and self-effacing as novices, whispered unnoticed through their days, hardly embodied inside their solid maroon-and-clay uniforms, creeping out of the school at eighteen on the same mouse feet that had brought them in at eleven. A number of such girls secured lovers and husbands at once, without the trouble of looking for them, and began upon tumultuous and dazzling erotic careers. Some needed just a year or two to blossom into women who occupied the normal amount of space and breathed their ration of air. Some of them blossomed at thirty, no doubt, and some will find themselves at forty; some will creep on those mouse feet into old age.

In my first year at school I learnt a great deal of poetry by heart, and recited it in my bedroom at night to improve my diction. My vowels remained long and slow, but – though I continued to wear the shoes with the running boards, and to drag my satchel after me – I became indistinguishable, in a year or two, from my companions who had more privileged home-lives. The nuns and lay teachers, though blinkered and inadequate in some respects, were not so snobbish that they made distinctions between Karina, myself and the others: not to our faces, anyway. Who knows – perhaps they regarded us with interest? We were the first girls from our school – from any school like ours – to go to the Holy Redeemer, and perhaps we were thought of as a worthy social experiment.

In my first-year exams I performed with competence in each subject, and was placed fifteenth in a class of thirty-four girls. I was very satisfied with my modest success; it was unlikely to tempt fate, unlikely to attract envy or spite. But then in my second year – in spite of myself, it seemed – I was placed near the top of the class. A year later, only Julianne and I were serious contenders for the Third-Year Prize. She began to notice me, her blue eyes sliding dubiously over me from beneath the lemony froth of her fringe.

Julianne was a doctor’s daughter. She was tall, strong, athletic and fast. She never minded what she said and she never minded what she did. If this were a school story for girls, of the kind that have gone out of fashion now, I would be telling you that she was the most popular girl in the form.

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