An Experiment in Love: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

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 inthe 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-yolk 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, ‘Don’t talk daft.’
    I didn’t 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. ‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked.
    ‘I’ve been poorly.’
    ‘You’re weak,’ she said.
    ‘I’m not.’
    ‘It’s your hair. Being that long. All down your back. Your strength goes into it.’
    ‘It doesn’t.’
    ‘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 don’t know if you understand about restitution. I am always aggrieved – though God knows, I’ve not set foot in church since my schooldays – by 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. I’m afraid it’s 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