The Experimentalist Read online

  ‘But don’t let’s blub, though,’ said Harriet quickly. ‘Teresa will see us and smirk some more. Tell me about this Up Jenkins.’

  ‘I’d need a sixpence to show you how to play it, and I haven’t got one. It’s no good.’

  The Mother Superior had told her that no money was the rule of the school.

  ‘I have,’ said Harriet. ‘Here.’

  So Marie explained that one person had to hide a sixpence in between her fingers, and when the other player said, say, ‘Five Bar Gates’, she had to bring her hands up from below the desk and put them up like gates on the surface, with the palms facing in so the other person couldn’t decide where the coin was hidden. If her opponent couldn’t decide exactly where the sixpence was, she could then use one of the various other commands.

  There was ‘Lobster Pots’ – both hands resting on the tips of the fingers and jigging up and down – or ‘Coffee Pots’ – one set of fingers resting on top of the other with pointing motions to left and right. There was ‘Butterflies’ – a crafty flapping of the hands taking especial care not to let slip the trembling sixpence.

  And finally there was ‘Bangsmashums’ – a straight palms down slap on to the surface whereupon, if the coin was heard to strike the wood, it could help the opponent guess its exact location.

  Harriet proved surprisingly handy with a sixpence and there was much laughter as Marie explained the intricacies of the game. Some of the other children started to crowd around, but Teresa stayed aloof, looking thoughtful.

  When Sister Veronica brought in the next new girl, Teresa put her hand up.

  ‘Yes, Teresa? What is it?’

  ‘Someone’s playing with money, Sister Veronica.’

  ‘Money? There is no money in the school. It is a rule. A rule of the school.’

  All eyes turned on Harriet and Marie.

  ‘Who is playing with money? What possible games can be played with money?’

  ‘It’s those two, Sister Veronica. I think they may be gambling.’

  ***

  Throughout the rest of an uncomfortable term, Harriet and Marie remained close friends. The nuns, of course, did their best to keep them apart, and Teresa always seemed to be around spying on them, although they tied her shoes together in the refectory and put a grass snake in her clothes locker to try and discourage her. Harriet was good with creepy-crawly things. She told Marie that her parents were actually divorced which was a frightful blight, and made her something of a dangerous freak. Marie hadn’t yet been able to analyse her own freakishness but she knew it was there all the same.

  Winter was late that year. Early November was mild but then, around the fifteenth, the weather suddenly turned, bringing clear blue skies and a north wind straight from the Arctic. The cold froze the water in the ewers in the middle of the dormitory. Legs turned blue on the sports field. The school cook who had been hired because she couldn’t cook (said Harriet) provided what she called ‘cold weather food’ which turned out to be burnt stew with globular clusters of fat and gristle in a sort of gelid brown gravy.

  Even so, when the end of term finally came in sight – the nuns permitted an austere degree of Christmas jollity, and the last week of term featured a school play, a carol service and even mince pies for tea – Marie found, to her surprise, that she almost didn’t want to go home. Christmas spirit at the castle was kept on a low burner, with Christmas dinner being the nadir of awfulness. The aunts were more interested in their food as they gobbled down the feast, but felt duty bound to ask Marie questions whose answers were of no interest to them. There were long intervals of succulent absence of dialogue, punctuated by Aunt Claire’s rowdy digestive system.

  It would be good to see Nanny again, though.

  ‘Where are you going…?’ asked Harriet. ‘Anywhere frantically wonderful?’

  ‘Just home, I think,’ Marie said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m going to New York to see my mother. She’s married to this businessman.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Marie. ‘I’m just going back to the Aunts. It’s a bit drear.’

  ‘Drear to say the least.’

  ‘Nanny’s all right, though.’

  ‘But Nannies only go so far. Why don’t you come with me to New York?’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘You haven’t asked.’

  ‘You don’t know them. Their idea of a good time is giving me a bad one.’

  ‘Try them. Go on. You’d like New York. They have wizard ice creams and things. Tell you what, I’ll get my mother to write to them. She’s not a bad old witch.’

  But even Harriet was mystified when her mother, who was usually indulgent, failed to respond to her daughter’s prompting. They both cried a little when they said goodbye to each other, and Marie returned to the castle with low expectations of entertainment, sadly missing her friend.

  Predictably enough, Aunt Bertha received her gravely and remarked that she hoped she would keep quiet as Aunt Claire was indisposed with gout.

  There were bright features, though. It was good to be in her own bedroom again and to be able to tell Nanny all about the awfulness of the school and the wonderfulness of Harriet. Nanny said there was going to be goose for Christmas dinner which at least was a change, and real silver sixpences in the Christmas pudding which Marie could keep. And one of the few neighbours was having a children’s party in their castle to which Marie had not been invited. Children’s parties were the worst things of all. So, though inevitably cast as a social outsider, Marie was very happy to fulfil that role.

  Nanny was cautious about Harriet.

  ‘Now, you don’t want to get setting too much store by that one, you know, dearie,’ said Nanny, looking thoughtful. ‘There’s no knowing how things might turn out. You know what it says in the hymn book, “Our earthly friends may fail us and change with changing years”.’

  ‘Harriet won’t fail me, Nanny. She’s decent. She’s not the sort.’

  ‘I don’t know, dearie, I’m sure. No doubt she means well.’

  ‘Anyway, you haven’t failed me, Nanny.’

  ‘That I haven’t and nor will I. But even Nanny can’t go on for ever. You’ve got to learn to be self-sufficient in this world.’

  Marie didn’t like to think of Nanny not going on for ever, so she reverted to her theme.

  ‘And the Man in the Wall hasn’t failed me.’

  ‘You still talking to that old stone? Don’t tell your aunt. Funny girl. You’re too old for all that. Still you always were fanciful…’

  It was true that the Man in the Wall had been dropped by her for Harriet, but passing down the book-lined corridors of the library at a loss for something to do – it was a rainy new year when it arrived – Marie found herself once more staring at the strange configuration of lines that flawed the masonry.

  How strangely like a face it seemed: goat-like, eyes narrowed, with pointed ears.

  ‘Hello, Man in the Wall,’ she said to the stone. ‘I expect you missed me last term.’

  The stone said nothing but continued to gaze at her through narrowed lids.

  ‘It would be nice if we could be friends again and you would talk to me like in the old days. Harriet’s away in New York, you see, and I don’t suppose there’ll be much else to do these holidays…’

  She had learned long ago that the Man in the Wall never replied in words, but if you emptied your mind and allowed your thoughts to run on a loose rein, you could start to see a whole jumble of visions and notions that seemed to come from somewhere outside you.

  She spent much of her time in the library over the course of the holiday, ignoring the pale winter sunshine and the snowdrops that sprouted in the grass among the damp hedgerows, and lost herself instead in banks of misty thought.

  Her Aunt Bertha expressed no more than routine caution about eyestrain – caution was the nearest she ever got to approval – and hazarded that school might have inculcated some sense of scholarship in her niec
e. But the Man in the Wall was the kind of instructor that showed Marie colours she had never seen and feelings she did not know – experiences which would be of no possible use in any syllabus.

  One day, as she was sitting in the library as usual, with a book called Great Cities of the World open in front of her – she’d got it out to look up New York so as to be near Harriet and was now floating pleasantly along a great avenue between skyscrapers – she felt an inexplicable stab of pain right in her centre, accompanied by sensations of the utmost dread and depression.

  She almost called out, the feeling was so intense; whether it came from mind or body she could not determine. However, there was no doubt about the fact that she was sitting upon something warm and sticky that turned out to her horror to be blood.

  The Man in the Wall gave no indication of concern.

  She rushed in a panic to the lavatory and discovered she was bleeding. She thought that she was probably going to die. However, after a while she decided that she wasn’t bleeding fast enough to die immediately, and cleaned herself up as best she could, putting her handkerchief inside her knickers to stem the flow.

  It seemed to her that she must have done something terrible to bring on such a bleeding. She searched for a reason. Certainly some of the sensations she experienced under the gaze of the Man in the Wall had been oddly exciting, particularly when she had thought of Harriet. It had made her feel warm and wriggly between the legs. Perhaps these were the thoughts that Mother Superior called lusts of the flesh, but they hadn’t seemed very fleshly, not, anyway, as fleshly as Dawn the kitchen maid who had bosoms the size of butter churns and a roving eye and was no better than she should be, according to Nanny, but she didn’t walk around bleeding like a plane tree.

  Then she thought of the phrase that Aunt Bertha had used so long ago in the garden to the Abbess.

  ‘I’d always be worried about the bad blood coming out.’

  That must be it. Her aunt’s worries were well founded. The blood was bad – it even smelt funny. Whatever happened, she had to conceal it, otherwise – the way they had talked about it – they might send her away somewhere for good because it was so terrible.

  She crept to her room – Nanny was visiting an old friend in the village, thank goodness – and changed her skirt and knickers, soaking the blood away in cold water and preparing a fib about falling in the wet grass down by the lake.

  She rinsed out the handkerchief in the same manner and put another one in its place. The flow of blood seemed to have slowed a little.

  Then she lay down carefully on her bed and cried.

  ***

  As it happened, no one guessed that there was anything the matter, though Nanny did say something about getting the roses back in her cheeks and took her out next day for a walk round the lake to look at the coot chicks.

  Marie was still convinced that at any moment she would spout blood like a fountain and keel over and die, and the handkerchief made it difficult to walk, but she waddled round bravely and Nanny didn’t notice.

  And next day the bleeding stopped.

  It was towards the end of the holiday that she was summoned to Aunt Bertha’s sitting-room where she found the two old women looking grave. Aunt Bertha had a telegram in her hand. She told Marie to sit down. Claire was dabbing her eyes.

  ‘Child,’ Bertha said, ‘brace yourself.’

  Marie looked at her with a sort of slow dread of she knew not what gathering under her belly-button.

  ‘Your friend Harriet.’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Bertha.’

  ‘Harriet has had an accident.’

  ‘Accident?’

  Why should they tell Aunt Bertha? Harriet was always having accidents. Her knees were always scratched and bruised. Her hands were always scarred. Harriet went too fast.

  ‘Accident, Aunt Bertha? Is she all right?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, my child. Harriet is dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ repeated Marie. ‘She can’t be dead.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I tell you she is, child. Do not contradict.’

  ‘There must be a mistake.’

  Harriet could not possibly be dead. She was so full of life. Marie could see her now – sparkling brown eyes peeping out of a fringe of dark hair, skinny legs poised to dart towards some new escapade.

  Escapade was one of Harriet’s favourite words. She could hear her now: ‘Come on Mary-Mary. What about this for an escapade?’

  ‘She was knocked over by a car, Marie,’ said Aunt Bertha, more gently. ‘She darted into the road without looking. They drive on the other side of the road there. There was nothing anyone could do.’

  It was some five minutes before Marie could take it in. The only friend of her own age she’d ever had was dead. She’d darted into a new escapade all right. She’d darted right out of St Saviour’s and out of everything. Marie felt almost cross with her while at same time succumbing to the most dreadful guilt and grief. She too wanted to escape out of everything.

  ***

  For three days she felt – and was – violently sick. Nanny tried to console her.

  ‘Don’t take on so, darling. She’s with the angels now.’

  ‘Why are the angels so selfish? They keep taking everyone. Mummy, Daddy, and now … I hate angels.’

  ‘Shhh. Don’t say that. Angels are kind and good.’

  ‘They can’t be good if they’ve taken Harriet. Why don’t they take me too? I don’t want to be here any more.’

  ‘Marie!’ Nanny sounded shocked and angry. ‘Never say that. I shan’t be your friend if you say that again. There are other people who care about you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your aunts care about you in their way.’

  ‘They only care about me because it’s a way of caring about themselves.’

  ‘Well, there’s me, then. What would I do without you?’

  Marie hugged her. ‘Sorry, Nanny. But there’s only you. And the way the angels are, how do I know they’re not coming for you next? It’s too many eggs in one basket.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Nanny. Now I don’t want to hear any more talk like that.’

  Marie suddenly blurted out what had been troubling her since she’d heard of the accident.

  ‘I think it was me,’ she said, starting to cry again. ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘You? How could it have been you?’

  ‘Bad blood,’ said Marie. ‘She was my friend. I killed her with my bad blood.’

  ‘Such nonsense. You couldn’t have done it. Bad blood’s just a phrase. It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘It wasn’t a phrase I had. I was having it when Harriet got knocked down. It was because she was my friend. To punish me. It was my fault.’

  ‘You were having it? What d’you mean?’

  ‘It was coming out of me. Bad blood … wickedness. My wickedness. But I don’t know what I’ve done.’

  ‘My poor child,’ said Nanny. ‘That’s not bad blood. Do they teach you nothing at school?’

  ‘They teach us to feel wicked.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. Oh dear. I’m such a silly. I should have told you, but somehow … Oh, never mind. What you had was, well, because you’re growing up.’

  ‘Growing up? I’m only twelve!’

  ‘You’re becoming a woman, my darling.’

  Nanny told her the facts of life as best as she could. Marie suddenly remembered little huddles of older girls at school, giggling and looking furtive. So that was what it was all about. She realised now that she’d had nothing whatever to do with Harriet’s death.

  It made her feel a little better, but no less lonely. At the back of her mind, though, in spite of what Nanny had said, she still had the feeling of being tainted. Why had Harriet’s mother not wanted her to come to New York? Why did she never seem to get asked to the children’s parties she heard the other girls at school talking about?

  ‘What’s wrong with me, Nanny?’ sh
e asked.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, darling. It’s people who are wrong…’

  But somehow Marie had the feeling there was more to it than that. The other thing was, the Man in the Wall had gone. It wasn’t like the other times when he’d vanish and then reappear after a month or two. This time she knew he was gone for good.

  ***

  For the next few years, Marie kept herself to herself. The other girls at school left her alone; it is the child who desperately wants to join in who generally gets persecuted. The great school weapon, sending to Coventry, has no effect on the solitary. Marie did not want to be popular; to have been one of the gang would have been a travesty. One or two schoolmates – usually girls new to the place – would try and strike up a friendship, but Marie discouraged it. It would only go wrong.

  As for the nuns, they only bothered you about lessons and religion and, as she was good at the former and enjoyed going to the ugly little chapel because it allowed her to think in peace, she was generally considered to be a good pupil. She had developed a talent for painting which excused her self-sufficiency.