Free An Experiment in Love: A Novel by Hilary Mantel Page A

the cotton rug on the polished floor, and I would imagine sliding lightly on my back across the room and through the wall, floating out, weightless, over Bloomsbury. Some evenings I took a spoonful or two of soup, made my apologies, pulled on my coat and sped out again into the autumn evening, and I see myself now as if – FLASH – an inner camera has caught me forever, hand flung up before a white face,
Carmel McBain, on her way to a meeting of the student Labour Club
.
    In Drury Lane, in the Aldwych, the theatres wereopening their doors; in Houghton Street, a hot little café steamed its fumes over the pavement. I would run up the steps, into my place of work, my palace of wonders; the half-deserted building came with its echo, its ever-burning strip lights, its tar-smell of typewriter ribbons and smoke; in the mazes and catacombs you could sniff out your meeting, guided by your nose towards the dusty scent of composite resolutions, sub-sections and sub-clauses, stacking chairs, tobacco: the reek of Afghan coats and flying jackets, the vaporous traces left in the air they inhabit by weak heads and fainter hearts.
    I do not remember that political philosophy was ever discussed, or political issues: only organization, personalities, how the Labour student movement should be run. In Paris, the ashes of the
événements
were hardly cool. Here in London, we discussed whether to go by coach (collectively) or to set out (individually) to some all-day-Saturday students’ meeting in some seedy provincial hall; and how much the coach would cost per seat. Whether there should be a joint social evening with the Women’s Liberation Group: would that be profitable to both, or end in some ideological and financial disaster?
    It was men who spoke; not young and fresh ones, but crease-browed and leather-jacketed elders, men with bad teeth from obscure post-graduate specialities. They would shuffle or lurch to their feet; then would come nose-rubbing, throat-clearing; then their voices would rumble just audibly, like spent thunder in a distant valley. Some would speak slumped in their seats, eyes fixed on the ceiling, ash dripping from a cigarette. Their manner was weary, as if they knew everything and had seen everything,and they paused often, perhaps in the middle of a phrase, to blow their noses or make a snickering sound that must have been laughter. Their remarks reached no conclusion; at a certain point, they would become slower, more sporadic, and finally peter out. Then another would draw attention to himself, with the bare flutter of an agenda in the stale air: and grunting, shrugging, turning down his mouth, begin in the middle of a sentence . . . Dave and Mike and Phil were their names, Phil and Dave and Mike. Young women carried them drinks from the vending-machine, black coffee’s frail white shell hardly dented by their light fingertips.
    I would put my head in my hands, sometimes, for even I must yawn; I would with delicacy track my fingertips back through my inch of hair, and say to myself, am I, can I be, she who so lately at the Holy Redeemer wore an air of purpose and expectation, and a prefect’s deep blue gown? So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this? Were these meetings as aimless as they appeared, or was I too untutored to see the importance of what was going on, or was I, in some deeper way, missing the point? Yes: that must be it.
    As the clock ticked away, a fantasy would creep up and possess me: that if you could stay on and on – if you could stay at the meeting till midnight or the hour beyond – then the masks would slip, the falsity be laid aside, the real business would begin. For it seemed to me that my fellow socialists were talking in code, a code designed perhaps to freeze out strangers and weed out the dilettante. Only the pure of heart were welcomehere. They must submit to a new version of the medieval ordeal: instead of poison, water, fire, a Trial by