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

Pointlessness. Once you had passed it – once you had endured the full rigours of a full debate on a revitalized constitution for a revitalized Labour students’ movement – then, in the hour after midnight, the chatter would cease – glances be exchanged – the talk begin, hesitant at first, half-smiling, people near-apologetic about their passions and their expertise, quoting Engels, Nye Bevan, Daniel Cohn-Bendit; we would exchange our intuitions and half-perceptions, pass on our visions and dreams, each vision and each dream justified by some reference, recondite or popular. Comrades would say, ‘This is what makes me a socialist . . .’ and speak from the heart; perhaps someone would mention Lenin, and wages councils, and coal-miners, and the withering away of the state. Dawn would break: gentle humming of the Red Flag.
    But in real life, nothing like this occurred at all. By ten-thirty the men would be looking at their watches, drifting and grumbling towards the union bar. I would hover a little, in the corners of rooms, on the edges of groups, hoping that someone would turn to me and begin a real conversation, one I could join in. Stacking chairs squeaked on a dirty floor, the women of the socialists stooped to haul up their fringed and scruffy shoulder bags; in the bar the women stood in a huddle, excluded by the ramparts of turned shoulders, with tepid glasses of pineapple juice clenched in bony white hands. Their eyes avoided mine; they smoked, and muttered to each other in code.
    Disillusioned, I would trail back up Drury Lane. Thetheatres would have turned out already, and the stage doors would be barred. An empty Malteser box bowling towards the Thames would bear witness to the evening passed. My eyes would be heavy and stinging with cigarette smoke and lack of sleep. Behind my ribs was a weight of disappointment. Still the lines ran through my head, distressing, irrelevent: Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? / Is this mine own countree? The irresponsive silence of the land, / The irresponsive sounding of the sea.
    ‘Why, why,’ Julianne said, ‘if you were going to have your hair cut, did you have it so stubbled?’
    ‘To last me,’ I said. ‘Till Christmas.’
    ‘Did you think there were no hairdressers in London?’
    ‘I thought they might be expensive.’
    ‘You really shouldn’t be so poor, should you?’ Julianne said.
    Each morning she flicked her white coat from its hanger, in case they were taken on the wards; her eyes large, soft, alert. She told some Sophies that I had run away from a convent, where my hair had been chopped off; she told others that I was a victim of the IRA, shorn for collaboration after a romance with a squaddie. ‘Caught in the Falls Road,’ she said, ‘her pantyhose around her ankles; her poor mother, if she were dead, would be turning in her grave.’
    Pretending to be Irish was a great diversion for Julianne. Lancashire, Ireland, it’s all the same to girls called Sophy.
    Sophies liked to be engaged to be married by the end of their final year. At breakfast they showed each othertheir solitaire diamonds. Facets winked as they passed them across the Thursday rasher and the side-plate of baked beans: exchanging them so that they could feel the fatness or looseness of a finger-joint, try on another future.
    Claire and Sue, the churchgoers, lived next door to us in C2. ‘Come in for a coffee,’ Sue would say, fluttering, as we leapt upstairs after dinner: I’d say sorry, got to work, and Julianne would growl, ‘They want our souls.’
    In C4 was Sophy, the original Sophy: a strapping girl who took fencing lessons, whose big feet lightly danced through Julianne’s dream-life as she pranced down the corridor each morning towards her breakfast. Sophy was straight-backed and sound in wind and limb, a girl with large pale eyes and a heavy drift of crimped, dirty-blonde hair; by the side of her mouth there was a mole, flat, definite, a beauty-spot. She looked as if