there mirrors?’
‘What?’
‘Are there full-length mirrors? In the bathrooms?’
‘No. Only pipes. Steam. The water is hot. There are white tiles, not much cracked, and scouring powder on a ledge, for when you’ve done.’
‘I don’t see how you’re expected to manage it. To take a bath without a mirror.’
I kept quiet. It had never seemed to me essential. Even important at all. ‘They’re only along the corridor,’ I said. ‘Three bathrooms in a row. There’s no reason why I should describe them to you.’
‘I like to have you describe things,’ she said moodily. ‘Descriptions are your strong point. God knows why you want to be reading law. Vanity, I suppose. You want to show your frightful grinding omnicompetence.’ She looked about her. ‘I see you’ve taken the best desk. The best bed.’
She sat down on her own bed, and began to simper. ‘At the hair,’ she explained. ‘Come now, Carmel, how can you bear to leave the old country behind? A girl like you, brought up with every advantage…the rag rugs, the flying ducks on the wall…’
‘We don’t, actually, have any flying ducks. Though my aunt has them.’
‘Maybe not, but I expect you have one of those fireside sets, do you, with little gilt tongs and a gilt shovel?’
I smiled, in spite of myself.
‘Shingled,’ she said. ‘Would that be the word? Cropped. Shaved.’ She pointed. ‘Do you know how that head of yours affects me? Sitting behind your straggly pigtails year in, year out, with your ribbons with the ends cut in Vs like they do them on wreaths—’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘—and then to walk in here, Miss, to a room in London in this Hall of Residence, where we are confined at Her Majesty’s Pleasure…What do you think, would they let us move out and get a flat?’
‘Together?’
‘Why not?’
‘What about my lower-class ways?’
She blew smoke at me. ‘I have an urge to say to you, Bejasus!’
‘Is that so?’
‘It would be nice if we went about and talked like an Edna O’Brien novel. It would suit us.’
‘Yes, it would become us,’ I said. ‘We haven’t the class for Girls of Slender Means.’
‘Speak for yourself. You charwoman’s daughter.’ Julianne wiped her eyes, but then she began to laugh again almost at once.
I told her about the poems that ran around in my head. She said, ‘You need to be taken out of yourself. We should go out and do some living. We could go to some students’ union or other, we must belong to them now. We will have a bottle or two of Guinness, will we? To build us up?’
There was a sound of revelry by night, I said to myself. I could have bitten the secret tongue in my brain that said it. Why did I think I was preparing for the Battle of Waterloo? Julianne made everything seem normal, but it was not normal for me. Her home was recoverable; she could travel to it next weekend, if she wished, and tumble into her frilly bed in her familiar room. I could not return until Christmas—at which point I could reclaim a fare from my local authority. Her parents, she had said, had offered to drive her down, see her installed, inspect her room and add a luxury or two; but she thought it better to make the break, get clean away on the Euston train, and besides, they must realize her accommodation was shared, and I might have brought my own luxuries with me.
I fought off self-pity: which Julianne’s words, on the whole, seemed designed to stimulate. I felt homesick already, and poor, more with the apprehension of poverty than with an actual lack in my purse; my right arm, that racked limb, did not feel as if it would support the weight of a bag of textbooks. If only the work would begin: the ink, the files, the grit behind sleepless eyes, the muffled tread of the invigilators. That was what I had come here for: to make my way, to make my living.
There was a knock on the door. Julianne bounced across the room. It was the porter, bringing her suitcase. ‘Put it there!’ she sang. She stretched her arms wide—Lady Bountiful. There was a plum cake inside her travelling bags, baked at home and sealed in a tin. She knew how to manage her life, how to go away from home. I thought of her father, the doctor; of her three brothers, who at their school played lacrosse. Brothers are an advantage, in the great world; they give a girl the faculty of easy contempt for men. Julianne’s skin seemed polished; she was altogether more apt for adventure, more translatable.
‘Julianne,’ I said, ‘you haven’t mentioned the obvious fact.’
She stretched her eyes. ‘Where is it obvious, where, the obvious fact?’
‘You know I mean Karina.’
‘Spare me,’ Julianne said.
‘She hasn’t got here yet, at least so far as I…’
‘Even so. Spare me.’
‘They asked if you wanted to share with her.’
Julianne stared at me. ‘Where in God’s name did they get that idea?’
I smiled inside. ‘They only asked. I think it was a formality.’
‘I hope you requested them to put her very far away, in the lowest, highest—’
‘In fact she’s next door.’
‘You’re not telling me you let them—’
‘No, OK. I’m lying. She’s on this corridor. C21.’ For I had seen the warden’s pencil moving swiftly over the lists, allocating numbers and floors. ‘Quite far away.’
‘Who with?’
‘A stranger.’
‘It would have to be. A stranger, it would have to be. If you had pulled some trick,’ she said, ‘and left me with Karina, I would never have spoken to you again.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I would have run up to you in the street with a specially made snagger and laddered your best tights. I would have got a packet of Durex and written on them “From Carmel to Niall, in anticipation,” and I would have taken them out of the packet and stuck pins in them all over and then folded them back in and sealed up the seal and posted them to your boyfriend and written SWALK on the envelope.’
‘Finished now?’
‘Sealed With A Loving Kiss,’ she said.
I wanted to plead, and say, but Karina, we are going to, you know, be friends with her? Aren’t we? But I couldn’t. It sounded too childish. As if we hadn’t moved on. I picked up my packet of Player’s and tossed it on to Julianne’s bed. ‘There you are. I’ve given up smoking,’
She gaped at me. ‘You’ve only just begun it.’
‘Even in my habits I mean
