Карен Армстронг – The Spiral Staircase (страница 8)

‘We’re sending a deputation to the Dean, asking her to reconsider,’ I said, a little dazed by my tutor’s assumption that I would take the liberal line.

Mrs Bednarowska gave her characteristic yelp of laughter. ‘That won’t work – though it’s very correct, of course,’ she opined, as she strode off with her curiously splay-footed gait to her rooms.

What I had not realized was that, as Secretary, I was expected to go with the president of the JCR to put our views to Miss Franklin. Maureen Mackintosh, a clever girl with masses of long red hair, was one of the most politically radical students in college, and I found her distinctly alarming. I always expected her to treat me with disdain, and dreaded lest she strike up a conversation about Vietnam and Cambodia in which I would certainly not be able to hold my own. And what on earth was an ex-nun doing campaigning for students to spend illicit nights together? To my relief, however, Maureen seemed untroubled by my presence as we set off for Miss Franklin’s apartment. We sat together, side by side, on a sofa in the Dean’s room, drinking tiny glasses of sherry in an atmosphere that was distinctly chilly, while the champion of the Virgin Vote sat with her back to the window, her cat Smokey purring noisily on her knee.

‘No more concessions!’ she replied, when we formally requested that the new measures be withdrawn and the wire fence removed. She repeated the phrase like a mantra at intervals during the ensuing discussion, almost chanting it in a strangely expressionless falsetto. ‘No more concessions!’

This irritated me. ‘You can’t call these “concessions”,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ve taken away rights that have already been given to us. We’re simply asking for a return to the status quo. Not for concessions.’

I might as well have kept my mouth shut. ‘No more concessions,’ Miss Franklin repeated.

‘The Common Room won’t accept this, Miss Franklin,’ Maureen replied sternly. ‘If you don’t at least restore the old “Gate Hours”, we shall have to take action. And that barbed wire is extremely dangerous. You didn’t warn us. Somebody could have been seriously injured.’

‘Then she – or he – would only have themselves to blame,’ Miss Franklin retorted smoothly. ‘You are here to be educated, not to indulge in unlicensed sex at all hours. Nor to organize childish demonstrations, at the expense of your studies.’

Maureen sighed, and again I felt indignant. The remark was entirely uncalled for. Maureen’s political activities certainly did not interfere with her work. She had recently won one of the highly coveted and prestigious Kennedy Scholarships for postgraduate study in the United States, and was going to Berkeley, which, I gathered, was the new Mecca for 60s revolutionaries. ‘I can only repeat,’ she persisted, with admirable self-control, ‘that the Common Room will have to take action.’

‘No more concessions!’ Miss Franklin sang implacably, turning away from us to give her attention to Smokey, and crooning endearments in his ear as he tried to climb over her ample bosom to the windowsill. I studied her with perplexity. All my life I had accepted the fact that some opinions were right and others wrong. And yet how deeply unattractive such a stance could be. Nothing we could say would cause Miss Franklin a moment’s doubt. Her mind was closed to any other possibility. She reminded me of those virginal saints in the Catholic legends who were utterly impermeable: wild beasts fell back from them in terror; swords could not pierce their invulnerable flesh; even when they were thrust into brothels, they proved impenetrable. They seemed to be surrounded by an invisible shield, a barricade that preserved them in a world of their own. In the convent we had sung hymns to the Virgin Mary, which compared her to a ‘garden enclosed’ or ‘a well sealed up’. I had been proud to take my vow of chastity, but I knew that right now I was no longer on the same side as the Virgin Vote.

I turned to Maureen inquiringly. She nodded and rose to her feet. ‘I don’t think we have anything more to say to one another,’ she said.

That night, under cover of darkness, I accompanied Maureen and a group of other students to the college wall. Each of us carried a pair of wire-clippers. Grimly and methodically we demolished the barbed-wire fence, and deposited it in a heap of ten-inch fragments on the lawn outside Miss Franklin’s window. I seemed to have thrown in my lot with the sexual revolution.

But a few days later, when I went to my first party, I was not quite so sure. Yet again, when I walked into the murky, smoke-filled room, the noise almost knocked me sideways. The parties I had attended before the convent had been sedate, elderly affairs. Under the benign but hawk-like gaze of our elders, we had lurched around the room in pairs, trying to match our faltering steps to the polite strains of waltzes and quicksteps. Bored, I had to admit, almost to stupefaction. But nobody seemed bored here, I noted, as I groped my way uncertainly to a corner where I had spotted Jane with her boyfriend Mark and accepted a glass of wine. I sipped it gratefully, hoping it might have some anaesthetic effect, as I stared, dazed, at the scene before me. The room was as dark as an underground cavern, the gloom relieved periodically by flickering lights that transformed us all into granite-hued hags. Jane’s skin looked blanched, her lips black. On the other side of the room, I could see Pat and Fiona, their pretty, fresh faces also drained of colour, their animated expressions curiously at variance with their corpse-like pallor.

‘You look stunned.’ Mark, a tall, solemn young man with the regular good looks of a male model, bent towards me solicitously. He had to shout above the din of a jangled crashing that I was trying to identify as music. Amplified male voices screamed, guitars thrummed, cymbals clashed and, beneath it all, a drum beat a primitive, disturbing pulse.

‘No. No, not at all,’ I yelled back, politely. It would have been so much easier, I now realize, if I had admitted how strange this new world appeared to me, had shared my confusion and dismay and let people in. But I seemed quite unable to do this. In my own way, I was quite as impenetrable as Miss Franklin or any Virgin Martyr. I wanted people to believe that I was taking it all in my stride and that leaving a convent was as easy as falling off a log. I didn’t want to be the object of pity or curiosity, and the convent habit of reticence was now almost reflexive. I tried to take an intelligent interest. ‘Who are the singers?’

With a unanimity that was almost comical, Jane and Mark both did a double-take. ‘The Beatles, of course!’ Jane exclaimed. And then, as I continued to look blank, she added, a little more tentatively: ‘You have heard of the Beatles, haven’t you?’

I had. Just. My sister had mentioned the group to me on one of her visits, and the name had cropped up occasionally in the conversation of my fellow-students. But even though it was now 1969, I had no idea who the Beatles really were, no notion of their extraordinary impact on British society during the 60s, had never encountered Beatlemania, and had certainly never knowingly heard a note of their music. Jane and Mark tried to explain to me what the Beatles meant for their generation, but I took little in. I could see that they were slightly alarmed by my ignorance. Jane was looking at me thoughtfully, though I made her laugh when I asked, in some perplexity, why the band was named after those rather unpleasant black insects. On my other side, Mark was reciting the lyrics, which shocked me by their unabashed expression of naked need: ‘Love, Love Me Do!’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand!’, ‘Please, Please Me!’ I could not even have admitted to myself that I had such needs, let alone shouted my yearnings aloud in such wild abandonment. Yet the words touched some raw place within me, making me aware of my loneliness in this crowded room. All around me I noticed feet tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words of the songs, glances exchanged as though a phrase had a special private significance. The Beatles were a current that united everybody at the party; a thread that bound the room together. They were the spokesmen of their generation, but even though they must have been about my own age, they could not speak for me. I was present at the party, but only as an outsider. The ease and confidence with which the Beatles simply said what they wanted appalled me, and yet I longed to be able to do the same. Even today, more than thirty years later, when I have come to appreciate their real genius, I find their songs almost unbearably poignant. Those desires had been schooled out of me, and yet the painfully direct appeal of the lyrics made me realize that I wished that I had them. I felt my throat swell with unshed tears: ‘All You Need Is Love’.

But love in this context? I stared bemused at the dancers. These new acquaintances of mine had obviously never heard of the quickstep. Instead, they were leaping, twisting, gyrating together in pairs. Some even danced singly, and no one followed any predetermined pattern. They shot into the air, waved their arms, swung out legs at odd angles. Doing what came naturally. But it was not natural for me. For a second I felt a pang of pure envy. I would love to be able to do that, I thought, and to be so wild, uninhibited and free. These students were living fully and intensely, in a way that I could not. When Mark, kindly, asked me if I would like to dance, I shook my head. I could no more fling myself around like that than fly.