Free Past by Tessa Hadley

Kasim thought incredulously. She thinks she gets a choice. She thinks it’s something special about her, and that she’s discriminating against pain out of an especially refined sensitivity – as if other people are made differently and don’t mind it.
    â€” Ever had a Chinese burn? he said slyly.
    â€” What’s that?
    â€” We used to do them in the playground at junior school. Give me your arm.
    â€” I don’t want one.
    â€” Give it to me.
    He held her arm above the wrist in his two fists, then twisted them opposite ways, pulling the skin lightly but hard enough to hurt her and make her pull away, only half laughing. She rubbed at the place where he’d left a red mark, easy tears welling like lenses, magnifying her tawny irises.
    â€” What about childbirth? he said. — Don’t you want children?
    â€” You can have an anaesthetic, Molly said, — from the waist down. My mother did and she said it was fine.
    Fran and Alice lay side by side on a rug on the prickly grass in the garden, with their skirts pulled up to tan their thighs, though Fran’s only ever turned pink. — It’s not fair, she grumbled. — Why haven’t I got your golden kind of skin? Harriet’s got it and she doesn’t even need it, she doesn’t care. So what do you think of the new Mrs Roland?
    â€” My god, she’s a Gorgon! Alice exclaimed with pent-up feeling. — Poor Roly. What’s he done? He must know what we’d think. No wonder he married her without telling us.
    â€” But he doesn’t seem to mind it. He’s basking in it.
    â€” He isn’t even a womaniser, though. He doesn’t lift a finger: it’s the women who do it. They see him looking so clever and so lost, so very much married to the wrong person. They come to his rescue; I’ll swear he isn’t at all active in the whole thing. I mean, everyone knew he needed rescuing from Valerie, but I’m not sure
he
did, until Pilar explained to him. And now he’s totally smitten. Sexually smitten.
    â€” I do appreciate Pilar’s very attractive. I’d die to have her figure.
    â€” Isn’t she a bit heavy in the jaw? Don’t you think? Carnivorous. And she so disapproves of us! She thinks we’re the worst kind of time-wasters.
    â€” She thinks we aren’t worthy of Roland.
    â€” She thinks we ought to be grovelling at his feet. No wonder he’s in love. Fran, I feel we’ll never have Roly to ourselves again! None of his other wives have taken him away from us like this. We could accommodate ourselves to the others – or they accommodated to us.
    â€” Don’t be silly, Fran said. — It won’t last.
    â€” D’you mean the marriage won’t last?
    â€” I mean this phase of the marriage: you know, the lovey-dovey phase, when everything the other person does seems especially entrancing and original. Before the next phase, when all the same things seem especially irritating.
    â€” Did you go through a lovey-dovey phase with Jeff?
    â€” I suppose I must have, though the memory’s so humiliating I’ve repressed it. I feel as if I’ve been seeing through Jeff for ever and ever.
    Upstairs Harriet was standing in her brother’s bedroom. The sash windows were thrown open high and she could hear her sisters’ voices from the garden though she couldn’t hear their words; she didn’t want to. Dust motes swarmed in the sunlight, and the thick hot silence inside the room seemed strongly printed with its absent inhabitants, who had marked it with their scent of cosmetics and perfume and aftershave. They had made up the bed with a duvet cover and pillowcases patterned in swirls of red and orange; the old-fashioned faded furniture seemed to hold stiffly back from an invasion. Harriet, too, was holding herself back – she was rusty, the joints of her spirit creaked and groaned with disuse. And yet she had