Free The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner Page B

new estates, and you’re thinking about all the things that never seemed worth thinking about before—rates and rent and gas cookers, and wallflower and broccoli plants for bedding—and he says: “I put our names down on the list for a Council house”—and you say: “Mum’s going to fix us up for crockery and I was looking through the sales catalogues”—and then you pass a shop with baby clothes and woolly lambs, and you look at one another and both of you giggle a bit and look away, and it’s madeyou feel all soft and silly like you never thought you could be, only now it seems all right somehow. That was how Bert and Betty were.
    And, you see, Mary didn’t understand—well, no one does till they’ve had the chance themselves, but Mary, she understood less than most. Only, she could make out well enough that they were happy, and that they didn’t want to talk to her. Two or three evenings she’d seen them that way, and the last evening she’d watched them ten minutes and more, both standing staring in at Lewis’ window, looking at curtain stuffs, and Betty saying she’d seen just as good down Aston way at half the price—the way one does, you know, when one wants something bad but one hasn’t the money for it. And Mary could hear the way they talked to one another, not minding a bit about things they couldn’t get, not minding anything yet, just because they were in love. And Betty Wothers was never once thinking of school days with Mary and how keen they’d both got about class-work and hockey on Saturdays, and doing better than the rest of the girls, and having tea with the headmistress. And Bert forgetting all about his mathematics and the ambitions he used to say he had—not about getting on at the Works, like he was always telling Betty he was going to, but about being a great professor at the University and all that. Well, of course they weren’t thinking of any such thing now, neither of them! But Mary, she just couldn’t understand, she couldn’t get it straight in her head that men and women do just fall in love with one another and then they don’t care any more about their friends nor what they used to want to do and be. It’s plain enough to most of us, or how would the world go on, but it wasn’t plain to Mary Snow.
    So Mary, she just turned and went back, walking rather quick so that she wouldn’t get spoken to at the corner of the Arcade or in Corporation Street. It took her a bit of time getting home, and instead of thinking about mathematics the way she mostly did when she was alone, she kept on puzzling and fidgeting about Betty and Bert, wondering what it was that made them look like that and act like that. It made her feel lonely, and a bit cold, somehow, and then she began remembering young George Higginson and how it had felt when he’d caught hold of her and squeezed her up. And because she’d hated that and because she remembered pretty clear just exactly the way she’d hated it, she felt lonelier than ever, and a bit frightened. She got home all right, and said good-night quickly and went to her little room, up the stairs where the lino was mostly worn away and the plaster was a bit loose here and there, the way it is in old houses. She sat down on the bed, carefully, because there was one of the iron legs of the frame that was a bit funny, and she hunched herself up with her outdoor coat still on and the counterpane round her shoulders on top of that, and she began reading one of her books on mathematics.
    But it didn’t help her this time. It didn’t stop her feeling lonely. It didn’t make those nice comfortable, five-way patterns come up in her mind, the way she liked. It didn’t somehow seem to make sense. She’d kicked off her shoes and was wriggling her stocking-feet up against one another to get warm; her hands were cold too and she tucked