Free Married Love by Tessa Hadley

him true as an arrow: she not only remembers him, she likes him. She could not have been expecting him to call – and yet he feels now that he has come because the girls conjured him up, talking about him. He’s certain that they’ve talked about him.
    — Ready for what? says Connie. — Anyway, I said we’d blindfold him. That way everything’s decent – he can’t see, he can only guess.
    — Goodbye? Ellen asks anxiously. — Why, where are you going?
    It’s always the same – although the visits to the Pearson house are his own idea, he feels the girls are drawing him there, as though he were under their spell. After that first time, they insist he comes again, whenever he can: on his afternoons off from work, and on Sundays. When he isn’t with them, he can’t help remembering, though it makes him ashamed, how he sat with his back to the girls in the bedroom while they dressed, sweating in his heavy suit, Connie’s white stocking wrapped twice around his eyes and tied behind his head. Ellen hadn’t wanted to agree to the game; it was typical of Connie’s mischief. He could taste the stale-sweetish trace of her foot’s perspiration in the stocking.
    Connie reminds him of the girls at school who fussed over him and derided him when he was a pretty child – girls with hard hands and mocking raucous voices, fat floppy bows in their hair. He prefers to think about his growing familiarity with the heavy furniture in the Pearson house, setting him apart from the other boys in the boatyard as if it already belonged to him. When on Sundays James sometimes crosses paths in the house with Ellen’s father, he’s surprised for a moment, as if Mr Pearson were the usurper in
his
domain. Mr Pearson – stooped, unsmiling, his face grey with ulcer pain – always stops to ask after James’s mother. He probably thinks James is coming there for Connie.
    Ellen is better-looking than Connie really – statuesque and slow and kind. Some days her skin looks doughy, with dimples like dirty fingerprints, but on other days James appreciates the golden ringlets against her white shoulders, poignant shadows in the neck of her blouse. She looks like a girl leaning on a classical pillar in a soap advertisement. Beside her, Connie is a little scamp, with her cropped hair and no figure to speak of. Connie wants Ellen to cut her hair too and they discuss it for hours. Ellen daren’t, she’s too afraid of her father. (James learns that Mrs Pearson’s nothing to be afraid of – she’s nervous, with puffy pink skin, and reads novels in her room. James weighs in against Ellen cutting her hair, he’s full of scorn for Connie’s cheap and showy gesture. A woman should have her reserves of hair, to uncoil at some important moment; although, if he tries to imagine the uncoiling, he feels clammy. But he admires Ellen’s qualities, her low voice, her clear pronunciation, her skills at the piano, playing selections from light opera. Not that he knows anything about opera.
    He tells his mother that he has called to see Ellen Pearson.
    — You never did.
    — Guess who I met there?
    He realises he’s only raised the subject so that he can use Connie’s name in his mouth and spit it out. She is his enemy, he thinks.
    — It was good of the Pearsons to take her in, his mother says. — Poor motherless kid.
    Connie’s mother was James’s pa’s cousin Rose; she died of a growth in her inside, after nine children. James can remember his Auntie Rose smoking while she made bread, the long ash on the end of her cigarette falling off into the dough. She was small and skinny like Connie, but very strong – she could knead enough dough at one time to bake eight loaves. — Gives the bread a bit of a flavour, she said to him, as if everything was a joke. The whole tribe of the McIlvanneys are feckless, his mother says.
    * * *
    The two girls pet James and tease him as if he is a pretty, comical doll. When he takes them out on the street, one on