Free Married Love by Tessa Hadley Page A

each arm, done up in their bell dresses and tunic suits, their tam-o’-shanters pulled at jaunty angles, everyone looks at them. Sometimes they catch the electric train into Newcastle to walk around. They talk across him, discussing clothes – ‘a blouse of violet georgette with beadwork … a sand-coloured cashmere frock with a tiered chiffon collar … a three-piece outfit in rose and blue tricot-silk’. It’s like listening to the sailors gibbering in their foreign languages. James has to keep squinting and staring ahead – looking out for where they’re going, dodging the trams and broken pavings and bicycles and horse muck – so as not to be drawn into the talk and made ridiculous. He feels as if the girls are water swirling around him while he tries to stand up straight.
    There’s a delay with his travelling down to Dartmouth to take up his apprenticeship. He needs another fifty pounds to buy his seagoing outfit. Connie says she doesn’t believe he’s actually going, but he doesn’t deign to show her his signed papers. He sees that Ellen suffers when he talks about how he wants to get away from England and see the world. They take a picnic to Heaton Park and she brings a hamper with compartments for all the food and utensils, blue leather straps with little buckles holding the cups and forks and bottle opener in place. James carries it along proudly. The earth under the trees is springy leaf mould, and flowers seem to hover like a blue mist at the level of his calves. He’s giddy for a moment, wading into the blue, treading down the fleshy stems of the flowers under his boots. The girls can’t believe that he hasn’t heard of bluebells or ever noticed them before. James is teetotal but the two girls drink wine and he’s aware of their two personalities changing and loosening under its influence. They laugh and squeal more loudly, showing off. Connie likes reminding him that she’s a grown-up woman and he’s only a boy; she exchanges sly glances with Ellen and claims there are things he doesn’t understand. They pretend they’re tired, they make him lie down, then they rest their heads against his jacket, one on either side. While they close their eyes he keeps very still, watching the sky above the treetops, the clouds drifting past.
    Ellen’s hair seems to give off a faint smell he doesn’t like – it’s naphthalene from mothballs. He can tell she’s not really asleep by the way she holds her head so tense and awkward against his ribs. Connie is mumbling and nuzzling into his breast, dribbling, until he pushes her off and she rolls over with her back to him, in a knot with her knees drawn up. At his Auntie Rose’s, when they were kids, he and his brothers were put to sleep in Connie’s bedroom once or twice. He remembers Connie in her vest and knickers, her skinny knees making a tent under the sheet, remembers her getting out of bed to use the shared chamber pot. He shores up these memories against her now. Something about the sight of the treetops brings back, like a strong stimulus rushing along his veins, things he has put out of his mind – adventures with his gang of mates, yelling and fighting and running, crashing through brambles, pushing on until his heart beat as if it were bursting out of his chest. Now he mustn’t move, with Ellen’s head against him.
    After a while Ellen sits up, relieved, and she and James have a cigarette. She finds it funny, the way he smokes nursing the cigarette with the tip in his palm, the end between his thumb and forefinger, drawing the smoke through his fist like the men on the docks. For once, James isn’t afraid that Ellen thinks he’s common. At this moment in the park, for some reason, the docks are something to impress her with – he doesn’t even remind her that he’s not one of those men, that he works in an office.
    — You’re smoking it down to the nub, he explains. — So’s not to waste any, and so the foreman can’t see.
    Ellen