Married Love by Tessa Hadley

Bunny, which she keeps in a book of poetry he gave her. Ellen’s eyes well up with tears – real tears, so that her nose gets red and her mouth twists into an ugly shape. She has had her hair cut now, and the new style doesn’t suit her heavy head the way it suits Connie’s.
    James pretends to be angry that he was too young to fight and do his bit, but really the faces in those photographs are too quenched and completed, he’s tired of them. Arthur tried to enlist but they turned him down because of his varicose veins. Two of Connie’s brothers were with the Tyneside Irish at the Somme, but she never cared for them much, she only wrinkles her nose when Ellen kindly tries to include them in her sorrowing. Anyway, they both came back, and they’ve been boozing and fighting their way round the docks ever since.
    — Let’s go for a swim, Connie says. — Let’s walk down in our swimsuits.
    — You can’t do that, says James.
    — We’ve done it every day. No one cares.
    — It
is
Sunday, says Ellen warily.
    The idea of the two of them flaunting themselves in the public street fills James with a boiling rage that somehow has to do with the dead soldiers. He thinks Connie is unpatriotic, shameless.
    — I wouldn’t allow any wife of mine to go parading round with nothing on in front of everybody, he says hotly.
    Connie is delighted. — ‘Allow’, Jimmy Mac? You won’t ‘allow’ it? Who d’you think you are, King of the Hottentots or something?
    The weather’s changing anyway, and Ellen decides it’s too chilly for the swimsuits. They go and walk on the front and have their photograph taken sitting on an upturned boat, then struggle across the pebbles in the sea wind, the girls clinging to James, Ellen’s beret blowing away and bowling off down the beach, James running like mad after it. He feels excitedly that they’re all on the brink of something new, an entirely new way of living, apart from their parents. Anything could happen. They’re all three laughing, Ellen too; she has forgotten to be mournful and dreamy, in spite of her dead friends. When he snatches up her beret she comes running after him, full tilt into him, almost knocking him over, so that he has to catch her to save her from falling. For a moment they’re staggering together, she’s warm in his arms – thanking him in breathless, gasping sentences, admiring how fast he runs. He doesn’t let go. He kisses her beside her ear, a sort of kiss, though he hasn’t kissed anyone since he was a baby. He can smell whatever it is that she puts on her hair. Over her shoulder he can see Connie pretending not to see them, crouching down to poke at something she’s found among the pebbles.
    To his surprise, in the evening Connie comes back with him on the train to Newcastle. She says she has to visit her dad, who isn’t well. (‘Stomach,’ she says shortly when he asks what’s wrong.) The two of them mostly sit in silence. Their mood is flat, the sea air has taken it out of them. Without Ellen, they’re returned to all the ordinary things they know of one another. When Connie closes her eyes, the purplish-red lids seem unnaturally large below her neat definite eyebrows; her face is more naked than when her eyes are open and vigilant. She asks about his work at the boatyard and he makes it sound more important than it is. He says he’s responsible for ordering the timbers and fittings, whereas in reality he’s just answering the telephone and running errands.
    — Ellen likes you, Connie says. — You could get a job with her dad’s firm.
    James frowns suspiciously, but he doesn’t think she’s teasing. He reminds her that he’s going away.
    — Oh, you and your old running away to sea. I don’t know why your heart’s so set on getting yourself drowned.
    It’s true that James was taken aback by the sight of the churning, pounding sea on the beach this afternoon, as if he’d somehow left it out of his calculations. He sees the sea in the