Married Love by Tessa Hadley Page B

only a bit of glass.
    On the third day they’re spotted by Japanese fishermen, who alert the Bamfield lifeboat. Then they’re taken by cutter to Seattle, and after that across Canada by train to St John in New Brunswick. From St John, James sends a postcard to Connie, telling her that he’s all right. On board the Royal Mail steamer that takes them home, the officers and apprentices travel first class; the shipwreck has made them famous. Lady Furness, a patron of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, helps James read the menu, which is written in French, and organises the apprentices in a tableau – ‘Survivors’ – to entertain the other passengers. They sing ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’.
    When they dock at Liverpool, Connie is waiting for him.
    He knows he ought to marry Ellen Pearson and get a house full of furniture.
    But he can’t. He won’t.

Because the Night
    THEIR PARENTS HAD fantastic parties, they were famous for it. The bath in the downstairs bathroom would be filled with ice, and then with bottles of Veuve du Vernay. All this was paid for on their father’s entertainment account at the import–export company where he was managing director, and a lot of the guests would have to be dull Anglia World people to make this all right. But the Anglia World people didn’t stay that long, and when they’d gone the party atmosphere changed, it was taken over by their parents’ real friends, the ones they still had from university, or the ones their mother, Peggy, had met as a teacher and a painter.
    When they were little Tom and Kristen were allowed to stay up late and run around, although it wasn’t the sort of party where anyone else’s children were invited. The au pair was meant to put them to bed but often the au pair – Annegret then Sylvie then Bengta – would be partying too: Annegret drooping her head shyly, tipping the drink from side to side in her wine glass, being chatted up by some teacher from Mum’s school, Bengta dancing barefoot by herself, to Blondie or David Bowie or the Eurythmics. If it was summer there would be coloured flares burning among the flowers in the beds, grown-ups swinging in the dark in the two hammocks slung between the trees.
    Tom was always good at inventing games, but the ones he made up on party nights were wilder. The children withdrew from the lit-up house; afloat in the dark, swollen with music and voices, it was hardly recognisable as the ordinary space they knew in daytime. Their house was on a hill at the edge of one of those minor towns in Surrey that are clustered up against the skirts of London; once it must have been in the countryside, but newer houses had been built around it, and pieces had been chopped off from their garden to go with each new one. But still they had a lawn with flower beds, and some huge old trees, and beyond that a tiny wood, about a third of an acre. At the back of this wood – reached by an earth path which wound past the tank with the oil for the central heating and the outhouse where the bikes and the lawnmower were kept – there were a couple of old greenhouses not used for anything. The children weren’t supposed to play in these because of the broken glass, and because in one of them there was a deep well with a square stone across the top. But on party nights the greenhouses became their base.
    Kristen wore the gauzy frilly Ossie Clark her mother had been married in, pulled up above her Brownie belt so she didn’t trip on it; Tom would be in his soldier suit, red jacket unbuttoned, his pistol in its holster slung low on his hip. Their gym daps gave them extra silence and speed. Kneeling among the baked-dry leaves on the stone floor of the greenhouse with the well, they made plans. If the weather had been fine, the glass panes would hold in their pocket of heat long into the evening, pungent with the green smell of tomato stalks, even though no tomatoes ever grew in there any more, only fleshy tall weeds that