She drew her hands away and he wondered what was happening — until her fists came down, and in the crash they made against his spine he heard her taking enormous drinks of breath out of the air. Tears were on her cheeks and he went in this time to a kiss of love in which both could breathe, so that he felt tears springing to his own eyes, but tears of laughter and happiness. They leaned against each other, hands free. “I love you, Brian,” she said.
They went into a wide hollow and lay down by a bush, dark banks bringing the night closer. The earth felt damp under his hand, and she drew him down to it, spreading kisses like salt on his face as if to recompense them both for his victory of kisses up in the field and bring them back to loving. He tasted the sweetness of her lipstick and opened each button of her coat as he fought back his own kisses into her loving mouth.
They afterwards lay in the dip of the Cherry Orchard with no watch between them to tell what time it was, each smoking a cigarette to give taste and body to the fragrance of their exhaustion and an illusion of comforting warmth to the humid freshness of the night. “You ought to get yoursen a topcoat,” she said. “You’ll get pneumonia like that, duck.”
He laughed: “Not me. I’ve got blood like boiling water. A walking stove.”
“Still,” she said. They walked out of the hollow. “It must be after nine. I wonder what happened to the others?”
“Gone, I expect. Joan lives at Lenton, don’t she?” He felt loosened from the fever, vibrant and sharp against the night air, as much in love with the rustle of bushes and odours of soil and grass as with Pauline. He stopped and drew another kiss from her, gentle and indrawn. “Well,” she said with a laugh, “you can never have enough, can you?”
“I can’t”—taking her naked hand by the dark shadows of Colliers’ Pad. They came to the lights of the main road: “Mam and dad’ll be at the pictures, being it’s Friday,” she said. “I don’t expect they’ll be back yet.”
“If your dad’s in, p’raps we’ll ’ave a game o’ darts. I’m hoping to beat ’im one of these days.”
“You’ll never do that: he had too much practice when he was in ’ospital.” He agreed: Ted Mullinder had been bed-bound through an accident at the pit. A truck underground had run into his foot and all but crushed it when he was coming back from the face one day. He’d got off too soon at the skip, thinking the truck had stopped when it hadn’t. It was as if a shark had got him, pain leapfrogged to his brain and exploded there, blowing him into a mixed land of black-out and dreams in which he had mistaken his own pain and suffering for somebody else’s, then woken up to find with horror that it had been his own. Operation after operation, and now he was a sad asthmatic cripple with a job on top, the only compensation being that he had become the unbeatable champion of the local darts team. On most nights he made his way on two sticks to the John Barleycorn, slung down three pints of mild, and got his hand in before a game by going round the clock. Though able to stand, he played from a chair set at the regulation paint mark, preferring to sling his arrows this way because his hospital marksmanship had been built up from a wheelchair. He was broad-shouldered and dark, kept in life and friendship by sufficient bouts of ironical cheerfulness, buttressed against despair by his wife and four daughters.
Mullinder now sat at the table with his bad leg spread towards the fire while his wife, a tall nut-brown gypsy-like woman, followed Brian and Pauline in with a loaded enamel teapot and set it before him. What a life, Brian observed: waited on like a king. Not that I wish it was me, with that bad foot. Eleven-year-old Maureen took up the other side of the hearth to read a comic. “Hey up, Brian,” she called out, no sooner was he in.
“Did you pass your scholarship?” he asked. You could tell she was one of the family all right, her face oval and alive, and even more mischievous because of her age.
“I don’t know yet. But I don’t care if I pass or not. I’ll feel daft in a uniform and all that. I want to go to work when I’m fourteen, not stay till I’m sixteen.”
“Don’t be barmy,” Mullinder said. “You’re a lot better off at school. You don’t know you’re born until you start wok, Maureen Madcap!”
“I’ll get mad all right in a bit, our dad. I’ve told you before not to call me Maureen Madcap.” But from almost crying with shame and shyness, she called to Brian: “Hey, Brian, you know what heppens when you wash too much?”
“What?”
“You get soap rash! Don’t you, our dad?”
“Go on,” he called. “I reckon Maureen Madcap’s the name for yo’, right enough.”
Mrs. Mullinder set Pauline to wash more cups, and put Brian at the supper table facing her husband. “Tek a couple o’ them cheese sandwiches,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind sacs in your tea, but I don’t get the sugar ration till tomorrow.”
“That’s all right. We’ve got nowt else but them.” He felt it strange that an issue should be made of it, as if he’d strayed into a higher degree of civilization than he was used to. Tea was tea, whether it was dosed with saccharine or sugar. In fact, the ration at home was always three weeks in advance because his mother had wheedled it out of the grocer. “She’s clever,” Mr. Mullinder laughed when he mentioned it. “When the war ends she’ll have had three weeks for nowt.”
“What’s the score on the Russian front these days?” Mullinder asked, teasing Brian’s obsession, who took him seriously: “They’ll be in Germany soon. I’m sure they’ll get to Berlin before anybody else.”
“Let’s hope they stay there,” Mullinder said. “They want to finish off that lot once and for all, this time.”
Brian ripped into a sandwich: “I’ll say.”
“Get my fags out o’ my mac pocket, Pauline,” her old man said. Brian liked to see her doing such things, washing-up, slicing bread, paring cheese, and spreading butter. He observed the mature sixteen-year-old shape of her body as best he could with so many in the house, saw how attractive it showed when prized out of the voluminous thick coat and clothed only in the blouse and skirt she had worked in by her machine all day. The raw animal sweetness lingering from their lovemaking in the Cherry Orchard still beat in his loins, and now and again as she passed him at the table he caught a faint odour of her face and skin, of powder and lipstick she lightly used — though her father had told her time and time again not to wear it. He was surprised that no one could twig they had spent the last hour loving each other, felt it should be showing in their eyes and the way they moved.
He ate his food slowly, drank tea, only half-aware of the squabble going on between Maureen and Doris, the eldest daughter, who was to be married in a month and seemed to be getting her bellyful of family fights before leaving them off for good. Mullinder switched the news on hopefully, but it didn’t get a look in, so with a pit curse — also drowned — he flicked it off again. I don’t know how he puts up with this racket, though maybe he likes it — you never know. It’s certainly a living family. If there was an argument like this in our house, fists and pots would be flying already. Pauline sat opposite, eating her supper. She caught his look and picked up her cup of tea to dispel it. He was overwhelmed by an impossible thought, an outlandish idea that would drag him from all settled notions of work and courting (and freedom that nevertheless existed between the two states) and set him on a course so new and head-racking, yet in a way perhaps wonderful and good, that he wished the vision of it had never fixed itself like a hot picture-transfer against his skin. Maybe she already is pregnant, he thought, we’ve done it often enough.