read every scrap of information there was to read about the progress of other aviators all over the world and utilised their best ideas.
Clover moved to the trestle table and rolled out the expensive canvas sailcloth. She measured it and marked it out with a piece of blue chalk, then began cutting with a huge pair of scissors. Meanwhile Ned sawed and sanded the lath of wood that was to become an extended spar on one of the wings and offered it up to the construction. They worked companionably, speaking little, while Clover’s thoughts were about Tom Doubleday and whether he was supposed to be meeting Ramona that evening.
It depressed her to think about it. Ramona and Tom Doubleday…What if she got pregnant and he had to marry her?
If only he had asked her, Clover, to be his, she would be the happiest girl in the world. Oh, she was not without admirers, that much was obvious. Often she caught men looking at her covetously in the Jolly Collier when she was helping to serve. Men looked at her in church on a Sunday, they ogled her at the foundry. When she was walking to work she would attract many a wolf whistle. Yet no other man had really appealed. Nobody had ever made her stomach churn like Tom Doubleday. She’d never looked at a man’s lips before and known she wanted, more than anything, to be kissed by them. She’d never looked at a man’s hands and wondered what sensations they would elicit if they explored her body. She’d lain in bed at night imagining it and all sorts of other very private things, and could not sleep for ages after because of it.
The nearest thing she’d experienced to romance was Ned Brisco, but that was too one-sided to be any good for him. It was time to be honest with Ned, time to make him realise there could never be anything more than that which already existed between them. Some day, she would meet a man and fall head over heels in love; somebody other than Tom Doubleday who was occupying her thoughts now. Ned had to be prepared for that. It was only fair.
‘Why is it that you like me to spend my time here with you, Ned?’ she asked, breaking the concentration.
Ned stopped what he was doing and turned round to face her. ‘That’s a funny question, Clover.’
‘But I’d really like to know.’
‘Well, because I enjoy your company, I suppose. It’s nice being with you. And because you help me a lot.’
‘You enjoy my company, you said. But you hardly ever speak while I’m here.’
‘I still enjoy your company, Clover. I feel comfortable with you. We don’t have to talk all the while.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ she answered softly.
‘What’s the matter, Clover? You sound real fed up.’ He sounded uneasy. ‘Aren’t you interested in the flying machine any more?’
‘’Course I am,’ she admitted. ‘I still want to see you succeed. I want to see the thing fly and know that I had a hand in it. But, as regards anything else…I mean us…you and me…we see each other here, yet we don’t talk much, you have to admit.’
He sighed with dejection. ‘I admit I’m not such a brilliant conversationalist, Clover.’
She smiled affectionately. She couldn’t help but like him. ‘Well you do seem to be limited to one topic…’
‘Yes, I know I’m a bit preoccupied with it. Sorry. It doesn’t mean I’m not interested in you, Clover. I think the world—’
‘So how would you feel if you saw me with another man?’ she asked straightforwardly. ‘Because if another man I liked asked me out and I liked him, I’d most likely go. I mean, it’s not as if you and me are courting or anything like that.’
‘No,’ he said and she perceived his dejection. ‘I agree, it’s not as if we’re courting. I had hoped though, when—’
‘So it would be a mistake for you to regard me as anything other than a friend –wouldn’t it? Even though plenty folk think we’re more than just friends.’
He shrugged again disappointedly. ‘So have you met somebody you like, Clover? Is that why you mention it?’
‘No, no. I haven’t met anybody, Ned. But I might. And if I do, I don’t want you to think that I…I don’t want you to think you have any claim on me. On the other hand, I’d hate you to think I don’t care anything for our friendship, ’cause I do. ’Cause that’s what we are – friends.’
‘Yes, we are friends, Clover. I’d like us to be more than that but…Dammit, I might as well say it, since we’re talking about it…I’m in love with you, Clover. Always have been. All right, I know you’re not in love with me, so…’ He shrugged again and turned back to the wing he was modifying. ‘Well, at least we work well together, don’t we?’
Clover’s twentieth birthday came and went and no great fuss made. She was privately delighted when she received a birthday card from Tom Doubleday which she secreted away in her bedroom away from Ramona’s prying eyes. She had a lovely new white two-piece summer dress made at Bessie Roberts’s. It had a high-necked bodice and pouched in front; she chose the style and paid for it herself. Mary Ann gave her a new prayer book, Jake handed her a sovereign to spend as she wished, and Ramona bought her a new parasol for the summer.
The new dress re-exposed a recent bone of contention that Clover had hoped was buried for good: to Mary Ann’s reaffirmed dismay, Clover still refused to wear a corset to pull in her waist. She insisted that her waist was small enough at twenty-four inches, so she didn’t need a corset. ‘Brazen faggot,’ her mother called her. ‘Wait till you’ve had kids and you’m my age and it all starts to puff out like a bladder full of wind,’ she told her. But Clover perceived some humour in her mother’s eyes. Perhaps envy, too, that she herself could not be so brazen as to face the world corsetless, especially as her younger husband was fond of patting her rock-hard backside, when he might well have preferred patting untrussed feminine flesh that yielded more temptingly to the touch. Ramona, too, embraced Clover’s attitude to corsets. It made perfect sense not to constrict your movements and make yourself uncomfortable and hot, especially now that summer was coming. In any case, at work she was bending down so much, reaching for bottles on low shelves, stretching up for glasses and spirit bottles. It was bad enough having to wear all the uncomfortable things a woman was expected to wear, let alone corsets. Besides, Ramona’s waist measured only twenty-three inches, so she needed a corset even less than Clover, being so petite. So corsets they did not wear and, since corsets were not a fit topic for discussion at the meal table in any case, the subject was finally abandoned.
Whitsun came and went in days of perpetual sunshine and the scaled-down model of Ned’s flying machine proved to be a big attraction in Buffery Park on the Sunday, watched by a gathering clutch of highly curious Sunday afternoon walkers. He carried out the modifications he deemed necessary the same evening and put them to the test next day, to the delight of a chattering of children who were astonished, and a group of grey old men whom nothing would surprise. It only remained to incorporate these changes into the full-scale biplane he had almost finished constructing.
Tom Doubleday, Clover knew, called in at the Jolly Collier two or three times a week nowadays, but since it always coincided with her return from work when she looked her shabbiest she seldom spoke to him. Occasionally, he would spot her drifting through the passage but there was no opportunity for conversation. And besides, she did not want to antagonise Ramona.
Apart from one or two days of squally rain early in June that left the uneven cobbled streets of Kates Hill dotted with inky puddles, the weather became more settled again.
