On Chesil Beach (7 page)

E
dward’s face was still unusually pink, his pupils dilated, his lips still parted, his breathing as before: shallow, irregular, rapid. His week of wedding preparation, of crazed restraint, was bearing down hard on his body’s young chemistry. She was so precious and vivid before him, and he did not quite know what to do. In the falling light, the blue dress he had failed to remove gleamed darkly against the stretched white counterpane. When he first touched her inner thigh her skin had been surprisingly cool, and for some reason this had excited him intensely. As he looked into her eyes, he had an impression of toppling toward her in constant giddy motion. He felt trapped between the pressure of his excitement and the burden of his ignorance. Beyond the films, the dirty jokes and the wild anecdotes, most of what he knew about women was derived from Florence herself. The perturbation beneath his hand could easily be a telltale sign that anyone could have told him how to recognize and respond to—some kind of precursor to female orgasm, perhaps. Equally, it could be nerves. There was no telling, and he was relieved when it began to subside. He remembered a time, in a vast cornfield outside Ewelme, when he sat at the controls of a combine harvester, having boasted to the farmer that he was competent, and then did not dare touch a single lever. He simply did not know enough. On the one hand, she was the one who had led him to the bedroom, removed her shoes with such abandon, let him place his hand so close. On the other, he knew from long experience how easily an impetuous move could wreck his chances. There again, while his hand remained in place, palpating her thigh, she continued to gaze at him so invitingly—her bold features softened, her eyes narrowing, then opening wide again to find his own, and now her head tilting back—that his caution was surely absurd. This hesitancy was a madness of his own. They were married, for goodness’ sake, and she was encouraging him, urging him on, desperate for him to take the lead. But still, he could not escape the memories of those times when he had misread the signs, most spectacularly in the cinema, at the showing of
A Taste of Honey
, when she had leaped out of her seat and into the aisle like a startled gazelle. That single mistake took weeks to repair—it was a disaster he dared not repeat, and he was skeptical that a forty-minute wedding ceremony could make so profound a difference.

The air in the room seemed thin, insubstantial, and it was a conscious effort to breathe. He was troubled by a fit of nervous yawning, which he suppressed with a frown and a flaring of the nostrils—it would not help if she thought he was bored. It pained him tremendously that their wedding night was not simple, when their love was so obvious. He regarded his state of excitement, ignorance and indecision as dangerous because he did not trust himself. He was capable of behaving stupidly, even explosively. He was known to his university friends as one of those quiet types, prone to the occasional violent eruption. According to his father, his very early childhood had been marked by spectacular tantrums. Through his school years and into his time at college he was drawn now and then by the wild freedom of a fistfight. From schoolyard scraps around which savagely chanting kids formed a spectator ring, to a solemn rendezvous in a woodland clearing near the edge of the village, to shameless brawls outside central London pubs, Edward found in fighting a thrilling unpredictability, and discovered a spontaneous, decisive self that eluded him in the rest of his tranquil existence. He never sought out these situations, but when they arose, certain aspects—the taunting, the restraining friends, the squaring up, the sheer outrageousness of his opponent—were irresistible. Something like tunnel vision and deafness descended on him, and then suddenly he was back there again, stepping into a forgotten pleasure, as though emerging into a recurring dream. As in a student drinking bout, the pain came afterward. He was no great pugilist, but he had the useful gift of physical recklessness, and was well placed to raise the stakes. He was also strong.

Florence had never seen this madness in him, and he did not intend to talk to her about it. He had not been in a fight for eighteen months, since January of 1961, in the second term of his final year. It was a one-sided affair, and unusual in that Edward had some cause, a degree of justice on his side. He was walking along Old Compton Street toward the French Pub in Dean Street with another third-year history student, Harold Mather. It was early evening and they had come straight from the library in Malet Street to meet up with friends. At Edward’s grammar school, Mather would have been the perfect victim—he was short, barely five foot five, wore thick glasses over comically squashed features and was maddeningly talkative and clever. At university, however, he flourished, he was a high-status figure. He had an important jazz record collection, he edited a literary magazine, he had a short story accepted, though not yet published, by
Encounter
magazine, he was hilarious in formal student union debates and a good mimic—he did Macmillan, Gaitskell, Kennedy, Khrushchev in fake Russian, as well as various African leaders and comedians like Al Read and Tony Hancock. He could reproduce all the voices and sketches from
Beyond the Fringe
and was reckoned by far the best student in the history group. Edward counted it as progress in his own life, evidence of a new maturity, that he prized his friendship with a man he might once have taken trouble to avoid.

At that time, on a weekday winter’s evening, Soho was only just coming to life. The pubs were full, but the clubs were not yet open, and the pavements were uncrowded. It was easy to notice the couple coming toward them along Old Compton Street. They were rockers—he was a big fellow in his mid-twenties, with long sideburns, studded leather jacket, tight jeans and boots, and his plump girlfriend, holding on to his arm, was identically dressed. As they passed, and without breaking stride, the man swung his arm out to deliver a hard, flat-handed smack to the back of Mather’s head, which caused him to stagger, and sent his Buddy Holly glasses skidding across the road. It was an act of casual contempt for Mather’s height and studious appearance, or for the fact that he looked, and was, Jewish. Perhaps it was intended to impress or amuse the girl. Edward did not stop to think about it. As he strode after the couple, he heard Harold call out something like a “no” or a “don’t,” but that was just the kind of entreaty he was now deaf to. He was back in that dream. He would have found it difficult to describe his state: his anger had lifted itself and spiraled into a kind of ecstasy. With his right hand he gripped the man’s shoulder and spun him around, and, with his left, took him by the throat and pushed him back against a wall. The man’s head clunked satisfyingly against a cast-iron drainpipe. Still clenching his throat, Edward hit him in the face, just once, but very hard, with a closed fist. Then he went back to help Mather find his glasses, one lens of which was cracked. They walked on, leaving the fellow sitting on the pavement, both hands covering his face, while his girlfriend fussed over him.

It took Edward some while into the evening to become aware of Harold Mather’s lack of gratitude, and then of his silence, or silence toward him, and even longer, a day or two, to realize that his friend not only disapproved, but worse—he was embarrassed. In the pub neither man told their friends the story, and afterward Mather never spoke about the incident to Edward. Rebuke would have been a relief. Without making any great show of it, Mather withdrew from him. Though they saw each other in company, and he was never obviously distant toward Edward, the friendship was never the same. Edward was in agonies when he considered that Mather was actually repelled by his behavior, but he did not have the courage to raise the subject. Besides, Mather made sure they were never alone together. At first Edward believed that his error was to have damaged Mather’s pride by witnessing his humiliation, which Edward then compounded by acting as his champion, demonstrating that he was tough while Mather was a vulnerable weakling. Later on, Edward realized that what he had done was simply not cool, and his shame was all the greater. Street fighting did not go with poetry and irony, bebop or history. He was guilty of a lapse of taste. He was not the person he had thought. What he believed was an interesting quirk, a rough virtue, turned out to be a vulgarity. He was a country boy, a provincial idiot who thought a bare-knuckle swipe could impress a friend. It was a mortifying reappraisal. He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged. Since then, Edward had stayed out of fights.

But now, on his wedding night, he did not trust himself. He could not be certain that the tunnel vision and selective deafness would never descend again, enveloping him like a wintry mist on Turville Heath, obscuring his more recent, more sophisticated self. He had been sitting beside Florence, with his hand under her dress, stroking her thigh for more than a minute and a half. His painful craving was building intolerably, and he was frightened by his own savage impatience and the furious words or actions it might provoke, and so end the evening. He loved her, but he wanted to shake her awake, or slap her out of her straight-backed music-stand poise, her North Oxford proprieties, and make her see how really simple it was: here was a boundless sensual freedom, theirs for the taking, even blessed by the vicar—
with my body I thee worship
—a dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace and have each other, drown each other in waves of breathless, mindless ecstasy. It was so simple! Why weren’t they up there now, instead of sitting here, bottled up with all the things they did not know how to say or dared not do?

And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all. He removed his hand and drew her to him and kissed her on the lips, with all the restraint he was capable of, holding back his tongue. He eased her back across the bed so that her head was cushioned on his arm. He lay on his side, propped on the elbow of that same arm, looking down at her. The bed squeaked mournfully when they moved, a reminder of other honeymoon couples who had passed through, all surely more adept than they were. He held down a sudden impulse to laugh at the idea of them, a solemn queue stretching out into the corridor, downstairs to reception, back through time. It was important not to think about them; comedy was an erotic poison. He also had to hold off the thought that she might be terrified of him. If he believed that, he could do nothing. She was compliant in his arms, her eyes still fixed on his, her face slack and difficult to read. Her breathing was steady and deep, like a sleeper’s. He whispered her name and told her again that he loved her, and she blinked, and parted her lips, perhaps in assent, or even reciprocation. With his free hand he began to remove her knickers. She tensed, but she did not resist, and lifted, or half lifted, her buttocks from the bed. Again, the sad sound of mattress springs or bed frame, like the bleat of a spring lamb. Even with his free arm at full stretch, it was not possible to continue to cushion her head while hooking the knickers past her knees and around her ankles. She helped him by bending her knees. A good sign. He could not face another attempt on the zip of her dress, so for the moment her bra—pale blue silk, so he had glimpsed, with a fine lace trim—must stay in place too. So much for the bare-limbed weightless embrace. But she was beautiful as she was, lying on his arm, her dress rucked up around her thighs, ropes of her tangled hair spread out across the counterpane. A sun queen. They kissed again. He was nauseous with desire and indecision. To get undressed he would have to disturb this promising arrangement of their bodies and risk breaking the spell. A slight change, a combination of tiny factors, little zephyrs of doubt, and she could change her mind. But he firmly believed that to make love—and for the very first time—merely by unzipping his fly was unsensual and gross. And impolite.

After some minutes, he slid from her side and undressed hurriedly over by the window, leaving a precious zone around the bed free of all such banality. He trod on the backs of his shoes to wrench them from his feet, and snatched his socks off with quick jabs of his thumbs. He observed that her eyes were not on him, but straight up, on the sagging canopy above her. In seconds he was naked but for his shirt, tie and wristwatch. Somehow the shirt, partly concealing, partly emphasizing his erection, like a draped public monument, politely acknowledged the code set by her dress. The tie was clearly absurd, and as he went back toward her he yanked it free with one hand while loosening his top button with the other. It was a confident swaggering motion, and for a moment there returned to him an idea of himself he once had, of a rough-hewn but fundamentally decent and capable fellow, and then it faded. The ghost of Harold Mather still troubled him.

F
lorence chose not to sit up, or even shift her position; she lay on her back, staring up at the biscuit-colored pleated cloth supported on posts that were intended to conjure, she supposed, an old England of stone-chilled castles and courtly love. She concentrated on the fabric’s uneven weave, on a green coin-sized stain—how had that got there?—and on a trailing thread that stirred in currents of air. She was trying not to think of the immediate future, or of the past, and she imagined herself clinging to this moment, the precious present, like an unroped climber on a cliff, pressing her face tight against the rock, not daring to move. Cool air traveled pleasantly over her bare legs. She listened to the distant waves, the call of herring gulls, and to the sound of Edward undressing. Here came the past anyway, the indistinct past. It was the smell of the sea that summoned it. She was twelve years old, lying still like this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany sides. Her mind was a blank, she felt she was in disgrace. After a two-day crossing, they were once more in the calm of Carteret harbor, south of Cherbourg. It was late in the evening, and her father was moving about the dim cramped cabin, undressing, like Edward now. She remembered the rustle of clothes, the clink of a belt unfastened or of keys or loose change. Her only task was to keep her eyes closed and think of a tune she liked. Or any tune. She remembered the sweet scent of almost rotten food in the closed air of a boat after a rough trip. She was usually sick many times on the crossing, and of no use to her father as a sailor, and that surely was the source of her shame.