On Chesil Beach (9 page)

They took walks over Port Meadow, upstream along the Thames to the Perch or the Trout for a pint. When they were not talking about their feelings—Edward was beginning to find those conversations cloying—they talked of their ambitions. He expanded on the series of short histories of half-forgotten figures who stood for a short while at the side of great men, or had their own brief moment in the sun. He described to her Sir Robert Carey’s wild dash north, how he had arrived at James’s court with his face bloodied following a fall from his horse and how all his exertions had earned him nothing. After his conversation with Violet, Edward had decided to add one of Norman Cohn’s medieval cultists, a flagellant Messiah of the 1360s whose coming was foretold, so he and his followers proclaimed, in the prophecies of Isaiah. Christ was merely his precursor, for he was the Emperor of the Last Days as well as God himself. His self-flagellating followers obeyed him slavishly, and prayed to him. His name was Konrad Schmid, and he was probably burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1368, after which all his huge following simply melted away. As Edward saw it, each history would be no longer than two hundred pages and would be published, with illustrations, by Penguin Books, and perhaps when the series was complete it could be available in a special boxed set.

Naturally, Florence talked about her plans for the Ennismore Quartet. The week before they had gone to their old college and played Beethoven’s second Razumovsky right through for her tutor, and he was obviously excited. He told them straightaway that they had a future and must at all costs hang together and work extremely hard. He said they should focus their repertoire, concentrate on Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert and leave Schumann, Brahms and all the twentieth-century composers until later. Florence told Edward that there was no other life she wanted, that she could not bear to waste away the years at a rear desk in some orchestra, assuming she could even get a place. With the quartet, the work was so intense, the demands on concentration so huge when each player was like a soloist, the music so beautiful and rich, that every time they played a piece through, they found something new.

She said all this knowing that classical music meant nothing to him. As far as he was concerned, it was best heard in the background at low volume, a stream of undifferentiated mewling, scraping and tooting generally taken to signify seriousness and maturity and respect for the past, and entirely devoid of interest or excitement. But Florence believed his triumphant shout at the opening of the Haffner Symphony was a breakthrough, and so she invited him to come to London with her and sit in on a rehearsal. He was ready to accept—of course, he wanted to watch her at work, but more important, he was curious to find out whether this cellist, Charles, she had mentioned rather too many times was a rival in any sense. If he was, Edward thought he needed to demonstrate his presence.

Because of a summer lull in bookings, the piano showroom next door to the Wigmore Hall was letting the quartet have a rehearsal room for a nominal fee. Florence and Edward arrived well before the others so that she could give him a tour of the hall. The green room, the tiny changing room, even the auditorium and the cupola could hardly account, he thought, for her reverence for the place. She was so proud of the Wigmore Hall, it was as if she had designed it herself. She led him out onto the stage and asked him to imagine the thrill and terror of stepping out to play before a discerning audience. He could not, though he did not say so. She told him that one day it would happen, she had made up her mind: the Ennismore Quartet would perform here, play beautifully and triumph. He loved her for the solemnity of her promise. He kissed her, and then he jumped down into the auditorium and stood three rows back, dead center, and vowed that whatever happened, he would be here on that day, in this very seat, 9C, and he would lead the applause and the bravos at the end.

When the rehearsal began, Edward sat quietly in a corner of the bare room in a state of profound happiness. He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now. The cellist, clearly disconcerted by Florence’s new friend, was a pudding of a fellow with a stammer and a terrible skin condition, and Edward was able to feel sorry for him and generously forgive his slavish fixation on Florence, for he too could not keep his eyes off her. She was in a state of trance-like contentment as she settled down to work with her friends. She put on her headband, and Edward, waiting for the session to begin, fell into a reverie, not only about sex with Florence but marriage, and family, and the daughter they might have. Surely it was a mark of his maturity to contemplate such things. Perhaps it was just a respectable variation of an old dream of being loved by more than one girl. She would have her mother’s beauty and seriousness, and lovely straight back, and was sure to play an instrument—the violin, probably, though he did not entirely rule out the electric guitar.

On that particular afternoon Sonia, the viola player from Florence’s floor, arrived to work on the Mozart quintet. At last they were ready to begin. There was the briefest tightening silence, which may have been scored by Mozart himself. As soon as they started to play, Edward was struck by the sheer volume, and the muscularity of the sound, and the velvety interleaving of the instruments, and for minutes on end he actually enjoyed the music—until he lost the thread and became bored in a familiar way with the prim agitation and sameness of it all. Then Florence called a halt and quietly gave notes, and there was a general discussion until they began again. This happened several times, and repetition began to reveal to Edward a discernible sweet melody, and various passing entanglements between the players, and daring swoops and leaps that he came to look out for next time around. Later, on the train home, he was able to tell her with complete honesty that he had been moved by the music, and he even hummed bits to her. Florence was so touched, she made another promise—again, that thrilling solemnity that seemed to double the size of her eyes. When the great day came for the Ennismore to make its Wigmore Hall debut, they would play the quintet, and it would be especially for him.

In return, he brought to Oxford from the cottage a selection of records he wanted her to learn to love. She sat dead still and listened patiently, with closed eyes and too much concentration, to Chuck Berry. He thought she might dislike “Roll Over Beethoven,” but she found it hilarious. She tried to find something appreciative to say about each song, but she used words like “bouncy” or “merry” or “heartfelt,” and he knew she was simply being kind. When he suggested that she did not really “get” rock and roll and there was no reason why she should continue to try, she admitted that what she could not stand was the drumming. When the tunes were so elementary, mostly in simple four-four time, why this relentless thumping and crashing and clattering to keep time? What was the point, when there was already a rhythm guitar, and often a piano? If the musicians needed to hear the beats, why not get a metronome? What if the Ennismore Quartet took on a drummer? He kissed her and told her she was the squarest person in all of Western civilization.

“But you love me,” she said.

“
Therefore
I love you.”

In early August, when a Turville Heath neighbor fell ill, Edward was offered his part-time job, on a temporary basis, as groundsman at the Turville cricket club. He was to put in twelve hours a week, and he could do them whenever he wanted. He liked to leave the cottage in the early morning, before even his father was awake, and saunter through the noise of birdsong down the lime-tree avenue to the grounds as if he owned the place. During his first week he prepared the pitch for the local derby, the big game against Stonor. He cut the grass, hauled the roller and helped a carpenter who came up from Hambleden to build and paint a new sightscreen. Whenever he was not working or needed around the house, he headed straight for Oxford, not only because he longed to see Florence, but also because he wanted to forestall the visit she was bound to make to meet his family. He did not know what she and his mother would think of each other, or how Florence would react to the filth and disorder of the cottage. He thought he needed time to prepare both women, but as it turned out, it was not necessary; crossing the grounds one hot early Friday afternoon, he found Florence waiting for him in the shadow of the pavilion. She knew his hours, and had taken an early train and walked from Henley toward the Stonor Valley, with a one-inch-to-the-mile map in her hand and a couple of oranges in a canvas satchel. For half an hour she had been watching him as he marked out the far boundary. Loving him from a distance, she said when they kissed.

That was one of the exquisite moments of their early love, when they went slowly, arm in arm, back up the glorious avenue, walking in the center of the lane to take full possession. Now that it was inevitable, the prospect of her encounter with his mother and the cottage no longer seemed important. The shadows the lime trees cast were so deep they appeared bluish black in the brilliant light, and the heath was thick with fresh grasses and wildflowers. He showed off his knowledge of their country names and even found, by luck, by the roadside, a clump of Chiltern gentians. They picked just one. They saw a yellowhammer, a green finch, and then a sparrowhawk flashed by, cutting a narrow angle around a blackthorn tree. She did not know the names even of common birds like these, but she said she was determined to learn. She was exultant from the beauty of her walk and the clever route she had chosen, leaving the Stonor Valley to go along the narrow farm track into lonely Bix Bottom, past the ruined ivy-covered church of St. James, up the wooded slopes to the common at Maidensgrove, where she discovered an immense expanse of wildflowers, then through the beech woods to Pishill Bank, where a little brick-and-flint church and its churchyard were poised so beautifully on the side of the hill. As she described each place—and he knew them all so well—he imagined her there, on her own, walking toward him for hours, stopping only to frown at her map. All for him. What a gift! And he had never seen her so happy, or so pretty. She had tied back her hair with a scrap of black velvet, she wore black jeans and plimsolls, and a white shirt, through a buttonhole of which she had threaded a rakish dandelion. As they walked toward the cottage she kept tugging on his grass-stained arm for another kiss, though of the lightest sort, and for once he happily, or at least calmly, accepted that they would go no further. After she peeled her remaining orange for them to share along the way, her hand was sticky in his. They were innocently thrilled by her clever surprise, and their lives seemed hilarious and free, and the whole weekend lay before them.

T
he memory of that stroll from the cricket ground to the cottage taunted Edward now, a year later, on his wedding night, as he rose from the bed in the semidarkness. He was feeling the pull of contrary emotions and needed to hold on to all his best, his kindest thoughts of her, or else he thought he would fold, he would simply give up. There was a liquid heaviness in his legs as he crossed the room to retrieve his underpants from the floor. He put them on, picked up his trousers and stood for a good while with them dangling from his hand as he stared out the window at the wind-shrunken trees, darkened now to a continuous gray-green mass. High up was a smoky half-moon, casting virtually no light. The sound of waves collapsing onto the shore at regular intervals broke in on his thoughts, as though suddenly switched on, and filled him with weariness; the relentless laws and processes of the physical world, of moon and tides, in which he generally took little interest, were not remotely altered by his situation. This overobvious fact was too harsh. How could he get by, alone and unsupported? And how could he go down and face her on the beach, where he guessed she must be? His trousers felt heavy and ridiculous in his hand, these parallel tubes of cloth joined at one end, an arbitrary fashion of recent centuries. Putting them on, it seemed to him, would return him to the social world, to his obligations and to the true measure of his shame. Once dressed, he would have to go and find her. And so he delayed.

Like many vivid memories, his recollection of strolling toward Turville Heath with Florence created a penumbra of oblivion around it. They must have arrived at the cottage to find his mother alone—his father and the girls would have still been at school. Marjorie Mayhew was usually flustered by a strange face, but Edward retained no impression of introducing Florence, or of how she responded to the crammed and squalid rooms, and the stench of drains, always at its worst in summer, that drifted in from the kitchen. He had only snatches of memories of the afternoon, certain views, like old postcards. One was through the smeared, latticed window of the sitting room to the bottom of the garden, where Florence and his mother sat on the bench, each with a pair of scissors and copies of
Life
magazine, chatting as they cut up pages. When they came in from school, the girls must have taken Florence to see a neighbor’s newborn donkey, for another view showed all three coming back across the green, arm in arm. A third was of Florence taking a tray of tea out into the garden to his father. Oh yes, he should not doubt it, she was a good person, the best, and that summer all the Mayhews fell in love with Florence. The twins came to Oxford with him and spent the day on the river with Florence and her sister. Marjorie was always asking after Florence, though she could never remember her name, and Lionel Mayhew, in all his worldliness, advised his son to marry “that girl” before she got away.

He conjured these memories of last year, the cottage postcards, the walk under the limes, the Oxford summer, not from a sentimental desire to compound or indulge his sorrow but to dispel it and feel himself in love, and to hold back the advance of an element that initially he did not care to admit, the beginnings of a darkening of mood, a darker reckoning, a trace of poison that even now was branching through his being. Anger. The demon he had kept down earlier when he thought his patience was about to break. How tempting to give in to it, now that he was alone and could let it burn. After such humiliation, his self-respect demanded it. And what harm was there in a mere thought? Better to be done with it now, while he stood here, half naked among the ruins of his wedding night. He was aided in his surrender by the clarity that comes with a sudden absence of desire. With his thoughts no longer softened or blurred by longing, he was capable of registering an insult with forensic objectivity. And what an insult it was, what contempt she showed for him with her cry of revulsion and the fuss with the pillow, what a twist of the scalpel, to run from the room without a word, leaving him with the disgusting taint of shame and all the burden of failure. She had done what she could to make the situation worse, and irretrievable. He was contemptible to her, she wanted to punish him, to leave him alone to contemplate his inadequacies without any thought for her own part. Surely it was the movement of her hand, her fingers, that had brought him on. At the memory of that touch, that sweet sensation, fresh sharp-edged arousal began to distract him, enticing him from these hardening thoughts, tempting him to start forgiving her. But he resisted. He had found his theme, and he pushed on. He sensed there was a weightier matter just ahead, and here it was, he had it at last, he burst into it, like a miner breaking through the sides of a wider tunnel, a gloomy thoroughfare broad enough for his gathering fury.