On Chesil Beach Read online

  “You’re telling me I could do it with anyone I like but you.”

  She did not answer.

  “Have you actually forgotten that we were married today? We’re not two old queers living in secret on Beaumont Street. We’re man and wife!”

  The lower clouds parted again, and though there was no direct moonlight, a feeble glow, diffused through higher strata, moved along the beach to include the couple standing by the great fallen tree. In his fury, he bent down to pick up a large smooth stone, which he smacked into his right palm and back into his left.

  He was close to shouting now. “With my body I thee worship! That’s what you promised today. In front of everybody. Don’t you realize how disgusting and ridiculous your idea is? And what an insult it is. An insult to me! I mean, I mean”—he struggled for the words—“how dare you!”

  He took a step toward her, with the hand gripping the stone raised, then he spun around and in his frustration hurled it toward the sea. Even before it landed, just short of the water’s edge, he wheeled to face her again. “You tricked me. Actually, you’re a fraud. And I know exactly what else you are. Do you know what you are? You’re frigid, that’s what. Completely frigid. But you thought you needed a husband, and I was the first bloody idiot who came along.”

  She knew she had not set out to deceive him, but everything else, as soon as he said it, seemed entirely true. Frigid, that terrible word—she understood how it applied to her. She was exactly what the word meant. Her proposal was disgusting—how could she not have seen that before? and clearly an insult. And worst of all, she had broken her promises, made in public, in a church. As soon as he told her, it all fit perfectly. In her own eyes as well as his, she was worthless.

  She had nothing left to say, and she came away from the protection of the washed-up tree. To set off toward the hotel she had to pass by him, and as she did so she stopped right in front of him and said in little more than a whisper, “I am sorry, Edward. I am most terribly sorry.”

  She paused a moment, she lingered there, waiting for his reply, then she went on her way.

  Her words, their particular archaic construction, would haunt him for a long time to come. He would wake in the night and hear them, or something like their echo, and their yearning, regretful tone, and he would groan at the memory of that moment, of his silence and of the way he angrily turned from her, of how he then stayed out on the beach another hour, savoring the full deliciousness of the injury and wrong and insult she had inflicted on him, elevated by a mawkish sense of himself as being wholesomely and tragically in the right. He walked up and down on the exhausting shingle, hurling stones at the sea and shouting obscenities. Then he slumped by the tree and fell into a daydream of self-pity until he could fire up his rage again. He stood at the water’s edge thinking about her, and in his distraction let the waves wash over his shoes. Finally he trudged slowly back along the beach, stopping often to address in his mind a stern impartial judge who understood his case completely. In his misfortune, he felt almost noble.

  By the time he reached the hotel, she had packed her overnight case and gone. She left no note in the room. At reception he spoke to the two lads who had served the dinner from the trolley. Though they did not say so, they were clearly surprised that he did not know that there had been a family illness and his wife had been urgently called home. The assistant manager had kindly driven her to Dorchester, where she was hoping to catch the last train and make a late connection to Oxford. As Edward turned to go upstairs to the honeymoon suite, he did not actually see the young men exchange their meaningful glance, but he could imagine it well enough.

  He lay awake for the rest of the night on the four-poster bed, fully dressed, still furious. His thoughts chased themselves around in a dance, in a delirium of constant return. To marry him, then deny him, it was monstrous, wanted him to go with other women, perhaps she wanted to watch, it was a humiliation, it was unbelievable, no one would believe it, said she loved him, he hardly ever saw her breasts, tricked him into marriage, didn’t even know how to kiss, fooled him, conned him, no one must know, had to remain his shameful secret, that she married him then denied him, it was monstrous…

  Just before dawn he got up and went through to the sitting room and, standing behind his chair, scraped the solidified gravy from the meat and potatoes on his plate and ate them. After that, he emptied her plate—he did not care whose plate it was. Then he ate all the mints, and then the cheese. He left the hotel as dawn was breaking and drove Violet Ponting’s little car along miles of narrow lanes with high hedges, with the smell of fresh dung and mown grass rushing through the open window, until he joined the empty arterial road toward Oxford.

  He left the car outside the Pontings’ house with the keys in the ignition. Without a glance toward Florence’s window, he hurried off through the town with his suitcase to catch an early train. In a daze of exhaustion, he made the long walk from Henley to Turville Heath, taking care to avoid the route she had taken the year before. Why should he walk in her footsteps? Once home, he refused to explain himself to his father. His mother had already forgotten that he was married. The twins pestered him constantly with their questions and clever speculations. He took them to the bottom of the garden and made Harriet and Anne swear, solemnly and separately, hands on hearts, that they would never mention Florence’s name again.

  A week later he learned from his father that Mrs. Ponting had efficiently arranged the return of all the wedding presents. Between them, Lionel and Violet quietly set in motion a divorce on the grounds of nonconsummation. At his father’s prompting, Edward wrote a formal letter to Geoffrey Ponting, chairman of Ponting Electronics, regretting a “change of heart” and, without mentioning Florence, offered an apology, his resignation and a brief farewell.

  A year or so later, when his anger had faded, he was still too proud to look her up, or write. He dreaded that Florence might be with someone else and, not hearing from her, he became convinced that she was. Toward the end of that celebrated decade, when his life came under pressure from all the new excitements and freedoms and fashions, as well as from the chaos of numerous love affairs—he became at last reasonably competent—he often thought of her strange proposal, and it no longer seemed quite so ridiculous, and certainly not disgusting or insulting. In the new circumstances of the day, it appeared liberated, and far ahead of its time, innocently generous, an act of self-sacrifice that he had quite failed to understand. Man, what an offer! his friends might have said, though he never spoke of that night to anyone. By then, in the late sixties, he was living in London. Who would have predicted such transformations—the sudden guiltless elevation of sensual pleasure, the uncomplicated willingness of so many beautiful women? Edward wandered through those brief years like a confused and happy child reprieved from a prolonged punishment, not quite able to believe his luck. The series of short history books and all thoughts of serious scholarship were behind him, though there was never any particular point when he made a firm decision about his future. Like poor Sir Robert Carey, he simply fell away from history to live snugly in the present.

  He became involved in the administration of various rock festivals, helped start a health-food canteen in Hampstead, worked in a record shop not far from the canal in Camden Town, wrote rock reviews for small magazines, lived through a chaotic, overlapping sequence of lovers, traveled through France with a woman who became his wife for three and a half years and lived with her in Paris. He eventually became a part-owner of the record shop. His life was too busy for newspapers, and besides, for a while his attitude was that no one could honestly trust the “straight” press because everyone knew it was controlled by state, military or financial interests—a view that Edward later disowned.

  Even if he had read the papers in those times, he would have been unlikely to turn to the arts pages, to the long, thoughtful reviews of concerts. His precarious interest in classical music had faded entirely in favor of rock and roll. So he never hear
d about the Ennismore Quartet’s triumphant debut at the Wigmore Hall in July 1968. The Times critic welcomed the arrival of “fresh blood, youthful passion to the current scene.” He praised the “insight, the brooding intensity, the incisiveness of the playing,” which suggested “an astonishing musical maturity in players still in their twenties. They commanded with magisterial ease the full panoply of harmonic and dynamic effects and rich contrapuntal writing that typifies Mozart’s late style. His D Major Quintet was never so sensitively rendered.” At the end of his review he singled out the leader, the first violinist. “Then came a searingly expressive Adagio of consummate beauty and spiritual power. Miss Ponting, in the lilting tenderness of her tone and the lyrical delicacy of her phrasing, played, if I may put it this way, like a woman in love, not only with Mozart, or with music, but with life itself.”

  And even if Edward had read that review, he could not have known—no one knew but Florence—that as the house lights came up, and as the dazed young players stood to acknowledge the rapturous applause, the first violinist could not help her gaze traveling to the middle of the third row, to seat 9C.

  In later years, whenever Edward thought of her and addressed her in his mind, or imagined writing to her or bumping into her in the street, it seemed to him that an explanation of his existence would take up less than a minute, less than half a page. What had he done with himself? He had drifted through, half asleep, inattentive, unambitious, unserious, childless, comfortable. His modest achievements were mostly material. He owned a tiny flat in Camden Town, a share of a two-bedroom cottage in the Auvergne, and two specialist record stores, jazz and rock and roll, precarious ventures slowly being undermined by Internet shopping. He supposed he was considered a decent friend by his friends, and there had been some good times, wild times, especially in the early years. He was godfather to five children, though it was not until their late teens or early twenties that he started to play a role.

  In 1976 Edward’s mother died, and four years later he moved back to the cottage to take care of his father, who was suffering from rapidly advancing Parkinson’s disease. Harriet and Anne were married with children and both lived abroad. By then Edward, at forty, had a failed marriage behind him. He traveled to London three times a week to take care of the shops. His father died at home in 1983 and was buried in Pishill churchyard, alongside his wife. Edward remained in the cottage as a tenant—his sisters were the legal owners now. Initially he used the place as a bolt-hole from Camden Town, and then in the early nineties he moved there to live alone. Physically, Turville Heath, or his corner of it, was not so very different from the place he grew up in. Instead of agricultural laborers or craftsmen for neighbors, there were commuters or owners of second homes, but all were friendly enough. And Edward would never have described himself as unhappy—among his London friends was a woman he was fond of; well into his fifties he played cricket for Turville Park, he was active in a historical society in Henley, and played a part in the restoration of the ancient watercress beds in Ewelme. Two days a month he worked for a trust based in High Wycombe that helped brain-damaged children.

  Even in his sixties, a large, stout man with receding white hair and a pink, healthy face, he kept up the long hikes. His daily walk still took in the avenue of limes, and in good weather he would take a circular route to look at the wildflowers on the common at Maidensgrove or the butterflies in the nature reserve in Bix Bottom, returning through the beech woods to Pishill church, where, he thought, he too would one day be buried. Occasionally, he would come to a forking of the paths deep in a beech wood and idly think that this was where she must have paused to consult her map that morning in August, and he would imagine her vividly, only a few feet and forty years away, intent on finding him. Or he would pause by a view over the Stonor Valley and wonder whether this was where she stopped to eat her orange. At last he could admit to himself that he had never met anyone he loved as much, that he had never found anyone, man or woman, who matched her seriousness. Perhaps if he had stayed with her, he would have been more focused and ambitious about his own life, he might have written those history books. It was not his kind of thing at all, but he knew that the Ennismore Quartet was eminent, and was still a revered feature of the classical music scene. He would never attend the concerts, or buy, or even look at, the boxed sets of Beethoven or Schubert. He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile.

  When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience—if only he had had them both at once—would surely have seen them both through. And then what unborn children might have had their chances, what young girl with a headband might have become his loved familiar? This is how the entire course of a life can be changed—by doing nothing. On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.

  The characters in this novel are inventions and bear no resemblance to people living or dead. Edward and Florence’s hotel—just over a mile south of Abbotsbury, Dorset, occupying an elevated position in a field behind the beach parking lot—does not exist.

  I.M.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ian McEwan is the best-selling author of more than ten books, including the novels Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; and In Between the Sheets. He lives in London.

  ALSO BY IAN MCEWAN

  First Love, Last Rites

  In Between the Sheets

  The Cement Garden

  The Comfort of Strangers

  The Child in Time

  The Innocent

  Black Dogs

  The Daydreamer

  Enduring Love

  Amsterdam

  Atonement

  Saturday

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2008

  Copyright © 2007 by Ian McEwan

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Title page illustration by Louis Jones

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McEwan, Ian.

  On Chesil Beach / Ian McEwan.

  p. cm.

  I. Title. />
  PR6063.C4O6 2007

  823'.914—dc22 2006100720

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45582-6

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