On Chesil Beach Read online

  When he heard her moan, Edward knew that his happiness was almost complete. He had the impression of delightful weightlessness, of standing several inches clear of the ground, so that he towered pleasingly over her. There was pain-pleasure in the way his heart seemed to rise to thud at the base of his throat. He was thrilled by the light touch of her hands, not so very far from his groin, and by the compliance of her lovely body enfolded in his arms and the passionate sound of her breathing rapidly through her nostrils. It brought him to a point of unfamiliar ecstasy, cold and sharp just below the ribs, the way her tongue gently enveloped his as he pushed against it. Perhaps he could persuade her one day soon—perhaps this evening, and she might need no persuading—to take his cock into her soft and beautiful mouth. But that was a thought he needed to scramble away from as fast as he could, for he was in real danger of arriving too soon. He could feel it already beginning, tipping him toward disgrace. Just in time, he thought of the news, of the face of the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, tall, stooping, walruslike, a war hero, an old buffer—he was everything that was not sex, and ideal for the purpose. Trade gap, pay pause, resale price maintenance. Some cursed him for giving away the empire, but there was no choice really, with these winds of change blowing through Africa. No one would have taken that same message from a Labour man. And he had just sacked a third of his cabinet in the “night of the long knives.” That took some nerve. Mac the Knife, was one headline, Macbeth! was another. Serious-minded people complained he was burying the nation in an avalanche of TVs, cars, supermarkets and other junk. He let the people have what they wanted. Bread and circuses. A new nation, and now he wanted us to join Europe, and who could say for sure that he was wrong?

  Steadied at last. Edward’s thoughts dissolved, and he became once more his tongue, the very tip of it, at the same moment that Florence decided she could take no more. She felt pinioned and smothered, she was suffocating, she was nauseous. And she could hear a sound, rising steadily, not in steps like a scale, but in a slow glissando, and not quite a violin or a voice, but somewhere in between, rising and rising unbearably, without ever leaving the audible range, a violin-voice that was just on the edge of making sense, telling her something urgent in sibilants and vowels more primitive than words. It may have been inside the room, or out in the corridor, or only in her ears, like tinnitus. She may even have been making the noise herself. She did not care—she had to get out.

  She jerked her head away and pushed free of his arms. Even as he stared at her in surprise, still open-mouthed, a question beginning to form in his expression, she seized his hand and led him toward the bed. It was perverse of her, insane even, when she wanted to run from the room, across the gardens and down the lane, onto the beach to sit alone. Even one minute alone would have helped. But her sense of duty was painfully strong and she could not resist it. She could not bear to let Edward down. And she was convinced she was completely in the wrong. If the entire wedding ensemble of guests and close family had been somehow crammed invisibly into the room to watch, these ghosts would all side with Edward and his urgent, reasonable desires. They would assume there was something wrong with her, and they would be right.

  She also knew that her behavior was pitiful. To survive, to escape one hideous moment, she had to raise the stakes and commit herself to the next, and give the unhelpful impression that she longed for it herself. The final act could not be endlessly deferred. The moment was rising to meet her, just as she was foolishly moving toward it. She was trapped in a game whose rules she could not question. She could not escape the logic that had her leading, or towing, Edward across the room toward the open door of the bedroom and the narrow four-poster bed and its smooth white cover. She had no idea what she would do when they were there, but at least that awful sound had ceased, and in the few seconds it would take to arrive, her mouth and tongue were her own, and she could breathe and try to take possession of herself.

  TWO

  How did they meet, and why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and innocent? They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny, but still, it remained a paradox to them that so momentous a meeting should have been accidental, so dependent on a hundred minor events and choices. What a terrifying possibility, that it might never have happened at all. And in the first rush of love, they often wondered at how nearly their paths had crossed during their early teens, when Edward descended occasionally from the remoteness of his squalid family home in the Chiltern Hills to visit Oxford. It was titillating to believe they must have brushed past each other at one of those famous, youthful city events, at St. Giles’s Fair in the first week of September, or May Morning at dawn on the first of the month—a ridiculous and overrated ritual, they both agreed; or while renting a punt at the Cherwell Boathouse—though Edward had only ever done it once; or, later in their teens, during illicit drinking at the Turl. He even thought he may have been bused in with other thirteen-year-old boys to Oxford High, to be thrashed at a general knowledge quiz by girls who were as eerily informed and self-possessed as adults. Perhaps it was another school. Florence had no memory of being on the team, but she confessed it was the sort of thing she liked to do. When they compared their mental and geographical maps of Oxford, they found they had a close match.

  Then their childhoods and school years were over, and in 1958 they both chose London—University College for him, for her the Royal College of Music—and naturally they failed to meet. Edward lodged with a widowed aunt in Camden Town and cycled into Bloomsbury each morning. He worked all day, played football at weekends and drank beer with his mates. Until he became embarrassed by it, he had a taste for the occasional brawl outside a pub. His one serious unphysical pastime was listening to music, to the kind of punchy electric blues that turned out to be the true precursor and vital engine of English rock and roll—this music, in his lifelong view, was far superior to the fey three-minute music hall ditties from Liverpool that were to captivate the world in a few years’ time. He often left the library in the evenings and walked down Oxford Street to the Hundred Club to listen to John Mayall’s Power-house Four, or Alexis Korner, or Brian Knight. During his three years as a student, the nights at the club represented the peak of his cultural experience, and for years to come he considered that this was the music that formed his tastes, and even shaped his life.

  The few girls he knew—there were not so many at universities in those days—traveled in for lectures from the outer suburbs and left in the late afternoon, apparently under strict parental instruction to be home by six. Without saying so, these girls conveyed the clear impression that they were “keeping themselves” for a future husband. There was no ambiguity—to have sex with any one of these girls, you would have to marry her. A couple of friends, both decent footballers, went down this route, were married in their second year and disappeared from view. One of these unfortunates made a particular impact as a cautionary tale. He got a girl from the university administration office pregnant and was, in his friends’ view, “dragged to the altar” and not seen for a year, until he was spotted in Putney High Street, pushing a pram, in those days still a de-meaning act for a man.

  The Pill was a rumor in the newspapers, a ridiculous promise, another of those tall tales about America. The blues he heard at the Hundred Club suggested to Edward that all around him, just out of sight, men of his age were leading explosive, untiring sex lives, rich with gratifications of every kind. Pop music was bland, still coy on the matter, films were a little more explicit, but in Edward’s circle the men had to be content with telling dirty jokes, uneasy sexual boasting and boisterous camaraderie driven by furious drinking, which reduced further their chances of meeting a girl. Social change never proceeds at an even pace. There were rumors that in the English department, and along the road at the School of Oriental and African Studies and down Kingsway at the London School of Economics, men and women in tight black jeans and black polo-neck sweaters had constant easy sex, without having t
o meet each other’s parents. There was even talk of reefers. Edward sometimes took an experimental stroll from the history to the English department, hoping to find evidence of paradise on earth, but the corridors, the notice boards, and even the women looked no different.

  Florence was on the other side of town, near the Albert Hall, in a prim hostel for female students where the lights went out at eleven and male visitors were forbidden at any time and the girls were always popping in and out of each other’s rooms. Florence practiced five hours a day and went to concerts with her girlfriends. She preferred above all the chamber recitals at the Wigmore Hall, especially the string quartets, and sometimes attended as many as five in a week, lunchtimes as well as evenings. She loved the dark seriousness of the place, the faded, peeling walls backstage, the gleaming woodwork and deep red carpet of the entrance hall, the auditorium like a gilded tunnel, the famous cupola over the stage depicting, so she was told, mankind’s hunger for the magnificent abstraction of music, with the Genius of Harmony represented as a ball of eternal fire. She revered the ancient types, who took minutes to emerge from their taxis, the last of the Victorians, hobbling on their canes to their seats, to listen in alert critical silence, sometimes with the tartan rug they had brought draped across their knees. These fossils, with their knobbly shrunken skulls tipped humbly toward the stage, represented to Florence burnished experience and wise judgment, or suggested a musical expertise that arthritic fingers could no longer serve. And there was the simple thrill of knowing that so many famous musicians in the world had performed here and that great careers had begun on this very stage. It was here that she heard the sixteen-year-old cellist Jacqueline du Pré give her debut performance. Florence’s own tastes were not unusual, but they were intense. Beethoven’s Opus 18 obsessed her for a good while, then his last great quartets. Schumann, Brahms and then, in her last year, the quartets of Frank Bridge, Bartok and Britten. She heard all these composers over a period of three years at the Wigmore Hall.

  In her second year she was given a part-time job backstage, making tea for the performers in the spacious green room and crouching by the peephole so that she could open the door as the artistes left the stage. She also turned pages for the pianists in chamber pieces, and one night actually stood at Benjamin Britten’s side in a program of songs by Haydn, Frank Bridge and Britten himself. There was a boy treble singing, as well as Peter Pears, who slipped her a ten-shilling note as he and the great composer were leaving. She discovered the practice rooms next door, under the piano showroom, where legendary pianists like John Ogdon and Cherkassky thundered up and down their scales and arpeggios all morning like demented first-year students. The hall became a kind of second home—she felt possessive of every dim and dowdy corner, even of the cold concrete steps that led down to the wash-rooms. One of her jobs was to tidy the green room, and one afternoon she saw in a wastepaper basket some penciled performance notes discarded by the Amadeus Quartet. The hand was loopy and faint, barely legible, and concerned the opening movement of the Schubert Quartet No. 15. It thrilled her to decipher finally the words, “At B attack!” Florence could not stop herself playing with the idea that she had received an important message, or a vital prompt, and two weeks later, not long after the beginning of her final year, she asked three of the best students at college to join her own quartet.

  Only the cellist was a man, but Charles Rodway was of no real romantic interest to her. The men at college, devoted musicians, fiercely ambitious, ignorant of everything beyond their chosen instrument and its repertoire, never much appealed. Whenever one of the girls from the group started going steady with another student, she simply vanished socially, just like Edward’s footballer friends. It was as though the young woman had entered a convent. Since it did not seem possible to go out with a boy and still keep up with the old friends, Florence preferred to stick with her hostel group. She liked the banter, the intimacy, the kindness, the way the girls made much of each other’s birthdays and fussed around sweetly with kettles, blankets and fruit if you happened to get the flu. Her college years felt like freedom to her.

  Edward and Florence’s London maps barely overlapped. She knew very little of the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, and though she always intended to, she never visited the Reading Room of the British Museum. He knew nothing at all of Wigmore Hall or the tearooms in her quarter, and never once picnicked in Hyde Park or took a boat on the Serpentine. It was exciting for them to discover that they were in Trafalgar Square at the same moment in 1959, along with twenty thousand others, all resolving to ban the bomb.

  They did not meet until their London courses were over, when they drifted back to their respective family homes and the stillness of their childhoods to sit out a hot, boring week or two, waiting for their exam results. Later, this was what intrigued them most—how easily the encounter might not have happened. For Edward, this particular day could have passed like most others—a retreat to the end of the narrow garden to sit on a mossy bench in the shade of a giant elm, reading and staying out of his mother’s reach. Fifty yards away, her face, pale and indistinct, like one of her watercolors, would be at the kitchen or sitting-room window for twenty minutes at a stretch, watching him steadily. He tried to ignore her, but her gaze was like the touch of her hand on his back or his shoulder. Then he would hear her at the piano upstairs, stumbling through one of her pieces from the Anna Magdalena Notebook, the only piece of classical music he knew of at the time. Half an hour later she might be back at the window, staring at him again. She never came out to speak to him if she saw him with a book. Years ago, when Edward was still a schoolboy, his father had patiently instructed her never to interrupt her son’s studies.

  That summer, after finals, his interest was in fanatical medieval cults and their wild, psychotic leaders, who regularly proclaimed themselves the Messiah. For the second time in a year he was reading Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. Driven by notions of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel, convinced the pope was Antichrist and that the end of the world was nearing and only the pure would be saved, rabbles in their thousands would sweep through the German countryside, going from town to town, massacring Jews whenever they could find them, as well as priests and sometimes the rich. Then the authorities would violently suppress the movement, and another sect would spring up elsewhere a few years later. From within the dullness and safety of his existence, Edward read of these recurrent bouts of unreason with horrified fascination, grateful to live in a time when religion had generally faded into insignificance. He was wondering whether to apply for a doctorate, if his degree was good enough. This medieval madness could be his subject.

  On strolls through the beech woods, he dreamed of a series of short biographies he would write of semi-obscure figures who lived close to the center of important historical events. The first would be Sir Robert Carey, the man who rode from London to Edinburgh in seventy hours to deliver the news of Elizabeth I’s death to her successor, James VI of Scotland. Carey was an interesting figure who usefully wrote his own memoir. He fought against the Spanish Armada, was a superb swordsman and a patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. His arduous ride north was supposed to gain him great preferment under the new king, but instead he fell into relative obscurity.

  In more realistic moods, Edward thought he should find a proper job, teaching history in a grammar school and making certain he avoided National Service.

  If he was not reading, he usually wandered down the lane, along the avenue of limes, to the village of Northend, where Simon Carter, a school friend, lived. But on this particular morning, weary of books and birdsong and country peace, Edward took his rickety childhood bike from the shed, raised the saddle, pumped up the tires and set off with no particular plan. He had a pound note and two half crowns in his pocket and all he wanted was forward movement. At reckless speed, for the brakes barely worked, he flew through a green tunnel, down the steep hill, past Balham’s then Stracey’s farm, a
nd into the Stonor Valley, and as he hurtled past the iron railings of the park, he made the decision to go on to Henley, another four miles. When he arrived in the town, he headed for the railway station with the vague intention of going to London to look up friends. But the train waiting at the platform was going in the other direction, toward Oxford.

  An hour and a half later he was wandering through the city center in the heat of noon, still vaguely bored, and irritated with himself for wasting money and time. This used to be his local capital, the source or promise of nearly all his teenage excitement. But after London it seemed like a toy town, cloying and provincial, ridiculous in its pretensions. When a porter in a trilby scowled at him from the shade of a college entrance, he almost turned back to speak to him. Instead, Edward decided to buy himself a consolatory pint. Going along St. Giles toward the Eagle and Child, he saw a handwritten sign advertising a lunchtime meeting of the local Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and hesitated. He did not much like these earnest gatherings, neither the self-dramatizing rhetoric nor the mournful rectitude. Of course the weapons were hideous and should be stopped, but he had never learned anything new at a meeting. Still, he was a paid-up member, he had nothing else to do and he felt a vague pull of obligation. It was his duty to help save the world.

  He went along a tiled corridor and entered a dim hall with low painted roof beams and a churchy smell of wood polish and dust through which there rose a low discord of echoing voices. As his eyes adjusted, the first person he saw was Florence, standing by a door talking to a stringy, yellow-faced fellow holding a stack of pamphlets. She wore a white cotton dress that flared out like a party frock, and a narrow blue leather belt tightly fastened around her waist. He thought for a moment she was a nurse—in an abstract, conventional way he found nurses erotic, because—so he liked to fantasize—they already knew everything about his body and its needs. Unlike most girls he stared at in the street or in shops, she did not look away. Her look was quizzical or humorous, and possibly bored and wanting entertainment. It was a strange face, certainly beautiful, but in a sculpted, strong-boned way. In the gloom of the hall the singular quality of light from a high window to her right made her face resemble a carved mask, soulful and tranquil and hard to read. He had not paused as he entered the room. He was walking toward her with no idea of what he would say. In the matter of opening lines, he was reliably inept.