On Chesil Beach Page 4

  Her gaze was on him as he approached, and when he was near enough she took a pamphlet from her friend’s pile and said, “Would you like one? It’s all about a hydrogen bomb landing on Oxford.”

  As he took it from her, her finger trailed, surely not by accident, across the inside of his wrist. He said, “I can’t think of anything I’d rather read.”

  The fellow with her was looking venomous as he waited for him to move away, but Edward stayed right where he was.

  She too was restless at home, a big Victorian villa in the Gothic style just off the Banbury Road, fifteen minutes’ walk away. Violet, her mother, marking finals all day in the heat, was intolerant of Florence’s regular practice routines—repeated scales and arpeggios, double-stopping exercises, memory tests. “Screeching” was the word Violet used, as in, “Darling, I’m still not finished for today. Could you bear to delay your screeching until after tea?”

  It was supposed to be an affectionate joke, but Florence, who was unusually irritable that week, took it as further evidence of her mother’s disapproval of her career and hostility to music in general and therefore to Florence herself. She knew she ought to feel sorry for her mother. She was so tone-deaf she was unable to recognize a single tune, even the national anthem, which she could distinguish only by context from “Happy Birthday.” She was one of those people who could not say if one note was lower or higher than another. This was no less a disability and misfortune than a clubfoot or a harelip, but after the relative freedoms of Kensington, Florence was finding home life minutely oppressive and could not muster her sympathies. For example, she did not mind making her bed every morning—she had always done so—but she resented being asked at each breakfast whether she had.

  As often happened when she had been away, her father aroused in her conflicting emotions. There were times when she found him physically repellent and she could hardly bear the sight of him—his gleaming baldness, his tiny white hands, his restless schemes for improving his business and making even more money. And the high tenor voice, both wheedling and commanding, with its eccentrically distributed stresses. She hated hearing his enthusiastic reports about the boat, the ridiculously named Sugar Plum, which he kept down in Poole harbor. It grated on her, his accounts of a new kind of sail, a ship-to-shore radio, a special yacht varnish. He used to take her out with him, and several times, when she was twelve and thirteen, they crossed all the way to Carteret, near Cherbourg. They never talked about those trips. He had never asked her again, and she was glad. But sometimes, in a surge of protective feeling and guilty love, she would come up behind him where he sat and entwine her arms around his neck and kiss the top of his head and nuzzle him, liking his clean scent. She would do all this, then loathe herself for it later.

  And her younger sister got on her nerves, with her new Cockney accent and cultivated stupidity at the piano. How were they supposed to do as their father demanded and play a Sousa march for him when Ruth pretended that she could not count four beats in a bar?

  As always, Florence was adept at concealing her feelings from her family. It required no effort—she simply left the room, whenever it was possible to do so undemonstratively, and later was glad she had said nothing bitter or wounding to her parents or sister; otherwise she would be awake all night with her guilt. She constantly reminded herself how much she loved her family, trapping herself more effectively into silence. She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start—she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten. Best to keep things simple. She could only blame herself then, when she felt like a character in a newspaper cartoon, with steam hissing from her ears.

  And she had other concerns. Should she go for a rear-desk job with a provincial orchestra—she would count herself extremely lucky to get into the Bournemouth Symphony—or should she remain dependent on her parents for another year, on her father really, and work the string quartet up for its first engagement? That would mean lodging in London, and she was reluctant to ask Geoffrey for extra money. The cellist, Charles Rodway, had offered the spare bedroom in his parents’ house, but he was a brooding, intense fellow who gave her fixed, meaningful looks over the music stand. Lodging with him, she would be at his mercy. She knew of a full-time job, hers for the asking, with a Palm Court–style trio in a seedy grand hotel south of London. She had no scruples about the kind of music she would have to play—no one would be listening—but some instinct, or mere snobbery, convinced her she could not live in or near Croydon. She persuaded herself that her college results would help her make up her mind, and so, like Edward fifteen miles away in the wooded hills to the east, she passed her days in a form of anteroom, waiting fretfully for her life to begin.

  Back from college, transformed from a school-girl, mature in ways that no one in the household appeared to notice, Florence was beginning to realize that her parents had rather objectionable political opinions, and here at least she permitted herself open dissent at the dinner table, in arguments that meandered through the long summer evenings. This was release of a kind, but these conversations also inflamed her general impatience. Violet was genuinely interested in her daughter’s membership in CND, although it was trying for Florence, having a philosopher for a mother. She was provoked by her mother’s calmness or, more accurately, the sadness she affected as she heard her daughter out and then delivered her own opinion. She said that the Soviet Union was a cynical tyranny, a cruel and heartless state responsible for genocide on a scale that even outdid Nazi Germany and for a vast, barely understood network of political prison camps. She went on about show trials, censorship, absence of rule of law. The Soviet Union had trampled on human dignity and basic rights, it was a stifling occupying force in neighboring lands—Violet had Hungarians and Czechs among her academic friends—and it was expansionist by creed and must be opposed, just as Hitler had been. If it could not be opposed, because we did not have the tanks and men to defend the north German plain, then it had to be deterred. A couple of months later she would point to the building of the Berlin Wall and claim complete vindication—the Communist empire was now one giant prison.

  Florence knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes—clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design—was essentially a beneficial force in the world. It was and always had been for liberating the oppressed and standing up to fascism and the ravages of greedy capitalism. The comparison with Nazi Germany disgusted her. She recognized in her mother’s opinions a typical pattern of pro-American propaganda. She was disappointed in her mother, and even said so.

  And her father had just the sort of opinions you might expect from a businessman. His choice of words could be a little sharpened by half a bottle of wine: Harold Macmillan was a fool to be giving up the empire without a struggle, a bloody fool not to impose wage restraint on the unions, and a pathetic bloody fool for thinking of going cap in hand to the Europeans, begging to join their sinister club. Florence found it harder to contradict Geoffrey. She could never shake off a sense of awkward obligation to him. Among the privileges of her childhood was the keen attention that might have been directed at a brother, a son. Last summer her father had taken her out regularly after work in his Humber, so that she could have a go at her driving license just after her twenty-first birthday. She failed. Violin lessons from the age of five, with summer courses at a special school, skiing and tennis lessons and flying lessons, which she defiantly refused. And then the journeys: just the two of them, hiking in the Alps, Sierra Nevada and Pyrenees, and the special treats, the one-night business trips to European cities where she and Geoffrey always stayed in the grandest hotels.

  When Florence left her house after midday, after an unvoiced argument with her mother over a trifling domestic detail—Violet did not particularly approve of the way her daughter used the washing machine—she said that she
was going to post a letter and would not be wanting lunch. She turned south on the Banbury Road and headed toward the city center with a vague ambition of wandering through the covered market and perhaps bumping into an old school friend. Or she might buy a roll there and eat it on Christ Church meadow, in the shade, by the river. When she noticed the sign in St. Giles, the one Edward would see in fifteen minutes, she absentmindedly drifted in. It was her mother who was occupying her thoughts. After spending so much time with her affectionate friends at the student hostel, she noticed, coming home, how physically distant her mother was. She had never kissed or embraced Florence, even when she was small. Violet had barely ever touched her at all. Perhaps it was just as well. She was thin and bony, and Florence was not exactly pining for her caresses. And it was too late to start now.

  Within minutes of stepping out of the sunshine into the hall, it was clear to Florence she had made a mistake coming indoors. As her eyes adjusted, she looked about her with the vacant interest she might give the silverware collection in the Ashmolean. Suddenly a North Oxford boy whose name she had forgotten, a gaunt, twenty-two-year-old boy with glasses, came out of the darkness and trapped her. Without preamble, he began to outline for her the consequences of a single hydrogen bomb falling on Oxford. Almost a decade ago, when they were both thirteen, he had invited her to his home in Park Town, only three streets away, to admire a new invention, a television set, the first she had ever seen. On a small, gray, cloudy screen framed by carved mahogany doors, a man in a dinner jacket sat at a desk in what looked like a blizzard. Florence thought it was a ridiculous contraption without a future, but forever after, this boy—John? David? Michael?—seemed to believe she owed him her friendship, and here he was again, still calling in the debt.

  His pamphlet, two hundred copies of which were under his arm, set out Oxford’s fate. He wanted her to help him distribute them about the town. As he leaned in she felt the scent of his hair cream wrap itself around her face. His papery skin had a jaundiced gleam in the low light, his eyes were reduced by thick lenses to narrow black slits. Florence, incapable of rudeness, settled her face into an attentive grimace. There was something fascinating about tall thin men, the way their bones and Adam’s apple lurked so unconcealed beneath the skin, their birdlike faces, their predatory stoop. The crater he was describing would be half a mile across, a hundred feet deep. Because of radioactivity, Oxford would be unapproachable for ten thousand years. It began to sound like a promise of deliverance. But in fact, outside, the glorious city was exploding with the foliage of early summer, the sun was warming the treacle-colored Cotswold stone, Christ Church meadow would be in full splendor. Here in the hall she could see over the young man’s narrow shoulder murmuring figures moving about in the gloom, setting out the chairs, and then she saw Edward, coming toward her.

  Many weeks later, on another hot day, they took a punt on the Cherwell, upstream to the Vicky Arms, and later drifted back down toward the boathouse. Along the way they parked among a clump of hawthorns and lay on the bank in deep shade, Edward on his back chewing a stalk of grass, Florence with her head resting on his arm. In a break in the conversation they listened to wavelets pattering under the boat and the muffled knock as it swung against its tree-stump mooring. Occasionally a faint breeze brought them the soothing airy sound of traffic on the Banbury Road. A thrush sang intricately, repeating each phrase with care, then gave up in the heat. Edward was working at various temporary jobs, principally as a groundsman for a cricket club. She was giving all her time to the quartet. Their hours together were not always easy to arrange, and all the more precious. This was a snatched Saturday afternoon. They knew that it was one of the last days of full-blown high summer—it was already early September, and the leaves and grasses, though still unambiguously green, had an exhausted air. The conversation had returned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other.

  In answer to the question Edward had put several minutes before, Florence said at last, “Be-cause you weren’t wearing a jacket.”

  “What then?”

  “Um. Loose white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, tails almost hanging out…”

  “Nonsense.”

  “And gray flannel trousers with a mend in the knee, and scruffy plimsolls starting to come out at the toes. And long hair, almost over your ears.”

  “What else?”

  “Because you looked a bit wild, like you’d been in a fight.”

  “I’d been on my bike in the morning.”

  She raised herself up on one elbow to get a better view of his face, and they held each other’s gaze. It was still a novel and vertiginous experience for them to look for a minute on end into the eyes of another adult, without embarrassment or restraint. It was the closest they came, he thought, to making love. She pulled the grass stem from his mouth.

  “You’re such a country bumpkin.”

  “Come on. What else?”

  “All right. Because you stopped in the doorway and looked around at everyone as though you owned the place. Proud. No, I mean, bold.”

  He laughed at this. “But I was annoyed with myself.”

  “Then you saw me,” Florence said. “And you decided to stare me out.”

  “Not true. You glanced at me and decided I wasn’t worth a second look.”

  She kissed him, not deeply, but teasingly, or so he thought. In these early days he considered there was just a small chance that she was one of those fabled girls from a nice home who would want to go all the way with him, and soon. But surely not outdoors, along this frequented stretch of river.

  He drew her closer, until their noses were almost touching and their faces went dark. He said, “So did you think then it was love at first sight?”

  His tone was lighthearted and mocking, but she decided to take him seriously. The anxieties she would face were still far off, though occasionally she wondered what it was she was heading toward. A month ago they had told each other they were in love, and that was both a thrill and afterward, for her, a cause of one night of half waking, of vague dread that she had been impetuous and let go of something important, given something away that was not really hers to give. But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper. Now, on the riverbank in the soporific heat of one of the last days of this summer, she concentrated on that moment when he had paused at the entrance to the meeting room, and on what she had seen and felt when she looked in his direction.

  To aid her memory she pulled away and straightened and looked from his face toward the slow muddy green river. Suddenly it was no longer peaceful. Just upstream, drifting their way, was a familiar scene, a ramming battle between two overladen punts locked together at right angles as they rounded a bend at a slew, with the usual shrieks, piratical shouts and splashing. University students being self-consciously wacky, a reminder of how much she longed to be away from this place. Even as schoolgirls, she and her friends had regarded the students as an embarrassment, puerile invaders of their hometown.

  She tried to concentrate harder. His clothes had been unusual, but what she noted was the face—a thoughtful, delicate oval, a high forehead, dark eyebrows widely arched, and the stillness of his gaze as it roamed across the gathering and settled on her, as if he were not in the room at all but imagining it, dreaming her up. Memory unhelpfully inserted what she could not yet have heard—the faint country twang in his voice, close to the local Oxford accent, with its hint of West Country.

  She turned back to him. “I was curious about you.”

  But it was even more abstract than that. At the time it did not even occur to her to satisfy her curiosity. She did not think they were about to meet, or that there was anything she should do to make that possible. It was as if her own curiosity had nothing to do with her—she was really the one who was missing from the room. Falling in love was
revealing to her just how odd she was, how habitually sealed off in her everyday thoughts. Whenever Edward asked, How do you feel? or, What are you thinking? she always made an awkward answer. Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back. In the stone-floored echoing hall with the heavy low beams, her problems with Edward were already present in those first few seconds, in their first exchange of looks.

  He was born in July 1940, in the week the Battle of Britain began. His father, Lionel, would tell him later that for two months of that summer history held its breath while it decided whether or not German would be Edward’s first language. By his tenth birthday he discovered that this was only a manner of speaking—all over occupied France, for example, children had continued to speak French. Turville Heath was less than a hamlet, more a thin scattering of cottages around the woods and common land on a broad ridge above Turville village. By the end of the thirties, the northeastern end of the Chilterns, the London end, thirty miles away, had been in-vaded by urban sprawl and was already a suburban paradise. But at the southwestern tip, south of Beacon Hill, where one day a motorway torrent of cars and trucks would surge down through a cut in the chalk toward Birmingham, the land was more or less unchanged.