On Chesil Beach Page 8

  In a frenzy of anger and shame she sprang from the bed. And still, her other watching self appeared to be telling her calmly, but not quite in words, But this is just what it’s like to be mad. She could not look at him. It was torture to remain in the room with someone who knew her like this. She snatched her shoes from the floor and ran through the sitting room, past the ruin of their meal, and out into the corridor, down the stairs, out through the main entrance, around the side of the hotel and across the mossy lawn. And even when she reached the beach at last, she did not stop running.

  FOUR

  In the brief year between his first encounter with Florence in St. Giles and their wedding in St. Mary’s less than half a mile away, Edward was often an overnight guest at the large Victorian villa off the Banbury Road. Violet Ponting assigned him to what the family called the “small room,” on the top floor, chastely remote from Florence’s, with a view over a walled garden a hundred yards long and, beyond, the grounds of a college or an old people’s home—he never troubled to discover which. The “small room” was larger than any of the bedrooms at the Turville Heath cottage, and possibly larger than its sitting room. One wall was covered in plain white-painted shelves of Loeb editions in Latin and Greek. Edward liked the association with such austere learning, though he knew he fooled no one by leaving out copies of Epictetus or Strabo on the bedside table. Like everywhere else in the house, the walls of his room were exotically painted white—there was not a scrap of wallpaper in the Ponting domain, floral or striped—and the floor was bare, untreated boards. He had the top of the house to himself, with an extensive bathroom on a half-landing, with Victorian windows of colored glass and varnished cork tiles—another novelty.

  His bed was wide and unusually hard. In a corner, under the slope of a roof, was a scrubbed deal table with an Anglepoise lamp and a kitchen chair, painted blue. There were no pictures or rugs or ornaments, no chopped-up magazines, or any other remains of hobbies or projects. For the first time in his life he made a partial effort to be tidy, for this was a room like no other he had known, one in which it was possible to have calm, uncluttered thoughts. It was here one brilliant November midnight that Edward wrote a formal letter to Violet and Geoffrey Ponting declaring his ambition to marry their daughter, and did not quite ask their permission so much as confidently expect their approval.

  He was not wrong. They appeared delighted, and marked the engagement with a family lunch one Sunday at the Randolph Hotel. Edward knew too little about the world to be surprised by his welcome into the Ponting household. He politely took it as his due, as Florence’s steady boyfriend and then fiancé, that when he hitchhiked or took the train from Henley to Oxford, his room was always there for him, that there were always meals at which his opinions about the government and the world situation would be solicited, that he would have the run of the library and the garden with its croquet and marked-out badminton court. He was grateful, but not at all surprised, when his laundry was absorbed into the family’s and a tidy ironed pile appeared on the blanket at the end of his bed, courtesy of the cleaning lady, who came every single weekday.

  It seemed only proper that Geoffrey Ponting should want to play tennis with him on the grass courts at Summertown. Edward was a mediocre player—he had a decent serve that made use of his height, and he could hit the occasional beefy shot from the baseline. But at the net he was clumsy and stupid, and he could not trust his mutinous backhand, preferring to run around balls to his left. He was a little frightened of his girlfriend’s father, worried that Geoffrey Ponting thought he was an intruder, an impostor, a thief intending an assault on his daughter’s virginity, and then disappearing—only one part of which was true. As they drove to the courts, Edward also worried about the game—it would be impolite to win, and it would be a complete waste of his host’s time if Edward was unable to put up some decent opposition. He need not have troubled himself on either count. Ponting was in another league, a player of fast and accurate strokes, and an astonishing prancing vigor for a fifty-year-old. He took the first set six-one, the second six-love, the third six-one, but what mattered most was his fury whenever Edward managed to snatch a point. As he walked back to his position, the older player would deliver himself a muttered lecture that, as far as Edward could make out from his end, contained threats of violence against the self. In fact, now and then Ponting smacked his right buttock hard with his racket. He did not just want to win, or win easily; he needed every last point. The two games he lost in the first and third sets and his few unforced errors brought him to near screaming point—Oh for God’s sake, man! Come on! Driving back home he was terse, and Edward could at least feel that the dozen points he had won over three sets made for a victory of sorts. If he had won in the conventional manner, he might never have been allowed to see Florence again.

  Generally, Geoffrey Ponting, in his nervous, energetic fashion, was affable toward him. If Edward was at the house when he came in from work, around seven o’clock, he would mix them both gin and tonics from his drinks cupboard—tonic and gin in equal measure, and many ice cubes. To Edward, ice in drinks was a novelty. They would sit in the garden and talk politics—mostly, Edward listened to his future father-in-law’s views on the decline of British business, demarcation disputes in the trade unions and the folly of granting independence to various African colonies. Even when Ponting was sitting down he did not relax—he balanced himself on the edge of his seat, ready to leap up, and he jigged his knee up and down as he spoke, or wiggled his toes inside his sandals in time to a rhythm in his head. He was far shorter than Edward, but powerfully built, with muscular arms matted with blond hair which he liked to display by wearing short-sleeved shirts, even to work. His baldness too appeared an assertion of power rather than age—the tanned skin was stretched smooth and tight, like filled sails, over the large skull. The face also was large, with small fleshy lips whose resting position was a determined pout, and a button nose, and eyes set wide apart so that in certain lights he resembled a giant fetus.

  Florence never seemed to want to join them for these garden chats, and perhaps Ponting did not want her there. As far as Edward could tell, father and daughter rarely spoke, except in company, and then inconsequentially. He thought they were intensely aware of each other, though, and had the impression they exchanged glances when other people were talking, as though sharing a secret criticism. Ponting was always putting his arm around Ruth’s shoulders, but he never, in Edward’s sight, embraced her big sister. For all that, in conversation, Ponting made many gratifying references to “Florence and you” or “you young ones.” He was the one, rather than Violet, who became excited by the news of the engagement and arranged the lunch at the Randolph and proposed half a dozen toasts. It crossed Edward’s mind, barely seriously, that he was rather too keen to give his daughter away.

  It was around this time that Florence suggested to her father that Edward might be an asset to the firm. Ponting drove him one Saturday morning in his Humber to his factory on the edge of Witney, where scientific instruments filled with transistors were designed and assembled. He did not appear at all troubled, as they passed between the tangled benches, through the homely smell of molten solder, that Edward, reliably stupefied by science and technology, could not think of one interesting question to ask. He revived a little when he met, in a windowless back room, the bald, twenty-nine-year-old sales manager, who had a history degree from Durham and had written his doctoral thesis on medieval monasticism in the northeast of England. Over gin and tonics that evening, Ponting offered Edward a job traveling for the firm, securing new business. He would need to read up on the products and a tiny bit about electronics, and even less about contract law. Edward, who still had no career plans and who could easily imagine himself writing history books on trains and in hotel rooms between meetings, accepted, more in the spirit of politeness than of real interest.

  The various household jobs Edward volunteered to do tied him yet more closely to the Pont
ings. In that summer of 1961 he mowed the various lawns many times—the gardener was away sick—split three cords of logs for the woodstove, and drove the second car, an Austin 35, regularly to the dump with junk from the unused garage, which Violet wanted to convert to an extension library. In this same car—he was never permitted the Humber—he delivered Florence’s sister, Ruth, to friends and cousins in Thame, Banbury and Stratford, and then collected her. He chauffeured Violet around, once to a Schopenhauer symposium in Winchester, and on the way she grilled him about his interest in millenarian cults. What part did famine or social change have in providing followers? And with their anti-Semitism and attacks on the Church and the merchants, couldn’t the movements be seen as an early form of socialism of the Russian type? And then, also provocatively, wasn’t nuclear war the modern equivalent to the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, and were we not always bound by our history and our guilty natures to dream of our annihilation?

  He answered nervously, conscious that his intellectual mettle was being tested. As he spoke, they were driving through the outskirts of Winchester. At the edge of his vision he saw her take out her compact and powder her pinched white features. He was fascinated by her pale, polelike arms and sharp elbows, and wondered again whether she really could be Florence’s mother. But now he was obliged to concentrate, as well as drive. He said he believed the difference between then and now was more important than the similarity. It was the difference between, on the one hand, a lurid and absurd fantasy devised by a post–Iron Age mystic, then embellished by his credulous medieval equivalents, and, on the other, the rational fear of a possible and terrifying event it was in our power to prevent.

  In tones of crisp reprimand that effectively closed the conversation, she told him he had not quite understood her. The point was not whether the medieval cultists were wrong about the Book of Revelation and the end of the world. Of course they were wrong, but they passionately believed they were right, and they acted on their convictions. Likewise, he himself sincerely believed that nuclear weapons would destroy the world, and he acted accordingly. It was quite irrelevant that he was wrong, that the truth was that such weapons were keeping the world safe from war. This, after all, was the purpose of deterrence. Surely, as a historian, he had learned that down through the centuries mass delusions had common themes. When Edward grasped that she was likening his support for CND with membership in a millenarian sect, he politely withdrew, and they drove the last half-mile in silence. On another occasion he drove Violet to and from Cheltenham, where she gave a lecture to the sixth form at the Ladies’ College on the benefits of an Oxford education.

  His own was proceeding at a pace. During that summer he ate for the first time a salad with a lemon and oil dressing and, at breakfast, yogurt—a glamorous substance he knew only from a James Bond novel. His hard-pressed father’s cooking and the pie-and-chips regime of his student days could not have prepared him for the strange vegetables—the aubergines, green and red peppers, courgettes and mangetouts—that came regularly before him. He was surprised, even a little put out, on his first visit when Violet served as a first course a bowl of undercooked peas. He had to overcome an aversion, not to the taste so much as to the reputation of garlic. Ruth giggled for minutes on end, until she had to leave the room, when he called a baguette a croissant. Early on, he made an impression on the Pontings by claiming never to have been abroad, except to Scotland to climb the three Munroes of the Knoydart Peninsula. He encountered for the first time in his life muesli, olives, fresh black pepper, bread without butter, anchovies, undercooked lamb, cheese that was not cheddar, ratatouille, saucisson, bouillabaisse, entire meals without potatoes, and, most challenging of all, a fishy pink paste, tarama salata. Many of these items tasted only faintly repellent, and similar to each other in some indefinable way, but he was determined not to appear unsophisticated. Sometimes, if he ate too fast, he came close to gagging.

  Some of the novelties he took to straightaway: freshly ground and filtered coffee, orange juice at breakfast, confit of duck, fresh figs. He was in no position to know what an unusual situation the Pontings’ was, a don married to a successful businessman, and Violet, a sometime friend of Elizabeth David, managing a household in the vanguard of a culinary revolution while lecturing to students on monads and the categorical imperative. Edward absorbed these domestic circumstances without acknowledging their exotic opulence. He assumed that this was how Oxford university teachers lived, and he would not be caught out appearing impressed.

  In fact, he was entranced, he lived in a dream. During that warm summer, his desire for Florence was inseparable from the setting—the huge white rooms and their dustless wooden floors warmed by sunlight, the cool green air of the tangled garden breathed into the house through open windows, the scented blossoms of North Oxford, the fresh hardback books piled on tables in the library—the new Iris Murdoch (she was Violet’s friend), the new Nabokov, the new Angus Wilson—and his first encounter with a stereophonic record player. Florence showed him one morning the exposed, glowing orange valves of an amplifier protruding from an elegant gray box, and the waist-high speakers, and she put on for him at merciless volume Mozart’s Haffner Symphony. The opening octave leap seized him with its daring clarity—a whole orchestra suddenly spread before him—and he raised a fist and shouted across the room, careless of who heard, that he loved her. It was the first time he had ever said it, to her or to anyone. She mouthed the words back at him, and laughed with delight that he had at last been moved by a piece of classical music. He crossed the room and tried to dance with her, but the music became scurrying and agitated, and they came to a ragged halt and let it swirl around them as they embraced.

  How could he pretend to himself that within his narrow existence these were not extraordinary experiences? He managed not to think about it. By temperament he was not introspective, and moving around her house with a constant erection, or so it seemed, dulled or confined his thoughts somewhat. By the unspoken rules of the house, he was permitted to loll about on her bed during the day while she practiced the violin, as long as the bedroom door was left open. He was supposed to be reading, but all he could do was watch her and love her bare arms, her headband, her straight back, the sweet tilt of her chin as she tucked the instrument under it, the curve of her breasts silhouetted against the window, the way the hem of her cotton skirt swung against her tanned calves with the movement of her bowing, and small muscles in those calves rippling as she shifted and swayed. Now and then, she would sigh over some imagined imperfection of tone or phrasing and repeat a passage over and again. Another indicator of mood was her way of turning the pages on the stand, moving on from a piece with a sudden sharp snap of the wrist, or at other times lingeringly, pleased with herself at last, or anticipating new pleasures. He was stirred, almost impressed, by her obliviousness to him—she had the gift of total concentration, whereas he could pass the entire day in a twilight of boredom and arousal. An hour might go by before she appeared to remember he was there, and though she would turn and smile, she would never join him on the bed—fierce professional ambition, or another household protocol, kept her by her stand.

  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 a
s 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.