On Chesil Beach (2 page)

An incidental discovery was that even legendary success brought little happiness, only redoubled restlessness, gnawing ambition. As he dressed for the wedding that morning (tails, top hat, a thorough drenching in cologne), he had decided that none of the figures on his list could have known his kind of satisfaction. His elation was a form of greatness in itself. Here he was, a gloriously fulfilled, or almost fulfilled, man. At the age of twenty-two, he had already outshone them all.

He was gazing at his wife now, into her intricately flecked hazel eyes, into those pure whites touched by a bloom of the faintest milky blue. The lashes were thick and dark, like a child’s, and there was something childlike too in the solemnity of her face at rest. It was a lovely face, with a sculpted look that in a certain light brought to mind an American Indian woman, a high-born squaw. She had a strong jaw, and her smile was broad and artless, right into the creases at the corners of her eyes. She was big-boned—certain matrons at the wedding knowingly remarked on her generous hips. Her breasts, which Edward had touched and even kissed, though nowhere near enough, were small. Her violinist’s hands were pale and powerful, her long arms likewise; at her school sports days she had been adept at throwing the javelin.

Edward had never cared for classical music, but now he was learning its sprightly argot—
legato, pizzicato, con brio.
Slowly, through brute repetition, he was coming to recognize and even like certain pieces. There was one she played with her friends that especially moved him. When she practiced her scales and arpeggios at home she wore a headband, an endearing touch that caused him to dream about the daughter they might have one day. Florence’s playing was sinuous and exact, and she was known for the richness of her tone. One tutor said he had never encountered a student who made an open string sing so warmly. When she was before the music stand in the rehearsal room in London, or in her room at her parents’ house in Oxford, with Edward sprawled on the bed, watching and desiring her, she held herself gracefully, with back straight and head lifted proudly, and read the music with a commanding, almost haughty expression that stirred him. That look had such certitude, such knowledge of the path to pleasure.

When the business was music, she was always confident and fluid in her movements—rosining a bow, restringing her instrument, rearranging the room to accommodate her three friends from college for the string quartet that was her passion. She was the undisputed leader, and always had the final word in their many musical disagreements. But in the rest of her life she was surprisingly clumsy and unsure, forever stubbing a toe or knocking things over or bumping her head. The fingers that could manage the double stopping in a Bach partita were just as clever at spilling a full teacup over a linen tablecloth or dropping a glass onto a stone floor. She would trip over her feet if she thought she was being watched—she confided to Edward that she found it an ordeal to be in the street, walking toward a friend from a distance. And whenever she was anxious or too self-conscious, her hand would rise repeatedly to her forehead to brush away an imaginary strand of hair, a gentle, fluttering motion that would continue long after the source of stress had vanished.

How could he fail to love someone so strangely and warmly particular, so painfully honest and self-aware, whose every thought and emotion appeared naked to view, streaming like charged particles through her changing expressions and gestures? Even without her strong-boned beauty he would have had to love her. And she loved him with such intensity, such excruciating physical reticence. Not only his passions, heightened by the lack of a proper outlet, but also his protective instincts were aroused. But was she really so vulnerable? He had peeped once into her school report folder and seen her intelligence-tests results: one hundred and fifty-two, seventeen points above his own score. This was an age when these quotients were held to measure something as tangible as height or weight. When he sat in on a rehearsal with the quartet, and she had a difference of opinion on a phrasing or tempo or dynamic with Charles, the chubby and assertive cellist, whose face shone with late-flowering acne, Edward was intrigued by how cool Florence could be. She did not argue, she listened calmly, then announced her decision. No sign then of the little hair-brushing action. She knew her stuff, and she was determined to lead, the way the first violin should. She seemed to be able to get her rather frightening father to do what she wanted. Many months before the wedding he had, at her suggestion, offered Edward a job. Whether he really wanted it, or dared refuse it, was another matter. And she knew, by some womanly osmosis, exactly what was needed at that celebration, from the size of marquee to the quantity of summer pudding, and just how much it was reasonable to expect her father to pay.

“H
ere it comes,” she whispered as she squeezed his hand, warning him off another sudden intimacy. The waiters were arriving with their plates of beef, his piled twice the height of hers. They also brought sherry trifle and cheddar cheese and mint chocolates, which they arranged on a sideboard. After mumbling advice about the summoning bell by the fire-place—it must be pressed hard and held down—the lads withdrew, closing the door behind them with immense care. Then came a tinkling of the trolley retreating down the corridor, then, after a silence, a whoop or a hoot that could easily have come from the hotel bar downstairs, and at last, the newlyweds were properly alone.

A shift or a strengthening of the wind brought them the sound of waves breaking, like a distant shattering of glasses. The mist was lifting to reveal in part the contours of the low hills, curving away above the shoreline to the east. They could see a luminous gray smoothness that may have been the silky surface of the sea itself, or the lagoon, or the sky—it was difficult to tell. The altered breeze carried through the parted French windows an enticement, a salty scent of oxygen and open space that seemed at odds with the starched table linen, the cornflour-stiffened gravy, and the heavy polished silver they were taking in their hands. The wedding lunch had been huge and prolonged. They were not hungry. It was in theory open to them to abandon their plates, seize the wine bottle by the neck and run down to the shore and kick their shoes off and exult in their liberty. There was no one in the hotel who would have wanted to stop them. They were adults at last, on holiday, free to do as they chose. In just a few years’ time, that would be the kind of thing quite ordinary young people would do. But for now, the times held them. Even when Edward and Florence were alone, a thousand unacknowledged rules still applied. It was precisely because they were adults that they did not do childish things like walk away from a meal that others had taken pains to prepare. It was dinnertime, after all. And being childlike was not yet honorable, or in fashion.

Still, Edward was troubled by the call of the beach, and if he had known how to propose it, or justify it, he might have suggested going out straightaway. He had read aloud to Florence from a guidebook that said that thousands of years of pounding storms had sifted and graded the size of pebbles along the eighteen miles of beach, with the bigger stones at the eastern end. The legend was that local fishermen landing at night knew exactly where they were by the grade of shingle. Florence had suggested they might see for themselves by comparing handfuls gathered a mile apart. Trudging along the beach would have been better than sitting here. The ceiling, low enough already, appeared nearer to his head, and closing in. Rising from his plate, mingling with the sea breeze, was a clammy odor, like the breath of the family dog. Perhaps he was not quite as joyous as he kept telling himself he was. He felt a terrible pressure narrowing his thoughts, constraining his speech, and he was in acute physical discomfort—his trousers or underwear seemed to have shrunk.

So if a genie had appeared at their table to grant Edward’s most urgent request, he would not have asked for any beach in the world. All he wanted, all he could think of, was himself and Florence lying naked together on or in the bed next door, confronting at last that awesome experience that seemed as remote from daily life as a vision of religious ecstasy, or even death itself. The prospect—was it actually going to happen? to him?—once more sent cool fingers through his lower gut, and he caught himself in a momentary swooning motion which he concealed behind a contented sigh.

Like most young men of his time, or any time, without an easy manner, or means to sexual expression, he indulged constantly in what one enlightened authority was now calling “self-pleasuring.” Edward was pleased to discover the term. He was born too late in the century, in 1940, to believe that he was abusing his body, that his sight would be impaired, or that God watched on with stern incredulity as he bent daily to the task. Or even that everyone knew about it from his pale and inward look. All the same, a certain ill-defined disgrace hung over his efforts, a sense of failure and waste and, of course, loneliness. And pleasure was really an incidental benefit. The goal was release—from urgent, thought-confining desire for what could not be immediately had. How extraordinary it was, that a self-made spoonful, leaping clear of his body, should instantly free his mind to confront afresh Nelson’s decisiveness at Aboukir Bay.

Edward’s single most important contribution to the wedding arrangements was to refrain, for over a week. Not since he was twelve had he been so entirely chaste with himself. He wanted to be in top form for his bride. It was not easy, especially at night in bed, or in the mornings as he woke, or in the long afternoons, or in the hours before lunch, or after supper, during the hours before bed. Now here they were at last, married and alone. Why did he not rise from his roast, cover her in kisses and lead her toward the four-poster next door? It was not so simple. He had a fairly long history of engaging with Florence’s shyness. He had come to respect it, even revere it, mistaking it for a form of coyness, a conventional veil for a richly sexual nature. In all, part of the intricate depth of her personality, and proof of her quality. He persuaded himself that he preferred her this way. He did not spell it out for himself, but her reticence suited his own ignorance and lack of confidence; a more sensual and demanding woman, a
wild
woman, might have terrified him.

Their courtship had been a pavane, a stately unfolding, bound by protocols never agreed or voiced but generally observed. Nothing was ever discussed—nor did they feel the lack of intimate talk. These were matters beyond words, beyond definition. The language and practice of therapy, the currency of feelings diligently shared, mutually analyzed, were not yet in general circulation. While one heard of wealthier people going in for psychoanalysis, it was not yet customary to regard oneself in everyday terms as an enigma, as an exercise in narrative history, or as a problem waiting to be solved.

Between Edward and Florence, nothing happened quickly. Important advances, permissions wordlessly granted to extend what he was allowed to see or caress, were attained only gradually. The day in October he first saw her naked breasts long preceded the day he could touch them—December 19. He kissed them in February, though not her nipples, which he grazed with his lips once, in May. She allowed herself to advance across his own body with even greater caution. Sudden moves or radical suggestions on his part could undo months of good work. The evening in the cinema at a showing of
A Taste of Honey
when he took her hand and plunged it between his legs set the process back weeks. She became, not frosty, or even cool—that was never her way—but imperceptibly remote, perhaps disappointed, or even faintly betrayed. She retreated from him somehow without letting him ever feel in doubt about her love. Then at last they were back on course: when they were alone one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling heavily outside the windows of the disorderly sitting room of his parents’ tiny house in the Chiltern Hills, she let her hand rest briefly on, or near, his penis. For less than fifteen seconds, in rising hope and ecstasy, he felt her through two layers of fabric. As soon as she pulled away he knew he could bear it no more. He asked her to marry him.

He could not have known what it cost her to put a hand—it was the back of her hand—in such a place. She loved him, she wanted to please him, but she had to overcome considerable distaste. It was an honest attempt—she may have been clever, but she was without guile. She kept that hand in place for as long as she could, until she felt a stirring and hardening beneath the gray flannel of his trousers. She experienced a living thing, quite separate from her Edward—and she recoiled. Then he blurted out his proposal, and in the rush of emotion, the delight and hilarity and relief, the sudden embraces, she momentarily forgot her little shock. And he was so astonished by his own decisiveness, as well as mentally cramped by unresolved desire, that he could have had little idea of the contradiction she began to live with from that day on, the secret affair between disgust and joy.