On Chesil Beach (11 page)

Her back was still turned. She sensed he had drawn closer, she imagined him right behind her, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, softly clenching and unclenching as he considered the possibility of touching her shoulder. From the solid darkness of the hills, carrying right across the Fleet, came the song of a single bird, convoluted and fluting. By the prettiness of the song and the time of day she would have guessed it to be a nightingale. But did nightingales live by the sea? Did they sing in July? Edward knew, but she was in no mood to ask.

He said in a matter-of-fact way, “I loved you, but you make it so hard.”

They were silent as the implications of his tense settled around them. Then she said at last, wonderingly, “You
loved
me?”

He did not correct himself. Perhaps he himself was not so bad a tactician. He said simply, “We could be so free with each other, we could be in paradise. Instead we’re in this mess.”

The plain truth of this disarmed her, as did the reversion to a more hopeful tense. But the word “mess” brought back to her the vile scene in the bedroom, the tepid substance on her skin drying to a crust that cracked. She was certain she would never let such a thing happen to her again.

She answered neutrally, “Yes.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“It’s a mess.”

There was a silence, a kind of stalemate of indeterminate length, during which they listened to the waves and, intermittently, the bird, which had moved farther off and whose fainter call was of even greater clarity. Finally, as she expected, he put a hand on her shoulder. The touch was kindly, spreading a warmth along her spine and into the small of her back. She did not know what to think. She disliked herself for the way she was calculating the moment when she should turn around, and she saw herself as he might, as awkward and brittle like her mother, hard to know, making difficulties when they could be at ease in paradise. So she should make things simple. It was her duty, her marital duty.

As she turned, she stepped clear of his touch because she did not want to be kissed, not straightaway. She needed a clear mind to tell him her plan. But they were still close enough for her to make out some part of his features in the poor light. Perhaps at that moment the moon behind her was partly unmasked. She thought he was looking at her in the way he often did—it was a look of wonder—whenever he was about to tell her that she was beautiful. She never really believed him, and it bothered her when he said it because he might want something she could only fail to give. Thrown by this thought, she could not come to her point.

She found herself asking, “Is it a nightingale?”

“It’s a blackbird.”

“At night?” She could not conceal her disappointment.

“It must be a prime site. The poor fellow’s having to work hard.” Then he added, “Like me.”

Immediately she laughed. It was as if she had partly forgotten him, his true nature, and now he was clearly before her, the man she loved, her old friend, who said unpredictable, endearing things. But it was uncomfortable laughter, for she was feeling a little mad. She had never known her own feelings, her moods, to dip and swerve so. And now she was about to make a suggestion that from one point of view was entirely sensible, and from another, quite probably—she could not be sure—entirely outrageous. She felt as though she were trying to reinvent existence itself. She was bound to get it wrong.

Prompted by her laughter, he moved closer to her again and tried to take her hand, and again she moved away. It was crucial to be able to think straight. She started her speech as she had rehearsed it in her thoughts, with the all-important declaration.

“You know I love you. Very, very much. And I know you love me. I’ve never doubted it. I love being with you, and I want to spend my life with you, and you say you feel the same way. It should all be quite simple. But it isn’t—we’re in a mess, like you said. Even with all this love. I also know that it’s completely my fault, and we both know why. It must be pretty obvious to you by now that…”

She faltered; he went to speak, but she raised her hand.

“That I’m pretty hopeless, absolutely hopeless at sex. Not only am I no good at it, I don’t seem to need it like other people, like you do. It just isn’t something that’s part of me. I don’t like it, I don’t like the thought of it. I have no idea why that is, but I think it isn’t going to change. Not immediately. At least, I can’t imagine it changing. And if I don’t say this now, we’ll always be struggling with it, and it’s going to cause you a lot of unhappiness, and me too.”

This time when she paused he remained silent. He was six feet away, now no more than a silhouette, and quite still. She felt fearful, and made herself go on.

“Perhaps I should be psychoanalyzed. Perhaps what I really need to do is kill my mother and marry my father.”

The brave little joke she had thought of earlier, to soften her message or make herself sound less unworldly, brought no response from Edward. He remained an unreadable, two-dimensional shape against the sea, utterly still. With an uncertain, fluttering movement, her hand rose to her forehead to brush back an imaginary trailing hair. In her nervousness she began to speak faster, though her words were crisply enunciated. Like a skater on thinning ice, she accelerated to save herself from drowning. She tore through her sentences, as though speed alone would generate sense, as though she could propel him too past contradictions, swing him so fast along the curve of her intention that there could be no objection he could grasp at. Because she did not slur her words, she sounded unfortunately brisk, when in fact she was close to despair.

“I’ve thought about this carefully, and it’s not as stupid as it sounds. I mean, on first hearing. We love each other—that’s a given. Neither of us doubts it. We already know how happy we make each other. We’re free now to make our own choices, our own lives. Really, no one can tell us how to live. Free agents! And people live in all kinds of ways now, they can live by their own rules and standards without having to ask anyone else for permission. Mummy knows two homosexuals, they live in a flat together, like man and wife. Two men. In Oxford, in Beaumont Street. They’re very quiet about it. They both teach at Christ Church. No one bothers them. And we can make our own rules too. It’s because I know you love me that I can actually say this. What I mean, it’s this—Edward, I love you, and we don’t have to be like everyone, I mean, no one, no one at all…no one would know what we did or didn’t do. We could be together, live together, and if you wanted, really wanted, that’s to say, whenever it happened, and of course it would happen, I would understand, more than that, I’d want it, I would because I want you to be happy and free. I’d never be jealous, as long as I knew that you loved me. I would love you and play music, that’s all I want to do in life. Honestly. I just want to be with you, look after you, be happy with you, and work with the quartet, and one day play something, something beautiful for you, like the Mozart, at the Wigmore Hall.”

She stopped abruptly. She had not meant to talk about her musical ambitions, and she believed it was a mistake.

He made a noise between his teeth, more of a hiss than a sigh, and when he spoke he made a yelping sound. His indignation was so violent it sounded like triumph. “My God! Florence. Have I got this right? You want me to go with other women! Is that it?”

She said quietly, “Not if you didn’t want to.”

“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.

H
er 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.