On Chesil Beach

  At that time, on a weekday winter’s evening, Soho was only just coming to life. The pubs were full, but the clubs were not yet open, and the pavements were uncrowded. It was easy to notice the couple coming toward them along Old Compton Street. They were rockers—he was a big fellow in his mid-twenties, with long sideburns, studded leather jacket, tight jeans and boots, and his plump girlfriend, holding on to his arm, was identically dressed. As they passed, and without breaking stride, the man swung his arm out to deliver a hard, flat-handed smack to the back of Mather’s head, which caused him to stagger, and sent his Buddy Holly glasses skidding across the road. It was an act of casual contempt for Mather’s height and studious appearance, or for the fact that he looked, and was, Jewish. Perhaps it was intended to impress or amuse the girl. Edward did not stop to think about it. As he strode after the couple, he heard Harold call out something like a “no” or a “don’t,” but that was just the kind of entreaty he was now deaf to. He was back in that dream. He would have found it difficult to describe his state: his anger had lifted itself and spiraled into a kind of ecstasy. With his right hand he gripped the man’s shoulder and spun him around, and, with his left, took him by the throat and pushed him back against a wall. The man’s head clunked satisfyingly against a cast-iron drainpipe. Still clenching his throat, Edward hit him in the face, just once, but very hard, with a closed fist. Then he went back to help Mather find his glasses, one lens of which was cracked. They walked on, leaving the fellow sitting on the pavement, both hands covering his face, while his girlfriend fussed over him.

  It took Edward some while into the evening to become aware of Harold Mather’s lack of gratitude, and then of his silence, or silence toward him, and even longer, a day or two, to realize that his friend not only disapproved, but worse—he was embarrassed. In the pub neither man told their friends the story, and afterward Mather never spoke about the incident to Edward. Rebuke would have been a relief. Without making any great show of it, Mather withdrew from him. Though they saw each other in company, and he was never obviously distant toward Edward, the friendship was never the same. Edward was in agonies when he considered that Mather was actually repelled by his behavior, but he did not have the courage to raise the subject. Besides, Mather made sure they were never alone together. At first Edward believed that his error was to have damaged Mather’s pride by witnessing his humiliation, which Edward then compounded by acting as his champion, demonstrating that he was tough while Mather was a vulnerable weakling. Later on, Edward realized that what he had done was simply not cool, and his shame was all the greater. Street fighting did not go with poetry and irony, bebop or history. He was guilty of a lapse of taste. He was not the person he had thought. What he believed was an interesting quirk, a rough virtue, turned out to be a vulgarity. He was a country boy, a provincial idiot who thought a bare-knuckle swipe could impress a friend. It was a mortifying reappraisal. He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged. Since then, Edward had stayed out of fights.

  But now, on his wedding night, he did not trust himself. He could not be certain that the tunnel vision and selective deafness would never descend again, enveloping him like a wintry mist on Turville Heath, obscuring his more recent, more sophisticated self. He had been sitting beside Florence, with his hand under her dress, stroking her thigh for more than a minute and a half. His painful craving was building intolerably, and he was frightened by his own savage impatience and the furious words or actions it might provoke, and so end the evening. He loved her, but he wanted to shake her awake, or slap her out of her straight-backed music-stand poise, her North Oxford proprieties, and make her see how really simple it was: here was a boundless sensual freedom, theirs for the taking, even blessed by the vicar—with my body I thee worship—a dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace and have each other, drown each other in waves of breathless, mindless ecstasy. It was so simple! Why weren’t they up there now, instead of sitting here, bottled up with all the things they did not know how to say or dared not do?

  And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all. He removed his hand and drew her to him and kissed her on the lips, with all the restraint he was capable of, holding back his tongue. He eased her back across the bed so that her head was cushioned on his arm. He lay on his side, propped on the elbow of that same arm, looking down at her. The bed squeaked mournfully when they moved, a reminder of other honeymoon couples who had passed through, all surely more adept than they were. He held down a sudden impulse to laugh at the idea of them, a solemn queue stretching out into the corridor, downstairs to reception, back through time. It was important not to think about them; comedy was an erotic poison. He also had to hold off the thought that she might be terrified of him. If he believed that, he could do nothing. She was compliant in his arms, her eyes still fixed on his, her face slack and difficult to read. Her breathing was steady and deep, like a sleeper’s. He whispered her name and told her again that he loved her, and she blinked, and parted her lips, perhaps in assent, or even reciprocation. With his free hand he began to remove her knickers. She tensed, but she did not resist, and lifted, or half lifted, her buttocks from the bed. Again, the sad sound of mattress springs or bed frame, like the bleat of a spring lamb. Even with his free arm at full stretch, it was not possible to continue to cushion her head while hooking the knickers past her knees and around her ankles. She helped him by bending her knees. A good sign. He could not face another attempt on the zip of her dress, so for the moment her bra—pale blue silk, so he had glimpsed, with a fine lace trim—must stay in place too. So much for the bare-limbed weightless embrace. But she was beautiful as she was, lying on his arm, her dress rucked up around her thighs, ropes of her tangled hair spread out across the counterpane. A sun queen. They kissed again. He was nauseous with desire and indecision. To get undressed he would have to disturb this promising arrangement of their bodies and risk breaking the spell. A slight change, a combination of tiny factors, little zephyrs of doubt, and she could change her mind. But he firmly believed that to make love—and for the very first time—merely by unzipping his fly was unsensual and gross. And impolite.

  After some minutes, he slid from her side and undressed hurriedly over by the window, leaving a precious zone around the bed free of all such banality. He trod on the backs of his shoes to wrench them from his feet, and snatched his socks off with quick jabs of his thumbs. He observed that her eyes were not on him, but straight up, on the sagging canopy above her. In seconds he was naked but for his shirt, tie and wristwatch. Somehow the shirt, partly concealing, partly emphasizing his erection, like a draped public monument, politely acknowledged the code set by her dress. The tie was clearly absurd, and as he went back toward her he yanked it free with one hand while loosening his top button with the other. It was a confident swaggering motion, and for a moment there returned to him an idea of himself he once had, of a rough-hewn but fundamentally decent and capable fellow, and then it faded. The ghost of Harold Mather still troubled him.

  Florence chose not to sit up, or even shift her position; she lay on her back, staring up at the biscuit-colored pleated cloth supported on posts that were intended to conjure, she supposed, an old England of stone-chilled castles and courtly love. She concentrated on the fabric’s uneven weave, on a green coin-sized stain—how had that got there?—and on a trailing thread that stirred in currents of air. She was trying not to think of the immediate future, or of the past, and she imagined herself clinging to this moment, the precious present, like an unroped climber on a cliff, pressing her face tight agains
t the rock, not daring to move. Cool air traveled pleasantly over her bare legs. She listened to the distant waves, the call of herring gulls, and to the sound of Edward undressing. Here came the past anyway, the indistinct past. It was the smell of the sea that summoned it. She was twelve years old, lying still like this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany sides. Her mind was a blank, she felt she was in disgrace. After a two-day crossing, they were once more in the calm of Carteret harbor, south of Cherbourg. It was late in the evening, and her father was moving about the dim cramped cabin, undressing, like Edward now. She remembered the rustle of clothes, the clink of a belt unfastened or of keys or loose change. Her only task was to keep her eyes closed and think of a tune she liked. Or any tune. She remembered the sweet scent of almost rotten food in the closed air of a boat after a rough trip. She was usually sick many times on the crossing, and of no use to her father as a sailor, and that surely was the source of her shame.

  Nor could she avoid contemplating her immediate future. Her hope was that in whatever was to come, she would regain some version of that spreading, pleasurable sensation, that it would grow and overwhelm her and be an anesthetic to her fears, and deliver her from disgrace. It appeared unlikely. The true memory of the feeling, of being inside it, of truly knowing what it was like, had already diminished to a dry historical fact. It had happened once, like the Battle of Hastings. Still, it was her one chance, and so it was precious, like delicate antique crystal, easily dropped, and another good reason not to move.

  She felt the bed dip and shake as Edward climbed onto it, and his face, replacing the canopy, filled her view. Obligingly, she lifted her head so that he could slot his arm under it once more as a cushion. He drew her in tight along the length of his body. She had a view into the darkness of his nostrils and of a solitary bent hair in the left, standing like a bowed man before a grotto, trembling with every exhalation. She liked the sharply defined lines of the badge-shaped indentation on the upper lip. To the right of the philtrum was a rosy blemish, a tiny raised pin-prick, the beginnings or the fading traces of a spot. Against her hip she felt his erection, broomstick hard and pulsing, and to her surprise, she did not mind so much. What she did not want, not just yet, was to see it.

  To seal their reunion, he lowered his head and they kissed, his tongue barely grazing hers at the tip, and again, she was grateful. Conscious of the silence from the downstairs bar—no radio, no conversation—they whispered their “I love yous.” It soothed her to be invoking, however quietly, the unfading formula that bound them, and that surely proved their interests were identical. She wondered if perhaps she might even make it through, and be strong enough to pretend convincingly, and on later, successive occasions whittle her anxieties away through sheer familiarity, until she could honestly find and give pleasure. He need never know, at least not until she told it, from within the warmth of her new confidence, as a funny story—back then, when she was an ignorant girl, miserable in her foolish fears. Even now she did not mind him touching her breasts, when once she would have recoiled. There was hope for her, and at the thought she moved closer against his chest. He had his shirt on, she assumed, because his contraceptives were in the top pocket, easily reached. His hand was traveling the length of her body and was pulling back the hem of her skirt up to her waist. He had always been reticent about the girls he had made love to, but she did not doubt the wealth of his experience. She felt the summery air through the open window tickling her exposed pubic hair. She was already far gone into new territory, too far to come back.

  It had never occurred to Florence that the preliminaries of love would take place in dumb show, in such intense and watchful silence. But beyond the obvious three words, what could she herself say that did not sound contrived or foolish? And since he was silent, she thought this must be the convention. She would have preferred it if they had murmured the silly endearments they used when they lay around in her bedroom in North Oxford, fully clothed, wasting the afternoons away. She needed to feel close to him in order to hold down the demon of panic she knew was ready to overwhelm her. She had to know he was with her, on her side, and was not going to use her, that he was her friend and was kindly and tender. Otherwise it could all go wrong, in a very lonely way. She was dependent on him for this assurance, beyond love, and finally could not help herself issuing the inane command, “Tell me something.”

  One immediate and benign effect was that his hand stopped abruptly, not far from where it was before, inches below her navel. He gazed down at her, lips quivering a little—nerves, perhaps, or a nascent smile, or a thought evolving into words.

  To her relief, he caught the prompt and resorted to the familiar form of stupidity. He said solemnly, “You have a lovely face and a beautiful nature, and sexy elbows and ankles, and a clavicle, a putamen and a vibrato all men must adore, but you belong entirely to me and I am very glad and proud.”

  She said, “Very well, you may kiss my vibrato.”

  He took her left hand and sucked the ends of her fingers in turn, and put his tongue on the vi-olin player’s calluses there. They kissed, and it was in this moment of relative optimism for Florence that she felt his arms tense, and suddenly, in one deft athletic move, he had rolled on top of her, and though his weight was mostly through his elbows and forearms planted on either side of her head, she was pinned down and helpless, and a little breathless beneath his bulk. She felt disappointment that he had not lingered to stroke her pubic area again and set off that strange and spreading thrill. But her immediate preoccupation—an improvement on revulsion or fear—was to keep up appearances, not to let him down or humiliate herself, or seem a poor choice among all the women he had known. She was going to get through this. She would never let him know what a struggle it was, what it cost her, to appear calm. She was without any other desire but to please him and make this night a success, and without any other sensation beyond an awareness of the end of his penis, strangely cool, repeatedly jabbing and bumping into and around her urethra. Her panic and disgust, she thought, were under control, she loved Edward, and all her thoughts were on helping him have what he so dearly wanted and to make him love her all the more. It was in this spirit that she slid her right hand down between his groin and hers. He lifted a little to let her through. She was pleased with herself for remembering that the red manual advised that it was perfectly acceptable for the bride to “guide the man in.”

  She found his testicles first, and, not at all afraid now, she curled her fingers softly around this extraordinary bristling item she had seen in different forms on dogs and horses, but had never quite believed could fit comfortably on adult humans. Drawing her fingers across its underside, she arrived at the base of his penis, which she held with extreme care, for she had no idea how sensitive or robust it was. She trailed her fingers along its length, noting with interest its silky texture, right to the tip, which she lightly stroked; and then, amazed by her own boldness, she moved back down a little, to take his penis firmly, about halfway along, and pulled it downward, a slight adjustment, until she felt it just touching her labia.

  How could she have known what a terrible mistake she was making? Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He gave out a wail, a complicated series of agonized, rising vowels, the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a towering pile of soup plates.

  In horror she let go, as Edward, rising up with a bewildered look, his muscular back arching in spasms, emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities, filling her navel, coating her belly, thighs, and even a portion of her chin and kneecap in tepid, viscous fluid. It was a calamity, and she knew immediately that it was all her fault, that she was inept, ignorant and stupid. She should not have interfered, she should never have believed the manual. If his jugular had burst, it could not have seemed more terrible. How typical, her overconfident meddling in matters of awesome
complexity; she should have known well enough that her attitude in rehearsals for the string quartet had no relevance here.

  And there was another element, far worse in its way and quite beyond her control, summoning memories she had long ago decided were not really hers. She had taken pride, only half a minute before, in mastering her feelings and appearing calm. But now she was incapable of repressing her primal disgust, her visceral horror at being doused in fluid, in slime from another body. In seconds it had turned icy on her skin in the sea breeze, and yet, just as she knew it would, it seemed to scald her. Nothing in her nature could have held back her instant cry of revulsion. The feel of it crawling across her skin in thick rivulets, its alien milkiness, its intimate starchy odor, which dragged with it the stench of a shameful secret locked in musty confinement—she could not help herself, she had to be rid of it. As Edward shrank before her, she turned and scrambled to her knees, snatched a pillow from under the bedspread and wiped herself frantically. Even as she did so, she knew how loathsome, how unmannerly her behavior was, how it must add to his misery to see her so desperate to remove this part of himself from her skin. And actually, it was not so easy. It clung to her as she smeared it, and in parts it was already drying to a cracked glaze. She was two selves—the one who flung the pillow down in exasperation, the other who looked on and hated herself for it. It was unbearable that he should watch her, the punishing, hysterical woman he had foolishly married. She could hate him for what he was witnessing now and would never forget. She had to get away from him.