“So you’re gorn down Arnold Pitcher’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Nip round the corner to Angel Yard, Clem, then. See if your gran’s all right. I’m that worried. I espect she’re with Hoseason and that lot, but if she ent, you come back and tell me, orright?”
“Okay, Mum,” Clem said.
He hid his face, making a show of checking his brakes.
It was like he flew to the coast.
Frankie.
The huge white sky smiled down on him. His legs were effortless.
Frankie.
Freewheeling the slow downhill out of Napton, he took his hands from the handlebars and put them in his pockets and fiddled with himself.
Frankie.
The sign that said HAZEBOROUGH was deceitful; there was nothing for an uphill mile. He stood on the pedals.
Frankie, Frankie!
Then the sea spread itself in front of him, like restless metal. A car, a bulbous little Austin A30, passed him with a clergyman at the wheel, who smiled and waved. Perhaps he had mistaken Clem’s incandescent halo of lust for something more spiritual.
A road sign: NORWICH 21 MILES. NORWICH. People wrote it on the back of love-letter envelopes as a joke. It stood for Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home. Should be KORWICH, anyhow. The k is silent in knickers. The phrase struck him as funny, and he laughed aloud. Then something, someone, an older version of himself perhaps, told him that he was laughing because he was scared. Made him stop at the top of the low hill, the sea cliff dipping down to his right. He set his feet on either side of the bike on the tar-and-gravel road. He didn’t know if he stunk when he was sweaty. Some boys did. Goz did, a bit.
The thought he had tried to smother rose up again: It’d be better not to do it than be no good at it.
The electrical thrill of anticipation changed polarity, became something closer to dread. He was trembling; his watch shook when he looked at it. Ten to eleven, nearly. The strident calling of herring gulls sounded like mockery.
Where, exactly, do you put it in?
The railway that brought holidaymakers clattering to Cromer and Sheringham did not reach Hazeborough, despite the fact that the little hamlet had a beach superior to those of its jollier neighbors. But that was not the only reason that it remained unpopular, almost, in fact, desolate.
In 1940, after the heroic disaster of Dunkirk, the Ministry of Defense made a hasty survey of England’s south and east coasts to work out the likeliest places for Hitler’s forces to come ashore when they invaded. It was fairly unlikely that they’d choose north Norfolk, as opposed to Kent, say, or Sussex. But if the sneaky Nazi swine did decide to come across the North Sea rather than the English Channel, Hazeborough was exactly the kind of place they might fancy. The cliffs there were lower than at any point for miles and miles. The sea was shallow for some considerable distance from the shore, even at low tide. So the Royal Navy tethered sea mines — big buoyant spheres of explosive with detonator spikes — a mile or so offshore. The Royal Engineers garlanded the beach, all three miles of it, with coiled barbed wire and built “pillboxes”— concrete gun emplacements — atop the cliff. When that was done, the Royal Ordnance Corps planted land mines.
The Germans never came, as we know.
After the war, a decent effort was made to clear all this stuff away. It proved more difficult, and more hazardous, than putting it there. Maps and charts had gone missing. Navy minesweepers recovered fewer sea mines than they should have done; some had broken free of their mooring chains and drifted off. Tides and wild weather had reshaped the beach. In the winter of 1944, a large chunk of cliff had toppled down onto the minefield, bringing a pillbox with it.
It was four years (during which time one ROC man was killed, and two others maimed, by land mines) before Hazeborough beach was considered safe enough to be reopened to the public. And even then, in 1950, the farthermost reaches of the beach remained fenced off and marked with warning signs — a skull and crossbones inside a red triangle. In time, the mesh fences were slumped by windblown sand, and the signs were disfigured by boys with catapults. Even so, Hazeborough was regarded with suspicion. (Ruth was one of many who believed that you’d get blown up as soon as you set foot on the sand. She’d have had a purple fit if she’d known that Clem had gone there, even if his motives had been pure.) The place remained unprosperous and unpopular.
He leaned the bike against one of the rust-flaked uprights of the railings behind the shuttered clapboard café. He watched the sea lazily heave itself onto the shingly sand and retreat, sighing. The weather was on their side, at least. The wind up here could slice you to the bone if it wanted to, but today it was resting, or waiting. Above the horizon, a swath of sky was striped like the skin of a blue mackerel.
She wouldn’t come.
No, don’t think that.
The world could end now. The sky could convulse, turn sideways, become a tower of fire. He could be sucked into oblivion at any second, waiting in bloody Hazeborough to lose his virginity.
Don’t think that, neither.
A man with a muzzled greyhound walked by and gave him a good looking at.
Clem lit a cigarette and smoked it, then popped a Polo mint into his mouth for his breath.
She wouldn’t come. She hadn’t got out of going to church. She was sitting on a pew, her tears reflecting stained glass.
A tinny chirrup of a bicycle bell, and there she was. Coming toward him, waving. She was wearing a skirt and a tight white sweater under her coat. Glimpses of stocking top and thigh flickered at him, and his heart went ballistic.
The Reverend Hugh Underwood, white-surpliced, stood at the porch of Saint Nicholas’s Church, bidding farewell to his flock. It didn’t take long, but even so it was tedious. The business was nearly over when two of his departed congregation returned: the spinster twins, the Misses Fiske, clearly in a state of excitement. After a good deal of mutual nudging and urging, one of them said, “If yer’ve got a minute, Vicar, there’s somethun in the square you oughter see.”
Underwood considered this unlikely.
“Really? And what might that be, pray, Miss Fiske?”
The ladies couldn’t muster a reply between them. Instead, they blushed, made matching beckoning gestures, and scuttled off. Sighing, in need of a cup of tea and a cigarette, Underwood followed.
Borstead’s square was, in fact, roughly rectangular. Toward its slightly wider end stood an ancient stone cross, stump armed and covered in elaborate carvings blurred by time. It was, tradition had it, more than a thousand years old, placed there on the orders of Saint Dunstan himself, when Borstead was a nameless pagan crossroads. Next to it, for reasons no one could remember, an ancient fire engine was parked. It was an eighteenth-century horse-drawn cart, a lead-lined water tank and hand pump set into a red-painted wooden frame on iron-rimmed wheels. On market days, when the square was lined with stalls, the cross and the fire engine were an irritation to traffic; at other times they were largely ignored, on account of their familiarity. On this Sunday morning, however, they were the center of attention. A good many people, and not only the Reverend Underwood’s faithful, had gathered at the margins of the square to create a mocking hubbub, which hushed, gradually, as the vicar approached. Alongside Edmond’s, the haberdashery, he halted, aghast.
A circle of white-robed figures surrounded the cross and the fire engine. They were so extraordinary, so utterly unfamiliar, that for a dizzy moment he thought they might have descended from space or — less likely — heaven. Clearly, some were male and some female, yet the females had hair like men, and the males had no hair at all. And they were barefoot. A single voice persisted when silence descended: a stout bald man reciting from the book of Revelation. It took Underwood a full half minute to realize that it was Enoch Hoseason. Then he started to recognize the others. There were twelve, in all. The mad messiah and his disciples. There was heresy in the very number. Underwood formed his face into a stern mask and advanced.
/> Frankie dismounted and let her bike fall onto his, her pedals barging into his spokes.
“Hiya,” she said, and the awkwardness of it, the fact that she’d never said it before, melted him.
He embarked on a number of sentences that he couldn’t complete.
“Are you . . . ? Do you still . . . ? Did you, was it, I mean . . .”
She busied herself with herself, ignoring him. She fussed with her garter belt through her skirt, tugged her sweater back into order, shrugged her coat into shape. Tossed her hair back. Then she looked up at him. Her face was almost expressionless.
“Shut up,” she said, then planted her mouth on his and forced her tongue in, pressing herself against him. He was shocked; they’d never snogged openly in a public place before.
“So,” Frankie said, pulling away, “here we are. Still alive, just as I said we’d be. Where are we going?”
“This way,” he said.
He didn’t dare take her hand until they were some way along the beach, out of sight of the cliff-top huddle of fishermen’s cottages and gabled bungalows. Despite the enormity of what they were about to do, Frankie seemed to be without a care. She lifted her face to the bright pallor of the sky. She inhaled the sea air like a tourist. The silence between them didn’t appear to bother her; in fact, she seemed to want it. His own anxiety was so strong that he thought it might be audible, plangent as cracking ice. At least there was no one else around, he thought. He had no faith in his luck. It would not have surprised him if they’d come face-to-face, at this momentous moment, in this remote spot, with someone who knew him, someone who would report his assignation and bring the world down in a heap.
The gorsy jumble of fallen cliff forced them closer to the low surf. They walked across a springy mat of seaweed, bladder wrack. Its brown blisters popped beneath their feet, which delighted her. She let go of his hand and jumped on them, bursting them childishly, laughing, little squirts of water staining her shoes. He stood watching her, smiling like a parent.
Beyond the landslip, there was a sign on a pole: a pocked and dented skull and crossbones.
Frankie said, “What’s that mean?”
“Beware of pirates, ” Clem said. “Come on.”
He took hold of her hand again and led her toward the cliff, where a great slab of concrete, a wartime ruin, angled into the sand. He reckoned that in the lee of it they would see anyone approaching before anyone approaching would see them.
“Will this do?”
Frankie looked around as if she were considering buying it.
She leaned her back against the slab and smiled and opened her arms, which parted her coat, and said, “Come here, Clem Ackroyd.”
So he went to her and kissed her and put his hands up inside her clothes, up her back where he could feel the bra strap and the silky shiftings of her shoulder blades. She parted her legs, and although he almost didn’t want to, he shoved his shameful hardness up against her. Miraculously, it excited her. She placed her hands at the top of his hips and tugged him tighter in, lifting herself, mumbling his name into their kiss.
He thought, Is this it? Like this, standing up? Is this what she wants?
Then her mouth was smearing away from his, and she was somehow laughing and gasping, “No,” at the same time. She pulled away from him, shrugging her coat off. She spread it on the sand and sat on it, leaning forward, her arms wrapped around her knees. Not looking at him. Distant, as though he weren’t even there and she was lost in a private moment. He felt something that was the comfortable opposite of hope. Then, as if she were alone and getting ready for bed, Frankie flipped her shoes off and reached up under her skirt. She unfastened her stockings and peeled them from her legs. Such outrageously beautiful legs. She stretched them out and fingered the sand with her toes. She felt under her skirt again and fiddled with something. Produced, like a magician, her garter belt, a flimsy-looking thing like the skin of a small black reptile, and . . .
And looked up at him.
“?” her eyes said.
?
So he took his shoes and socks off, awkward, leaning against the slanting wall of the pillbox.
With her eyes on his, she undid her skirt and cast it aside. Her knickers were pink with a white lace waistband. Her belly curved like a question mark up toward the edge of her sweater.
With unsteady hands, he unbelted and dropped his jeans. He somehow got his right foot stuck and had to hop around to keep his balance. She laughed, and he tried to. While he was still struggling, she stood up and ran down to the slow surf and walked into it.
He didn’t know whether to lie on the coat and adopt some sort of seductive position until she came back or to follow her. From this distance, she looked so like a child, in her sweater and pink knickers and her arms held out and the cold, lazy foam separating and regathering around her shins. She turned and called something, words shredded by sea sound and gulls.
So he went to her, his shirttails flapping below his sleeveless sweater, his feet wincing on the stones and broken shells. The coldness of the water was withering at first, then an almost pleasant numbness. Frankie’s arms were folded under her breasts now, and she was gazing out at where the blue-gray horizon was silvered by slants of light.
“Frankie?”
It was like waking her up.
She said, “I don’t believe all this is going to come to an end, actually. It just can’t.”
“Yes, it could,” he said stoutly. “Right this minute some Russian or some American could be pressing a button, and we wunt know anything about it until . . . well, you know.”
She turned her head and looked at him.
“It’s not going to happen.” She said it brightly and firmly, with tears in her eyes.
His heart went as dead as his feet.
“Ent it?”
“No.” Then she smiled. “I love it when you go all pouty. It makes you look ever so young.”
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, the cold gray water sloshing at their legs.
“Come on, then,” she said, and took him by the hand and led him away from the sea.
“Mr. Hoseason!”
Enoch seemed oblivious to the vicar’s presence. He carried on declaiming the words of Saint John the Divine.
“Mr. Hoseason, sir! What is the meaning of this, this unseemly . . . exhibition?”
At last Enoch lifted his eyes and fixed them on Underwood’s. The dark ecstasy in his glare made the clergyman flinch.
“‘I know thy works,’” Enoch recited, his voice grimmer than before, “‘that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.
“‘So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
“‘Because thou sayest, I am rich and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked . . .’”
Good grief, Underwood thought. He knows the damned thing by heart!
It was clear that he wasn’t going to get any sense out of the blacksmith, so Underwood looked around the circle of Brethren until he caught the eye of Jonathan Eldon, whose denuded head was specked with razor cuts.
“Jonathan, for the love of God! What are you doing?”
“Awaiting deliverance,” Eldon said placidly.
“Deliverance? Deliverance from what?”
“Death.”
Underwood glanced around the square, uneasily. The crowd, though still small, had increased in number. The expressions on its faces ranged from scandalized outrage to coarse glee. There was, unmistakably, ugliness, or the promise of it, in the Sunday-morning air.
Someone called out from the crowd, “They’re waitun fer the Bomb to drop, Vicar!”
There was the kind of pause that precedes laughter, but no one laughed.
Ruth had her hands in the sink, peeling potatoes, when the phone startled her. She peered out of the kitchen window and called George
but got no reply. No doubt he was in that bleddy shed of his, with the transistor radio on. She wiped her hands on a tea towel, hurriedly.
“Hello?”
She heard pip-pip-pip and the clunk of a coin.
“Ruth? Thas Chrissie.”
Which made Ruth uneasy straightaway. Chrissie Slender was a regular visitor, Wednesday afternoons, sometimes Saturdays, but had hardly ever phoned.
“Chrissie? Whassup, then?”
“Ruth, you better come downtown. Thas Win.”
“Mother? Whatever d’yer mean? Hev somethun happened to her?”
“I dunt rightly know howter tell yer, Ruth. She’re in the square with Hoseason and that lot.”
Ruth felt a chill run through her. The hair on the bedroom floor. Oh, my God.
“Whas she doin in the square, Chrissie?”
“She’re makin an exhibition of herself, Ruth. They all are. I dunt like to be the one that tell yer.”
“Oh, Chrissie!”
“Get you down here, Ruth. An if yer got a spare coat, you bring that an all. Or a blanket or somethun.”
“Whatever for, Chrissie?”
She heard Chrissie hesitate.
“Win hent got hardly nothun on,” Chrissie said. “I’m worried she might catch her death.”
Ruth sat down heavily on the little chair beside the telephone. One of those hot, distancing spasms ran through her, and she clasped her hands on her plump knees until it was over.
When she came back to herself, she thought about Clem. Why hadn’t he come back to tell her what was going on?
She felt an inrush of incomprehension, of being excluded from events. She got to her feet and took off her pinafore and went outside to find George.
Frankie and Clem lay down on her coat in the soft shadow of the World War II gun emplacement. Their wet feet had gathered sand, so that they wore gritty pairs of ankle socks. They kissed, lengthily. She pulled him tight to her but kept her legs together. He pushed her away a little so that he could put a hand to her breasts. They murmured each other’s names when they paused for breath. After a while he thought she might be expecting him to force her, so he slid his hand down between her legs. This did not have the effect he’d desired. She levered herself into a sitting position.