On Chesil Beach Part 2

'Did you really need to come this far?' 'Yes.'

'It must be two miles back to the hotel.' She surprised herself with the hardness in her voice. 'I don't care how far it is. I needed to get out.'

He let this go. When he shifted his weight, the stones tinkled under his feet. She saw now that it was his jacket that he carried. It was warm and moist on the beach, warmer than it had been during the day. It bothered her that he thought he had to bring a jacket with him. At least he had not put on his tie! G.o.d, how irritable she suddenly felt, when minutes ago she was so ashamed of herself. She was usually so keen to have his good opinion, and now she did not care.

He was preparing to tell her what he had come to say, and he moved a step closer. 'Look, this is ridiculous. It was unfair of you to run out like that.'

'Was it?'

'In fact, it was b.l.o.o.d.y unpleasant.'

'Oh really? Well, it was b.l.o.o.d.y unpleasant, what you did.'

'Meaning what?'

She had her eyes shut as she said it. 'You know exactly what I mean.' She would torture herself with the memory of her part in this exchange, but now she added, 'It was absolutely revolting.'

She imagined she heard him grunt, as though punched in the chest. If only the silence that followed had been a few seconds longer, her guilt might have had time to rise up against her, and she might have added something less unkind.

But Edward came out swinging. 'You don't have the faintest idea how to be with a man. If you did, it would never have happened. You've never let me near you. You don't know a thing about any of it, do you? You carry on as if it's eighteen sixty-two. You don't even know how to kiss.'

She heard herself say smoothly, 'I know failure when I see it.' But it was not what she meant, this cruelty was not her at all. This was merely the second violin answering the first, a rhetorical parry provoked by the suddenness, the precision of his attack, the sneer she heard in all his repeated 'you's. How much accusation was she supposed to bear in one small speech?

If she had hurt him, he gave no sign, though she could barely see his face. Perhaps it was the darkness that had emboldened her. When he spoke again, he did not even raise his voice.

'I am not going to be humiliated by you.' 'And I'm not going to be bullied by you.' 'I'm not bullying you.' 'Yes you are. You always are.' 'This is ridiculous. What are you talking about?' She was not sure, but she knew it was the route she was taking. 'You're always pushing me, pushing me, wanting something out of me. We can never just be. We can never just be happy. There's this constant pressure. There's always something more that you want out of me. This endless wheedling.'

'Wheedling? I don't understand. I hope you're not talking about money.'

She was not. It was far from her thoughts. How preposterous to mention money. How dare he. So she said, 'Well, all right, now you mention it. It's clearly on your mind.'

It was his sarcasm that had goaded her. Or his flippancy.

What she was referring to was more fundamental than money, but she did not know how to say it. It was his tongue pushing deeper into her mouth, his hand going further under her skirt or blouse, his hand tugging hers towards his groin, a certain way he had of looking away from her and going silent. It was the brooding expectation of her giving more, and because she didn't, she was a disappointment for slowing everything down. Whatever new frontier she crossed, there was always another waiting for her. Every concession she made increased the demand, and then the disappointment. Even in their happiest moments, there was always the accusing shadow, the barely hidden gloom of his unfulfilment, looming like an alp, a form of perpetual sorrow which had been accepted by them both as her responsibility. She wanted to be in love and be herself. But to be herself, she had to say no all the time. And then she was no longer herself. She had been cast on the side of sickliness, as an opponent of normal life. It irritated her, the way he pursued her so quickly along the beach, when he should have given her time to herself. And what they had here, on the sh.o.r.es of the English Channel, was only a minor theme in the larger pattern. She could already see ahead. They would have this row, they would make up, or half make up, she would be coaxed back to the room, and then the expectations would be laid on her again. And she would fail again. She could not breathe. Her marriage was eight hours old and each hour was a weight on her, all the heavier because she did not know how to describe these thoughts to him. So money would have to do as the subject - in fact, it did perfectly well, because now he was roused. He said, 'I've never cared about money, yours or anyone's.'

She knew this was true, but she said nothing. He had shifted position, so now she saw his outline clearly against the dying glow on the water behind him.

'So keep your money, your father's money, spend it on yourself. Get a new violin. Don't waste it on anything I might use.'

His voice was tight. She had offended him deeply, even more than she intended, but for now she did not care, and it helped that she could not see his face. They had never talked about money before. Her father's wedding present was two thousand pounds. She and Edward had talked only vaguely of buying a house with it one day.

He said, 'You think I wheedled that job out of you? It was your idea. And I don't want it. Do you understand? I don't want to work for your father. You can tell him I've changed my mind.'

'Tell him yourself. He'll be really pleased. He's gone to a lot of trouble for you.' 'Right then. I will.'

He turned and walked away from her, towards the sh.o.r.eline, and after a few steps came back, kicking at the shingle with unashamed violence, sending up a spray of small stones, some of which landed near her feet. His anger stirred her own and she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they went around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, deferring, agreeing. They barely knew each other, and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them. They had been frightened of ever disagreeing, and now his anger was setting her free. She wanted to hurt him, punish him in order to make herself distinct from him. It was such an unfamiliar impulse in her, towards the thrill of destruction, that she had no resistance against it. Her heart beat hard and she wanted to tell him that she hated him, and she was about to say these harsh and wonderful words that she had never uttered before in her life when he spoke first. He was back to his starting point, and calling on all his dignity to reprimand her.

'Why did you run off? It was wrong of you, and hurtful.'

Wrong. Hurtful. How pathetic!

She said, I've already told you. I had to get out. I couldn't bear it, being with you in there.'

'You were wanting to humiliate me.'

'Oh, all right then. If that's what you want. I was trying to humiliate you. It's no less than you deserve when you can't even control yourself.'

'You're a b.i.t.c.h talking like that.'

The word was a starburst in the night sky. Now she could say what she liked.

'If that's what you think, then get away from me. Just clear off, will you. Edward, please go away. Don't you understand? I came out here to be alone.'

She knew he realised he had gone too far with his word, and now he was trapped with it. As she turned her back on him, she was conscious of play-acting, of being tactical in a way she had always despised in her more demonstrative girlfriends. She was tiring of the conversation. Even the best outcome would only return her to more of the same silent manoeuvrings. Often when she was unhappy, she wondered what it was she would most like to be doing. In this instance, she knew immediately. She saw herself on the London-bound platform of Oxford railway station, nine o'clock in the morning, violin case in her hand, a sheaf of music and a bundle of sharpened pencils in the old canvas school satchel on her shoulder, heading towards a rehearsal with the quartet, towards an encounter with beauty and difficulty, with problems that could actually be resolved by friends working together. Whereas here, with Edward, there was no resolution she could imagine, unless she made her proposal, and now she doubted if she had the courage. How unfree she was, her life entangled with this strange person from a hamlet in the Chiltern hills who knew the names of wild flowers and crops and all the medieval kings and popes. And how extraordinary it now seemed to her, that she had chosen this situation, this entanglement, for herself.

Her back was still turned. She sensed he had drawn closer, she imagined him right behind her, his hands hanging loosely at his side, 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 further 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 round, 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 straight away. 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 re-invent 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 s.e.x. 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 psychoa.n.a.lysed. 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 h.o.m.os.e.xuals, 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 G.o.d! 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 realise 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 towards her, with the hand gripping the stone raised, then he spun around and in his frustration hurled it towards 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 fitted 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 towards the hotel she had to pa.s.s 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.

Her 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, savouring 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 n.o.ble. 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 a.s.sistant 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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, sc.r.a.ped 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 gra.s.s rushing through the open window, until he joined the empty arterial road towards Oxford. He left the car outside the Pontings' house with the keys in the ignition. Without a glance towards 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 non-consummation. 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. Towards 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 circ.u.mstances 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.

He became involved in the administration of various rock festivals, helped start a health-food canteen in Hampstead, worked in a record shop not far from the ca.n.a.l in Camden Town, wrote rock reviews for small magazines, lived through a chaotic, overlapping sequence of lovers, travelled through France with a woman who became his wife for three and a half years and lived with her in Paris. He eventually became a part-owner of the record shop. His life was too busy for newspapers, and besides, for a while his att.i.tude was that no one could honestly trust the 'straight' press because everyone knew it was controlled by state, military or financial interests - a view that Edward later disowned.

Even if he had read the papers in those times, he would have been unlikely to turn to the arts pages, to the long, thoughtful reviews of concerts. His precarious interest in cla.s.sical music had faded entirely in favour of rock and roll. So he never heard about the Ennismore Quartet's triumphant debut at the Wigmore Hall in July 1968. The Times critic welcomed the arrival of 'fresh blood, youthful pa.s.sion to the current scene'. He praised the 'insight, the brooding intensity, the incisiveness of the playing', which suggested 'an astonishing musical maturity in players still in their twenties. They commanded with magisterial ease the full panoply of harmonic and dynamic effects and rich contrapuntal writing that typifies Mozart's late style. His D Major Quintet was never so sensitively rendered.' At the end of his review he singled out the leader, the first violinist. 'Then came a searingly expressive Adagio of consummate beauty and spiritual power. Miss Ponting, in the lilting tenderness of her tone and the lyrical delicacy of her phrasing, played, if I may put it this way, like a woman in love, not only with Mozart, or with music, but with life itself.

And even if Edward had read that review, he could not have known - no one knew but Florence - that as the house lights came up, and as the dazed young players stood to acknowledge the rapturous applause, the first violinist could not help her gaze travelling to the middle of the third row, to seat 9C.

In later years, whenever Edward thought of her and addressed her in his mind, or imagined writing to her or b.u.mping into her in the street, it seemed to him that an explanation of his existence would take up less than a minute, less than half a page. What had he done with himself? He had drifted through, half asleep, inattentive, unambitious, unserious, childless, comfortable. His modest achievements were mostly material. He owned a tiny flat in Camden Town, a share of a two-bedroom cottage in the Auvergne, and two specialist record stores, jazz and rock and roll, precarious ventures slowly being undermined by Internet shopping. He supposed he was considered a decent friend by his friends, and there had been some good times, wild times, especially in the early years. He was G.o.dfather to five children, though it was not until their late teens or early twenties that he started to play a role.

In 1976 Edward's mother died, and four years later he moved back to the cottage to take care of his father, who was suffering from rapidly advancing Parkinson's disease. Harriet and Anne were married with children and both lived abroad. By then Edward, at forty, had a failed marriage behind him. He travelled to London three times a week to take care of the shops. His father died at home in 1983 and was buried in Pishill churchyard, alongside his wife. Edward remained in the cottage as a tenant - his sisters were the legal owners now. Initially he used the place as a bolt-hole from Camden Town, and then in the early nineties he moved there to live alone.

Physically, Turville Heath, or his corner of it, was not so very different from the place he grew up in. Instead of agricultural labourers or craftsmen for neighbours, there were commuters or owners of second homes, but all were friendly enough. And Edward would never have described himself as unhappy - among his London friends was a woman he was fond of; well into his fifties he played cricket for Turville Park, he was active in a historical society in Henley, and played a part in the restoration of the ancient watercress beds in Ewelme. Two days a month he worked for a trust based in High Wycombe that helped brain-damaged children.

Even in his sixties, a large, stout man with receding white hair and a pink, healthy face, he kept up the long hikes. His daily walk still took in the avenue of limes, and in good weather he would take a circular route to look at the wildflowers on the common at Maidensgrove or the b.u.t.terflies in the nature reserve in Bix Bottom, returning through the beech woods to Pishill church, where, he thought, he too would one day be buried. Occasionally, he would come to a forking of the paths deep in a beech wood and idly think that this was when she must have paused to consult her map that morning in August, and he would imagine her vividly, only a few feet and forty years away, intent on finding him. Or he would pause by a view over the Stonor valley and wonder whether this was where she stopped to eat her orange. At last he could admit to himself that he had never met anyone he loved as much, that he had never found anyone, man or woman, who matched her seriousness. Perhaps if he had stayed with her, he would have been more focused and ambitious about his own life, he might have written those history books. It was not his kind of thing at all, but he knew that the Ennismore Quartet was eminent, and was still a revered feature of the cla.s.sical music scene. He would never attend the concerts, or buy, or even look at, the boxed sets of Beethoven or Schubert. He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her b.u.t.tonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile. When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his rea.s.surance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience - if only he had had them both at once - would surely have seen them both through. And then what unborn children might have had their chances, what young girl with an Alice band might have become his loved familiar? This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing. On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer's dusk, watching her hurry along the sh.o.r.e, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.

The End.