On Chesil Beach

by Ian Mcewan

  THREE

  When Florence reached the bedroom, she released Edward’s hand and, steadying herself against one of the oak posts that supported the bed’s canopy, she dipped first to her right, then to her left, dropping a shoulder prettily each time, in order to remove her shoes. These were going-away shoes she had bought with her mother one quarrelsome rainy afternoon in Debenhams—it was unusual and stressful for Violet to enter a shop. They were of soft pale blue leather, with low heels and a tiny bow at the front, artfully twisted in leather of darker blue. The bride was not hurried in her movements—this was yet another of those delaying tactics that also committed her further. She was aware of her husband’s enchanted gaze, but for the moment she did not feel quite so agitated or pressured. Entering the bedroom, she had plunged into an uncomfortable, dreamlike condition that encumbered her like an old-fashioned diving suit in deep water. Her thoughts did not seem her own—they were piped down to her, thoughts instead of oxygen.

  And in this condition she had been aware of a stately, simple musical phrase, playing and repeating itself, in the shadowy ungraspable way of auditory memory, following her to the bedside, where it played again as she took a shoe in each hand. The familiar phrase—some might even have called it famous—consisted of four rising notes, which appeared to be posing a tentative question. Because the instrument was a cello rather than her violin, the interrogator was not herself but a detached observer, mildly incredulous, but insistent too, for after a brief silence and a lingering, unconvincing reply from the other instruments, the cello put the question again, in different terms, on a different chord, and then again, and again, and each time received a doubtful answer. There was no set of words she could match to these notes; it was not as if something were being said. The inquiry was without content, as pure as a question mark.

  It was the opening of a Mozart quintet, the cause of some dispute between Florence and her friends because playing it had meant drafting in another viola player and the others preferred to avoid complications. But Florence insisted she wanted someone for this piece, and when she invited a girlfriend from her floor at college to join them for a rehearsal and they sight-read it through, naturally the cellist in his vanity fell for it, and soon enough the others came under its spell. Who could not? If the opening phrase posed a difficult question about the cohesion of the Ennismore Quartet—named after the address of the girls’ hostel—it was settled by Florence’s resolve in the face of opposition, one against three, and her tough-minded sense of her own good taste.

  As she crossed the bedroom, still with her back to Edward, still playing for time, and carefully set her shoes down on the floor by the wardrobe, the same four notes reminded her of this other aspect of her nature. The Florence who led her quartet, who coolly imposed her will, would never meekly submit to conventional expectations. She was no lamb to be uncomplainingly knifed. Or penetrated. She would demand of herself what it was exactly she wanted and did not want from her marriage, and she would say so out loud to Edward and expect to discover some form of compromise with him. Surely what each of them desired should not be at the other’s expense. The point was to love, and set each other free. Yes, she needed to speak up, the way she did at rehearsals, and she was going to do it now. She even had the beginnings of a proposal she might make. Her lips parted, and she drew breath. Then, at the sound of a floorboard, she turned, and he was coming toward her, smiling, his beautiful face a little pink, and the liberating idea—as if never quite her own—was gone.

  Her going-away dress was of a light summer cotton in cornflower blue, a perfect match for her shoes, and discovered only after many pavement hours between Regent Street and Marble Arch, thankfully without her mother. When Edward drew Florence into his embrace, it was not to kiss her, but first to press her body against his, and then to put a hand on her nape and feel for the zip of this dress. His other hand was flat and firm against the small of her back, and he was whispering in her ear, so loudly, so closely that she heard only a roar of warm moist air. But the zip could not be unfastened with one hand alone, at least, not for the first inch or two. You had to hold the top of the dress straight with one hand while pulling down, otherwise the fine material would bunch and snag. She would have reached over her shoulder to help, but her arms were trapped, and besides, it did not seem right, showing him what to do. Above all, she did not wish to hurt his feelings. With a sharp sigh, he tugged harder at the zip, trying to force it, but the point had already been reached when it would move neither down nor up. For the moment she was trapped inside her dress.

  “Oh God, Flo. Just keep still, will you.”

  Obediently, she froze, horrified by the agitation in his voice, automatically certain that it was her fault. It was, after all, her dress, her zip. It might have helped, she thought, to get free and turn her back, and move nearer the window for the light. But that could appear unaffectionate, and the interruption would admit to the scale of the problem. At home she relied on her sister, who was clever with her fingers, despite her abysmal piano playing. Their mother had no patience for small things. Poor Edward—she felt on her shoulders tremors of effort along his arms as he brought both hands into play, and she imagined his thick fingers fumbling between the folds of pinched cloth and obstinate metal. She was sorry for him, and she was a little frightened of him too. To make even a timid suggestion might enrage him further. So she stood patiently, until at last he freed himself from her with a groan and stepped back.

  In fact, he was penitent. “I’m really sorry. It’s a mess. I’m so bloody clumsy.”

  “Darling. It happens to me often enough.”

  They went and sat together on the bed. He smiled to let her know he did not believe her, but appreciated the remark. Here in the bedroom the windows were open wide toward the same view of hotel lawn, woodland and sea. A sudden shift in wind or tide, or perhaps it was the wake of a passing ship, brought the sound of several waves breaking in succession, hard smacks against the shore. Then, just as suddenly, the waves were as before, tinkling and raking softly across the shingle.

  She put her arm around his shoulder. “Do you want to know a secret?”

  “Yes.”

  She took his earlobe between forefinger and thumb and gently tugged his head toward her and whispered, “Actually, I’m a little bit scared.”

  This was not strictly accurate but, thoughtful though she was, she could never have described her array of feelings: a dry physical sensation of tight shrinking, general revulsion at what she might be asked to do, shame at the prospect of disappointing him, and of being revealed as a fraud. She disliked herself, and when she whispered to him, she thought her words hissed in her mouth like those of a stage villain. But it was better to talk of being scared than admit to disgust or shame. She had to do everything she could to begin to lower his expectations.

  He was gazing at her, and nothing registered in his expression to show he had heard her. Even in her difficult state, she marveled at his soft brown eyes. Such kindly intelligence and forgiveness. Perhaps if she stared into them and saw nothing else, she might just be able to do anything he asked of her. She would trust him utterly. But this was fantasy.

  He said at last, “I think I am too.” As he spoke he placed his hand just above her knee, and slid along, under the hem of her dress, and came to rest on her inner thigh, with his thumb just touching her knickers. Her legs were bare and smooth, and brown from sunbathing in the garden and tennis games with old school friends on the Summertown public courts and two long picnics with Edward on the flowery downs above the pretty village of Ewelme, where Chaucer’s granddaughter was interred. They continued to look into each other’s eyes—in this they were accomplished. Such was her awareness of his touch, the warmth and sticky pressure of his hand against her skin, that she could imagine, she could see, precisely his long, curving thumb in the blue gloom under her dress, lying patiently like a siege engine beyond the city walls, the well-trimmed nail just brushing the cream silk pucke
red in tiny swags along the line of the lacy trim, and touching too—she was certain of this, she felt it clearly—a stray hair curling free.

  She was doing all she could to prevent a muscle in her leg from tightening, but it was happening without her, of its own accord, as inevitable and powerful as a sneeze. It was not painful as it clenched and went into mild spasm, this treacherous band of muscle, but she felt it was letting her down, giving the first indication of the extent of her problem. He surely felt the little storm beneath his hand, for his eyes widened minutely, and the tilt of his eyebrows and the soundless parting of his lips suggested that he was impressed, even in awe, as he mistook her turmoil for eagerness.

  “Flo…?” He said her name cautiously, on a dip and a rise, as though wanting to steady her or dissuade her from some headlong action. But he was having to hold down a little storm of his own. His breathing was shallow and irregular, and he kept detaching his tongue from his palate with a soft, sticking sound.

  It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush? Her unruly muscle jumped and fluttered like a moth trapped beneath her skin. She had similar trouble sometimes with her eyelid. But perhaps the tumult was subsiding; she could not be sure. It helped her to settle on the basics, and she spelled them out for herself with stupid clarity: his hand was there because he was her husband; she let it stay because she was his wife. Certain of her friends—Greta, Hermione, Lucy especially—would have been naked between the sheets hours ago, and would have consummated this marriage—noisily, joyously—long before the wedding. In their affection and generosity, they even had the impression that this was precisely what she had done. She had never lied to them, but neither had she set them straight. Thinking of her friends, she felt the peculiar unshared flavor of her own existence: she was alone.

  Edward’s hand did not advance—he may have been unnerved by what he had unleashed—and instead rocked lightly in place, gently kneading her inner thigh. This may have been why the spasm was fading, but she was no longer paying attention. It must have been accidental, because he could not have known that as his hand palpated her leg, the tip of his thumb pushed against the lone hair that curled out free from under her panties, rocking it back and forth, stirring in the root, along the nerve of the follicle, a mere shadow of a sensation, an almost abstract beginning, as infinitely small as a geometric point that grew to a minuscule smooth-edged speck, and continued to swell. She doubted it, denied it, even as she felt herself sink and inwardly fold in its direction. How could the root of a solitary hair drag her whole body in? To the caressing rhythm of his hand, in steady beats, the single point of feeling spread itself across the surface of her skin, across her belly, and in pulses downward to her perineum. The feeling was not entirely unfamiliar—something between an ache and an itch, but smoother, warmer and somehow emptier, a pleasurable aching emptiness emanating from one rhythmically disturbed follicle, extending in concentric waves across her body and now moving deeper into it.

  For the first time, her love for Edward was associated with a definable physical sensation, as irrefutable as vertigo. Before, she had known only a comforting broth of warm emotions, a thick winter blanket of kindness and trust. That had always seemed enough, an achievement in itself. Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else. When she was a late-developing fourteen, in despair that all her friends had breasts while she still resembled a giant nine-year-old, she had a similar moment of revelation in front of the mirror the evening she first discerned and probed a novel tight swelling around her nipples. If her mother had not been preparing her Spinoza lecture on the floor below, Florence would have shouted in delight. It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.

  She and Edward still held each other’s eyes. Talking appeared out of the question. She was half pretending that nothing was happening—that his hand was not under her dress, his thumb was not pushing an outlying pubic hair back and forth, and she was not making a momentous sensory discovery. Behind Edward’s head extended a partial view of a distant past—the open door and the dining table by the French window and the debris around their uneaten supper—but she did not let her gaze shift to take it in. Despite the pleasing sensation and her relief, there remained her apprehension, a high wall, not so easily demolished. Nor did she want it to be. For all the novelty, she was not in a state of wild abandonment, nor did she want to be hurried toward one. She wanted to linger in this spacious moment, in these fully clothed conditions, with the soft brown-eyed gaze and the tender caress and the spreading thrill. But she knew that this was impossible, and that, as everyone said, one thing would have to lead to another.

  Edward’s face was still unusually pink, his pupils dilated, his lips still parted, his breathing as before: shallow, irregular, rapid. His week of wedding preparation, of crazed restraint, was bearing down hard on his body’s young chemistry. She was so precious and vivid before him, and he did not quite know what to do. In the falling light, the blue dress he had failed to remove gleamed darkly against the stretched white counterpane. When he first touched her inner thigh her skin had been surprisingly cool, and for some reason this had excited him intensely. As he looked into her eyes, he had an impression of toppling toward her in constant giddy motion. He felt trapped between the pressure of his excitement and the burden of his ignorance. Beyond the films, the dirty jokes and the wild anecdotes, most of what he knew about women was derived from Florence herself. The perturbation beneath his hand could easily be a telltale sign that anyone could have told him how to recognize and respond to—some kind of precursor to female orgasm, perhaps. Equally, it could be nerves. There was no telling, and he was relieved when it began to subside. He remembered a time, in a vast cornfield outside Ewelme, when he sat at the controls of a combine harvester, having boasted to the farmer that he was competent, and then did not dare touch a single lever. He simply did not know enough. On the one hand, she was the one who had led him to the bedroom, removed her shoes with such abandon, let him place his hand so close. On the other, he knew from long experience how easily an impetuous move could wreck his chances. There again, while his hand remained in place, palpating her thigh, she continued to gaze at him so invitingly—her bold features softened, her eyes narrowing, then opening wide again to find his own, and now her head tilting back—that his caution was surely absurd. This hesitancy was a madness of his own. They were married, for goodness’ sake, and she was encouraging him, urging him on, desperate for him to take the lead. But still, he could not escape the memories of those times when he had misread the signs, most spectacularly in the cinema, at the showing of A Taste of Honey, when she had leaped out of her seat and into the aisle like a startled gazelle. That single mistake took weeks to repair—it was a disaster he dared not repeat, and he was skeptical that a forty-minute wedding ceremony could make so profound a difference.

  The air in the room seemed thin, insubstantial, and it was a conscious effort to breathe. He was troubled by a fit of nervous yawning, which he suppressed with a frown and a flaring of the nostrils—it would not help if she thought he was bored. It pained him tremendously that their wedding night was not simple, when their love was so obvious. He regarded his state of excitement, ignorance and indecision as dangerous because he did not trust himself. He was capable of behaving stupidly, even explosively. He was known to his university friends as one of those quiet types, prone to the occasional violent eruption. According to his father, his very early childhood had been marked by spectacular tantrums. Through his school years and into his time at college he was drawn now and then by the wild freedom of a fistfight. From schoolyard scraps around which savagely chanting kids formed a spectator ring, to a solemn rendezvous in a woodland clearing
near the edge of the village, to shameless brawls outside central London pubs, Edward found in fighting a thrilling unpredictability, and discovered a spontaneous, decisive self that eluded him in the rest of his tranquil existence. He never sought out these situations, but when they arose, certain aspects—the taunting, the restraining friends, the squaring up, the sheer outrageousness of his opponent—were irresistible. Something like tunnel vision and deafness descended on him, and then suddenly he was back there again, stepping into a forgotten pleasure, as though emerging into a recurring dream. As in a student drinking bout, the pain came afterward. He was no great pugilist, but he had the useful gift of physical recklessness, and was well placed to raise the stakes. He was also strong.

  Florence had never seen this madness in him, and he did not intend to talk to her about it. He had not been in a fight for eighteen months, since January of 1961, in the second term of his final year. It was a one-sided affair, and unusual in that Edward had some cause, a degree of justice on his side. He was walking along Old Compton Street toward the French Pub in Dean Street with another third-year history student, Harold Mather. It was early evening and they had come straight from the library in Malet Street to meet up with friends. At Edward’s grammar school, Mather would have been the perfect victim—he was short, barely five foot five, wore thick glasses over comically squashed features and was maddeningly talkative and clever. At university, however, he flourished, he was a high-status figure. He had an important jazz record collection, he edited a literary magazine, he had a short story accepted, though not yet published, by Encounter magazine, he was hilarious in formal student union debates and a good mimic—he did Macmillan, Gaitskell, Kennedy, Khrushchev in fake Russian, as well as various African leaders and comedians like Al Read and Tony Hancock. He could reproduce all the voices and sketches from Beyond the Fringe and was reckoned by far the best student in the history group. Edward counted it as progress in his own life, evidence of a new maturity, that he prized his friendship with a man he might once have taken trouble to avoid.