On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online

asking, with a Palm Court–style trio in a seedy grand hotel south of London. She had no scruples about the kind of music she would have to play—no one would be listening—but some instinct, or mere snobbery, convinced her she could not live in or near Croydon. She persuaded herself that her college results would help her make up her mind, and so, like Edward fifteen miles away in the wooded hills to the east, she passed her days in a form of anteroom, waiting fretfully for her life to begin.
    Back from college, transformed from a school-girl, mature in ways that no one in the household appeared to notice, Florence was beginning to realize that her parents had rather objectionable political opinions, and here at least she permitted herself open dissent at the dinner table, in arguments that meandered through the long summer evenings. This was release of a kind, but these conversations also inflamed her general impatience. Violet was genuinely interested in her daughter’s membership in CND, although it was trying for Florence, having a philosopher for a mother. She was provoked by her mother’s calmness or, more accurately, the sadness she affected as she heard her daughter out and then delivered her own opinion. She said that the Soviet Union was a cynical tyranny, a cruel and heartless state responsible for genocide on a scale that even outdid Nazi Germany and for a vast, barely understood network of political prison camps. She went on about show trials, censorship, absence of rule of law. The Soviet Union had trampled on human dignity and basic rights, it was a stifling occupying force in neighboring lands—Violet had Hungarians and Czechs among her academic friends—and it was expansionist by creed and must be opposed, just as Hitler had been. If it could not be opposed, because we did not have the tanks and men to defend the north German plain, then it had to be deterred. A couple of months later she would point to the building of the Berlin Wall and claim complete vindication—the Communist empire was now one giant prison.
    Florence knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes—clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design—was essentially a beneficial force in the world. It was and always had been for liberating the oppressed and standing up to fascism and the ravages of greedy capitalism. The comparison with Nazi Germany disgusted her. She recognized in her mother’s opinions a typical pattern of pro-American propaganda. She was disappointed in her mother, and even said so.
    And her father had just the sort of opinions you might expect from a businessman. His choice of words could be a little sharpened by half a bottle of wine: Harold Macmillan was a fool to be giving up the empire without a struggle, a bloody fool not to impose wage restraint on the unions, and a pathetic bloody fool for thinking of going cap in hand to the Europeans, begging to join their sinister club. Florence found it harder to contradict Geoffrey. She could never shake off a sense of awkward obligation to him. Among the privileges of her childhood was the keen attention that might have been directed at a brother, a son. Last summer her father had taken her out regularly after work in his Humber, so that she could have a go at her driving license just after her twenty-first birthday. She failed. Violin lessons from the age of five, with summer courses at a special school, skiing and tennis lessons and flying lessons, which she defiantly refused. And then the journeys: just the two of them, hiking in the Alps, Sierra Nevada and Pyrenees, and the special treats, the one-night business trips to European cities where she and Geoffrey always stayed in the grandest hotels.
    When Florence left her house after midday, after an unvoiced argument with her mother over a trifling domestic detail—Violet did not particularly approve of the way her daughter used the washing machine—she said that she was