On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online Page A

going to post a letter and would not be wanting lunch. She turned south on the Banbury Road and headed toward the city center with a vague ambition of wandering through the covered market and perhaps bumping into an old school friend. Or she might buy a roll there and eat it on Christ Church meadow, in the shade, by the river. When she noticed the sign in St. Giles, the one Edward would see in fifteen minutes, she absentmindedly drifted in. It was her mother who was occupying her thoughts. After spending so much time with her affectionate friends at the student hostel, she noticed, coming home, how physically distant her mother was. She had never kissed or embraced Florence, even when she was small. Violet had barely ever touched her at all. Perhaps it was just as well. She was thin and bony, and Florence was not exactly pining for her caresses. And it was too late to start now.
    Within minutes of stepping out of the sunshine into the hall, it was clear to Florence she had made a mistake coming indoors. As her eyes adjusted, she looked about her with the vacant interest she might give the silverware collection in the Ashmolean. Suddenly a North Oxford boy whose name she had forgotten, a gaunt, twenty-two-year-old boy with glasses, came out of the darkness and trapped her. Without preamble, he began to outline for her the consequences of a single hydrogen bomb falling on Oxford. Almost a decade ago, when they were both thirteen, he had invited her to his home in Park Town, only three streets away, to admire a new invention, a television set, the first she had ever seen. On a small, gray, cloudy screen framed by carved mahogany doors, a man in a dinner jacket sat at a desk in what looked like a blizzard. Florence thought it was a ridiculous contraption without a future, but forever after, this boy—John? David? Michael?—seemed to believe she owed him her friendship, and here he was again, still calling in the debt.
    His pamphlet, two hundred copies of which were under his arm, set out Oxford’s fate. He wanted her to help him distribute them about the town. As he leaned in she felt the scent of his hair cream wrap itself around her face. His papery skin had a jaundiced gleam in the low light, his eyes were reduced by thick lenses to narrow black slits. Florence, incapable of rudeness, settled her face into an attentive grimace. There was something fascinating about tall thin men, the way their bones and Adam’s apple lurked so unconcealed beneath the skin, their birdlike faces, their predatory stoop. The crater he was describing would be half a mile across, a hundred feet deep. Because of radioactivity, Oxford would be unapproachable for ten thousand years. It began to sound like a promise of deliverance. But in fact, outside, the glorious city was exploding with the foliage of early summer, the sun was warming the treacle-colored Cotswold stone, Christ Church meadow would be in full splendor. Here in the hall she could see over the young man’s narrow shoulder murmuring figures moving about in the gloom, setting out the chairs, and then she saw Edward, coming toward her.
    Many weeks later, on another hot day, they took a punt on the Cherwell, upstream to the Vicky Arms, and later drifted back down toward the boathouse. Along the way they parked among a clump of hawthorns and lay on the bank in deep shade, Edward on his back chewing a stalk of grass, Florence with her head resting on his arm. In a break in the conversation they listened to wavelets pattering under the boat and the muffled knock as it swung against its tree-stump mooring. Occasionally a faint breeze brought them the soothing airy sound of traffic on the Banbury Road. A thrush sang intricately, repeating each phrase with care, then gave up in the heat. Edward was working at various temporary jobs, principally as a groundsman for a cricket club. She was giving all her time to the quartet. Their hours together were not always easy to arrange, and all the more