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

precious. This was a snatched Saturday afternoon. They knew that it was one of the last days of full-blown high summer—it was already early September, and the leaves and grasses, though still unambiguously green, had an exhausted air. The conversation had returned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other.
    In answer to the question Edward had put several minutes before, Florence said at last, “Be-cause you weren’t wearing a jacket.”
    “What then?”
    “Um. Loose white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, tails almost hanging out…”
    “Nonsense.”
    “And gray flannel trousers with a mend in the knee, and scruffy plimsolls starting to come out at the toes. And long hair, almost over your ears.”
    “What else?”
    “Because you looked a bit wild, like you’d been in a fight.”
    “I’d been on my bike in the morning.”
    She raised herself up on one elbow to get a better view of his face, and they held each other’s gaze. It was still a novel and vertiginous experience for them to look for a minute on end into the eyes of another adult, without embarrassment or restraint. It was the closest they came, he thought, to making love. She pulled the grass stem from his mouth.
    “You’re such a country bumpkin.”
    “Come on. What else?”
    “All right. Because you stopped in the doorway and looked around at everyone as though you owned the place. Proud. No, I mean, bold.”
    He laughed at this. “But I was annoyed with myself.”
    “Then you saw me,” Florence said. “And you decided to stare me out.”
    “Not true. You glanced at me and decided I wasn’t worth a second look.”
    She kissed him, not deeply, but teasingly, or so he thought. In these early days he considered there was just a small chance that she was one of those fabled girls from a nice home who would want to go all the way with him, and soon. But surely not outdoors, along this frequented stretch of river.
    He drew her closer, until their noses were almost touching and their faces went dark. He said, “So did you think then it was love at first sight?”
    His tone was lighthearted and mocking, but she decided to take him seriously. The anxieties she would face were still far off, though occasionally she wondered what it was she was heading toward. A month ago they had told each other they were in love, and that was both a thrill and afterward, for her, a cause of one night of half waking, of vague dread that she had been impetuous and let go of something important, given something away that was not really hers to give. But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper. Now, on the riverbank in the soporific heat of one of the last days of this summer, she concentrated on that moment when he had paused at the entrance to the meeting room, and on what she had seen and felt when she looked in his direction.
    To aid her memory she pulled away and straightened and looked from his face toward the slow muddy green river. Suddenly it was no longer peaceful. Just upstream, drifting their way, was a familiar scene, a ramming battle between two overladen punts locked together at right angles as they rounded a bend at a slew, with the usual shrieks, piratical shouts and splashing. University students being self-consciously wacky, a reminder of how much she longed to be away from this place. Even as schoolgirls, she and her friends had regarded the students as an embarrassment, puerile invaders of their hometown.
    She tried to concentrate harder. His clothes had been unusual, but what she noted was the face—a thoughtful, delicate oval, a high forehead, dark eyebrows widely arched, and the stillness of his gaze as it roamed across the gathering and settled on her, as if he were not in the room at all but imagining it, dreaming her up. Memory unhelpfully inserted