The New Confessions by William Boyd Read Free Book Online Page A

the uneven dome of the Bass Rock clear in the hazeless air. A very faint breeze rose up from the firth and below us stretched the bay. A few bathers and children congregated at the town and around the striped canvas bathing machines and a duckboard jetty where a long thin steam launch advertised CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE BASS ROCK—SIXPENCE . A small gnarled Gypsy tended three dusty donkeys for those who fancied a trot up and down the strand.
    We trudged up the beach to the far end away from the crowd. We were surprised by a hale old man—elbows and knees a lurid pink—who emerged from the sea quite naked and who, with a blithe “Fine day,” strode fitly across our path towards his clothes. We found our picnic spot hidden in a gully between two high dunes. Paths wound in and out of the sand hills fringed with coarse grass, and disappeared into the gorse and whin bushes beyond. We spread a traveling rug, unpacked the picnic and found a cool spot for the ginger beer bottles. Gregor was stripped, hauled into a bathing costume and dispatched with bucket and spade to the water’s edge. I went behind a dune and undressed slowly. The radiant day could not lift my spirits. The excursion was so evidently an attempted antidote that I could not see beyond its ulterior motives. I tramped back to the picnic site enjoying the way the sharp dune grass cut at my bare legs.
    Oonagh was halfway through changing. Her skirt and petticoat lay on the rug. Her swimming costume—a coarse woolen thing—was pulled up to her waist and she was now trying to work its bodice up beneath her blouse and camisole. I sat down with a histrionic sigh and picked moodily at a scab on my knee.
    “Cheer up,” Oonagh said, impatiently removing her blouse. “It’s not the end of the world.”
    “That’s all right for you to say.”
    She dropped her blouse on the rug and came and knelt in front of me.
    “Come on, Johnny,” she said quietly. “If you don’t like it tell your faither, an’ he’ll fetch you home.”
    “That’s what you think.”
    She made an exasperated face. “Well, I’m not going to waste my good time feeling sorry for you if you’re so set on doing it all yourself.”
    As she talked she undid the buttons down the front of her camisole and shrugged it off. I looked up and for an instant saw her big white breasts with their brown nipples before she slipped her arms into the sleeves of her bathing costume and tugged the bodice up and over them. She pulled on her bathing cap and started stuffing stray tendrils of hair beneath it.
    “Are you too sad to go for a swim?” She got to her feet.
    I ran down to the surf beside her.
    I have a photograph of Oonagh taken later that day as she stood knee-deep in the green and spumy water. She is in midstride heading towards a wailing wave-doused Gregor. Her arms are raised to clear the next incoming breaker, which is about to crash against her canted hip. The sodden wool serge of her costume clings to her strong thighs and heavy breasts. Her mouth is open—part smile, part shocked anticipation of the cold wave. But she is not sufficiently preoccupied to forget the photographer and her big bulbous eyes are caught—bright and knowing—just at the moment she glances obliquely at me. The pose is at once guileless and natural but the glance, the posture, the full curves of her body, exude a robust coquettishness. As we swam and played in the surf I looked at Oonagh anew, touching myself, fast in the grip of her bracing carnality. For the first time I felt the rapt exhilaration of a pure sexual excitement. It seemed to catch at my chest as if my lungs were held by powerful hands. That perfect day at Gullane, Oonagh exerted an influence that has dominated me ever since. My God, Oonagh, when I think of you now … the terrible thing you did to me. But how were you to know? How is anyone to know? From that day on what excited me in the women I met and loved (except one, except you) was whatever