On Chesil Beach

FOUR

IN THE brief year between his first encounter with Florence in St Giles’ and their wedding in St Mary’s less than half a mile away, Edward was often an overnight guest at the large Victorian villa off the Banbury Road. Violet Ponting assigned him to what the family called the ‘small room’, on the top floor, chastely remote from Florence’s, with a view over a walled garden a hundred yards long and, beyond, the grounds of a college or an old people’s home–he never troubled to discover which. The ‘small room’ was larger than any of the bedrooms at the Turville Heath cottage, and possibly larger than its sitting room. One wall was covered in plain white-painted shelves of Loeb editions in Latin and Greek. Edward liked the association with such austere learning, though he knew he fooled no one by leaving out copies of Epictetus or Strabo on the bedside table. Like everywhere else in the house, the walls of his room were exotically painted white–there was not a scrap of wallpaper in the Ponting domain, floral or striped–and the floor was bare, untreated boards. He had the top of the house to himself, with an extensive bathroom on a half-landing, with Victorian windows of coloured glass and varnished cork tiles–another novelty.

His bed was wide and unusually hard. In a corner, under the slope of a roof, was a scrubbed deal table with an anglepoise lamp and a kitchen chair, painted blue. There were no pictures or rugs or ornaments, no chopped-up magazines, or any other remains of hobbies or projects. For the first time in his life he made a partial effort to be tidy, for this was a room like no other he had known, one in which it was possible to have calm, uncluttered thoughts. It was here one brilliant November midnight that Edward wrote a formal letter to Violet and Geoffrey Ponting declaring his ambition to marry their daughter, and did not quite ask their permission so much as confidently expect their approval.

He was not wrong. They appeared delighted, and marked the engagement with a family lunch one Sunday at the Randolph Hotel. Edward knew too little about the world to be surprised by his welcome into the Ponting household. He politely took it as his due, as Florence’s steady boyfriend and then fiancé, that when he hitch-hiked or took the train from Henley to Oxford, his room was always there for him, that there were always meals at which his opinions about the government and the world situation would be solicited, that he would have the run of the library and the garden with its croquet and marked-out badminton court. He was grateful, but not at all surprised, when his laundry was absorbed into the family’s and a tidy ironed pile appeared on the blanket at the end of his bed, courtesy of the cleaning lady, who came every single weekday.

It seemed only proper that Geoffrey Ponting should want to play tennis with him on the grass courts at Summertown. Edward was a mediocre player–he had a decent serve that made use of his height, and he could hit the occasional beefy shot from the baseline. But at the net he was clumsy and stupid, and he could not trust his mutinous backhand, preferring to run round balls to his left. He was a little frightened of his girlfriend’s father, worried that Geoffrey Ponting thought he was an intruder, an impostor, a thief intending an assault on his daughter’s virginity, and then disappearing–only one part of which was true. As they drove to the courts, Edward also worried about the game–it would be impolite to win, and it would be a complete waste of his host’s time if Edward was unable to put up some decent opposition. He need not have troubled himself on either count. Ponting was in another league, a player of fast and accurate strokes, and an astonishing prancing vigour for a fifty-year-old. He took the first set six-one, the second six-love, the third six-one, but what mattered most was his fury whenever Edward managed to snatch a point. As he walked back to his position, the older player would deliver himself a muttered lecture that, as far as Edward could make out from his end, contained threats of violence against the self. In fact, now and then Ponting smacked his right buttock hard with his racket. He did not just want to win, or win easily; he needed every last point. The two games he lost in the first and third sets and his few unforced errors brought him to near screaming point–Oh for God’s sake, man! Come on! Driving back home he was terse, and Edward could at least feel that the dozen points he had won over three sets made for a victory of sorts. If he had won in the conventional manner, he might never have been allowed to see Florence again.

Generally, Geoffrey Ponting, in his nervous, energetic fashion, was affable towards him. If Edward was at the house when he came in from work, around seven o’clock, he would mix them both gin and tonics from his drinks cupboard–tonic and gin in equal measure, and many ice cubes. To Edward, ice in drinks was a novelty. They would sit in the garden and talk politics–mostly, Edward listened to his future father-in-law’s views on the decline of British business, demarcation disputes in the trade unions and the folly of granting independence to various African colonies. Even when Ponting was sitting down he did not relax–he balanced himself on the edge of his seat, ready to leap up, and he jigged his knee up and down as he spoke, or wiggled his toes inside his sandals in time to a rhythm in his head. He was far shorter than Edward, but powerfully built, with muscular arms matted with blond hair which he liked to display by wearing short-sleeved shirts, even to work. His baldness too appeared an assertion of power rather than age–the tanned skin was stretched smooth and tight, like filled sails, over the large skull. The face also was large, with small fleshy lips whose resting position was a determined pout, and a button nose, and eyes set wide apart so that in certain lights he resembled a giant foetus.

Florence never seemed to want to join them for these garden chats, and perhaps Ponting did not want her there. As far as Edward could tell, father and daughter rarely spoke, except in company, and then inconsequentially. He thought they were intensely aware of each other, though, and had the impression they exchanged glances when other people were talking, as though sharing a secret criticism. Ponting was always putting his arm around Ruth’s shoulders, but he never, in Edward’s sight, embraced her big sister. For all that, in conversation, Ponting made many gratifying references to ‘Florence and you’ or ‘you young ones’. He was the one, rather than Violet, who became excited by the news of the engagement and arranged the lunch at the Randolph and proposed half a dozen toasts. It crossed Edward’s mind, barely seriously, that he was rather too keen to give his daughter away.

It was around this time that Florence suggested to her father that Edward might be an asset to the firm. Ponting drove him one Saturday morning in his Humber to his factory on the edge of Witney, where scientific instruments filled with transistors were designed and assembled. He did not appear at all troubled, as they passed between the tangled benches, through the homely smell of molten solder, that Edward, reliably stupefied by science and technology, could not think of one interesting question to ask. He revived a little when he met, in a windowless back room, the bald, twenty-nine-year-old sales manager, who had a history degree from Durham and had written his doctoral thesis on medieval monasticism in the north-east of England. Over gin and tonics that evening, Ponting offered Edward a job travelling for the firm, securing new business. He would need to read up on the products and a tiny bit about electronics, and even less about contract law. Edward, who still had no career plans and who could easily imagine himself writing history books on trains and in hotel rooms between meetings, accepted, more in the spirit of politeness than of real interest.

The various household jobs Edward volunteered to do tied him yet more closely to the Pontings. In that summer of 1961 he mowed the various lawns many times–the gardener was away sick–split three cords of logs for the wood store, and drove the second car, an Austin 35, regularly to the tip with junk from the unused garage which Violet wanted to convert to an extension library. In this same car–he was never permitted the Humber–he delivered Florence’s sister, Ruth, to friends and cousins in Thame, Banbury and Stratford, and then collected her. He chauffeured Violet around, once to a Schopenhauer symposium in Winchester, and on the way she grilled him about his interest in millenarian cults. What part did famine or social change have in providing followers? And with their anti-Semitism and attacks on the Church and the merchants, couldn’t the movements be seen as an early form of socialism of the Russian type? And then, also provocatively, wasn’t nuclear war the modern equivalent to the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, and were we not always bound by our history and our guilty natures to dream of our annihilation?

He answered nervously, conscious that his intellectual mettle was being tested. As he spoke, they were driving through the outskirts of Winchester. At the edge of his vision he saw her take out her compact and powder her pinched white features. He was fascinated by her pale, pole-like arms and sharp elbows, and wondered again whether she really could be Florence’s mother. But now he was obliged to concentrate, as well as drive. He said he believed the difference between then and now was more important than the similarity. It was the difference between, on the one hand, a lurid and absurd fantasy devised by a post-Iron Age mystic, then embellished by his credulous medieval equivalents, and, on the other, the rational fear of a possible and terrifying event it was in our power to prevent.

In tones of crisp reprimand that effectively closed the conversation, she told him he had not quite understood her. The point was not whether the medieval cultists were wrong about the Book of Revelation and the end of the world. Of course they were wrong, but they passionately believed they were right, and they acted on their convictions. Likewise, he himself sincerely believed that nuclear weapons would destroy the world, and he acted accordingly. It was quite irrelevant that he was wrong, that the truth was that such weapons were keeping the world safe from war. This, after all, was the purpose of deterrence. Surely, as a historian, he had learned that down through the centuries mass delusions had common themes. When Edward grasped that she was likening his support for CND with membership of a millenarian sect, he politely withdrew, and they drove the last half-mile in silence. On another occasion he drove Violet to and from Cheltenham, where she gave a lecture to the sixth form at the Ladies’ College on the benefits of an Oxford education.

His own was proceeding at a pace. During that summer he ate for the first time a salad with a lemon and oil dressing and, at breakfast, yoghurt–a glamorous substance he knew only from a James Bond novel. His hard-pressed father’s cooking and the pie-and-chips regime of his student days could not have prepared him for the strange vegetables–the aubergines, green and red peppers, courgettes and mangetouts–that came regularly before him. He was surprised, even a little put out, on his first visit when Violet served as a first course a bowl of undercooked peas. He had to overcome an aversion, not to the taste so much as to the reputation of garlic. Ruth giggled for minutes on end, until she had to leave the room, when he called a baguette a croissant. Early on, he made an impression on the Pontings by claiming never to have been abroad, except to Scotland to climb the three Munroes of the Knoydart peninsula. He encountered for the first time in his life muesli, olives, fresh black pepper, bread without butter, anchovies, undercooked lamb, cheese that was not cheddar, ratatouille, saucisson, bouillabaisse, entire meals without potatoes, and, most challenging of all, a fishy pink paste, tarama salata. Many of these items tasted only faintly repellent, and similar to each other in some indefinable way, but he was determined not to appear unsophisticated. Sometimes, if he ate too fast, he came close to gagging.

Some of the novelties he took to straight away: freshly ground and filtered coffee, orange juice at breakfast, confit of duck, fresh figs. He was in no position to know what an unusual situation the Pontings’ was, a don married to a successful businessman, and Violet, a sometime friend of Elizabeth David, managing a household in the vanguard of a culinary revolution while lecturing to students on monads and the categorical imperative. Edward absorbed these domestic circumstances without acknowledging their exotic opulence. He assumed that this was how Oxford university teachers lived, and he would not be caught out appearing impressed.

In fact, he was entranced, he lived in a dream. During that warm summer, his desire for Florence was inseparable from the setting–the huge white rooms and their dustless wooden floors warmed by sunlight, the cool green air of the tangled garden breathed into the house through open windows, the scented blossoms of North Oxford, the fresh hardback books piled on tables in the library–the new Iris Murdoch (she was Violet’s friend), the new Nabokov, the new Angus Wilson–and his first encounter with a stereophonic record player. Florence showed him one morning the exposed, glowing orange valves of an amplifier protruding from an elegant grey box, and the waist-high speakers, and she put on for him at merciless volume Mozart’s Haffner Symphony. The opening octave leap seized him with its daring clarity–a whole orchestra suddenly spread before him–and he raised a fist and shouted across the room, careless of who heard, that he loved her. It was the first time he had ever said it, to her or to anyone. She mouthed the words back at him, and laughed with delight that he had at last been moved by a piece of classical music. He crossed the room and tried to dance with her, but the music became scurrying and agitated, and they came to a ragged halt and let it swirl around them as they embraced.

How could he pretend to himself that within his narrow existence these were not extraordinary experiences? He managed not to think about it. By temperament, he was not introspective, and moving around her house with a constant erection, or so it seemed, dulled or confined his thoughts somewhat. By the unspoken rules of the house, he was permitted to loll about on her bed during the day while she practised the violin, as long as the bedroom door was left open. He was supposed to be reading, but all he could do was watch her and love her bare arms, her Alice band, her straight back, the sweet tilt of her chin as she tucked the instrument under it, the curve of her breasts silhouetted against the window, the way the hem of her cotton skirt swung against her tanned calves with the movement of her bowing, and small muscles in those calves rippling as she shifted and swayed. Now and then, she would sigh over some imagined imperfection of tone or phrasing and repeat a passage over and again. Another indicator of mood was her way of turning the pages on the stand, moving on from a piece with a sudden sharp snap of the wrist, or at other times lingeringly, pleased with herself at last, or anticipating new pleasures. He was stirred, almost impressed, by her obliviousness to him–she had the gift of total concentration, whereas he could pass the entire day in a twilight of boredom and arousal. An hour might go by before she appeared to remember he was there, and though she would turn and smile, she would never join him on the bed–fierce professional ambition, or another household protocol, kept her by her stand.

They took walks over Port Meadow, upstream along the Thames to the Perch or the Trout for a pint. When they were not talking about their feelings–Edward was beginning to find those conversations cloying–they talked of their ambitions. He expanded on the series of short histories of half-forgotten figures who stood for a short while at the side of great men, or had their own brief moment in the sun. He described to her Sir Robert Carey’s wild dash north, how he had arrived at James’s court with his face bloodied following a fall from his horse, and how all his exertions had earned him nothing. After his conversation with Violet, Edward had decided to add one of Norman Cohen’s medieval cultists, a flagellant Messiah of the 1360s whose coming was foretold, so he and his followers proclaimed, in the prophecies of Isaiah. Christ was merely his precursor, for he was the Emperor of the Last Days as well as God himself. His self-flagellating followers obeyed him slavishly, and prayed to him. His name was Konrad Schmid, and he was probably burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1368, after which all his huge following simply melted away. As Edward saw it, each history would be no longer than two hundred pages and would be published, with illustrations, by Penguin Books, and perhaps when the series was complete it could be available in a special boxed set.

Naturally, Florence talked about her plans for the Ennismore Quartet. The week before they had gone to their old college and played Beethoven’s Razumovsky right through for her tutor, and he was obviously excited. He told them straight away they had a future, and must at all costs hang together and work extremely hard. He said they should focus their repertoire, concentrate on Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert and leave Schumann, Brahms and all the twentieth-century composers until later. Florence told Edward that there was no other life she wanted, that she could not bear to waste away the years at a rear desk in some orchestra, assuming she could even get a place. With the quartet, the work was so intense, the demands on concentration so huge when each player was like a soloist, the music so beautiful and rich, that every time they played a piece through, they found something new.

She said all this knowing that classical music meant nothing to him. As far as he was concerned, it was best heard in the background at low volume, a stream of undifferentiated mewling, scraping and tooting generally taken to signify seriousness and maturity and respect for the past, and entirely devoid of interest or excitement. But Florence believed his triumphant shout at the opening of the Haffner Symphony was a breakthrough, and so she invited him to come to London with her and sit in on a rehearsal. He was ready to accept–of course, he wanted to watch her at work, but more importantly, he was curious to find out whether this cellist, Charles, she had mentioned rather too many times was a rival in any sense. If he was, Edward thought he needed to demonstrate his presence.

Because of a summer lull in bookings, the piano showroom next door to the Wigmore Hall was letting the quartet have a rehearsal room for a nominal fee. Florence and Edward arrived well before the others so that she could give him a tour of the Hall. The green room, the tiny changing room, even the auditorium and the cupola could hardly account, he thought, for her reverence for the place. She was so proud of the Wigmore Hall, it was as if she had designed it herself. She led him out onto the stage and asked him to imagine the thrill and terror of stepping out to play before a discerning audience. He could not, though he did not say so. She told him that one day it would happen, she had made up her mind: the Ennismore Quartet would perform here, play beautifully and triumph. He loved her for the solemnity of her promise. He kissed her, and then he jumped down into the auditorium and stood three rows back, dead centre and vowed that whatever happened, he would be here on that day, in this very seat, 9C, and he would lead the applause and the bravos at the end.

When the rehearsal began, Edward sat quietly in a corner of the bare room in a state of profound happiness. He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now. The cellist, clearly disconcerted by Florence’s new friend, was a pudding of a fellow with a stammer and a terrible skin condition, and Edward was able to feel sorry for him and generously forgive his slavish fixation on Florence, for he too could not keep his eyes off her. She was in a state of trance-like contentment as she settled down to work with her friends. She put on her Alice band, and Edward, waiting for the session to begin, fell into a reverie, not only about sex with Florence, but marriage, and family, and the daughter they might have. Surely it was a mark of his maturity to contemplate such things. Perhaps it was just a respectable variation of an old dream of being loved by more than one girl. She would have her mother’s beauty and seriousness, and lovely straight back, and was sure to play an instrument–the violin, probably, though he did not entirely rule out the electric guitar.

On that particular afternoon Sonia, the viola player from Florence’s corridor, arrived to work on the Mozart quintet. At last they were ready to begin. There was the briefest tightening silence which may have been scored by Mozart himself. As soon as they started to play, Edward was struck by the sheer volume, and the muscularity of the sound, and the velvety interleaving of the instruments, and for minutes on end he actually enjoyed the music–until he lost the thread and became bored in a familiar way with the prim agitation and sameness of it all. Then Florence called a halt and quietly gave notes, and there was a general discussion until they began again. This happened several times, and repetition began to reveal to Edward a discernible sweet melody, and various passing entanglements between the players, and daring swoops and leaps that he came to look out for next time round. Later, on the train home, he was able to tell her with complete honesty that he had been moved by the music, and he even hummed bits to her. Florence was so touched, she made another promise –again, that thrilling solemnity that seemed to double the size of her eyes. When the great day came for the Ennismore to make its Wigmore Hall debut, they would play the quintet, and it would be especially for him.

In return, he brought to Oxford from the cottage a selection of records he wanted her to learn to love. She sat dead still and listened patiently, with closed eyes and too much concentration, to Chuck Berry. He thought she might dislike ‘Roll over Beethoven’, but she found it hilarious. He played her ‘clumsy but honourable’ cover versions of Chuck Berry songs by the Beatles and Rolling Stones. She tried to find something appreciative to say about each one, but she used words like ‘bouncy’ or ‘merry’ or ‘heartfelt’, and he knew she was simply being kind. When he suggested that she did not really ‘get’ rock and roll and there was no reason why she should continue to try, she admitted that what she could not stand was the drumming. When the tunes were so elementary, mostly in simple four-four time, why this relentless thumping and crashing and clattering to keep time? What was the point, when there was already a rhythm guitar, and often a piano? If the musicians needed to hear the beats, why not get a metronome? What if the Ennismore Quartet took on a drummer? He kissed her and told her she was the squarest person in all of Western civilisation.

‘But you love me,’ she said.

‘Therefore I love you.’

In early August, when a Turville Heath neighbour fell ill, Edward was offered his part-time job, on a temporary basis, as groundsman at the Turville cricket club. He was to put in twelve hours a week, and he could do them whenever he wanted. He liked to leave the cottage in the early morning, before even his father was awake, and saunter through the noise of birdsong down the lime tree avenue to the ground, as if he owned the place. During his first week he prepared the pitch for the local derby, the big game against Stonor. He cut the grass, hauled the roller and helped a carpenter who came up from Hambleden to build and paint a new sightscreen. Whenever he was not working or needed around the house, he headed straight for Oxford, not only because he longed to see Florence, but also because he wanted to forestall the visit she was bound to make to meet his family. He did not know what she and his mother would think of each other, or how Florence would react to the filth and disorder of the cottage. He thought he needed time to prepare both women, but, as it turned out, it was not necessary; crossing the ground one hot early Friday afternoon, he found Florence waiting for him in the shadow of the pavilion. She knew his hours, and had taken an early train, and walked from Henley towards the Stonor valley, with a one-inch-to-the-mile map in her hand and a couple of oranges in a canvas satchel. For half an hour she had been watching him as he marked out the far boundary. Loving him from a distance, she said when they kissed.

That was one of the exquisite moments of their early love, when they went slowly, arm in arm, back up the glorious avenue, walking in the centre of the lane to take full possession. Now that it was inevitable, the prospect of her encounter with his mother and the cottage no longer seemed important. The shadows the lime trees cast were so deep they appeared bluish black in the brilliant light, and the heath was thick with fresh grasses and wild flowers. He showed off his knowledge of their country names and even found, by luck, by the roadside, a clump of Chiltern gentians. They picked just one. They saw a yellowhammer, a greenfinch, and then a sparrowhawk flashed by, cutting a narrow angle around a blackthorn tree. She did not even know the names of common birds like these, but she said she was determined to learn. She was exultant from the beauty of her walk and the clever route she had chosen, leaving the Stonor valley to go along the narrow farm track into lonely Bix Bottom, past the ruined ivy-covered church of St James, up the wooded slopes to the common at Maidensgrove where she discovered an immense expanse of wild flowers, then through the beech woods to Pishill Bank, where a little brick-and-flint church and its churchyard were poised so beautifully on the side of the hill. As she described each place–and he knew them all so well–he imagined her there, on her own, walking towards him for hours, stopping only to frown at her map. All for him. What a gift! And he had never seen her so happy, or so pretty. She had tied back her hair with a scrap of black velvet, she wore black jeans and plimsolls, and a white shirt through a buttonhole of which she had threaded a rakish dandelion. As they walked towards the cottage she kept tugging on his grass-stained arm for another kiss, though of the lightest sort, and for once he happily, or at least calmly, accepted that they would go no further. After she peeled her remaining orange for them to share along the way, her hand was sticky in his. They were innocently thrilled by her clever surprise, and their lives seemed hilarious and free, and the whole weekend lay before them.

THE MEMORY of that stroll from the cricket ground to the cottage taunted Edward now, a year later, on his wedding night, as he rose from the bed in the semi-darkness. He was feeling the pull of contrary emotions, and needed to hold on to all his best, his kindest thoughts of her, or else he thought he would fold, he would simply give up. There was a liquid heaviness in his legs as he crossed the room to retrieve his underpants from the floor. He put them on, picked up his trousers and stood for a good while with them dangling from his hand as he stared out of the window at the wind-shrunken trees, darkened now to a continuous grey-green mass. High up was a smoky half moon, casting virtually no light. The sound of waves collapsing onto the shore at regular intervals broke in on his thoughts, as though suddenly switched on, and filled him with weariness; the relentless laws and processes of the physical world, of moon and tides, in which he generally took little interest, were not remotely altered by his situation. This over-obvious fact was too harsh. How could he get by, alone and unsupported? And how could he go down and face her on the beach, where he guessed she must be? His trousers felt heavy and ridiculous in his hand, these parallel tubes of cloth joined at one end, an arbitrary fashion of recent centuries. Putting them on, it seemed to him, would return him to the social world, to his obligations and to the true measure of his shame. Once dressed, he would have to go and find her. And so he delayed.

Like many vivid memories, his recollection of strolling towards Turville Heath with Florence created a penumbra of oblivion around it. They must have arrived at the cottage to find his mother alone–his father and the girls would have still been at school. Marjorie Mayhew was usually flustered by a strange face, but Edward retained no impression of introducing Florence, or of how she responded to the crammed and squalid rooms and the stench of drains, always at its worst in summer, that drifted in from the kitchen. He had only snatches of memories of the afternoon, certain views, like old postcards. One was through the smeared, latticed window of the sitting room to the bottom of the garden, where Florence and his mother sat on the bench, each with a pair of scissors and copies of Life magazine, chatting as they cut up pages. When they came in from school, the girls must have taken Florence to see a neighbour’s newborn donkey, for another view showed all three coming back across the green, arm in arm. A third was of Florence taking a tray of tea out into the garden to his father. Oh yes, he should not doubt it, she was a good person, the best, and that summer all the Mayhews fell in love with Florence. The twins came to Oxford with him and spent the day on the river with Florence and her sister. Marjorie was always asking after Florence, though she could never remember her name, and Lionel Mayhew, in all his worldliness, advised his son to marry ‘that girl’ before she got away.

He conjured these memories of last year, the cottage postcards, the walk under the limes, the Oxford summer, not from a sentimental desire to compound or indulge his sorrow but to dispel it and feel himself in love, and to hold back the advance of an element that initially he did not care to admit, the beginnings of a darkening of mood, a darker reckoning, a trace of poison that even now was branching through his being. Anger. The demon he had kept down earlier when he thought his patience was about to break. How tempting to give in to it, now that he was alone and could let it burn. After such humiliation, his self-respect demanded it. And what harm was there in a mere thought? Better to be done with it now, while he stood here, half naked among the ruins of his wedding night. He was aided in his surrender by the clarity that comes with a sudden absence of desire. With his thoughts no longer softened or blurred by longing, he was capable of registering an insult with forensic objectivity. And what an insult it was, what contempt she showed for him with her cry of revulsion and the fuss with the pillow, what a twist of the scalpel, to run from the room without a word, leaving him with the disgusting taint of shame, and all the burden of failure. She had done what she could to make the situation worse, and irretrievable. He was contemptible to her, she wanted to punish him, to leave him alone to contemplate his inadequacies without any thought for her own part. Surely it was the movement of her hand, her fingers, that had brought him on. At the memory of that touch, that sweet sensation, fresh sharp-edged arousal began to distract him, enticing him from these hardening thoughts, tempting him to start forgiving her. But he resisted. He had found his theme, and he pushed on. He sensed there was a weightier matter just ahead, and here it was, he had it at last, he burst into it, like a miner breaking through the sides of a wider tunnel, a gloomy thoroughfare broad enough for his gathering fury.

It stood clear before him, and he was an idiot not to have seen it. For a whole year he had suffered in passive torment, wanting her till he ached, and wanting small things too, pathetic innocent things like a real full kiss, and her touching him and letting him touch her. The promise of marriage was his only relief. And then what pleasures she had denied them both. Even if they could not make love until after they were married, there was no need for such contortions, such agonies of restraint. He had been patient, uncomplaining–a polite fool. Other men would have demanded more, or walked away. And if, at the end of a year of straining to contain himself, he was not able to hold himself back and had failed at the crucial moment, then he refused to take the blame. That was it. He rejected this humiliation, he did not recognise it. It was outrageous of her to cry out in disappointment, to flounce from the room, when the fault was hers. He should accept the fact, she did not like kissing and touching, she did not like their bodies to be close, she had no interest in him. She was unsensual, utterly without desire. She could never feel what he felt. Edward took the next steps with fatal ease: she had known all this–how could she not?–and she had deceived him. She wanted a husband for the sake of respectability, or to please her parents, or because it was what everyone did. Or she thought it was a marvellous game. She did not love him, she could not love in the way that men and women loved, and she knew this and kept it from him. She was dishonest.

It is not easy to pursue such hard truths in bare feet and underpants. He drew his trousers on and groped for his socks and shoes, and thought it through all over again, smoothing out the rough edges and the difficult transitions, the bridging passages that lifted free of his own uncertainties, and so perfected his case, and felt as he did so his anger surge again. It was approaching a pitch, and would be meaningless if it remained unspoken. Everything was about to come clear. She needed to know what he thought and felt–he needed to tell her and show her. He snatched his jacket from a chair and hurried from the room.