On Chesil Beach Read Online Free PDF Page A

buffer—he was everything that was not sex, and ideal for the purpose. Trade gap, pay pause, resale price maintenance. Some cursed him for giving away the empire, but there was no choice really, with these winds of change blowing through Africa. No one would have taken that same message from a Labour man. And he had just sacked a third of his cabinet in the “night of the long knives.” That took some nerve. Mac the Knife, was one headline, Macbeth! was another. Serious-minded people complained he was burying the nation in an avalanche of TVs, cars, supermarkets and other junk. He let the people have what they wanted. Bread and circuses. A new nation, and now he wanted us to join Europe, and who could say for sure that he was wrong?
    Steadied at last. Edward’s thoughts dissolved, and he became once more his tongue, the very tip of it, at the same moment that Florence decided she could take no more. She felt pinioned and smothered, she was suffocating, she was nauseous. And she could hear a sound, rising steadily, not in steps like a scale, but in a slow glissando, and not quite a violin or a voice, but somewhere in between, rising and rising unbearably, without ever leaving the audible range, a violin-voice that was just on the edge of making sense, telling her something urgent in sibilants and vowels more primitive than words. It may have been inside the room, or out in the corridor, or only in her ears, like tinnitus. She may even have been making the noise herself. She did not care—she had to get out.
    She jerked her head away and pushed free of his arms. Even as he stared at her in surprise, still open-mouthed, a question beginning to form in his expression, she seized his hand and led him toward the bed. It was perverse of her, insane even, when she wanted to run from the room, across the gardens and down the lane, onto the beach to sit alone. Even one minute alone would have helped. But her sense of duty was painfully strong and she could not resist it. She could not bear to let Edward down. And she was convinced she was completely in the wrong. If the entire wedding ensemble of guests and close family had been somehow crammed invisibly into the room to watch, these ghosts would all side with Edward and his urgent, reasonable desires. They would assume there was something wrong with her, and they would be right.
    She also knew that her behavior was pitiful. To survive, to escape one hideous moment, she had to raise the stakes and commit herself to the next, and give the unhelpful impression that she longed for it herself. The final act could not be endlessly deferred. The moment was rising to meet her, just as she was foolishly moving toward it. She was trapped in a game whose rules she could not question. She could not escape the logic that had her leading, or towing, Edward across the room toward the open door of the bedroom and the narrow four-poster bed and its smooth white cover. She had no idea what she would do when they were there, but at least that awful sound had ceased, and in the few seconds it would take to arrive, her mouth and tongue were her own, and she could breathe and try to take possession of herself.

TWO
    H ow did they meet, and why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and innocent? They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny, but still, it remained a paradox to them that so momentous a meeting should have been accidental, so dependent on a hundred minor events and choices. What a terrifying possibility, that it might never have happened at all. And in the first rush of love, they often wondered at how nearly their paths had crossed during their early teens, when Edward descended occasionally from the remoteness of his squalid family home in the Chiltern Hills to visit Oxford. It was titillating to believe they must have brushed past each other at one of those famous, youthful city events, at St. Giles’s Fair in the first week of September, or May Morning at