down the road, and presently came to a gap between a cafe and a shop that led on to the beach. The morning was hot, and I thought of buying the ice cream my mother had given me the money for, but decided to wait, since I did not know how long this day might last. I was already regretting the sandwiches I had so profligately thrown away.
I went and sat on the beach, and made a funnel of my fist and let sand pour through it while I gazed dolefully out to sea. The water with the sun on it was a broad sheet of rapidly bobbing sharp metallic flakes, old- gold, silver, chrome. People were out walking their dogs, and there were a few swimmers in the sea already, splashing and squealing. I was sure that all eyes were on me, that I was the centre of attention. What if that old boy with the bulldog, for instance, or that skinny woman with the sprig of lilac in the band of her straw hat, what if one of them were to become suspicious and challenge me—what defence of my idle presence would I be able to offer? And Mrs Gray, what would she say when she saw me, what would she do? There were times when she was for me only another adult, just as preoccupied and unpredictable and prone to outbursts of unreasoning anger; just as unlike me, that is, as all the rest of the grown-up world.
I stayed squatting there miserably in the sand for what seemed at least an hour but which when I checked by the clock on the bell-tower of the Protestant church behind the beach turned out to have been not a full ten minutes. I got up and brushed myself down and set off to walk through the village, to see what might be seen, which was only the usual: holiday-makers in wide shorts and silly hats, shops with clusters of beach balls in the doorways and ice-cream machines that whirred and thumped, golfers on the golf course in sleeveless yellow pullovers and big shoes with frilled wings. Sunlight glanced on passing windscreens and made sharp shadows in gateways. I stopped to watch a dog fight between three dogs but it was quickly over. As I was going by the galvanised-iron church I thought I spotted Kitty approaching on a bike and hid behind a hedge, my heart a hot lump struggling in my chest like a cat in a sack.
In those echoless caverns of empty time, being unobserved, unnoticed, I became increasingly detached from myself, increasingly disembodied. At moments I seemed to have become a phantom, and felt that I might walk up to people and pass straight through them and they would not even register a breath. At midday I bought a bun and a bar of chocolate and ate them sitting on a bench outside Myler’s grocery shop. Boredom and the beating sun were making me feel slightly sick. In desperation I began to devise stratagems so that I could call at the Beach Hotel and ask for Mrs Gray. I had got on the Rossmore train by mistake and was stranded here and needed to borrow the fare home; there had been an attempted break-in at their house on the square and I had rushed down to tell them of it; Mr Gray had thrown himself out of the carriage on the way up because Miss Flushing had threatened to jilt him, and they were still searching along the tracks for his mangled body—what did it matter? I was ready to say anything. But still I wandered, agitated and desolate, and the time went slower and slower.
I did encounter Billy. It was the most peculiar thing. I turned a corner and ran smack into him. He was coming from the public tennis courts, along with three or four other fellows, none of whom I knew. We faltered, Billy and I, then stopped, and stared. Stanley and Livingstone could not have been more startled. Billy was in tennis whites, a cream-coloured jumper with a blue band tied by the arms around his waist, and carried a racket—no, two rackets, I see them, both of them in shiny new wooden presses. He blushed, and I am sure I did, too, in the exquisite awkwardness of the moment. We both began to say something at the same time, and stopped. This was not supposed to have happened, we were not supposed to meet here like this—what did I mean by being here, anyway? And what was to be done? Billy was trying to hide those two rackets in their ostentatious presses, holding them down at his side with a show of negligence. The others had gone on a little way but now they paused, and looked back at us with not much curiosity. Mark, I was not thinking of Mrs Gray or my purpose in being there, that was not what was making for this discomfiting sensation, this hot mixture of embarrassment, dull dread and sharp annoyance. Then what was? Just the surprise, I suppose, the being caught off-guard. It was as if we had both become unfairly entangled in something shaming and could not think how to extricate ourselves; in a moment it seemed we would be snarling at each other, like two beasts halted snout to snout on a jungle path. Then everything suddenly relaxed, and Billy did his lopsided and faintly apologetic smile, ducking his head to one side—for a moment he was his mother—and with eyes downcast stepped past me, in a gingerly sinuous fashion, as if he were negotiating a barbed and bristling obstacle that had risen in his way. He spoke a word, too, that I did not catch, and went on to join his new seaside friends, who by now were grinning in ignorant enjoyment of what they had seen and had not understood. I could make out clearly the still reddened back of Billy’s neck. One of them clapped him on the shoulder, as if he had come valiant and safe through some tricky trial, and then they went on together, laughing, and a second one of them put an arm around Billy’s shoulders and glanced back at me with spiteful scorn. It all was done with so quickly that as I walked on it was as if it had not happened at all, and with a calm that surprised me I resumed my wanderings.
It was eerie how often that day I seemed to see—no, how often I
I had relinquished hope by then and was trudging up the road to the station on my way to take the last train home. So dispirited was I that I did not so much as cast a glance at the Beach Hotel as I passed by. She came towards me from the direction of the station with the sun at her back, a moving silhouette outlined in burning gold. She was wearing sandals, and her short-sleeved dress with the flower pattern—it was the dress I recognised first —and her hair was pinned back in a way that made her seem very young, a bare-legged girl slapping along in her sandals, swinging a shopping bag. At first she, too, I saw, could not believe the evidence of her eyes, and stopped on the path and stared in astonishment and dawning alarm. This was not at all the way I had imagined us meeting. What was I doing here, she demanded—was there something wrong? I did not know what to say. I had been right about the sunburn: there was a pink flush on her forehead and in the hollow of her throat, and a few freckles were sprinkled very fetchingly across the saddle of her nose.
She tilted her head and was regarding me with a sharp, sidewise stare, her eyes narrowed and her mouth set. The look of fright that had come into her face at the sight of me was turning now into a frown of suspicion and angry reproach. I could see her urgently calculating in her mind the dimensions of the problem that my sudden, shocking appearance here had presented her with. At any moment one of her children might walk out at the hotel gate not a hundred yards down the road and see the two of us there, and then what? In return I eyed her sulkily, kicking with my toe at a crack in the pavement. I was disappointed—more, I was disillusioned, bitterly so. Yes, I had given her a shock; yes, there was a danger we might be spotted and unable to account for ourselves; but what of her repeated affirmations of love for me, that love that was supposed to be careless of all convention? What of the heedless passion that had led her to lie down with me in her laundry room on an April afternoon, that had sent her prancing naked through the summer woods, and for the sake of which she was willing to park the station wagon at the side of a public road in broad daylight and scramble into the back seat and without preamble hike her skirt up to her waist and draw me peremptorily down upon her, her bucking boy? Her eyes now had taken on a harried look, and she kept glancing past me down the road towards the hotel and pressing the tip of her tongue back and forth along her lower lip. Something, I saw, would have to be done, and done quickly, to draw her attention away from herself and all she might lose and turn it back on me. I let my shoulders droop and lowered my gaze in chastened fashion—oh, yes, an actor in the making—and in a voice that had the merest hint of a sob in it I told her that I had come to Rossmore because I had not known what else to do, since I could not have borne to be away from her another day, another hour. She peered at me for a long moment, startled by the seeming intensity of my words, and then smiled, in that delighted, slow, blurry way of hers. ‘Aren’t you a terrible fellow?’ she murmured, her voice thickening, and she shook her head, and was mine again.
We went together back the way she had come, passing by the station, and having crossed the little humpbacked bridge we were at once in the countryside. Where had she been, I wanted to know, where had she come from? She laughed. She had been in town, all day. She showed me her bulging shopping bag. ‘They haven’t a thing in that place,’ she said, jerking her head disdainfully backwards in the direction of the Beach Hotel, ‘only sausages and spuds, spuds and sausages, every damned day.’ So she had gone up this morning, and come back, now, on the train? Yes, and she had been idling, like me, wandering about the town for hours, wondering where I
