John was playing, but very softly. Chris lay back on the rocks and stared up at the sky, now beginning to boil with stars. I sat still, watching him, letting his face grow into my knowledge and become part of all that I was familiar with and accepted. It was not difficult in any way.
‘I like you,’ he said at last. ‘You don’t taste like a spy.’
Now it was I who did not reply. The mood of truth was on us both, and it would be a lie to deny that that was why I was here—well, I would have preferred to call myself an emissary; but then so, no doubt, would most spies.
‘Are you supposed to try and persuade me to go back?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘Just to see how you are.’
‘How I am, who I am . . . does it really matter to anyone but me?’
‘It matters to anyone who loves you, I suppose.’
Now he looked at me, as if I had pronounced a command-word. His head lay on its side on the rock on a pillow of salty hair; his eyes were nearly black in this light, and obscured, mysterious.
After a single searching look at me, he turned again to face the sky. ‘It isn’t me he loves. It’s some idea he has of what he thought was promised to him when I was born. Parents shape their children in their own image, like God in Genesis, and then, like God again, are horrified when the unique soul in them pushes their lives and personalities off in a unique direction. But just as God presumably implanted that free-booting quality in Adam, so my father passed it on to me as my inheritance from him. Why is he so appalled that I’m part of my era, that I’ve gone with my own crowd, doing my own thing? You’d think he might be proud that I lead and don’t follow. I’ve created something original out of my own head which a lot of people like and use as their own personal point of departure in their voyages of self-discovery. He thinks it’s stupid and meaningless, a form of escape, a failure to take hold of life. Well, that’s all right. There was a time when I’d have given anything to have him understand me, but I don’t care any more. I see it’s not only his privilege to remain shut inside his own conditioning, it’s inevitable. If I had a son who wanted to imprison himself in a little shoe-box house and go to business every day, I’d hate him too, and rage against it, and eventually disown him in despair.’ He lay quietly for a while, frowning, his hands idling on the white twisted branch. ‘Have you ever been out for a walk in the country with my father?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you ever passed a patch of nettles?’
A flash of understanding came over me. I knew what he was going to say and how he was going to interpret it, and my mind raced ahead to counter it.
‘Have you noticed what he does? It’s his game. He doesn’t tread the nettles down, or swipe them with a stick, or, more sensible still, avoid them altogether. He—how does the saying go—he grasps them. On purpose. If he gets stung, the nettle’s won the game, and if not, he has. There’s always some little thing that people do—they usually call it a game—which is the key to their whole personality and way of life, and that’s my father’s. He goes out of his way to find challenges and tests, he sets up his own dragons to slay. And he calls me childish and feeble because I believe in floating with the tide. Is a man a coward or a weakling because he leaves the nettles alone?’
‘But will they leave you alone?’
He laughed. ‘Well, no, of course there are a certain percentage of nettles strewing every path. The fuzz are nettles who actually fling themselves into your way. I don’t like going to jug, you know. But on the whole, nettles don’t sting you when you’re in the water. And here . . .’ He broke off, rolled over, and lifted himself on his elbows, so that he faced the invisible sea. He snuffed deeply, like a dog, and suddenly he reached over and grabbed my hand, nearly pulling me over as he lifted it to his mouth and licked the back of it.
‘You haven’t been in yet!’ he said in amazement. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘About half a day—’
‘Unbelievable! What’s the matter with you? How can you possibly resist? Come on! Let’s go in now!’ He leapt to his feet, tugging me.
‘Now?’ I gasped, all my middle age rushing back upon me. It was dark, and the leap from the rocks into the sea terrified me to contemplate.
‘Yes, now, this minute! Take your clothes off!’
‘Hey, just a minute—’
‘Oh, keep your bra and pants on if you must. Just get in the water!’ As I stood there, hesitating, chilled and fearful in my youthlessness, he did something extraordinary. He suddenly put his arms round me and kissed my lips with his own soft childish ones. His beard tickled me gently on the cheek, and his hair blew round my face. I felt his slender bony chest pressed against me and his strong, nervy hands on my back. It was not like being kissed by a man; it was not like any kiss of my life. I did something extraordinary too. I didn’t pull away.
The kiss didn’t last more than a single interminable moment, and then he was smiling at me in the firelight and saying, ‘When you’re in, you’ll understand me better. I want you to understand me.’ He took my hand and drew me further down the rocks till we were out of sight of the others on the far side of the fire. We could still see the reflection of the flames, and the billowing smoke, over the bright rim of rock above our heads. Below us, starlit, lay the breathing sea.
Hurriedly, with such an air of practicality that I could not object, Chris began to peel off my dress. He steadied me with one hand while I kicked off my sandals. To tell the truth I seemed to be under some sort of spell. I was reminded of some past time when I had behaved in an entirely uncharacteristic way in alien surroundings—because of them, almost—but I couldn’t quite place it. I was hard put to it to place anything in my past at all; this—this moment, this intimacy, this strange childish magic of the boy and the night, the sea and the stars and the scented air, was time out of time; I stood away from my everyday self and watched the familiar figure that was me being embraced, led about and undressed by a stranger, and nothing rebelled or protested, so nothing was done except what he wanted.
The guitar music slid down over the brow of the rocks.
‘Now,’ said Chris when I stood in my underwear, shivering slightly, before him. ‘In you come. I’ll taste you again when you come out.’
We stood together on the brink. The sea was not far below us; it swelled up towards us like a beckoning arm. Chris stepped out of his ragged shorts and stood naked in the starlight. Then he took my hand again.
‘Jump,’ he said quietly.
We jumped together, hand in hand, and the mild, clear water closed over my head. He pulled me down, and I turned my face up and opened my eyes for a second. The surface above me glinted with tiny splinters of reflected starlight.
The hand holding mine released me, and I let myself drift upward. As my face broke out into the night air, I saw the moon’s horn lying on the horizon, laying a long luminescent path of ripples straight to me. Below me I could just see Chris’s long white shape, broken by refraction, weaving through the transparent water. The first shock of cold had passed; the sea wrapped me round in silky, variable currents, now warm, now chill, as I trod water and moved my arms languidly. I swam slowly out further, and now, looking back, I could see the fire, the firelit figures; I could see John playing, and his guitar-notes came to me in a fine drift, a mist of notes, across the sea-top.
I lay on my back and looked up at the black velvet sky, tasting the salt and the soft night air, and thinking how queer it all was—thinking of the word ‘queer’ for the first time in years in its original meaning, for truly the events of the night were not merely ‘odd’ or ‘strange’ but a little weird, a touch uncanny. When Chris, a naked white sea-ghost, rose at my side and lay gently flapping his fins beside me in the moonlight, and I tried to relate him to the mental picture I had had of him even a single hour ago, I got gooseflesh from the queerness of it.
‘There are no words for it, are there?’ he ask
ed at last, in what I can only call a reverent tone of voice. There was no need to remind myself that for him this sensual delight had the added dimension of a religious experience, and, incredible as it seems, this realisation no longer struck me as in any way comic or infantile or even unlikely. A little longer, floating here, I thought, and I’ll find myself sharing his emotions—I’ll join his cult if I’m not careful. Because there really was something in the circumstances and in the sensations which could not be explained away in terms of temperature and chemical reactions. There was a strong element of mysticism. Perhaps it was only the proximity of Chris, my sudden vulnerability to his feelings, an empathy I had not expected and could not explain. Lying there at his side in the sea, I thought, ‘What is the matter with Andy, that he cannot see this son of his for the gentle, sensitive, genuine and honest creature he seems to me to be?’
We swam and floated together for a long time, until at last the night-breeze began blowing the sea-skin into gooseflesh waves and without consulting each other we swam slowly back to the rocks. Their roughness grazed my legs as he pulled me up, as if the land were punishing me for my infidelity with the water.
We stood together on the ledge just above his deep, sighing sea, and he looked at me for a long time and then said,
‘What’s so difficult to understand about that? It’s beautiful—it’s perfect. That’s all. Can’t you go back and tell him?’
‘I don’t care what you say, it’s different in England.’
He shrugged.
‘You can’t pretend that sitting in the refuse-filled fountains at Trafalgar Square, or sinking your feet into the muck at the bottom of the Serpentine, or even plunging yourself into that cold grey thing that calls itself the English Channel, can be as readily understood as what we’ve just been doing.’
He leant his weight on one thin leg and stared out across the puckered surface, frowning.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Do you like making love? Don’t answer, of course you do. Well, some people are harder to make love with than others. Some people resist you, or they don’t know by instinct how to caress you, or they do or say something that grates on you right in the middle. But if somebody said to you, which would you rather, make love to all sorts of people including those who are not very good lovers or even unpleasant or violent or ugly, or not make love at all—what would you answer?’
The question was clearly rhetorical, and yet of course I had to answer it truthfully. He was a person whose whole aura seemed to draw the truth and nothing but the truth. A lie, even a temporisation, I felt, would bump against something invisible that surrounded him and bounce off before it reached his ears.
‘Well, frankly I’d much rather do without.’
His eyes came back to me slowly and incredulously. ‘Do without making love?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Just as I can understand you feeling a sense of worship for this body of water, but the fountains and the Channel baffle me. Love isn’t love, and worship isn’t worth a damn, in my eyes, if they’re indiscriminating.’
His expression was baffled now, hurt even. ‘But I do discriminate! I discriminate between water and every other element. Worshippers for all the ages of men have gladly put up with shortcomings in their gods. Look at the millions of people who can still accept the Christian god, after all he’s been responsible for! It’s utterly beyond me how my father, for instance, can still maintain that Christianity is basically good, even divinely inspired, when you consider that it inspired, among other things, the Crusades, the Conquistadors, the witch-hunts and the Inquisition. All those atrocities were carried out, not by outsiders upon Christians, but by Christians in the name of Christ. To me, that, taken with the belief that Christ was divine and all-knowing and therefore knew what he was starting, simply rules out Christianity, however good its original teachings. But my idea is that we love through the senses, and worship through them, too. I think when humanity develops more, we won’t need cults, we won’t need to worship something other than our own selves. But obviously there aren’t many human beings at the moment perfect enough to find anything in themselves worth worshipping. I’ve always felt a great need to dedicate myself to something—I admit it. I’m not strong enough not to need anything. But to invent some personalised deity and then try to convince myself that he’s perfect and omnipotent and omniscient and at the same time capable of perpetrating or even enduring all the horrors and anomalies of this disgusting, cruel world—’ he lowered his head like a bull and actually stamped his foot on the rock, every muscle taut with a sudden overpowering uprush of revulsion and horror which quite startled me—‘that I can’t do, not even to satisfy my own craven need. So I haven’t invented. I’ve taken something that exists, a life-force, a life-element, in itself positive and pure and combining all the best elements of passiveness and activeness, and capable of giving more simple, unvarnished physical pleasure than anything in life except sex. (And as a matter of fact, even sex is no good if it’s dry!) We’ve embellished it with all sorts of songs and rituals and symbols, but that’s more for fun than anything serious. The serious part is that we get, from what you’d call our worship of water, all the comfort that other religious people get, which is, after all, only the comfort of devoting yourself to something great outside yourself which may test you—must test you—but can never fail you. It’s always there. It’s in our bodies, if nowhere else. Have you ever been truly thirsty and then had a glass of cold water to drink? I bet you’ve never felt nearer to ecstasy than at that moment. We use that—thirst and quenching—as part of our ritual, to remind us of the whole cycle of want and replenishment that keeps life interesting and at the same time can make it so terrible for so many people. Here, we lie out on the rocks and cook ourselves for two hours before we let ourselves jump into the water. We deny ourselves a drink until our mouths are parched; then we sip iced water drop by drop. Even making love after three days of not, isn’t more delicious, more exciting, more calculated to make you happy and grateful and inspired than those first sips of water, that first moment when you plunge your hot, dry body into the beautiful sea.’
We were sitting down by now, he on his shorts, I on my dress, for the rocks here were sharp. I was listening concentratedly and wondering whether it was a side-effect of this magical place which was making this whole diatribe, which Andy would certainly have called bizarre and ridiculous, and which very well might be so, sound perfectly sensible and plausible.
‘What are you smiling at?’ he asked me suddenly, with suspicion.
‘Oh, I don’t know! The whole thing is outrageous, just as your father says. And yet tonight it makes sense. Maybe the sea has bewitched us both.’
‘If you can think that, even for a moment, you’ve got to admit it has its own spiritual power. Oh, you’re lovely! Being with you is great, and you were beautiful in the water, like a seal or some other sea-creature, so at home and at ease . . . Here, take those things off and let’s make love!’
‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘No, take your hands away. Honestly I can’t. It’s not in my nature.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, look. We can meet, and we have met, across the 20-odd years that separate us; we’ve been together for two hours now, on terms of intimacy I should have thought unbelievable beforehand. But making love is something else. You make love with everybody you like in the least, pretty and ugly, old and young . . . male and female? . . .’
‘Sure—’
‘H’m. Well, I don’t. People of my age, women anyway, don’t, and don’t start on with this no-difference-between-men-and-women bit, you’ll never convince anyone of my generation of the truth or desirability of that proposition! My lovers are a very circumscribed lot. They have to be the right age, the right sex, and a lot of other things too. Really, we’re so unalike! You parch your bodies so as to enjoy your drinks and swims more, and that accords perfectly with my own philosophy, but “going without” sex for three days to work up
an appetite makes me wonder if we’re of the same species. I take it you don’t make love to creatures of other species?’ He shook his head. ‘Well, that’s something! But—’
‘But I would,’ he interrupted vehemently, ‘if there were no people around.’
I laughed rather wildly, and couldn’t stop for quite a while. He laughed too, but without really knowing why.
‘Oh Chris! What am I to tell your father?’
‘Is he one of your lovers?’ he asked abruptly.
I stopped laughing. We looked at each other.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘And that’s another reason why I couldn’t with you.’
‘It’s the only one so far that strikes me as valid,’ he said quietly. ‘And I’m not sure why even that does. It annoys me rather. It seems he has managed to indoctrinate me to some extent with his constricting values . . .’ He stared at me for some moments in the quiet gloom, and then drew a deep sigh. ‘No, it’s no use,’ he said. ‘I still like you, but I don’t want you any more, not now I know he’s had you. Maybe it’s just because subconsciously I resent finding out that I have the same taste as him in anything . . .’
Taking my cue, I dragged my wet crumpled dress out from under me and pulled it on. The salt on my skin was beginning to prickle; how John could tolerate, let alone like, this sensation I couldn’t imagine . . . All I wanted was to get under a shower. The magic was gone, melted away; ordinary practical reality had crept in and reasserted itself with the drying-off of our bodies.
Chris sat moodily throwing scraps of stone into the sea.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘Oh, nothing much. I had this terrific feeling of sexiness about you and now it’s gone all flat. As you can plainly see,’ he added with a graphic gesture. ‘Humiliating. Cover it up.’ He stood up and pulled on his shorts, keeping his back to me. Again I noticed the thinness of his flanks. Could it be that Andy was disappointed by Chris’s failure to grow broad and tough-muscled like him? For the rest, I was bewildered. How was it possible to detest so heartily someone so basically sound and intelligent—albeit promiscuous?