On Chesil Beach (12 page)

He became involved in the administration of various rock festivals, helped start a health-food canteen in Hampstead, worked in a record shop not far from the canal in Camden Town, wrote rock reviews for small magazines, lived through a chaotic, overlapping sequence of lovers, traveled through France with a woman who became his wife for three and a half years and lived with her in Paris. He eventually became a part-owner of the record shop. His life was too busy for newspapers, and besides, for a while his attitude was that no one could honestly trust the “straight” press because everyone knew it was controlled by state, military or financial interests—a view that Edward later disowned.

Even if he had read the papers in those times, he would have been unlikely to turn to the arts pages, to the long, thoughtful reviews of concerts. His precarious interest in classical music had faded entirely in favor of rock and roll. So he never heard about the Ennismore Quartet’s triumphant debut at the Wigmore Hall in July 1968. The
Times
critic welcomed the arrival of “fresh blood, youthful passion to the current scene.” He praised the “insight, the brooding intensity, the incisiveness of the playing,” which suggested “an astonishing musical maturity in players still in their twenties. They commanded with magisterial ease the full panoply of harmonic and dynamic effects and rich contrapuntal writing that typifies Mozart’s late style. His D Major Quintet was never so sensitively rendered.” At the end of his review he singled out the leader, the first violinist. “Then came a searingly expressive Adagio of consummate beauty and spiritual power. Miss Ponting, in the lilting tenderness of her tone and the lyrical delicacy of her phrasing, played, if I may put it this way, like a woman in love, not only with Mozart, or with music, but with life itself.”

And even if Edward had read that review, he could not have known—no one knew but Florence—that as the house lights came up, and as the dazed young players stood to acknowledge the rapturous applause, the first violinist could not help her gaze traveling to the middle of the third row, to seat 9C.

In later years, whenever Edward thought of her and addressed her in his mind, or imagined writing to her or bumping into her in the street, it seemed to him that an explanation of his existence would take up less than a minute, less than half a page. What had he done with himself? He had drifted through, half asleep, inattentive, unambitious, unserious, childless, comfortable. His modest achievements were mostly material. He owned a tiny flat in Camden Town, a share of a two-bedroom cottage in the Auvergne, and two specialist record stores, jazz and rock and roll, precarious ventures slowly being undermined by Internet shopping. He supposed he was considered a decent friend by his friends, and there had been some good times, wild times, especially in the early years. He was godfather to five children, though it was not until their late teens or early twenties that he started to play a role.

In 1976 Edward’s mother died, and four years later he moved back to the cottage to take care of his father, who was suffering from rapidly advancing Parkinson’s disease. Harriet and Anne were married with children and both lived abroad. By then Edward, at forty, had a failed marriage behind him. He traveled to London three times a week to take care of the shops. His father died at home in 1983 and was buried in Pishill churchyard, alongside his wife. Edward remained in the cottage as a tenant—his sisters were the legal owners now. Initially he used the place as a bolt-hole from Camden Town, and then in the early nineties he moved there to live alone. Physically, Turville Heath, or his corner of it, was not so very different from the place he grew up in. Instead of agricultural laborers or craftsmen for neighbors, there were commuters or owners of second homes, but all were friendly enough. And Edward would never have described himself as unhappy—among his London friends was a woman he was fond of; well into his fifties he played cricket for Turville Park, he was active in a historical society in Henley, and played a part in the restoration of the ancient watercress beds in Ewelme. Two days a month he worked for a trust based in High Wycombe that helped brain-damaged children.

Even in his sixties, a large, stout man with receding white hair and a pink, healthy face, he kept up the long hikes. His daily walk still took in the avenue of limes, and in good weather he would take a circular route to look at the wildflowers on the common at Maidensgrove or the butterflies in the nature reserve in Bix Bottom, returning through the beech woods to Pishill church, where, he thought, he too would one day be buried. Occasionally, he would come to a forking of the paths deep in a beech wood and idly think that this was where she must have paused to consult her map that morning in August, and he would imagine her vividly, only a few feet and forty years away, intent on finding him. Or he would pause by a view over the Stonor Valley and wonder whether this was where she stopped to eat her orange. At last he could admit to himself that he had never met anyone he loved as much, that he had never found anyone, man or woman, who matched her seriousness. Perhaps if he had stayed with her, he would have been more focused and ambitious about his own life, he might have written those history books. It was not his kind of thing at all, but he knew that the Ennismore Quartet was eminent, and was still a revered feature of the classical music scene. He would never attend the concerts, or buy, or even look at, the boxed sets of Beethoven or Schubert. He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile.

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience—if only he had had them both at once—would surely have seen them both through. And then what unborn children might have had their chances, what young girl with a headband might have become his loved familiar? This is how the entire course of a life can be changed—by doing nothing. On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.

The characters in this novel are inventions and bear no resemblance to people living or dead. Edward and Florence’s hotel—just over a mile south of Abbotsbury, Dorset, occupying an elevated position in a field behind the beach parking lot—does not exist.

I.M.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian McEwan is the best-selling author of more than ten books, including the novels
Saturday
;
Atonement
, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award;
The Comfort of Strangers
and
Black Dogs
, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize;
Amsterdam
, winner of the Booker Prize; and
The Child in Time
, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections
First Love, Last Rites
, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; and
In Between the Sheets
. He lives in London.

ALSO BY IAN M
C
EWAN

First Love, Last Rites

In Between the Sheets

The Cement Garden

The Comfort of Strangers

The Child in Time

The Innocent

Black Dogs

The Daydreamer

Enduring Love

Amsterdam

Atonement

Saturday

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2008

Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

www.anchorbooks.com

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Title page illustration by Louis Jones

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McEwan, Ian.

On Chesil Beach / Ian McEwan.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PR6063.C4O6 2007

823'.914—dc22 2006100720

eISBN: 978-0-307-45582-6

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