And so it was that morning for Joseph and Celice. Conditions were correct for singing, that is all. The sand was still a little moist from sea spray, dust free and already warmed above 16° centigrade by the sun and by the heat retained from the previous day’s fine weather. The surface sand grains on the dune slopes were well rounded, as required, and coated with a layer of silica — otherwise this would have been known as Tone Deaf Bay, not Baritone, producing a cacophony of frequencies and not the coherent and acoustic wave of singing. There was, as well, the optimum direction and velocity of wind. And there had been a catalyst, someone, some fleeting thing, a gull, a fox, a slipping dune, to start the salt sand moving and allow the famous baritone to croon. The singing only signified the scientific present and its past.
But Joseph and Celice were becoming less scientific by the minute. They were becoming more disposed to take the baritone not as a sign of bad luck but as a blessing. They would not say the earth had moved for them, but they could claim that the landscape had broken out in song and was arousing them, and was embracing them.
They had, in fact, not even touched each other so far that morning. He’d seen her almost naked through the veranda windows and had been terrified. She’d pulled her nightshirt high above her head. There were three sudden triangles of hair, her armpits and her crotch, and then the dropping of her head hair, springing back in place as the shirt’s tight neckband cleared her forehead. She’d turned away before he had a chance to see her breasts. He’d caught an instant only of her narrow waist, her perfect eighteenth-century back, the age of flesh and dimples. She’d bent to pick the clothes out of a drawer. Then her body disappeared again, beneath a modest working shirt, and she became the wader on one leg pulling on a pair of pants, her socks, blue jeans, black jumper, walking boots. She’d turned and waved at him. He’d never been so shocked or fearful. He was a small boy at the blind summit of a roller-coaster ride, poised at the limits of control, his stomach in his mouth, and no retreat.
He had not dared to take her hand as they’d walked down to Baritone Bay. One fingertip, one uninvited touch, and she would disappear, he thought. And she had not attempted to touch him either. Touch is too obvious. She walked ahead. She let her body swing. She let him watch. She knew she was the centre of his universe. She wanted, if she could, to leave this small man giddy. He’d have a heart-attack. The earth would swallow him. He’d have a fit and bite his tongue in half. He would be speechless when she’d done with him.
Celice only touched him when they’d topped the outer dune to listen to the ululating orchestra of sand. She knew she’d have to overcome his nervousness and inexperience. She had to take command. She stood behind him and let the tumbling sand beneath their feet topple them together. She put both hands on his hips as if to steady herself. Quite innocent. Quite sisterly. But then she pressed her chin and mouth against his head and smelt the musty mushroom of his scalp. The sudden pressure seemed to clear his lungs of oxygen. He gasped and buckled under her, a man with just one bone. She had to hold him round the waist to stop him falling. Her fingers dug into his clothes, first at the side and then around his abdomen. She pulled up his shirt,
and found the space between his belt and navel. Room enough for her slim wrist.
He winced, and shook. He doubled up. ‘Cold hands,’ he said.
‘Good pastry,’ she replied.
Joseph was indeed sent giddy. He pressed his back into Celice’s chest. He turned his face towards her. An awkward angle. His mouth was lifted, open, pink. He was a greedy little bird. She fed him fat worms with her tongue. She had to duck her knees and tip her head to find his mouth with hers.
The lissom grass was irresistible, the perfect blanket, velvety and sensuous. Celice and Joseph fell on their knees and pulled each other’s trousers down. She stretched her toes beyond his toes when they made love. She liked her Joseph all the more for being small. She liked to be the wrapper, not the wrapped. And he was clearly more than happy to be eclipsed by her, to have his light shut out by her descending shapes, to have his breathing blocked, his ears absorbed into her mouth, to earn the wet and grateful puppy kiss across his fingertips when finally he dared to touch between her legs.
No one could say their love was cautious. Love on that day was bold. Joseph was not as reckless as she’d hoped he’d be. But she enjoyed his shaking passion and the way — once he had found his voice — he glorified the parts of her he liked, the wonder of her springy hair, the girlish, modest chest, the way her skin was coloured in its contours, summit white but darker in its crevices, at her throat, her armpits, under her breasts, her torso, the inside of her thighs. She showed him where to linger and what to leave alone. He even rubbed her back and neck, and kissed, as she requested, every vertebra. But still he was no maestro of the spine. Nor was he in control of her. It can’t have helped that he was trembling with desire and that his senses of timing, balance and direction had deserted him. Or that he was attempting to make love to her still shackled by his underclothes and jeans. She should have guessed how green he’d be, how inexperienced, how lacking in technique. He was not the Casanova of her dreams. It was, though, thrilling to imagine what he might achieve when he became her lover, night on night, when he had learned to direct his energies more accurately. This first time, though, she’d do her best for him. She’d sacrifice herself.
It didn’t matter, so he said, that after all her scheming and attention, his climax when it arrived was not a mighty one and hers was oddly short and shadowy, approaching and departing in one move. A shiver and a shudder; they were done. But were they satisfied? Entirely so. Not Eros manifest, perhaps. Not sent sublime by orgasms into the whirlpool of amnesia that poets claim — although it isn’t true — is like the absolute forgetfulness of death. But happy to their fingertips. And pacified. And sparkling. And more in love — it’s all that counts when all is said and done — than they had been before the sex.
There must have been a moment when the baritone stopped singing. The salt dunes did not make acoustic waves all morning. Conditions changed. The wind came round and dropped. The perfect angle was reduced. The sand dried out. The lovers did not care or even notice, though. They were not listening to the reverberations of the land, but to their own.
She wrapped herself around him afterwards. They were too deep to spot the distant, inland plume of smoke, or hear the calls of ‘Joseph! Celice! Festa!’ from the sprinting ornithologist. The dunes blocked out the world. They cuddled on the bed of lissom grass. They were the oddest pair, in their flat, hollow suntrap, hidden from the sea, with no idea of what the bay might have in store for them.
23
Syl was exhausted, naturally. It had been a day of walking. First along the coast and back. Then up from the Mission Church to the family house, a longer distance than she’d remembered from her childhood, but curative.
The town looked and smelt its best at dusk. The grime and wear became invisible. Man-made illuminations showed only the good parts of the streets. The coloured bar lights had come on, in all their ripening shades from green to red, no blues, like strings of mangoes. The pavement stalls, their wares side-lit by lanterns from the town’s pre-electric past, were already trading Sunday treats: nut sticks, cocoa dips, candied fruit, doughnuts. The brochette salesmen raked the charcoal in their braziers. Each pulse of flame was their street cry. But, most of all, the dusk’s illumination came from the headlamps of cars in swinging, lighthouse beams. The corridors of quizzing light retracted and stretched out to sweep the legs and faces of the people on the street. The sleeping Sunday town was resurrected in the evening. It was a time for families and lovers.