So had I. I sat and brooded over her and pondered a hundred things. I had no intention of waking her, though I did wonder if I should bathe her thigh. The long scratches looked quite clean. This sudden magical withdrawal into unconsciousness was just what I had been wanting at different times during the day, to be with her and yet not with her. And now as I sat and sighed beside her there was a strange pleasure in not touching her. After a while I lightly lifted the bedclothes over her, laying down the folded sheet just below those clasped and nestling hands, and I wondered what I had done, or more perhaps what she had done, since it was more her will than mine which had so completely transformed our lives. Perhaps tomorrow morning it would all seem to her like a dreadful dream. Perhaps tomorrow I would be driving a weeping girl back to London. For that too I must be faithfully ready, for I had already been given a fortune which I did not in the least deserve. How wonderful and terrible it had been when she leapt out of the car. But what did it mean except that she was young and the young love extremes? She was a child of extremes and I was a puritan and old. Would I ever make love to her? Ought I to? Would I be able to?
«Look, Bradley, an animal's skull, all washed by the sea. What is it, a sheep?»
«A sheep yes.» We 11 take it, back.
«There are all those stones and shells to take back too.»
«Well, we can get the car down, can't we?»
«I think so. There's that cry again. What did you say it was?»
«The curlew. It says its name. Oh Bradley, look at this beautiful piece of wood, the way the sea has had it, it looks like Chinese writing.»
«Are we to bring that too?»
«Of course.»
I took the square piece of wood, all its wrinkles smoothed and joined by the sea water until it looked like a sort of delicate sketch of an old face, a sketch such as some Italian artist, Leonardo perhaps, might make in a rather abstract way in his notebook. I took the sheep's skull. The skull, bereft of teeth but otherwise fairly complete, had been in the sea for some time. There was nothing sharp upon it. It had been smoothed and caressed and polished until it seemed more like a work of art, some exquisite fabrication in ivory, than one of nature's remnants. The bone was densely smooth to the touch, warmed by the sun, the colour of thick cream, the colour of Julian's shoulders.
«Bradley, are you awake? Tea, coffee, milk, sugar? How little know about you.»
«Indeed. Tea, milk, sugar. Did you see my socks?»
«I love your socks. We're going straight down to the sea.» And we did. We had a picnic breakfast with milky tea in a thermos flask and bread and butter and jam, down on the flat stones of the beach, just beside where the sea, much more gently than last night, was touching the clean fringe of the land, which it had itself fashioned to be its pure spouse and counterpart, withdrawing to breathe and returning again to touch. Behind us were wind-combed sand dunes and yellow arches of long reedy grass and blue sky the colour of Julian's eyes. Before us was the calm cold English sea, diamond-sparkling and rather dark even under the sun.
There have been many moments of happiness. But that first breakfast beside the sea had a simplicity and an intensity which it would be hard to match. It was not even plagued by hope. It was just perfect communion and rest and the kind of joy which comes when the beloved and one's own soul become so mingled with the external world that there is a place made for once upon the planet where stones and tufts of grass and transparent water and the quiet sound of the wind can really be. It was perhaps the other side of the diptych from last night's moment of seeing Julian in the twilight lying motionless beside the road. But it was not really connected, as moments of pure joy are not really connected with anything. Any human life which has such moments has surely put a trembling finger upon nature's most transcendent aim.
As I sat and watched her preparing our lunch (she had told me quite correctly that she could not cook) I marvelled at her sheer grasp of the situation, her absolute hereness, and I tried to put off all anxiety, as it seemed that she had done, and to keep at bay the demons of abstraction in protest against which she had hurled herself from the moving car. In the afternoon we drove across the flowery courtyard to collect our trophies and to look for more and we laid them out on the rough weedy lawn in front of the house. The stones were all elliptical and faintly humped and fairly uniform in size but varied immensely in colour. Some were purple spotted with dark blue, some tawny with creamy blotches, some a mottled lavender grey, many with swirling patterns round a central eye or strikingly decorated with stripes of purest white. As Julian said, it was very difficult to decide to leave any of them behind. It was like being in a huge art gallery and being told to help oneself. The most privileged stones she now took inside together with the sheep's skull and the bits of driftwood. The square piece of wood with the Chinese writing she propped upright like an icon upon the chimney piece of our little sitting-room, with the sheep's skull on one side of it and the gilt snuffbox on the other, and on the window ledges she arranged the stones among pieces of grey worked tree root, like small modern sculptures. I watched her total absorption in these tasks. We had tea.
After tea we drove over to the big church and walked about inside its bony emptiness. A few chairs upon the huge stone floor be tokened a tiny congregation. There was no stained glass, only huge oerpendicular windows through which the cool sun shone onto the rather powdery stone of the floor, casting a little shadow into 'iescats many centuries old. The church in the flat land –f ruined ship or ark, or perhaps like the skeleton of al, under whose gaunt ribs one moved with awe in silence with soft feet, padding and prowling,! ri s!
We drove back under a sky of light brown cloud streaked with long mouths full of green or orange light, and I felt exalted and hollow and clean and at the same time burning with desire and wondering, but with no will of my own, what was going to happen next. Julian prattled on and I gave her a short tutorial on English church architecture. Then she announced that she wanted to swim and we drove to the dunes and ran to the sea and it turned out that she had her bathing costume on underneath her dress and she rushed into the water and was soon splashing about and taunting me. (I cannot swim.) I think however that the sea was extremely cold for she came out of it fairly quickly.
Meanwhile I sat upon the ridge of patterned stones above the water, holding the hem of her discarded dress and, until I noticed what I was doing and deliberately relaxed, crushing it up spasmodically in my hand. I did not think that Julian was deliberately postponing the moment of love-making or that she was doubting her gift of herself. Nor did I think that she wanted me to force her. I felt entirely given over to her instinct and to the tempo of her being. The moment I longed for and dreaded would come at its natural time, and its natural time would be tonight.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries. There are, I am told, people who just want «a woman» or «a man.» I cannot conceive of this state of affairs and it does not concern me. I had rarely wanted another human being absolutely which was the same as to say that I had rarely wanted another human being at all. Holding hands and kissing, that can mean something in friendship, though it had not been my way. But that trembling dedication to the totality of another I had experienced-well, as I sat on the divan bed that evening and waited for Julian I felt, never before: though I knew intellectually that I had been in love with Christian. And there had been another case, of which I do not tell the story here.