It was and was not like the first day of the honeymoon when the newly married pair, in tender deference to each other, feign habits which are not their own. I was not a young husband. I was not young and I was not a husband. I felt none of the youthful spouse's need to take control, his reflective anxiety about the future, his calmingly classified commitment. I feared the future and I was committed but I felt myself that day in a world so entirely weird, in a land of marvels, where all that was required of my courage was that I should walk on and on. I felt no need to take control. It was not that Julian controlled me. We were both of us controlled by something else.
We had had eggs for lunch and sausages for supper. At supper we drank some of the wine. Julian had the healthy young person's indifference to alcohol. I thought I would be too excited to drink, but I downed two glasses with a sort of amazed appreciation. Julian had taken great pleasure in finding a pretty tablecloth and laying the table as elaborately as she could for both meals. Patara was, as advertised, well provided with all household necessities. Julian's dustpan and brush were otiose. (It also, as advertised, had its own electricity from a generator in the abandoned farmyard.) She had brought in flowers from the garden, straggling canterbury bells of a faded cottony blue, yellow loosestrife and wild lupins from beyond the fence, and one white peony streaked with crimson, as georgeous as a lotus. We sat down formally and laughed with delight. After supper she said suddenly, «There's nothing to worry about.»
«Uh– hu.»
«You understand me?»
«Yes.» We washed up. She went into the bathroom and I went into the bedroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I inspected my dulled straight hair and my thin discreetly wrinkled face. I looked amazingly young. I got undressed. Then she came and we were together for the first time.
When one has at last got what has been ardently longed for one wishes time to cease. Often indeed at such moments it is miraculously slowed. Looking into each other's eyes we caressed each other without any haste at all, with a sort of tender curious astonishment. I felt none of Marvell's frenzy now. I felt rather that I was privileged to be living out in a brief span some great aeon of the experience of love. Did the Greeks know between 600 and 400 b.c. what millennia of human experience they were enacting? Perhaps not. But I knew, as I worshipped my darling from head to foot that I was under orders, a sort of incarnate history of human love.
«Don't be silly, Bradley.»
«I'm too old.»
«Darling, we'll sleep.»
«I'm going outside for a minute.»
I went out naked into the dark garden where the light from the bedroom showed a dim square of jagged grass and dandelions. A mist was coming in from the sea, drifting slowly past the house, curling and uncurling like cigarette smoke. I listened and could not hear the waves, but a train rattled and then cried out like an owl somewhere in the land behind me.
When I came back she had put on a sort of– dark blue silk nightshirt, unbuttoned to the navel. I pushed it back onto her shoulders. Her breasts were the perfect fruit of youth, rounded and just pendant. Her hair had dried into a soft golden fuzz. Her eyes were huge. I put on a dressing-gown. I knelt in front of her without touching her.
«My darling, don't worry.»
«I'm not worrying,» I said. «I'm just no bloody good.»
«It will be all right.»
«Julian, I'm old.»
«Nonsense. I can see how old you are!»
«No, but-How bruised you are, your poor arm and your leg.»
«I'm sorry-«
«It's beautiful, as if you'd been fingered by a god, stained with purple.»
«Come into bed, Bradley.»
«Your knees smell of the northern sea. Has anyone ever kissed the soles of your feet before?»
«No.»
«Good. Sorry to be such a failure.»
«You know there isn't any possible failure here, Bradley. I love you.»
«I'm your slave.»
«We will be married, won't we?»
«It's impossible.»
«You needn't scream.»
«Well, why do you say these sort of abstract things that you don't mean?»
«I'm just instinctively protecting myself.»
«You haven't answered properly. You will marry me, won't you?»
«You're quite mad,» I said, «but as I told you, I'm your slave. Whatever you go on wanting will be the law of my being.»
«That's settled then. Oh dear, I am so tired.»
We both were. After we had turned off the light she said, «And another thing, Bradley. Today has been the happiest day I have ever had in my whole life.»
I was asleep two seconds later. We woke at dawn and embraced each other again, but with the same result.
The next day the mist was still there, thicker, still moving in from the sea with a sort of relentless marching motion, passing by the house in a steady purposive manner like a shadowy army bound for some distant hosting. We watched it, sitting laced together in the window seat of the little sitting-room in the early morning.
After breakfast we decided to walk inland and look for a shop. The air was chilly and Julian was wearing one of my jackets as an overcoat, since it had not occurred to her to purchase a coat during her shopping spree. We walked along a footpath beside a little stream full of watercress and then came to a signalman's cottage and crossed the railway and then went over a humpy bridge which was reflecting itself in a very quiet canal. The sun was piercing the mist now and rolling it up into great cloudy spheres of gold in the midst of which we walked as between huge balls which never quite touched us or touched each other. I felt very troubled about what had happened, or rather not happened, during the night, but I was also being made insanely happy by Julian's presence. To torment us I said, «We can't stay here forever, you know.»
«Don't use that tone of voice. That's your 'despair.' Not again.»
«No, just saying the obvious.»
«I think we must stay here awhile to learn happiness.»
«It's not my subject.»
«You mean about our marriage?»
«Yes. Then later on I'll do my exams, everything will be-«Suppose I were much older than-«
«Oh stop worrying, Bradley. You want to sort of justify everything.»
«I am by you eternally justified. Even if your love were to end now I am justified.»
«Is that a quotation?»
«Only from me.»
«Well, it isn't going to end now. And do stop boring me about your age.»
«For all that beauty that doth cover thee is but the seemly raiment of my heart, which in thy breast doth live as thine in me. How can I then be older than thou art?»
«Is that a quotation?»
«It's a damn rotten argument.»
«Bradley, have you noticed anything about me?»
«One or two little things, I suppose.»
«Have you noticed that in the last two or three days I've grown up?»
I had noticed that. «Yes.»
«I was a child and perhaps you are still thinking of me as a child. But now I am a woman, a real one.»
«Oh my darling girl, hold onto me, hold onto me, hold onto me, and if I ever try to leave you don't let me.»
We walked across a meadow to a little village and found our shop and as we began to walk back the mist cleared away completely. And now the dunes and our courtyard were huge and glistening with sun, all the stones, dampened a little by the mist, shining in their different colours. We left our basket beside the fence and ran on down towards the sea. Julian suggested that we should collect some wood for a fire, but this proved difficult because every bit of wood we found was far too beautiful to burn. However we did find a few pieces which she consented to immolate, and I was carrying them back through the sandy dunes to our collecting point, leaving her still on the beach, when I saw in the distance something which absolutely froze my blood. A man in uniform on a bicycle was just riding along the bumpy track away from our bungalow.