Lurching down the hills to the beach in the old car, I talked a great deal. The slight sense of adventure in the dark road and the attentive profile of the young man whom, sometimes, as now, I felt I knew very well (I imagined myself saying: Ludi Koch? Of course, he’s different when you know him. …) brought out in me a tendency to exaggerate and animate. Unconsciously I selected for him those anecdotes of the Mine and the town that presented certain aspects of the life as a little ridiculous, if not quite as reprehensible as he condemned it. There was even one story that showed my father as rather stuffy, rather circumscribed. … I could tell it with the child’s elderly amusement at the parent.
Then it seemed just as easy not to talk. We left the car and got down onto the dark beach giving short instructions to each other: Look out for that bush; all right now. … He disappeared into the dark.
I lay down on my back on the cool sand that held the cool of the night as it held the heat of the sun, deep down, far below the loose billowy surface, cool, cool all through. I kept the palm of my hand under my head to keep my hair free of sand, but soon I took my hand away and let the soft touch of my hair against my neck become indistinguishable from the touch of the sand. At first I was completely sunk in darkness. There was no sea, no earth, no sky. Even the sand I lay on was a tactile concept only. The sound of the sea was the flow of dark itself. Then, as I lay, a breaking wave turned back a glimmer of pale along the dark, and slowly, slowly, I made out a different, moving quality of the dark that was the sea. Flowing over his legs; I saw them undulating in the water dark, like fins that moved like fans. I might be lying on the air with the earth on top of me.
I did not know how long he was away. With nothing but the waves’ faint break in the darkness to measure the passing of time, I could not tell if it was ten minutes or half an hour, but suddenly he stepped into the enclosing dark about me and he was there, toweling his hair. A few drops of cold water shook from it onto my cheek. I sat up, and a faint slither of sand ran like a breeze down the back of my dress. I could hardly see him, yet he was there vigorously, his sharp breathing, the smell of damp towel, and as he bent, the fresh smell of khaki.
He said: “Where are you?”
“Here.”—I put up my hand, but he could not see it.
“Was it cold?”
“No. There’s a lot of seaweed about, tangling up your legs. Come—” he said.
I got up obediently. We began to walk slowly along the beach, quite far from the water, where the sand was dry and coldly heavy to walk in. All my being was concentrated in my left hand, which hung beside him as we walked. My whole body was poured into that hand as I waited for him to take it. It seemed to me that he must take it; I felt us walking up the beach together, with our hands clasped. In my head I listened and heard again him saying: “Come—”; so short, so intimate, and the strange pleasure of my obedience, as if the word itself drew me up out of the sand.
He began to talk, about the men with whom he lived in camp. He talked on and on. I answered yes or no: I was unable to listen, the way one cannot hear when one is preoccupied by distress of anger. He did not seem to notice. Now and then the uneven flow of the sand beneath our feet caused his shirt to brush my shoulder with the faint scratch of material; my hand, numb with the laxity of waiting, felt as if it had been jambed.
We had reached the lagoon, pouring silently down the channel it had cut for itself into the sea. “Shall we get back now?” he said and, with a little groan, lowered himself down to the sand; he squatted with his arms folded on his knees. I stood awkwardly, with what must have been an almost pettish attitude of offense innocently expressed in my stiff body. But as he made no move to get up, I sat down too, facing past the hump of his knees.
“But you know,” he said suddenly, as if it were the continuation of something we had discussed, “you’re really only a little girl. I wonder. I wonder if you are.” He took me by the elbows and drew me round, close against his knees and I saw his teeth, white for a moment, and knew that he had smiled. He enclosed my head and his knees in his arms and rocked them gently once or twice. The most suffocating joy took hold of me; I was terrified that he would stop, suddenly release me. So I kept as still as fear, my hands dangling against his shoes. He gave a curious sigh, as one who consents to something against his will. Then he bent to my face and lifted it with his own and kissed me, opening my tight pressing mouth, the child’s hard kiss with which I tried to express my eagerness as a woman. The idea of the kiss completely blocked out for me the physical sensation; I was intoxicated with the idea of Ludi kissing me, so that afterward it was the idea that I remembered, and not the feel of his lips. I buried my face on his knees again and the smell of khaki, of the ironed khaki drill of his trousers, came to me as the smell of love. … I remembered the Cluff brothers at the dance … the smell of khaki … my heart beat up at the excitement of contrasting myself then with myself at this moment.
Ludi was feeling gently down my bare arm, as if to find out how some curious thing was made.
“Well,” he said at last, “can’t you speak?”
“Ludi,” I asked, “do you really like me?”
Chapter 7
I do not know if I had ever been kissed before. Even if I had, it does not matter; it was as if it had never happened, the prim mouth of a frightened schoolboy dry on my lips, the social good-night kiss on the doorstep that would be smiled upon indulgently by Mine parents, the contact that was an end in itself, like a handshake. Now I lay in my bed in the high little room in Mrs. Koch’s house and kept my face away from the pillow because I wanted my lips free of any tactual distraction that might make it difficult for me to keep intact on my mouth the shape and sensation of Ludi’s kiss. I thought about it as something precious that had been shown to me; vivid, but withdrawn too quickly for me to be able to re-create every detail as my anxious memory willed. That anxious memory trembling eagerly to forget nothing; perhaps that is the beginning of desire, the end of a childhood? Wanting to remember becomes wanting: the recurring question that has no answer but its own eventual fading out into age, as it faded in from childhood.
Suddenly sleep, arbitrary, uncaring, melted my body away from me. I had just time to recognize myself going; and with only my mind still left to me, the idea of the kiss became complete in itself: I held it warmed in my heart as a child holds the imaginative world in the clasped body of a Teddy bear.
I woke late — by the standards of the Koch household — to a day of such heat that already by the time I had put on my clothes my heart was thumping with effort. Ludi was finishing a second cup of tea, chair half pushed away from the table. He was reading the paper, and on this, as on every other morning, his lifted head excused him from any further talk or attention. There was a whole small pawpaw on my plate instead of the usual segment scooped free of pips. I looked up to Mrs. Koch. “Matthew’s conscience offering,” she smiled. I cut it open; it was one of those with deep pink flesh and I knew it would have a special flavor, sharper, more perfumed than the yellow ones. The beautiful black pips beaded out under my spoon. I ate the whole fruit, very carefully, and it made me deeply hungry. Mrs. Koch went out to the kitchen to fetch my scrambled eggs and the toast Matthew was making for me.
Now. I turned my eyes slowly, as if their movement might have some equivalent of the creak of footsteps. His raised knee, crossed over the other, was in the line of my lowered vision, the slightly roughened skin of the kneecap, the big taut tendon underneath, the golden hairs over the calf muscle. He moved his toes a little inside the shabby sandshoe.