After lunch, Ludi suggested that we drive out to Cruden’s Beach for the afternoon — the stare of the sun was completely shut off by thick cloud, but the heat came through, muffled and still.
“You certainly are taking a holiday,” Mrs. Koch said, gently teasing, questioning, “How is it you’re deserting the fish for us?” And in a conspiracy of possessiveness that was sweet to me, I allied myself with her in banter. Yet when I went along the passage to get my bathing suit, I could not walk: I wanted to run, jump, my hands were inept with happiness as I assembled my things — Ludi was spending his time with me, it was me for whom he stayed. Mrs. Koch’s innocent teasing, her “way” as Ludi would call it, gave me the assurance I could have had no other way, independent and unsuspecting testimony of something that could be truly interpreted only by my key. With my delight there was astonishment; I was content to be allowed to be with him, to watch him. My feeling was still so much a cherished compound of the imagination; that the adored object should show signs of wishing to come to life and take part was more than I could imagine.
I sat between Mrs. Koch and Ludi in the old swaying car and it seemed that all the time there was some kind of machine running inside me. It had started up and now it was humming secretly all the time, unbeknown to anyone. I watched fascinated the dance of my lax hands, jolting against my lap with the shake of the car. Sometimes I felt I must keep my head down to hide the excitement of happiness that I could feel in my face. Yet my joy could not be confined; the sight of the sea round a bend, a little native on a calf’s back, brought a cry of pleasure I could not hold back. On the great beach there were two or three little gatherings of people, not holiday-makers but residents from the district, stranded in the uncertain boredom of their Sunday afternoon. Of course a hand went up, like a pennant, as we sank from the path to the sand. Mrs. Koch knew somebody: “Why Ludi … it’s the Leicesters, I think.”
Ludi and I lay face down in the sand a yard or two away from the women and children round a thermos flask — the squatting pattern, like a party game, that broke up and re-formed round Mrs. Koch sinking majestically to rest. Presently I got up and went back to the car to change into my bathing costume. It was difficult to get into, crouching on the floor, because it was still damp from morning. At last I wriggled and dragged my way into it and came out, feeling as if I were being held by tight clammy hands. From the short distance I could see Ludi, nearer the group now, explaining something with a rotating gesture of his hand as he talked. I walked over the sand and stood near him. He finished his explanation, saying: “… Yes, yes, that’s what I was saying. … It wouldn’t matter which way you put it on, so long as that axle arrangement was at the right angle.” He paused a moment and closed his teeth on a match, and I thought he would speak to me, but he had merely paused to ponder something and suddenly he had it: “Of course you must understand that a thing like this isn’t foolproof … not by any means. And I can’t really say unless I see it.” And then with a sudden confidence: “But it should be all right, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be perfectly all right.”—He had a way of putting his head on one side and turning one hand up.
I did not even wonder what it was they were talking about. I simply stood there. Now Ludi lifted his head round to me. “Again?”
The curious inability to speak came over me. I nodded hard, smiling.
“That child hasn’t been out the water the whole day,” said Mrs. Koch, interrupting her conversation with a little thin woman who was crocheting as she talked.
“Oh, well …,” said Ludi, getting out of his shorts. He gave a shrug and the half-lift of a smile to the man to whom he had been talking, as one acknowledges the necessity of pleasing a child. He pulled off his shirt and we went down toward the water together. But when the cool rill closed over our feet and the breath of the sea lifted to our faces, we began to walk along the water line. “You can’t go anywhere without mother finding a friend,” Ludi said. “Leicester’s got about as much mechanical sense as that shell. Stupidity of his questions—”
He seemed to lose interest in what he was saying. We walked right away up the beach and over some rocks and to another beach, a smaller one, where the sand was coarser and bright. I picked up a handful and saw that it was not sand at all, really, but the fragments of shells, pounded to a kind of meal by the pestle of the sea on a mortar of rocks. I showed it to Ludi and he looked at it and then blew it off my hand and dusted my hand and let it fall, in a gesture that suddenly seemed to me to express him, all that, in him, was exciting and wonderful to me. And just as the thought was bursting over me in a curious turmoil of feeling, a physical feeling, like a kind of blush, that I had never felt before, he put his hand down on the nape of my neck. It caught my hair back from my head so that I had to walk stiffly, and, noticing this, seriously and capably as if he were adjusting something he had made, he slid his hand under my hair to free it.
Our feet were hurt by the coarse shingle and we wandered to the rocks and sat with our feet in the pools. We talked about the sea and the life of the sea around us, and I picked the tiny conical towers of winkles off the rock with my fingernail and threw them back into the water. I said: “Let’s go in …?” He stretched himself backward against the rock and for answer, or rather as if he had forgotten to answer, looked at me slowly, smiling and yet not smiling, a look of regret, willing reluctance — a look that puzzled me. My greatest concern was to keep from him anything that might remind him that I was still a child, and so I did not want him to know that it puzzled me, that anything he did or said could puzzle me. I smiled as if in understanding. But the smile must have been too quick, too bright. He shook his head. I said: “Why do you do that over me?”—with the anxiousness which came up in me so quickly. He said with a little beckoning jerk of the chin: “Come here.” And very carefully I slid to my knees in the water, and arranged myself nearer to him and timidly put my hand, that jumped once, in reaction from the contact, on his knee. He kissed me as he had done the night before but this time I held my mouth slightly open though I kept very still. Then he breathed softly on my cheeks and kissed me again several times, and between the kisses I waited for him to kiss me again, while the tepid stagnant water of the pool touched with a terrible softness against the inner sides of my thighs. I think it was from the touch of the warm water that I suddenly stood up. Yet I wanted him to kiss me again, I wanted to prove to myself the reality of the feel of his lips, smooth and dry, the secret — so it seemed to me — of the deep, soft pressure of moisture, the astonishing warmth that, seeing his mouth move in talk, could never be guessed. I waited but, with the unexpectedness that quickened my pleasure with the continual threat of small disappointments, we went into the sea instead, though he did not swim away from me, but kept near, so that I could talk, shout to him, and we would bump against each other, strangely buoyant with water, each feeling the touch of the other’s limbs like the blunt contact of air-filled rubber shapes. There was a joy for me in tumbling about Ludi; I must have jumped around him like a puppy inviting play. But if he was not swimming seriously, he liked to float with his eyes closed, lonely on the water.
We stayed in too long — perhaps I had been in the sea too often altogether, that day — for when I came out and lay on the rough sand I had the feeling of air pressing inside me against my collarbones, and a swinging in my head. Water kept closing over my hearing and as I got up to shake it out of my ear, Ludi lifted my wet hair up on top of my head and pushed me to him with his elbow. He began to kiss me again. This time he took the whole of my mouth into the warm wet membrane of his mouth and his tongue came into my mouth and was looking for something; went everywhere, shockingly, pushing my tongue aside, fighting my cheeks, resisting my teeth. I was afraid and I did not want him to stop. I clung to the flesh behind his shoulder as if I were in danger of slipping down somewhere and as we stood together in the sultry afternoon the cool film of water dried from our bodies, and the warmth of our skin came through, into contact. Against the bare patch between the brassière and the shorts of my bathing suit I felt the steamy wet wool of his trunks and in the hollow of my neck, the slight liveness, as if it was capable of certain limited movement, of the hair on his breastbone. A drop of cold water fell from his hair onto my warm back, and another, and in the soft bed of my belly, as if it were growing there, I became conscious of another warmth, a warmth that grew from Ludi, from a center of warmth that came to life between his thighs. Nobody told me love was warm. Such warmth — I seemed to remember it, it seemed like something forgotten by me since I was born. Nobody told me it was warmth. How can it be understood, accepted, cold? I should have remembered — how? from where? — that it was warmth. All the fires were here, and the warmth of my mother’s bed long ago, and the deep heat of the sun.