It was fun swimming with his mother, little bits of talk if they were close, ‘Hello!’ like delighted friends, then unannounced races to and fro, and companionable circlings, in breaststroke, round a moored dinghy, My Boy Lollipop, or the two red marker buoys. He was a stronger swimmer now than last year, and his mother acknowledged this, with a hint of distance in her laugh. They were different in the water, daily habits dissolved, his mother all features with her thick hair sleeked away, and the chill of the sea not to be ignored. He felt it once or twice, with the pitch of a small unexpected wave in his face, her look, entirely used to him but not quite sure what she was seeing. He loved his father not being here, but he wished his father could see him, hanging for a moment on an upstretched arm from the gunwale of the dinghy, with an easy new sense of his own strength. ‘Oh, he’s off,’ said his mother, and Johnny swung about almost reluctantly to see the shore, further off now, church and trees in the picture above the town roofs, and Bastien a hundred yards away from Norma, walking calmly towards the far rocky corner that led round, at low tide, to Crab Beach.
When they came out, and ran up the sand, and stood dripping and drying themselves in front of Norma, the indescribable alertness to change, to his own unmannerly growth, seemed to glow off them both, as the breeze ran across them and the force of the sun took over from the cold of the sea. He was nearly as tall as his mother now, in a year she would look up to him, as she did to her husband. She had sturdy legs, scratched around the ankles from walking in sandals, her large breasts were squashed together by the black bathing suit, her high cleavage goosefleshed under droplets of water. He knew she was forty-four, an age not mentioned, far ahead in the dense tangled stasis of adult life, whose language he still hardly understood, though he was learning to hear new tones in it, hardness and significant silence.
No point in following Bastien to Crab Beach, the rumour of topless women . . . he hoped it wasn’t true . . . but ached at the thought of him there with them, while he was left behind here, with his mother and her friend. He squatted down by her while she rubbed sun cream on his back, feeling her take stock again, unseen, of the new size of him. He thought about how Bastien had changed in a year, the hair on his legs, the shadowed upper lip and chin, and how when he himself went off next month to boarding school he would surprise his mother each time he came home. ‘Don’t go too far,’ she said, as he walked off, not knowing really where to go. His mother and Norma settled down, saying nothing; he went where they couldn’t see him, past the family with the dog and the striped canvas windbreak, the young man was changing, Johnny a second too late as he pulled up his pants with a snap and stood wringing the wet from the tiny green trunks. Johnny could be so absorbed in looking he forgot he was visible, and being looked at. ‘All right?’ said the man – a clench of shame for Johnny, but it was just pleasantness, unsuspecting. The dog ran over, and Johnny scratched its head with sudden rough energy and relief.
Talk had started up when he drifted back behind his mother and Norma – he went perching and shifting over the ridge of rocks, little creatures in the trapped weedy pools hiding from his shadow. His mother had her book from the library, The Red and the Green, and Norma, excluded, made conversation in idle, vaguely nettled resistance to it. The niceness of his mother glowed through, her book turned face down, answering, hitching one thing of no great interest to another, and keeping it going. He knew very well she didn’t care much for Norma Haxby, and not at all for Clifford – it was a keen little glimpse into the marital machinery to overhear her talking for her husband. ‘I’ve brought the Mail,’ she said, ‘if you want it,’ and reached over to the basket; Norma took it, but perhaps couldn’t read it in her sunglasses. He was aware of her turning her head and watching him, and wondering perhaps where the other boy was. He hopped down to a place where he could make drawings in the firm wet sand. He could only just hear them through the general noise of the beach and the gulls, and they spoke now with confidential flatness. His mother looked up over her book, ‘I hope they’re getting on all right. I think Bastien’s rather bored.’
‘It’s that age, I expect, isn’t it,’ said Norma vaguely.
‘He only seems interested in girls.’
‘How old is he?’
‘He’s fifteen.’
Norma peered out to sea. ‘He could pass for older, couldn’t he.’
‘Mm, I know what you mean.’
‘Good-looking . . .’ said Norma.
His mother peered humorously down the beach. ‘Lazy puppy. I wish he had some other things to wear.’
‘Well,’ said Norma, ‘I suppose they grow out of things, at that age.’
‘Actually, I don’t care, but he’ll need something smarter for dinner at the Boat Club.’
‘They’re quite relaxed, aren’t they?’
‘They may be, but Drum isn’t. He won’t take him there in those trousers.’
‘Ah, I see . . .’
‘He’s very proper, is Drum!’
‘Oh, well so’s Cliff,’ said Norma.
Johnny had made a face, like a great luscious boy doll, huge eyes and lips: sand was a tricky medium. He erased the whole thing in a stamping dance, smoothed it again with a stick of driftwood. Then he lay down on his front and closed his eyes. The talk ambled on, his mother’s reasonable tone each time Norma brought her out of her book.
‘I say, Cliff was quite surprised about David being at Oxford University.’
‘Well, it was only for one term, you know.’
‘He didn’t want to go back, then?’
‘He could have gone back, of course, after the War. But, you know, Norma, he was twenty-three or something, youngest ever squadron leader, DFC – he just couldn’t see himself getting back into student life.’
‘I should think you were jolly glad, too.’ The repeated click of a lighter, and in a few seconds cigarette smoke in the ozone. ‘No, Cliff was saying he’d had a very good war.’
‘Yes, he did. He loved it all really, that was the thing.’
Norma said nothing about Clifford’s war. ‘You took a while to get round to starting a family, though, Connie.’
‘I suppose we did, we both had so much energy – you know what it’s like—’
‘Well . . .’
‘And there was the business to set up – that was all-consuming for five years. And anyway we wanted our fun.’ He felt the pause here, she must have looked round. ‘Not that it wasn’t fun having Jonathan . . . David always wanted a boy.’
‘Oh, did he? You never wanted another?’
‘I wouldn’t have minded, but he wasn’t keen – strictly between you and me.’
‘Of course . . .’ Two busy puffs and a sigh as she screwed the barely smoked cigarette into the sand beside the others. ‘I expect David’s very busy with work all the time, anyway, Cliff is. It’s nine o’clock sometimes before he gets in.’
His mother said quite humorously, ‘Yes, I don’t always feel I have his undivided attention.’
‘Well, this is it,’ said Norma, perhaps not sure how vexed she was.
‘He’s on the Council now, too, of course. And he’s taken on the RAF benevolent thing, which he feels very strongly about.’
‘Oh, well . . .’
‘But Cliff must have a lot of dinners and so on.’
‘Oh, dinners, meetings . . . Dinners he can take me to, not always of course, and there’s the Masonic. But I go with him if I can – well, it saves me having to cook!’
It was hard to picture Norma cooking – sausages on sticks seemed about it. Connie said, ‘And Drum has his sports things too, some evenings, and most weekends.’