After that there'd been a lot of talk, then the cinema, eventually the beach at Seaton, which the debris from the pits hadn't ruined yet, and now we were "going together." It hadn't meant much to me before, that phrase, "going together," but now I understood it. We went places together, and we went well together. I thought so, anyway.
The garden allotments started properly at the end of the colliery wall and sprawled over many acres along the coast road on the northern extreme of the village. The access paths, which divided them, were dusty, mazy, meandering. But behind the fences people were at work, and they came to and fro along the paths, so that it wasn't really private there. I had returned Moira's kiss, and in several quieter places had tried to draw her closer once or twice.
Invariably she held me at arm's length, saying: "Not here!" And her nervousness made me nervous, too, so that I'd look here and there all about, to make sure we were unobserved. And it was at such a time, glancing back the way we'd come, that I thought I saw a face hastily snatched back around the corner of a fence. The thought didn't occur to me that it might be Raymond. By now I'd quite forgotten about him.
Where the allotments ended the open fields began, gradually declining to a dene and a stream that ran down to the sea. A second cigarette had been smoked down to its tip and discarded by the time we crossed the fields along a hedgerow, and we'd fallen silent where we strolled through the long summer grass. But I was aware of my arm, linked with hers, and hugged close against her right breast. And that was a thought which made me dizzy, for through a heady half-hour I had actually held that breast in my hand, had known how warm it was, with its little hard tip that felt rough against the parent softness.
Oh, the back row love-seats in the local cinema were worthy of an award; whoever designed them deserves an accolade from all the world's lovers. Two people on a single, softly upholstered seat, thigh-to-thigh and hip-to-hip, with no ghastly armrest divider, no obstruction to the slow, breathless, tender and timid first invasion.
In the dark with only the cinema's wall behind us, and the smoky beam from the projector turning all else to pitch, I was sure she wasn't aware of my progress with the top button of her blouse, and I considered myself incredibly fortunate to be able to disguise my fumblings with the second of those small obstacles. But after a while, when for all my efforts it appeared I'd get no further and my frustration was mounting as the tingling seconds ticked by, then she'd gently taken my hand away and effortlessly completed the job for me. She had known — which, while it took something of the edge off my triumph, nevertheless increased the frisson to new and previously unexplored heights.
Was I innocent? I don't know. Others, younger by a year, had said they knew everything there was to know. Everything! That was a thought.
But in opening that button and making way for my hand, Moira had invited me in, as it were; cuddled up together there in the back row, my hand had molded itself to the shape of her breast and learned every contour better than any actor ever memorized his lines. Even now, a week later, I could form my hand into a cup and feel her flesh filling it again. And desired to feel her filling it again.
Where the hedgerow met a fence at right-angles, we crossed a stile; I was across first and helped Moira down. While I held one hand to steady her, she hitched her short skirt a little to step down from the stile's high platform. It was funny, but I found Moira's legs more fascinating in that skirt than in her bathing costume. And I'd started to notice the heat of my ears — that they were hot quite apart from the heat of the sun, with a sort of internal burning — as we more nearly approached our destination. My destination, anyway, where if her feelings matched mine she'd succumb a little more to my seductions.
As we left the stile to take the path down into the dene and toward the sea cliffs, I glanced back the way we'd come. I don't know why. It was just that I had a feeling. And back there, across the fields, but hurrying, I thought… a figure. Raymond? If it was, and if he were to bother us today of all days… I promised myself he'd pay for it with a bloody nose. But on the other hand it could be anybody. Saying nothing of it to Moira, I hurried her through the dene. Cool under the trees, where the sunlight dappled the rough cobbled path, she said:
"What on earth's the hurry, Josh? Are you that eager?"
The way I took her up in my arms and kissed her till I reeled must have answered her question for me; but there were voices here and there along the path, and the place echoed like a tunnel. No, I knew where I wanted to take her.
Toward the bottom of the dene, where it narrowed to a bottleneck of woods and water scooped through the beach banks and tunneled toward the sea, we turned north across an old wooden bridge over the scummy stream and began climbing toward the cliff paths, open fields, and sand holes that lay between us and Easingham Colliery. Up there, in the long grasses of those summer fields, we could be quite alone and Moira would let me make love to her, I hoped. She'd hinted as much, anyway, the last time I walked her home.
Toiling steeply up an earth track, where white sand spilled down from sand holes up ahead, we looked down on the beach — or what had been a beach before the pit-yakkers came — and remembered a time when it was almost completely white from the banks and cliffs to the sea. On a palmy summer day like this the sea should be blue, but it was gray. Its waves broke in a gray froth of scum on a black shore that looked ravaged by cancer — the cancer of the pits.
The landscape down there could be that of an alien planet: the black beach scarred by streamlets of dully glinting slurry gurgling seaward; concentric tidemarks of congealed froth, with the sick, wallowing sea seeming eager to escape from its own vomit; a dozen sea-coal lorries scattered here and there like ticks on a carcass, their crews shoveling pebble-sized nuggets of the wet, filthy black gold in through open tail-gates, while other vehicles trundled like lice over the rotting black corpse of a moonscape. Sucked up by the sun, gray mists wreathed the whole scene.
"It's worse than I remembered it," I said. "And you were right: we couldn't have walked down there, not even along the foot of the banks. It's just too filthy! And to think: all of that was pure white sand just, oh —»
" — Ten years ago?" she said. "Well, maybe not pure white, but it was still a nice beach then, anyway. Yes, I remember. I've seen that beach full of people, the sea bobbing with their heads. My father used to swim there, with me on his chest! I remember it. I can remember things from all the way back to when I was a baby. It's a shame they've done this to it."
"It's actually unsafe," I told her. "There are places they've flagged, where they've put up warning notices. Quicksands of slag and slop and slurry — gritty black sludge from the pits. And just look at that skyline!"
South lay the colliery at Harden, the perimeter of its works coming close to the banks where they rolled down to the sea, with half-a-dozen of its black spider legs straddling out farther yet. These were the aerial trip-dumpers: conveyor-belts or ski-lifts of slag, endlessly swaying to the rim and tripped there, to tip the refuse of the coke-ovens down onto the smoking wasteland of foreshore; and these were, directly, the culprits of all this desolation. Twenty-four hours a day for fifty years they'd crawled on their high cables, between their spindly towers, great buckets of muck depositing the pus of the earth to corrode a coast. And behind this lower intestine of the works lay the greater pulsating mass of the spider itself: the pit, with its wheel-towers and soaring black chimneys, its mastaba cooling towers and mausoleum coke-ovens. Yellow smoke, gray and black smoke, belching continuously into the blue sky — or into a sky which looked blue but was in fact polluted, as any rainy day would testify, when white washing on garden lines would turn a streaky gray with the first patter of raindrops.