Sarah pressed against him, briefly, to let the woman and her child past, and then he sat beside her as the train emptied. After a while she reached down and touched his hand.
They took their time walking to the sea. At first he was disappointed, it was so crowded. Men with trousers rolled up to show knobbly legs, handkerchiefs knotted over sweating scalps, women with skirts tucked up to reveal voluminous bloomers, small children screaming as the damp sand was towelled off their legs. Everywhere people swirling their tongues round icecream cones, biting into candy-floss, licking rock, sucking fingers, determined to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure from the day. In his khaki, Prior moved among them like a ghost.
Only Sarah connected him to the jostling crowd, and he put his hand around her, clasping her tightly, though at that moment he felt no stirring of desire. He said, ‘You wouldn’t think there was a war on, would you?’
They walked down to the water’s edge. He felt quite callous towards her now, even as he drew her towards him and matched his stride to hers. She belonged with the pleasure-seeking crowds. He both envied and despised her, and was quite coldly determined to get her. They owed him something, all of them, and she should pay. He glanced at her. ‘Shall we walk along?’
Their linked shadows, dumpy and deformed, stretched across the sand. After a while they came to an outcrop of rock, and, clambering over it, found they’d left the crowded part of the beach behind. Sarah took off her jacket and then, with a great fuss and pleas not to look, her shoes and stockings as well. She paddled at the water’s edge, where the waves seethed between her toes.
‘I don’t suppose you’re allowed to take anything off?’ she said, looking back at him, teasing.
‘Not a thing.’
‘Not even your boots?’
‘No, but I can wade. I always paddle with me boots on.’
He didn’t expect her to understand, or if she did, to admit it, but she turned on him at once. ‘Boots have a way of springing a leak.’
‘Not mine.’
‘Oh, you’d be different, I suppose?’
Until now the air had been so still it scarcely moved against the skin. But now small gusts began to whip up the sand, stinging patches of bare skin. Prior looked back the way they’d come. The sun was past its height. Even the little mounds of worm-casts had each its individual shadow, but what chiefly struck him was the yellowing of the light. It was now positively sulphurous, thick with heat. They seemed to be trapped, fixed, in some element thicker than air. Black figures, like insects, swarmed across the beach, making for the shelter of the town.
Sarah, too, had turned to look back. He said quickly, ‘No, don’t let’s go back. It’ll blow over.’
‘You think that’s gunna blow over?’
Reluctantly he said, ‘Do you want to go back?’
‘We’d be drenched before we got there. Anyway, I like storms.’
They stood looking out to sea, while the yellow light deepened. There was no difference now between his skin colour and hers. Suddenly Sarah clutched her head. ‘What’s happening?’
He could hardly believe what he saw. The coppery wires on the surface of her hair were standing straight up, in a way he had never believed any human hair could do. He pulled his cap off, and winced at the tingling in his scalp.
‘What is it?’ Sarah said.
‘Electricity.’
She burst out laughing.
‘No, I mean it.’
Lightning flickered once, illuminating her yellow skin.
‘Come on,’ Prior said.
He snatched her hand and started to run with her towards the shelter of some bushes. Scrambling up the last slope, he staggered, and would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed a clump of marram grass. He felt a sharp pain, and, bringing his hand up, saw a smear of blood on the palm. Sarah pushed him from behind. They stumbled down the other side of the slope, just as a sudden fierce thickening of rain blinded them, and the first rumblings of thunder came.
A dense thicket of buckthorn offered the only possible shelter. Prior stamped down the nettles and thistles that thronged the gaps, and then held the thorns back for Sarah to crawl inside. He followed her in. They crouched down, the rain scarcely reaching them through the thick roof of thorn, though the wind rocked and beat the bush. Prior looked round. The ground was dry, and very bare, the thorn too thick to allow anything else to grow.
Sarah was feeling her hair. ‘Is it all right?’
‘It’s going down.’
‘So’s yours.’
He grinned. ‘’S not surprising. Storm took me mind right off it.’
She laughed, but refused to reply. Prior was remembering childhood games, making dens. An interior like this, so dark, so private, so easily defended, would have been a real find. Mixed with this distinctly childish excitement another excitement was growing. He no longer felt hostile to her, as he’d done back there in the crowd. They seemed to have walked away from all that. It was ages since he’d made love. He felt as he sometimes did coming out of the line, listening to the others talk and sometimes joining in, what they were going to do and how many times they were going to do it, though as far as he knew everybody else’s experience was like his own. The first time was almost always a disappointment. Either stuck at half mast or firing before you reached the target. He didn’t want to think about Sarah like this.
Sarah rolled over on to her elbow and looked at him. ‘This is nice.’
He lay beside her. A few splashes of rain found his upturned face. After a while he touched her hand and felt her fingertips curl round his. Through the thickness in his throat, he said, ‘I’m not pushing, but if you wanted to, I’d make sure it was all right.’
After a while he felt her fingers creep across his chest, insinuating themselves between the buttons of his tunic. He kissed her, moving from her lips to her breasts, not looking at her, not opening his eyes, learning her with his tongue, flicking the nipples hard, probing the whorled darkness of her navel, and then on down, down, across the smooth marble of her belly into the coarse and springy turf. His nostrils filled with the scent of rock pools at low tide. He slipped his hands underneath her, and lifted her, until her whole pelvis became a cup from which he drank.
Afterwards they lay in silence, enjoying the peace, until footsteps walking along the coastal path warned them that the storm was over. The buckthorn scattered raindrops over them, as they crawled out on to the grass.
They beat sand and twigs from each other’s clothes, then started to walk back along the coastal path.
‘What we need is something to warm us up,’ Prior said.
‘We can’t go anywhere looking like this.’
They stopped on the outskirts of the town, and tried more seriously to set themselves to rights. They went to a pub, and leant back against the wooden seat, nudging each other under the table, drunk with their love-making and the storm and the sense of having secrets.
‘I can feel your voice through the wood,’ Sarah said.
Abruptly, the joy died. Prior became quite suddenly depressed. He pushed his half-finished meal away.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh, I was remembering a man in my platoon.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you know, he sent the same letter to his wife every week for two years.’
Sarah felt a chill come over her. She didn’t know why she was being told this. ‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
‘How do you know he did?’
‘Because I had to censor it. I censored it every week. We read all their letters.’
He could see her not liking this, but she kept her voice light. ‘Who reads yours?’