On Chesil Beach by Ian Mcewan

Author:Ian Mcewan [Mcewan, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary, Psychological
ISBN: 9780307386175
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

EDWARD’S FACE was still unusually pink, his pupils dilated, his lips still parted, his breathing as before: shallow, irregular, rapid. His week of wedding preparation, of crazed restraint, was bearing down hard on his body’s young chemistry. She was so precious and vivid before him, and he did not quite know what to do. In the falling light, the blue dress he had failed to remove gleamed darkly against the stretched white counterpane. When he first touched her inner thigh her skin had been surprisingly cool, and for some reason this had excited him intensely. As he looked into her eyes, he had an impression of toppling towards her in constant giddy motion. He felt trapped between the pressure of his excitement and the burden of his ignorance. Beyond the films, the dirty jokes and the wild anecdotes, most of what he knew about women was derived from Florence herself. The perturbation beneath his hand could easily be a tell-tale sign that anyone could have told him how to recognise and respond to, some kind of precursor to female orgasm, perhaps. Equally, it could be nerves. There was no telling, and he was relieved when it began to subside. He remembered a time, in a vast cornfield outside Ewelme, when he sat at the controls of a combine harvester, having boasted to the farmer that he was competent, and then did not dare touch a single lever. He simply did not know enough. On the one hand, she was the one who had led him to the bedroom, removed her shoes with such abandon, let him place his hand so close. On the other, he knew from long experience how easily an impetuous move could wreck his chances. There again, while his hand remained in place, palpating her thigh, she continued to gaze at him so invitingly–her bold features softened, her eyes narrowing, then opening wide again to find his own, and now her head tilting back–that his caution was surely absurd. This hesitancy was a madness of his own. They were married, for goodness’ sake, and she was encouraging him, urging him on, desperate for him to take the lead. But still, he could not escape the memories of those times when he had misread the signs, most spectacularly in the cinema, at the showing of A Taste of Honey, when she had leaped out of her seat and into the aisle like a startled gazelle. That single mistake took weeks to repair–it was a disaster he dared not repeat, and he was sceptical that a forty-minute wedding ceremony could make so profound a difference.

The air in the room seemed thin, insubstantial, and it was a conscious effort to breathe. He was troubled by a fit of nervous yawning, which he suppressed with a frown and a flaring of the nostrils–it would not help if she thought he was bored. It pained him tremendously that their wedding night was not simple, when their love was so obvious. He regarded his state of excitement, ignorance and indecision as dangerous because he did not trust himself.

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