they went out on to the surfers’ beaches. The two were swimming well apart, ignoring each other, and the women’s eyes were behind the secretive dark glasses, and neither wanted to talk – could not.
They saw a head like a seal’s quite far out grow larger, and then it was Saul, and he came out of the sea, waving at them, but went up through the salty sea bushes and past the houses up to the street.
The boys were swimming in. When they reached the shallows they stood up and faced each other. They began to tussle. Thus had they fought all through their growing-up, boy fashion, but soon it was evident that there was nothing childlike about this fight. They were standing waist deep, waves came rushing in, battering them with foam, and streamed away, and then Ian had disappeared and Tom was holding him down. A wave came in, another, and Lil started up in anguish and said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to kill Ian. Tom’s going to kill …’
Ian reappeared, gasping, clutching Tom’s shoulders. Down he went again.
‘Be quiet, Lil,’ said Roz. ‘We mustn’t interfere.’
‘He’s going to kill … Tom wants to kill …’
Then Ian had been down a long time, surely a minute, more …
Tom let out a great yell and let go of Ian, who bobbed up. He was hardly able to stand, fell, stood up again, and watched Tom striding through the waves to the beach. As Tom stepped up on to the sand, blood flowed from his calf. Ian had bitten him, deep under the waves, and it was a bad bite. Ian was standing swaying in the water, choking gasping.
Roz fought with herself, then ran out into the waves and supported Ian in. The boy was pale, vomiting sea water, but he shook off Roz and went to sit by himself on the sand, his head on his knees. Roz returned to her place. ‘Our fault,’ whispered Lil.
‘Stop it, Lil. That’s not going to help.’
Tom was standing on one leg, to examine his calf, which was pouring copious blood. He went back into the sea and stood sloshing the sea water on to the bite. He came out again, found his swimming towel, tore it in half, and tied one half tight around his leg. Then he stood, hesitating. He might have gone back into his house and through it to Lil’s. He might have stayed in his own house, claiming it from Ian? He could have flopped down where he stood near the fence, not far from the women. Instead he turned and stared hard, it seemed with curiosity, at Ian. Then he limped to where Ian sat, and sat down by him. No one spoke.
The women stared at these two young heroes, their sons, their lovers, these beautiful young men, their bodies glistening with sea water and sun oil, like wrestlers from an older time.
‘What are we going to do, Roz?’ whispered Lil.
‘I know what I am going to do,’ said Roz, and stood up. ‘Lunch,’ she called, exactly as she had been doing for years, and the boys obediently got up and followed the women into Roz’s house.
‘You’d better get that dressed,’ said Roz to her son. It was Ian who fetched the box of bandages and Elastoplast and put disinfectant on the bite, and then tied up the wound.
On the table was the usual spread of sausages and cheese and ham and bread, a big dish of fruit, and the four sat around the table and ate. Not a word. And then Roz spoke calmly, deliberately. ‘We all have to behave normally. Remember – everything must be as usual, as it always is.’
The boys looked at each other, for information, it seemed. They looked at Lil. They looked at Roz. They frowned. Lil was smiling, but only just. Roz cut an apple into four, pushed a quarter each at the others, and bit juicily into her segment.
‘Very funny,’ said Ian.
‘I think so,’ said Roz.
Ian got up, clutching a big sandwich stuffed with salad, the apple quarter in his other hand, and went into Roz’s room.
‘Well,’ said Lil, laughing with something like bitterness.
‘Exactly,’ said Roz.
Tom got up, and went out and across the street to Lil’s house.
‘What are we going to do?’ Lil asked her friend, as if she expected an answer, there and then.
‘It seems to me we are doing it,’ said Roz. She followed Ian into her bedroom.
Lil collected up the box with the medicaments and bandages, and walked across to her house. On the way she waved to Saul Butler, who was on his verandah.
School began: it was the boys’ last year. Both were prefects, and admired. Lil was often in other towns and places, judging, giving prizes, making speeches, a well-known figure, this slim, tall, shy woman, in her pale perfect linens, her fair hair smooth and neat. She was known for her kind smile, her sympathy, her warmth. Girls and boys had crushes on her and wrote letters that often included, ‘I know that you would understand me.’ Roz was supervising productions of musicals at a couple of schools, and working on a play, a farce, about sex, a magnetic noisy woman who insisted that her bite was much worse than her bark: ‘So watch out; don’t make me angry!’ The four were in and out, together or separately, nothing seemed to have changed, they ate their meals with windows open on the street, they swam, but sometimes were by themselves on the beach because the boys were out surfing, leaving them behind.
Both had changed, Ian more than Tom. Diffident, shy and awkward he had been, but now he was confident, adult. Roz, who remembered the anguished boy when he had first come to her bed, was quietly proud, but she could never of course say a word to anyone, not even Lil. She had made a man of him, all right. Look at him … never these days did he clutch and cling and weep, because of his loneliness and his vanished father. He was quietly proprietorial with her, which amused her – and she adored it. Tom, who had never suffered from shyness or self-doubt, had become a strong, thoughtful youth, who was protective of Lil in a way that Roz had not seen. These were no longer boys, but young men, and good-looking, and so the girls were after them, and both Lil’s house and Roz’s were, they joked – like fortresses against delirious and desirous young women. But inside these houses, open to sun, sea breezes, the sounds of the sea, were rooms where no one went but Ian and Roz, Tom and Lil.
Lil said to Roz she was so happy it made her afraid. ‘How could anything possibly be as wonderful?’ she whispered, afraid to be overheard – by whom? No one was anywhere near. What she meant was, and Roz knew she did, that such an intense happiness must have its punishment. Roz grew loud and jokey and said that this was a love that dare not speak its name, and sang, ‘I love you, yes I do, I love you, it’s a sin to tell a lie …’
‘Oh, Roz,’ said Lil, ‘sometimes I get so afraid.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Roz. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll soon get bored with the old women and go after girls their own age.’
Time passed.
Ian went to college and learned business and money and computers, and worked in the sports firms, helping Lil: soon he would take his father’s place. Tom decided to go into theatre management. The best course in the whole country was in his father’s university, and it seemed obvious that there was where he should go. Harold wrote and rang to say that there was plenty of room in the house he now shared with his new wife, his new daughter. Harold and Roz had divorced, without acrimony. But Tom said he would stay here, this town was his home, he didn’t want to go north. There was a good enough course right here, and besides, his mother was an education
