closed. Without his penetrating stare and with the quick crackle of his talk silenced, he looked younger, softer-faced.
For once Nick wasn’t thinking of anything at all. He was simply relishing the quiet, the clean smell of the salt-scoured air, and the red light of the sun on his eyelids. It was so different from the confined dark, the noise and the often suffocating heat of every day.
When he opened his eyes again it was to look at Mari. She was lying propped up on one elbow, watching the slow trickle of sand grains past her arm. With her rosy cheeks and round brown eyes she looked polished, shiny with health like an apple, and that was an unusual attraction in Nantlas. Nick’s appraisal took in the rest of her. She was slim, but not thin, with a neat waist. And although she was short like the other girls in the valley, she had pretty legs and ankles. It amused Nick that she knew he was looking at her, admiring her, and wouldn’t meet his eyes.
‘Your shoes are full of sand,’ he said softly.
At once Mari sat up. ‘I said I’d take them off, didn’t I?’
She kicked off the shoes and then, deftly and unaffectedly, she unhooked her stockings and rolled them down over her knees and ankles. Her bare skin was very white, and Nick saw that her feet were small and square. Suddenly he was struck by her vulnerability, and his own. He knelt in the sand and kissed the instep of one foot. The skin was smooth and very warm.
He looked up at her and saw that she was smiling.
‘How old are you, Mari?’
‘Nineteen. I told you before.’
‘Do you think that’s old enough?’
He liked her better still because she didn’t pretend to be shocked, or not to know what he meant.
‘Yes. If it’s with you.’
The afternoon sun filled their hollow. As he reached to kiss her mouth Nick saw that the light had tipped her brown eyelashes with gold. Then their eyes closed, and for a long moment they didn’t see or hear anything else. Nick’s hand reached up and fumbled with the buttons of the new blue blouse. They came undone and he slid it off, stroking her shoulders and touching the hollows beside her neck. Then he found the buttons of her skirt and undid those too. Mari sat facing him in her cotton camisole neatly trimmed with cheap lace. Somehow it looked wrong beside the sharp grass and the clean washed sand.
‘Please take it off. I don’t think I can find the right buttons.’
‘Nick.’ She was genuinely scandalized now, wrapping her arms protectively around herself. ‘What if someone sees?’ He laughed delightedly. ‘So, Mari. It’s all right to make love and not be married, and to do it outside in the sunshine, but it’s not all right to take your underclothes off? Look, I’m taking mine off.’
Unconcernedly he stripped himself and knelt beside her again. Nick was neither interested in nor ashamed of his own body. For most of the time it was simply an instrument to be worked until it complained, and then in too-rare moments like this it gave him intense pleasure. But Mari was staring in half-abashed fascination, so he waited, trying to be patient with her. She looked at the breadth of his shoulders, and the knots of muscle in his arms. Nick’s skin was white too, but with an unhealthy, underground pallor of hard labour in enclosed places. There were bruises too, old ones fading into yellow and new blue ones. Across his upper arm there was a long puckered scar, blueish under the wrinkled skin as if the wound had not been cleaned properly before healing itself.
‘What’s that?’
‘A shovel,’ he said indifferently. ‘There isn’t a lot of room to work in an uncommon seam, and my arm was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Oh.’ Mari was looking down to where the sparse dark hair on his chest grew down in a thin line over his belly. Hesitantly, glancing up at him to see if she was doing right, she reached out to touch him.
‘That’s right.’ Nick’s voice was quite different now. ‘Touch me.’
There was another long moment of silence before he asked again. ‘Please. Take that thing off. If there’s anyone anywhere near, they’re doing the same as us. Why should they want to spy?’
Mari raised her arms and slipped the thin cotton off over her head. She sat up straight, lifting her head at the novel sensation of the breeze on her bare skin. She had small, firm breasts with pink nipples. Nick’s dark head bent forward as he touched one, very gently, with his tongue. Then they lay down in each other’s arms, stretching out against each other in the warmth.
‘It feels so lovely,’ Mari said. It was the oddness of another body next to hers, the same skin and heat as her own, but yet so different, and the sun and air on her flesh, and the prickle of the sand beneath her.
‘Here,’ Nick said, lifting her up. ‘Lie on my shirt.’
‘Oh, why? I liked the feel of the sand.’
She felt his deep chuckle in his throat, and suddenly he was the old comical Nick again that she knew quite well from social evenings and dances in the hall of the Miners’ Rest, and snatched half-hours alone in her mam’s front parlour.
‘Because it won’t feel nearly as lovely if we’re both covered in it, believe me.’
Mari was flooded with the sense of her own ignorance and she buried her face against him. ‘Tell me what to do,’ she said.
‘Like this, my love. Like this.’ Nick took her hand, and showed her. Then in his turn he discovered her, a discovery so surprising that it made her forget the sun and the sky, and the sound of the sea, and everything in the world except the two of them. At that moment Mari wouldn’t have known or cared if every man, woman and child in Nantlas had been standing at the lip of the hollow watching them.
Then, much later, she fell asleep with her hair fanned out over the scar on his arm, and his shirt spread over her for covering. Nick lay still, holding her close, and watching the light over them change from bright to pale blue, and then to no colour, at all except for a rim of palest pink.
At last Mari murmured something inaudible, stretched, and opened her eyes. ‘Have I been asleep for very long?’
‘Yes, very long. It was nice, watching you.’
She sat up, shaking the sand out of her hair, and his shirt fell away from her shoulders. At once her hands came up to cover herself.
‘It’s a bit late for that,’ he said, smiling at her.
‘I know that. It’s not you. What if …’ Gingerly she levered herself to peer over the rim of the hollow. The world stretched away ahead, empty except for the sea birds, and she flopped back in relief.
‘Here.’ Nick was holding her clothes out to her, shaken free of sand and folded neatly. He helped her to dress, smoothing the blue cotton and fastening the buttons with surprising dexterity. His hands were rough and cracked, but the fingers were slim for a man’s, and supple. When they were both dressed, they leaned back against the sand. Nick produced a small, slightly crushed bar of chocolate from his pocket and she bit ravenously into it. From another pocket be brought out a green and yellow Gold Flake tin and rolled himself a cigarette, and they sat contentedly together.
‘Nick?’ she asked after a moment. ‘What
