Chapter Twenty-Six
He didn’t lose his virginity to Julia that evening, or the next, but a few days later, in the sand dunes, as evening came. He had been back at Worth Bay for five days by then, trying to settle back into life with Aunt Dinah. The weather was still, clear, hot, the nights thick with stars, the Milky Way visible over the Channel towards France, brighter than ever on those blackout nights. In later years Tony would stand on the porch and try to see that pale swirl of countless stars, as on those cloudless warm nights, but he never could.
It was on a night like that, amongst the dragon’s teeth high up towards Bill’s Point along the coastline, that they did it. Julia had already prised from him the existence of the French letter, and he was desperate for her, wild almost, and both of them thought it made sense. It seemed like a natural thing to do, in this world where concrete pillars and bollards lined the bay, where planes strafed the sands, and where danger was still everywhere.
They didn’t think it was wrong, or that they were too young, or that they were deceiving anyone. It was as natural to them both as kissing had been. Afterwards, as he lay still inside her, panting and worried he might pass out, she began to giggle and then, moving her head back so that the curls mingled with the sand, properly laugh, her small white teeth shining in the gathering gloom.
‘Well, what’s so funny?’ he said, grinning at her.
‘Oh, I don’t know. That I’ve done it with you. You’re just divine, Ant, and you seem to have no idea. I can’t believe it.’
‘Can’t believe what?’
She slid her body up so she was free of him, pulled on her knickers, then nestled back against him. He stroked her freckled forearms. ‘If there was more choice, you wouldn’t choose me,’ she said into his chest, quietly. ‘But I’d always choose you.’
He could feel the tips of her nipples, hard again, and her thudding heart, and he held her to him more tightly. ‘That’s rubbish, Julia – don’t say things like that. Anyway, I thought we were in it together, both of us.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she said, and then she closed her eyes, slowly. ‘Us against everything. Especially the Nazis. And Pa.’
‘And school.’
‘And school. And being selfish and petty. The greater good.’ Julia sat up and he could see she was about to start on again about equality – she was jolly obsessed with it, this idea that women were given a raw deal. ‘We should all be fighting together. Miss Bright has a friend working in a munitions factory, in Liverpool, putting the sulphur into the shells. It’s turned her face and hands bright yellow – they call her Canary – but she loves working, she was at home doing nothing before except cleaning and cooking for her husband who didn’t even work. And the minute the war’s over she’ll lose her job. The men’ll want it back. Men want everything for themselves, the power, the money, and they keep women down in a position of servitude. When you get married, you resign from your job. Can you imagine that, Ant?’ She actually shook a fist at him. ‘These awful magazines like Woman telling girls they need to wear stockings and wave their hair and silly things men don’t have to do. Women are the objects . . .’ Ant nodded, and she trailed off, looking up at him through her lashes. ‘Talking of objects. Honestly, Ant, I don’t want to hark on about it but you really are awfully handsome now.’
‘Now!’
‘You know what I mean. You were a boy when we met. Now, you’re not. You’re a heartbreaker. A matinee idol. How’s the acting, by the way?’
‘I was a servant in Antony and Cleopatra last term.’
He hadn’t told anyone at school that he liked acting. He’d been picked to be a soldier in the end-of-year production of Antony and Cleopatra because he was tall. ‘You and the other poofs, eh, Wilde?’ Johnson had said, when he’d seen him in his Roman soldier costume, queuing to go into the ballroom, which was now their hall, of the old country house on the shores of Lake Windermere to which they’d been evacuated. ‘Ha! Look at Wilde, chaps! He’s got make-up on! Dressed up like your mother, Wilde. She’d be over the moon to see you using her eye pencil.’
How dreary, how pathetic to be this Johnson, with his small, small tales of life in a large house in Surrey and the father who taught him to shoot and the big brother who was out in Cairo ‘doing his bit’. The tennis court ‘rolled every week in summer by our gardener, Philpott’, holidays in the south of France before the war, the tedious Christmas family traditions he insisted on telling one about. He would grow up pink, baby-faced, querulous, snide, small-minded, mean, idiotic. Ant knew this. He found lately that he knew more than his contemporaries, as though tragedy had widened his world view, made him see and understand more. Ant had promised himself right then, shivering in his costume in the cool of a Cumbrian July, that he would never ever be a Johnson. He would be wild and curious and open to everything.
‘I’m certain you were wonderful.’
‘Not really, Jules. I stood at the back with a spear.’
‘I’ll bet you held the spear jolly well.’ She slipped her plump breasts into her brassiere, fiddling with the hooks. ‘No, no, don’t worry. You’d better dispose of that,’ she said briskly, pointing to the condom, elongated and ridiculous-looking. ‘Wrap it in your handkerchief, chuck it away later.’
‘Have you done this before?’ he said, smiling up at her with his hands behind his head, and she hit him.
‘No! Of course not. You’re the first, and if Pa or Ian knew we’d be for it, absolutely. He didn’t even want me to go to school but Mummy’s aunt paid so he had to accept. He really can’t stand the fact that I’m brighter than Ian. I am. I’ll go to Girton if they’ll have me. He’ll never let me, of course.’
‘Really?’ Tony was surprised. ‘Even your father? But he’s all for education and everything—’
Julia gathered her cotton floral frock and pink cardigan together. ‘Since we’ve been back, I’ve noticed, he’s become much worse. A Land Girl fixed his car in the ATP the other day, on the way back from the station. I thought he’d die of anger, he was so ashamed.’
‘But he loves Aunt Dinah. And she’s – well, she’s like a man, in lots of ways. Does exactly what she wants.’ He was proud of her for it.
‘He’s a hypocrite. I think he doesn’t understand it, this new world, and the war, and it makes him furious. That’s what Miss Bright at school says, anyway. She says men hate us having the freedoms they’ve got, and that’s how we know it’s worth fighting for. Miss Bright was in prison for Votes for Women, you know. I’d go to prison for it.’ She leaned over him, and the smell of her, salty, sweaty, sweet like roses, the feel of her firm, soft skin almost undid him. She kissed him. ‘We must be careful, but gosh, there’s a war on, and life is short.’ Her face shone in the light from the setting sun, rippling on the sea. ‘Wasn’t this nice, anyway? I thought it was awfully nice.’
‘I should say.’ He sat up, grinning shyly, and fumbled in his blazer pocket. ‘Here. Would you like a cigarette?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Julia, pulling her dress back over her head, her springy hair emerging first with a bounce. She scrambled into her sandals, and it struck him then how funny the business of it was, the taking off of clothes and artifice, and how natural it was to be naked as they had been five minutes ago, to put himself in her as she had spread herself for him, brushing her hair out of her eyes, moving down to meet him as he pushed inside her, and both of them at the same time saying to the other, ‘It’s lovely.’
It wasn’t at all how he had imagined, it was kind, and sweet, and moving . . . Julia was, for all her am-dram quality, entirely natural.
‘Don’t go. Stay a while. Please,’ he said.
Her fingers deftly fastened the straps on her sandals. ‘Be awfully sophisticated to sit here watching the last of the sunset with you, but I promised Daddy I’d boil up the bones from the duck carcass. Duck soup. Don’t know if that’s bathos or pathos or something like it – we learned it in school last term.’ She pulled her cloche straw hat on and looked down at him, blinking heavily. ‘I liked it awfully today. Tomorrow?’
Anthony put his fingers around her smooth ankle and nodded. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Marvellous,’ said Julia, and her smile was brilliant. ‘What a summer it’ll be.’