Eye of the Needle(9)

She dropped her hands, shouted, “Go!” and struck out in a fast crawl.

David won, of course, with his enormously long arms and legs. Lucy found herself in difficulty when she was still fifty yards from the island. She switched to breaststroke, but she was too exhausted even for that, and she had to roll over on to her back and float. David, who was already sitting on the bank blowing like a walrus, slipped back into the water and swam to meet her. He got behind her, held her beneath the arms in the correct lifesaving position, and pulled her slowly to shore. His hands were just below her breasts.

“I’m enjoying this,” he said, and she giggled despite her breathlessness.

A few moments later he said, “I suppose I might as well tell you.”

“What?” she panted.

“The lake is only four feet deep.”

“You…!” She wriggled out of his arms, spluttering and laughing, and found her footing.

He took her hand and led her out of the water and through the trees. He pointed to an old wooden rowboat rotting upside-down beneath a hawthorn. “When I was a boy I used to row out here in that, with one of Papa’s pipes, a box of matches and a pinch of St. Bruno in a twist of paper. This is where I used to smoke it.”

They were in a clearing, completely surrounded by bushes. The turf underfoot was clean and springy. Lucy flopped on the ground.

“We’ll swim back slowly,” David said.

“Let’s not even talk about it just yet,” she replied.

He sat beside her and kissed her, then pushed her gently backwards until she was lying down. He stroked her hip and kissed her throat, and soon she stopped shivering. When he laid his hand gently, nervously, on the soft mound between her legs, she arched upwards, willing him to press harder. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him open-mouthed and wetly. His hands went to the straps of her swimsuit, and he pulled them down over her shoulders. She said, “No.”

He buried his face between her breasts. “Lucy, please.”

“No.”

He looked at her. “It might be my last chance.”

She rolled away from him and stood up. Then, because of the war, and because of the pleading look on his flushed young face, and because of the glow inside her which would not go away, she took off her costume with one swift movement and removed her bathing cap so that her dark-red hair shook out over her shoulders. She knelt in front of him, taking his face in her hands and guiding his lips to her breast.

She lost her virginity painlessly, enthusiastically, and only a little too quickly.





THE SPICE OF GUILT made the memory more pleasant, not less. Even if it had been a well-planned seduction then she had been a willing, not to say eager, victim, especially at the end.

She began to dress in her going-away outfit. She had startled him a couple of times that afternoon on the island: once when she wanted him to kiss her breasts, and again when she had guided him inside her with her hands. Apparently such things did not happen in the books he read. Like most of her friends, Lucy read D. H. Lawrence for information about sex. She believed in his choreography and mistrusted the sound effects—the things his people did to one another sounded nice, but not that nice; she was not expecting trumpets and thunderstorms and the clash of cymbals at her sexual awakening.

David was a little more ignorant than she, but he was gentle, and he took pleasure in her pleasure, and she was sure that was the important thing.

They had done it only once since the first time. Exactly a week before their wedding they had made love again, and it caused their first row.

This time it was at her parents’ house, in the morning after everyone else had left. He came to her room in his robe and got into bed with her. She almost changed her mind about Lawrence’s trumpets and cymbals. David got out of bed immediately afterward.

“Don’t go,” she said.

“Somebody might come in.”

“I’ll chance it. Come back to bed.” She was warm and drowsy and comfortable, and she wanted him beside her.

He put on his robe. “It makes me nervous.”

“You weren’t nervous five minutes ago.” She reached for him. “Lie with me. I want to get to know your body.”

Her directness obviously embarrassed him, and he turned away.

She flounced out of bed, her lovely breasts heaving. “You’re making me feel cheap!” She sat on the edge of the bed and burst into tears.

David put his arms around her and said: “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. You’re the first for me, too, and I don’t know what to expect, and I feel confused…I mean, nobody tells you anything about this, do they?”

She snuffled and shook her head in agreement, and it occurred to her that what was really unnerving him was the knowledge that in eight days’ time he had to take off in a flimsy aircraft and fight for his life above the clouds; so she forgave him, and he dried her tears, and they got back into bed. He was very sweet after that….

She was just about ready. She examined herself in a full-length mirror. Her suit was faintly military, with square shoulders and epaulettes, but the blouse beneath it was feminine, for balance. Her hair fell in sausage curls beneath a natty pill-box hat. It would not have been right to go away gorgeously dressed, not this year; but she felt she had achieved the kind of briskly practical, yet attractive, look that was rapidly becoming fashionable.