It was the last summer of peace. There was an eerie sense of normality as everyday life continued as though nothing was happening although no-one talked about tomorrow or the future for the time being. Silently we all recognized that the only thing we could be sure about was 'now'. Perhaps that is the key to this story.
When I came down from Cambridge I took my father's advice and went in to banking but almost died of boredom within a month. I knew then that I must pursue my own ambitions or one day I would wake up and realise that I had earned too much money to risk not being a banker.
I took off to my favourite southern coast with little more than a few pens and a note book to begin my new career as a ground breaking poet. I saw a card in a shop window of the small seaside town advertising an attic room to rent. I answered the call immediately. The house was a few miles outside the town; a beautiful secluded house, with magnificent grounds that ran down to a narrow, shallow river and then to the sea. When I rang the doorbell the home help answered and asked me to sit in the drawing room and Mr. and Mrs. Thompson would be down shortly. When the door opened Mr. Thompson introduced himself as Robert Thompson, and immediately called me 'old sport'. Moving to one side he then introduced his wife, Sophie and at that moment the world, history, time itself stopped for me and has never resumed. Beyond the few clouds in the sky that day, terrible forces were gathering and soon the world would be turned upside down forever. Nothing would stay the same. My love and passion for Sophie, like the wider world we inhabited, marked the tragic end, not the beginning, of a story.
As for him I took an instant dislike to him; there was something bullying about him, coarse, physical. He did not seem to regard her at all. I thought immediately afterwards that my reading of both of them could have been mistaken; time was to show it was not.
As I left the house an hour later I had vague recollections of being told about the house, the couple's routines, showed the room, told the rent and so on. But I was drunk, that is how it seemed. It was not just a question of her beauty, which was not the ostentatious, glamorous kind but a refined and delicate beauty, born, I felt, of intelligence and a capacity for love. This was the first of many lessons Sophie was to teach me: human beauty, or at least the female kind, was more than physical. It was the minute, human actions that enraptured me: the way she moved, sat down, smiled, laughed, tucked a stray hair behind her ear and shook my hand when I left.
After I had walked a few steps away from the house I turned around to catch another glimpse of it. To my surprise Sophie was still standing in the doorway watching me go but her husband had gone back inside. When I saw her she smiled and I replied with a limp wave but that smile stretched out forever.
Two days later when I moved in I was met in the entrance hall by Robert who explained that he had to go away for a few days on business but that Sophie would show me all I needed to know. He introduced the housekeeper, Mrs. Henderson, who would help me settle in.
"Sophie will see you soon," was his parting shot as his car arrived to take him somewhere.
What happened next is hard to explain to anyone else except myself. I hold on to the wildly romantic and no doubt erroneous view, that out there is the right person for everyone but the world is a big place and the chance of everyone finding that person is remote.
Once in my room I touched none of my belongings and just waited for her. The temporal logic of time was in abeyance; events were fiercely compressed into mere moments. Soon there was quiet knock on the door and Sophie came in. Neither of us spoke but smiled knowingly. She walked over to me close enough to touch and paused for a moment before putting her arms around my neck and kissed me before resting her head on my chest. It was that simple. I remember saying, "What took you so long?"
How can I truly convey this? It felt not like a first meeting but a reunion, a resumption of something that we had once, who knows when?
After a minutes silence in that position she stood up and gently pushed me a few inches away. She then started to undo the buttons of her dress and said, "Well, are you going to fuck me or not?" We both laughed and in doing so registered our mutual understanding of this extraordinary moment.
As she released the final button she reached up to the collar to pull it away but I intercepted her hands and put them by her side. I wanted the privilege of doing that. As the dress slid to the floor I saw for the first time her beautiful body. She never wore a bra, she did not need one; I noticed the first time I saw her, the press of a nipple against her dress. She had beautiful, small, pointed breasts with large, dark nipples. She always derided them, "They're girls' breasts," she exclaimed, "not a woman's! And when I lie down they disappear altogether!" No matter how many times I told her how beautiful they were, she remained unconvinced and self conscious about them. When her younger sister, Martine, who was more generously endowed than Sophie, came to visit I was warned not to spend the whole weekend looking at her breasts. However, this was all jest. I think over time she came to believe me when I told her how beautiful she was but she would never admit it; she never had compliments from Robert and was too modest to believe too easily what I told her.
I tried to show her once that her beauty had a lot to with curves but not the curves of her breasts. On one occasion when she was naked I tried to demonstrate it to her. I stood behind her with my hands on the cheeks of her face and slowly ran my hands downwards, first to point out the curve inwards as they ran down her slender neck; then down her spine until it curved outwards to her perfectly formed backside, inwards again down her slender legs, out and down her calves before finally returning inwards as her legs thinned down to her ankles.
"That," I recall exclaiming triumphantly, "is the beauty of your curves, my love!"
I told her she should read Hogarth's Line of Beauty. Then she put on one of her mock reprimands.
"Don't you try and sound clever with me young man. I'm the lady of the house here and you're just the lodger!"
Then she would throw her head back and peal with laughter. And my heart beat with desire.
That first time was brief, each of us trying to restrain the urgency of desire. I heard for the first time the loud music of Sophie's gasps and groans that became the soundtrack of that summer. We tried to avoid doing it when Mrs. Henderson was in the house but it was not always possible and so I was forced to put my hand across Sophie's mouth to muffle the noise. We were insatiable. The more we did it the more we wanted it. My cock hardened just waiting for her. When it didn't I took off my clothes and massaged it fiercely so it was in prime order when she finally arrived. Throwing off the few clothes she was wearing she was on top of me in an instant. Her loud gasps, sweating body and those rapidly vibrating breasts is an image whose arousal power, all these years later, has remained undiminished.
But it is the sea that is forever locked into all facets of my memories of that summer and Sophie. My childhood was a city one and as children we never once visited the sea; I was fifteen years old when I first saw it and I was mesmerised.
That summer the sea's smells, sounds and truculent changes of mood were part of my all encompassing passion for Sophie. One glorious, hot day she announced that she wanted to show me a special part of the beach only twenty minutes walk away for which she said brought a large picnic basket in which were fresh strawberries and a bottle of champagne.
The place she took me to was beautifully secluded by dunes and largely unvisited.
"But first," she announced just after we arrived, "I want a swim."
"I haven't brought a costume."
By this time she had just about stripped off all she was wearing.
"Suppose someone comes," I feebly objected.
"Don't be a prude," she yelled and ran screeching and naked into the sea. I stripped off and ran after her. When we came back Sophie flopped onto the sand with her legs apart and her arms held imploringly outwards.
"Please, Hugh, please, now!"
My earlier inhibitions had dissolved and I eased myself on top of her. I cannot claim to remember all the details of the many times I fucked her that summer but this one I did. As my lips and tongue ranged over her body I experienced for the first and last time that euphoric elixir of female skin, salt water and sweat mixed with the distant call of gulls, lapping waves and the heavy rhythm of Sophie's loud, urgent gasps.
When we had finally caught our breath Sophie sat up and decided now was the time for the champagne and strawberries but I intervened.
"No," I remember saying, "now I'm going to teach you something."
Her eyes lit up. Anticipation enlivened her face.
"There is only one way to eat strawberries and drink champagne," I continued, "do you know what that is?"
"No," she said with the excitement of a young child.
