‘Oh?’ she said. ‘But I bet you can’t remember the film we saw. It was Psycho. I don’t know which of us was the most frightened!’
‘I was,’ he grinned.
‘Then,’ she continued, ‘when you were thirteen, we made a picnic in the field on Ellison’s Bank. After we had eaten we fooled about a bit and you put your hand on my leg under my dress. I shouted at you and you pretended it was an accident. But the next week you did it again and I wouldn’t speak to you for a fortnight.’
‘I should be so unlucky now!’ Harry sighed. ‘Anyway, you soon enough came back for more.’
‘Then you started going to school in Hartlepool and I didn’t see so much of you. The winter was a long one. But the next summer was a good one – for us, anyway. One day we got a changing tent on the beach at Crimdon and went swimming. Afterwards, in the tent, when you were supposed to be drying my back, you touched me.’
‘And you touched me,’ he reminded her.
‘And you wanted me to lie down with you.’
‘But you wouldn’t.’
‘Not until the next year. Harry, I wasn’t even fifteen! That was terrible!’
‘Oh, it wasn’t so bad,’ he grinned. ‘Not the way I remember it. But do you remember that first time?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘What a mess!’ he chuckled ruefully. ‘Like trying to pick a lock with a piece of wet blotting paper.’
She had to smile. ‘You got good at it very quickly, though,’ she said. ‘I always wondered where you learned it all. I suppose I really wondered if someone else had shown you how.’
He had been smiling but now the smile fell from his face in a moment. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he said sharply.
‘Why, another girl, of course!’ She was startled by his abrupt change of mood. ‘What did you think I meant?’
‘Another girl?’ he was frowning still. But slowly his look turned first to a sour smile, then an amused grin, and at the last a shaky laugh. ‘Another girl!’ he said again, laughing outright now. ‘What, when I was eleven?’
Relieved, Brenda laughed with him. ‘You’re funny,’ she said.
‘You know,’ he answered, ‘it seems that all my life people have been telling me the same thing: that I’m funny. I’m not really, you know. God, sometimes I wish I knew how to be: how to have a good laugh! It’s as if I don’t have time, as if I’ve never had time. Did you ever get the feeling that if you don’t laugh soon you’ll scream? It’s a feeling I get, I promise you.’
She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never understand you. And sometimes I think you don’t want me to.’ She sighed. ‘It would be nice if you wanted me as much as I want you.’
He stood up, drew her to her feet and kissed her on the forehead, his way of changing the subject. ‘Come on, let’s walk all the way along the beach into Hartlepool. You can catch a bus back to Harden from there.’
‘Walk into Hartlepool? That’ll take all day!’
‘We’ll stop for a coffee on the beach at Crimdon,’ he said. ‘And we can have a swim from the sands a bit farther along. Then we’ll go to my place. You can stay until this evening if you like – unless you’ve other plans?’
‘No, I haven’t – you know I haven’t – but. . .’
‘But?’
Suddenly she was upset, a touch of anxiety. ‘Harry, what’s going to happen to us?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Do you love me?’
‘I think so.’
‘But don’t you know? I mean, I know I love you.’
They began to walk along the dunes, gradually making for the damp sands where the sea was retreating. There were people swimming in the sea down there but not many; the beach was dirty with all the debris of the coalmines to the north, a problem which had been growing for a quarter of a century. Black lorries trundled at the waterline like great amphibious beetles, where their crews shovelled up rounded nuggets of washed sea-coal like black gold. A few miles south of here it was a little cleaner, but as far as Seaton Carew coal and slag deposits marred the clean white sands. Farther south still the damage was much less, but since the mines were almost exhausted Nature would soon begin to put things right again. Still, it would take a long time for the beaches to return to their former beauty. Perhaps they never would.