Suddenly Barry Flegg opened his mouth and yawned like a horse.

‘I expect you’ll marry some bloke, and he’ll take you to bed, and get children with you. That’s what happens to most girls. The normal thing.’

Nobody had spoken so coarsely to her before. The shock of it convinced her that her mother was mostly right.

She lay there trying not to frown, trembling although she gripped the sand.

‘Poor old Anthea!’ Barry Flegg was saying, and began gently to stroke her thigh. ‘It’s my common origins. Dad’s the stationmaster at Buckleboo. Mother used to clean out the toilets at the Black Bull before she married. They’re a bloody boring pair, but good. I go down there from time to time, when my sense of duty needs refreshing, and learn about truth at its source. And eat baked parsnips, which I don’t particularly like.’

All the time gently stroking her thigh. And she let him. Petrified with curiosity.

Gulls were flying overhead in slow, white, unabashed sweeps, looking, and lulling, and swooning, and wooing.

When he eased his arm, harder than the pillow of sand, underneath her neck, she was no longer so very surprised, nor at the stench of male body and whorls of tingling hair with which the gulf in her experience was now filling. She lay rigid, though, unyielding while unresisting, allowing the theory of it to play upon her breasts and ear.

‘Poor old Anthea!’ he kept on saying. ‘This is the course the Vocational Guidance Officer prescribes. Believe me!’

Her vocation! If she had had faith she might have believed in voices, particularly those of men. Or she might have offered up her pale hair, instead of submitting her cheek to razors. Some of it was excruciating.

‘Lie still! I want you.’ He had changed key to give an order.

But the hoarser voice and the weight and extent of his body growing on hers, undermined her daring.

Then the one great gull swooped, intense of beak, intent of eye, as though about to strike.

‘No-ooh!’ she screamed.

Beating her head against the sand.

At least he respected her distress. He raised himself, and lay along the ridge of shells which were becoming sand, but close beside her, and without any attempt to disguise the true state of his affairs.

She sat up dusting her still comparatively white shins.

‘I’d always hoped,’ she said, ‘I’d fall in love.’

‘Why not?’ he replied, looking at her without resentment. ‘That’s what we’re all trying for. But have to learn it.’

‘Not like animals.’

‘We are, aren’t we? With instincts for decency thrown in.’

She preferred to nurse, not so much her bruised sides, as a moral injury she might have enjoyed sustaining.

‘It’s not the way I look at it,’ she said. ‘It’s more,’ she said, ‘something finer.’

He kept on looking at her from under the heavy eyelids, so that she had to turn to him at last, and smile, restoring him to a position where they might meet socially. But could not return his stare for long, because she was too conscious of his throat.