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Chapters (51)
  1. Introduction by Michael Bronski
  2. BEGINNING
  3. II
  4. III
  5. IV
  6. V
  7. VI
  8. VII
  9. VIII
  10. IX
  11. X
  12. XI
  13. XII
  14. XIII
  15. MIDDLE
  16. II
  17. III
  18. IV
  19. V
  20. VI
  21. VII
  22. VIII
  23. IX
  24. X
  25. XI
  26. XII
  27. XIII
  28. XIV
  29. XV
  30. XVI
  31. XVII
  32. XVIII
  33. XIX
  34. XX
  35. END
  36. II
  37. III
  38. IV
  39. V
  40. VI
  41. VII
  42. VIII
  43. IX
  44. X
  45. XI
  46. XII
  47. XIII
  48. XIV
  49. XV
  50. XVI
  51. About the Author

Moon or no moon, it had been a mistake to choose this period in preference to the longer holiday he could have had later, at the close of summer school. It was a mistake to buy the sandwiches and cokes for Cliff Hauman in the cafeteria: he didn’t even know him at the time; but it had been even more of a mistake to invite the Haumans to join them on the upper deck. It was a mistake to offer them the use of their room at Dune House, when they came out to Sconset to swim. Baiting Ethel about her distress (“I suppose it’s a moral question”) had been a very serious mistake indeed. It was a mistake to have let the Haumans take them over so completely; and he should never have permitted Miss Fly to seat them all at the same table. He should not have attempted to question Cliff so personally in the shower, he should have avoided him as much as possible (what, indeed, did they have in common?), and he should not have attended the Yacht Club party where, from the beginning, he had felt he did not belong. As it turned out, it had been a serious error to have left Ethel’s bottle of sun-­tan oil on the beach, though this was an oversight merely; but he should not have abandoned her on the steps of Dune House to go wandering off by himself on a disastrous midnight walk in the fog: purposely or not, he had headed straight for the beach against the regulations of wartime. But perhaps the greatest error of all went far back: he should not have married.

Why had he married? He had loved Ethel Cameron, or at least thought he had; but as he looked back on it now, his feeling for her seemed to him to have been whim rather than passion. He had wanted to belong, fit in, find a place in social life which he could have found only in marriage. Well-­intentioned though he had been, did one have the right to play with another’s life in such a fashion? Out of a kind of will to do good, an unconscious dread of the errors to which his bachelorhood had been susceptible, he had involved Ethel in an insoluble problem of his own making and dragged her down with him. What could he do about it now? He had committed another deadly error in allowing Ethel to leave the island by herself. In the dangerous state she was in, who knew what she might not do? Yet he had stood helplessly by and allowed her to go. Why? Pride, perhaps. Certainly it had little to do with Cliff Hauman. Since the upsetting revelation of last midnight, he had positively ruled out even the remote probability of getting anywhere with the marine.

VII

VII