Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [104]
He thought, Is this it? Like this, standing up? Is this what she wants?
Then her mouth was smearing away from his, and she was somehow laughing and gasping, “No,” at the same time. She pulled away from him, shrugging her coat off. She spread it on the sand and sat on it, leaning forward, her arms wrapped around her knees. Not looking at him. Distant, as though he weren’t even there and she was lost in a private moment. He felt something that was the comfortable opposite of hope. Then, as if she were alone and getting ready for bed, Frankie flipped her shoes off and reached up under her skirt. She unfastened her stockings and peeled them from her legs. Such outrageously beautiful legs. She stretched them out and fingered the sand with her toes. She felt under her skirt again and fiddled with something. Produced, like a magician, her garter belt, a flimsy-looking thing like the skin of a small black reptile, and . . .
And looked up at him.
“?” her eyes said.
?
So he took his shoes and socks off, awkward, leaning against the slanting wall of the pillbox.
With her eyes on his, she undid her skirt and cast it aside. Her knickers were pink with a white lace waistband. Her belly curved like a question mark up toward the edge of her sweater.
With unsteady hands, he unbelted and dropped his jeans. He somehow got his right foot stuck and had to hop around to keep his balance. She laughed, and he tried to. While he was still struggling, she stood up and ran down to the slow surf and walked into it.
He didn’t know whether to lie on the coat and adopt some sort of seductive position until she came back or to follow her. From this distance, she looked so like a child, in her sweater and pink knickers and her arms held out and the cold, lazy foam separating and regathering around her shins. She turned and called something, words shredded by sea sound and gulls.
So he went to her, his shirttails flapping below his sleeveless sweater, his feet wincing on the stones and broken shells. The coldness of the water was withering at first, then an almost pleasant numbness. Frankie’s arms were folded under her breasts now, and she was gazing out at where the blue-gray horizon was silvered by slants of light.
“Frankie?”
It was like waking her up.
She said, “I don’t believe all this is going to come to an end, actually. It just can’t.”
“Yes, it could,” he said stoutly. “Right this minute some Russian or some American could be pressing a button, and we wunt know anything about it until . . . well, you know.”
She turned her head and looked at him.
“It’s not going to happen.” She said it brightly and firmly, with tears in her eyes.
His heart went as dead as his feet.
“Ent it?”
“No.” Then she smiled. “I love it when you go all pouty. It makes you look ever so young.”
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, the cold gray water sloshing at their legs.
“Come on, then,” she said, and took him by the hand and led him away from the sea.
“Mr. Hoseason!”
Enoch seemed oblivious to the vicar’s presence. He carried on declaiming the words of Saint John the Divine.
“Mr. Hoseason, sir! What is the meaning of this, this unseemly . . . exhibition?”
At last Enoch lifted his eyes and fixed them on Underwood’s. The dark ecstasy in his glare made the clergyman flinch.
“‘I know thy works,’” Enoch recited, his voice grimmer than before, “‘that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.
“‘So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
“‘Because thou sayest, I am rich and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked . . .’”
Good grief, Underwood thought. He knows the damned thing by heart!
It was clear that he wasn’t going to get any sense out of the blacksmith, so Underwood looked around the circle of Brethren until he caught the eye of Jonathan Eldon, whose denuded head was specked with razor cuts.
“Jonathan, for the love of God! What are you doing?”
“Awaiting deliverance,”