A young man goes to the beach, having spurned his friends because he’d decided he wants to spend the day alone. Once there, “among the ice-cream cries” he’s lonely and bored. He falls in love with a young woman “willing and warm under the cotton” who smiles at him in a communal garden. But he is too shy to talk to her. Luckily, they encounter each other again later that day in the pub where he’s been kicking himself for his shyness. After getting acquainted, they head back to her room, taking a party of people from the pub with them. She tells him the others won’t stay long and that he must be patient. Once in her room, he starts to fantasise about the time they’ll spend together, not only that night but for the rest of their lives. He’s sure the two of them are made for each other. It all seems too good to be true. But don’t worry, the only climax on offer is the devastating kind. Stepping out of the room to use the toilet, the young man gets lost in the dark hallways of the house. After disturbing many of the occupants of the other rooms, tearing up and down the halls shouting the woman’s name, and almost falling to his death down a shaft, he fails to find his way back to his lover. The horror!
Perhaps what appeals to me about this story is that Thomas sets up a kind of fantasy for the retiring type (of which I count myself), wherein despite being too shy to talk to the woman in the garden the young man gets a second chance (which never happens in real life, let me tell you!) and looks set to spend the night with her, only for this fantasy to be cruelly dismantled at the end. It’s almost as if I can hear Dylan Thomas laughing in my face.
The young man, we can only assume, will be haunted by this missed opportunity for the rest of his life, and will be forever wondering ‘what if?’ As, of course, is the reader. By this, and by his or her own lifetime’s worth of missed opportunities. How delicious. Right?
First published in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dent, 1940
A Personal Anthology 