Read On the Beach for Free Online Page A

give the knot between her shoulder blades a tweak as she went into the water, and it now floated by her side. She grabbed it with one hand and said, “Swim round to the other side and sit on the centreboard. She’ll come up all right.” She swam with him.
    In the distance they saw the white motor boat on safety patrol turn and head towards them. She said to her companion, “Here’s the crash boat coming now. Just one thing after another. Help me get this on before they come, Dwight.” She could have done it perfectly well herself, lying face down in the water. “That’s right—a good hard knot. Not quite so tight as that; I’m not a Japanese. That’s right. Now let’s get this boat up and go on with the race.”
    She climbed on to the centreboard that stuck out horizontally from the hull at water level and stood on it holding on to the gunwale while he swam below, marvelling at the slim lines of her figure and at her effrontery. He bore his weight down on the plate with her and the boat lifted sodden sails out of the water, hesitated, and then came upright with a rush. The girl tumbled over the topsides into the cockpit and fell in a heap as she cast off the mainsheet, and Dwight clambered in beside her. In a minute they were under way again, the vessel tender with the weight of water on her sails, before the crash boat reached them. “Don’t you do that again,” she said severely. “This is my sun-bathing suit. It’s not meant for swimming in.”
    “I don’t know how I came to do it,” he apologised. “We were doing all right up till then.”
    They completed the course without further incident,finishing last but one. They sailed in to the beach, and Peter met them waist deep in the water. He caught the boat and turned her into wind. “Have a good sail?” he asked. “I saw you bottle her.”
    “It’s been a lovely sail,” the girl replied. “Dwight bottled her and then my bra came off, so one way and another we’ve had a thrilling time. Never a dull moment. She goes beautifully, Peter.”
    They jumped over into the water and pulled the boat ashore, let down the sails, and put her on the trolley on the slipway to park her up on the beach. Then they bathed off the end of the jetty and sat smoking in the warm evening sun, sheltered from the offshore wind by the cliff behind them.
    The American looked at the blue water, the red cliffs, the moored motor boats rocking on the water. “This is quite a place you’ve got here,” he said reflectively. “For its size it’s as nice a little club as any that I’ve seen.”
    “They don’t take sailing too seriously,” Peter remarked. “That’s the secret.”
    The girl said, “That’s the secret of everything. When do we start drinking again, Peter?”
    “The crowd are coming in at about eight o’clock,” he told her. He turned to his guest. “We’ve got a few people coming in this evening,” he said. “I thought we’d go down and have dinner at the hotel first. Eases the strain on the domestic side.”
    “Sure. That’ll be fine.”
    The girl said, “You’re not taking Commander Towers to the Pier Hotel again?”
    “That’s where we thought of going for dinner.”
    She said darkly, “It seems to me to be very unwise.”
    The American laughed. “You’re building up quite a reputation for me in these parts.”
    “You’re doing that for yourself,” she retorted. “I’m doing all I can to whitewash you. I’m not going to say a word about you tearing off my bra.”
    Dwight Towers glanced at her uncertainly, and then he laughed. He laughed as he had not laughed for a year, unrestrained by thoughts of what had gone before. “Okay,” he said at last. “We’ll keep that a secret, just between you and me.”
    “It will be on my side,” she said primly. “You’ll probably be telling everyone about it later on this evening when you’re a bit full.”
    Peter said, “Maybe we’d better think about changing. I told Mary we’d be