Amy and Dorrigo begin their affair

Amy and Dorrigo begin their affair when Amy admits that her feelings for Dorrigo are the reason she cannot bear being alone with Keith. What follows is an intimate relationship that gives both characters a powerful sense of connection, yet also exposes a conflict between desire and freedom. The affair grows into a secret summer of increasingly risky encounters, ending abruptly when Keith tells Amy that he knows about it and has known all along.

The Confession and the Beginning

Amy’s admission makes explicit what had been held back: she wants to be with Dorrigo. Her statement links her distress around Keith to her attachment to Dorrigo, rather than presenting the affair as a sudden, unexplained change. Dorrigo has no answer when she first speaks. The movement from her declaration to their intimacy is therefore not negotiated through an extended conversation; the confession itself marks the decisive change in their relationship.

The beginning is narrated through Dorrigo’s shifting experience. Their intimacy first appears to draw them into an unusually complete understanding of one another. A disturbance nearby interrupts that sense of closeness, and Dorrigo abruptly experiences Amy as distant. The connection seems to vanish almost as soon as it has formed. Amy calls his attention back to her, and he responds, even though he is now afraid of being drawn into a life and future he has not chosen. The scene establishes the affair’s central tension at its outset: the desire for union is accompanied by fear of losing oneself.

An Intensifying Secret Relationship

Dorrigo initially struggles to accept the force of Amy’s feelings. He first dismisses them as lust, then becomes perplexed by their intensity, and eventually recognizes that he cannot simply explain or evade them. His account presents Amy’s desire as a powerful force that overwhelms his low estimation of himself and draws him into the relationship. This progression matters because the affair is not depicted as a settled decision made once and then calmly maintained; Dorrigo repeatedly experiences himself as yielding to an attachment whose strength surprises him.

As the summer continues, the pair become increasingly reckless. They take opportunities wherever they can, aware that discovery might end the secrecy, yet also thrilled by the risk. Their encounters take place on beaches, in the ocean, in a Cabriolet, behind the King of Cornwall Hotel, in its cellar, and, on one occasion, in the kitchen late at night. The range of settings makes their affair seem to spread through the ordinary spaces around them. Secrecy does not cool their attachment; the possibility of being discovered becomes part of the pressure under which it develops.

Dorrigo’s experience after their encounters is more unsettled than a straightforward story of romantic happiness would suggest. Amy can seem physically close yet emotionally remote, and he is amazed by her rather than simply pleased or proud. During one morning encounter, her apparent absorption in an experience of her own unsettles him. He wonders whether he is merely a means by which she reaches an elsewhere that he cannot understand; the possibility produces a brief resentment, even as he recognizes that his own body is caught up in the same mystery. The affair thus gives them intense closeness without guaranteeing mutual understanding.

The Affair’s Double Bind

The relationship repeatedly places intimacy and autonomy in opposition. At the beginning, Dorrigo fears that surrendering to Amy will cost him his freedom and future. Yet when he gives himself over to the relationship, he experiences her not merely as an object of desire but as necessary to his sense of completeness. The change is not a resolution of his fear so much as its counterpart: the more powerful the attachment becomes, the more consequential the possibility of being absorbed by it appears.

The narration also emphasizes how little either character can make the affair fully legible. Amy’s feelings are first difficult for Dorrigo to believe and later difficult for him to name. Her intense absorption can seem to him both compelling and unfamiliar; he cannot confidently determine what she seeks from him. His reflections do not erase her desire, which she states directly, but they show how the relationship is filtered through his uncertainty and self-questioning. The affair is therefore presented as mutual intimacy without complete access to the other person’s inner life.

Exposure and the End of the Summer

The secret relationship ends in a confrontation rather than a gradual cooling. Keith tells Amy that he knows about the affair and that he has always known. The disclosure brings the summer to an abrupt close, compared in the narrative to a joyriders’ car smash. Its force comes partly from the reversal: the lovers have taken risks while imagining discovery as a possibility, but Keith’s words reveal that their secrecy has not kept him unaware.

This ending gives the affair a defined arc: Amy’s confession opens it, secret encounters intensify it, and Keith’s knowledge closes its summer. The evidence does not describe a reconciliation or a lasting resolution between the three characters at this point. Instead, the relationship remains marked by the contrast between its private intensity and the exposure waiting beyond it. For Dorrigo, it is at once a profound experience of connection and an episode shadowed by his fear that love might claim more of his life than he can surrender.