Atonement Page 12

  Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia’s thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave? What had made her so blind, so obtuse? Many seconds had passed, and it was no longer plausible to be staring fixedly at the sheet of paper. The act of folding it away brought her to an obvious realization: it could not have been sent unsealed. She turned to look at her sister.

  Leon was saying to her, “How about this? I’m good at voices, you’re even better. We’ll read it aloud together.”

  Cecilia moved round him, into Briony’s view.

  “Briony? Briony, did you read this?”

  But Briony, engaged in a shrill response to her brother’s suggestion, writhed in his arms and turned her face from her sister and half buried it in Leon’s jacket.

  From across the room Emily said soothingly, “Calmly now.”

  Again, Cecilia shifted her position so that she was on the other side of her brother. “Where’s the envelope?”

  Briony turned her face away again and laughed wildly at something Leon was telling her.

  Then Cecilia was aware of another figure in their presence, at the edge of vision, moving behind her, and when she turned she confronted Paul Marshall. In one hand he held a silver tray on which stood five cocktail glasses, each one half filled with a viscous brown substance. He lifted a glass and presented it to her.

  “I insist you try it.”

  Ten

  THE VERY complexity of her feelings confirmed Briony in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit. What fairy tale ever held so much by way of contradiction? A savage and thoughtless curiosity prompted her to rip the letter from its envelope—she read it in the hall after Polly had let her in—and though the shock of the message vindicated her completely, this did not prevent her from feeling guilty. It was wrong to open people’s letters, but it was right, it was essential, for her to know everything. She had been delighted to see her brother again, but that did not prevent her from exaggerating her feelings to avoid her sister’s accusing question. And afterward she had only pretended to be eagerly obedient to her mother’s command by running up to her room; as well as wanting to escape Cecilia, she needed to be alone to consider Robbie afresh, and to frame the opening paragraph of a story shot through with real life. No more princesses! The scene by the fountain, its air of ugly threat, and at the end, when both had gone their separate ways, the luminous absence shimmering above the wetness on the gravel—all this would have to be reconsidered. With the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness, and even in her excitement over the possibilities, she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her help.

  The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them obscenely, a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams—an uncle and a nut, the Latin for next, an Old English king attempting to turn back the tide. Rhyming words took their form from children’s books—the smallest pig in the litter, the hounds pursuing the fox, the flat-bottomed boats on the Cam by Grantchester meadow. Naturally, she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No one in her presence had ever referred to the word’s existence, and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her to which—Briony was certain—the word referred. She had no doubt that that was what it was. The context helped, but more than that, the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddling at the foot of the cross. That the word had been written by a man confessing to an image in his mind, confiding a lonely preoccupation, disgusted her profoundly.

  She had read the note standing shamelessly in the center of the entrance hall, immediately sensing the danger contained by such crudity. Something irreducibly human, or male, threatened the order of their household, and Briony knew that unless she helped her sister, they would all suffer. It was also clear that she would have to be helped in a delicate, tactful manner. Otherwise, as Briony knew from experience, Cecilia would turn on her.

  These thoughts preoccupied her as she washed her hands and face and chose a clean dress. The socks she wanted to wear were not to be found, but she wasted no time in hunting. She put on some others, strapped on her shoes and sat at her desk. Downstairs, they were drinking cocktails and she would have at least twenty minutes to herself. She could brush her hair on the way out. Outside her open window a cricket was singing. A sheaf of foolscap from her father’s office was before her, the desk light threw down its comforting yellow patch, the fountain pen was in her hand. The orderly troupe of farm animals lined along the windowsill and the straitlaced dolls poised in the various rooms of their open-sided mansion waited for the gem of her first sentence. At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. What she wanted was to be lost to the unfolding of an irresistible idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of her scratchy silver nib and coiling into words. But how to do justice to the changes that had made her into a real writer at last, and to her chaotic swarm of impressions, and to the disgust and fascination she felt? Order must be imposed. She should begin, as she had decided earlier, with a simple account of what she had seen at the fountain. But that episode in the sunlight was not quite so interesting as the dusk, the idle minutes on the bridge lost to daydreaming, and then Robbie appearing in the semidarkness, calling to her, holding in his hand the little white square that contained the letter that contained the word. And what did the word contain?

  She wrote, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.”

  Surely it was not too childish to say there had to be a story; and this was the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil. But wasn’t she—that was, Briony the writer—supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such nursery-tale ideas as good and evil? There must be some lofty, godlike place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection. If such a place existed, she was not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind.

  Trapped between the urge to write a simple diary account of her day’s experiences and the ambition to make something greater of them that would be polished, self-contained and obscure, she sat for many minutes frowning at her sheet of paper and its infantile quotation and did not write another word. Actions she thought she could describe well enough, and she had the hang of dialogue. She could do the woods in winter, and the grimness of a castle wall. But how to do feelings? All very well to write, She felt sad, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things. Pen in hand, she stared across the room toward her hard-faced dolls, the estranged companions of a childhood she considered closed. It was a chilly sensation, growing up. She would never sit on Emily’s or Cecilia’s lap again, or only as a joke. Two summers ago, on her eleventh birthday, her parents, brother and sister and a fifth person she could not remember had taken her out onto the lawn and tossed her in a blanket eleven times, and then once for luck. Could she trust it now, the hilarious freedom of the upward flight, the blind trust in the kindly grip of adult wrists, when the fifth person could so easily have been Robbie?

  At the sound of the soft clearing of a female throat, she looked up,
startled. It was Lola. She was leaning apologetically into the room, and as soon as their eyes met she tapped the door gently with her knuckles.

  “Can I come in?”

  She came in anyway, her movements somewhat restricted by the blue satin sheath dress she wore. Her hair was loose and she was barefoot. As she approached, Briony put away her pen and covered her sentence with the corner of a book. Lola sat herself down on the edge of the bed and blew dramatically through her cheeks. It was as though they had always had a sisterly end-of-day chat.

  “I’ve had the most appalling evening.”

  When Briony was obliged by her cousin’s fierce stare to raise an eyebrow, she continued, “The twins have been torturing me.”

  She thought it was a figure of speech until Lola twisted her shoulder to reveal, high on her arm, a long scratch.

  “How awful!”

  She held out her wrists. Round each were blotchy bands of chafing.

  “Chinese burns!”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ll get some antiseptic for your arm.”

  “I’ve done all that myself.”

  It was true, the womanly tang of Lola’s perfume could not conceal a childish whiff of Germolene. The least Briony could do was to leave her desk and go to sit beside her cousin.

  “You poor thing!”

  Briony’s compassion made Lola’s eyes fill, and her voice went husky.

  “Everybody thinks they’re angels just because they look alike, but they’re little brutes.”

  She held back a sob, seeming to bite it down with a tremor along her jaw, and then inhaled deeply several times through flared nostrils. Briony took her hand and thought she could see how one might begin to love Lola. Then she went to her chest of drawers and took out a hankie, unfolded it and gave it to her. Lola was about to use it, but the sight of its gaily printed motif of cowgirls and lariats caused her to give out a gentle hooting sound on a rising note, the kind of noise children make to imitate ghosts. Downstairs the doorbell rang, and moments later, just discernible, the rapid tick of high heels on the tiled floor of the hallway. It would be Robbie, and Cecilia was going to the door herself. Worried that Lola’s crying could be heard downstairs, Briony got to her feet again and pushed the bedroom door closed. Her cousin’s distress produced in her a state of restlessness, an agitation that was close to joy. She went back to the bed and put her arm round Lola who raised her hands to her face and began to cry. That a girl so brittle and domineering should be brought this low by a couple of nine-year-old boys seemed wondrous to Briony, and it gave her a sense of her own power. It was what lay behind this near-joyful feeling. Perhaps she was not as weak as she always assumed; finally, you had to measure yourself by other people—there really was nothing else. Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself. At a loss for words, she gently rubbed her cousin’s shoulder and reflected that Jackson and Pierrot alone could not be responsible for such grief; she remembered there was other sorrow in Lola’s life. The family home in the north—Briony imagined streets of blackened mills, and grim men trudging to work with sandwiches in tin boxes. The Quincey home was closed up and might never open again.

  Lola was beginning to recover. Briony asked softly, “What happened?”

  The older girl blew her nose and thought for a moment. “I was getting ready for a bath. They came bursting in and pounced on me. They got me down on the floor …” At this memory she paused to fight another rising sob.

  “But why would they do that?”

  She took a deep breath and composed herself. She stared unseeingly across the room. “They want to go home. I said they couldn’t. They think I’m the one who’s keeping them here.”

  The twins unreasonably venting their frustration on their sister—all this made sense to Briony. But what was troubling her organized spirit now was the thought that soon the call would come to go downstairs and her cousin would need to be in possession of herself.

  “They just don’t understand,” Briony said wisely as she went to the handbasin and filled it with hot water. “They’re just little kids who’ve taken a bad knock.”

  Full of sadness, Lola lowered her head and nodded in such a way that Briony felt a rush of tenderness for her. She guided Lola to the basin and put a flannel in her hands. And then, from a mixture of motives—a practical need to change the subject, the desire to share a secret and show the older girl that she too had worldly experiences, but above all because she warmed to Lola and wanted to draw her closer—Briony told her about meeting Robbie on the bridge, and the letter, and how she had opened it, and what was in it. Rather than say the word out loud, which was unthinkable, she spelled it out for her, backward. The effect on Lola was gratifying. She raised her dripping face from the basin and let her mouth fall open. Briony passed her a towel. Some seconds passed while Lola pretended to find her words. She was hamming it up a bit, but that was fine, and so was her hoarse whisper.

  “Thinking about it all the time?”

  Briony nodded and faced away, as though grappling with tragedy. She could learn to be a little more expressive from her cousin whose turn it now was to put a comforting hand on Briony’s shoulder.

  “How appalling for you. The man’s a maniac.”

  A maniac. The word had refinement, and the weight of medical diagnosis. All these years she had known him and that was what he had been. When she was little he used to carry her on his back and pretend to be a beast. She had been alone with him many times at the swimming hole where he taught her one summer how to tread water and do the breaststroke. Now his condition was named she felt a certain consolation, though the mystery of the fountain episode deepened. She had already decided not to tell that story, suspecting that the explanation was simple and that it would be better not to expose her ignorance.

  “What’s your sister going to do?”

  “I just don’t know.” Again, she did not mention that she dreaded her next meeting with Cecilia.

  “D’you know, on our first afternoon I thought he was a monster when I heard him shouting at the twins by the swimming pool.”

  Briony tried to recall similar moments when the symptoms of mania might have been observed. She said, “He’s always pretended to be rather nice. He’s deceived us for years.”

  The change of subject had worked the trick, for the area around Lola’s eyes which had been inflamed was freckly and pale once more and she was very much her old self. She took Briony’s hand. “I think the police should know about him.”

  The constable in the village was a kindly man with a waxed mustache whose wife kept hens and delivered fresh eggs on her bicycle. Communicating the letter and its word, even spelling it out backward for him, was inconceivable. She went to move her hand away but Lola tightened her grip and seemed to read the younger girl’s mind.

  “We just need to show them the letter.”

  “She might not agree to it.”

  “I bet she will. Maniacs can attack anyone.”

  Lola looked suddenly thoughtful and seemed about to tell her cousin something new. But instead she sprang away and took up Briony’s hairbrush and stood in front of the mirror vigorously brushing out her hair. She had barely started when they heard Mrs. Tallis calling them down to dinner. Lola was immediately petulant, and Briony assumed that these rapid changes of mood were part of her recent upset.

  “It’s hopeless. I’m nowhere near ready,” she said, close to tears again. “I haven’t even started on my face.”

  “I’ll go down now,” Briony soothed her. “I’ll tell them you’ll be a little while yet.” But Lola was already on her way out the room and did not seem to hear.

  After Briony tidied her hair she remained in front of the mirror, studying her own face, wondering what she might do when she came to “start” on it, which she knew she must one day soon. Another demand on her time. At least she had no freckles to conceal or soften, and that surely saved labor. Long ago, at the age of ten, she
decided that lipstick made her seem clownish. That notion was due for revision. But not yet, when there was so much else to consider. She stood by the desk and absently replaced the top of her fountain pen. Writing a story was a hopeless, puny enterprise when such powerful and chaotic forces were turning about her, and when all day long successive events had absorbed or transformed what had gone before. There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. She wondered whether she had made a terrible mistake by confiding in her cousin—Cecilia would hardly be pleased if excitable Lola started flaunting her knowledge of Robbie’s note. And how was it possible to go downstairs now and be at table with a maniac? If the police made an arrest, she, Briony, might be made to appear in court, and say the word aloud, in proof.

  Reluctantly, she left her room and made her way along the gloomy paneled corridor to the head of the stairs where she paused to listen. The voices were still in the drawing room—she heard her mother’s and Mr. Marshall’s, and then, separately, the twins talking to each other. No Cecilia then, no maniac. Briony felt her heart rate rise as she began her unwilling descent. Her life had ceased to be simple. Only three days ago she was finishing off The Trials of Arabella and waiting for her cousins. She had wanted everything to be different, and here it was; and not only was it bad, it was about to get worse. She stopped again on the first landing to consolidate a scheme; she would keep well clear of her skittish cousin, not even catch her eye—she could not afford to be drawn into a conspiracy, nor did she wish to prompt a disastrous outburst. And Cecilia, whom she ought to protect, she dared not go near. Robbie, obviously, she should avoid for safety’s sake. Her mother with her fussing would not be helpful. It would be impossible to think straight in her presence. It was the twins she should go for—they would be her refuge. She would stay close and look after them. These summer dinners always started so late—it was past ten o’clock—and the boys would be tired. And otherwise she should be sociable with Mr. Marshall and ask him about sweets—who thought them up, how they got made. It was a coward’s plan but she could think of no other. With dinner about to be served, this was hardly the moment to be summoning P.C. Vockins from the village.