Atonement Page 9

  Beyond the compass were his copies of Auden’s Poems and Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. At the other end of the table were various histories, theoretical treatises and practical handbooks on landscape gardening. Ten typed-up poems lay beneath a printed rejection slip from Criterion magazine, initialed by Mr. Eliot himself. Closest to where Robbie sat were the books of his new interest. Gray’s Anatomy was open by a folio pad of his own drawings. He had set himself the task of drawing and committing to memory the bones of the hand. He tried to distract himself by running through some of them now, murmuring their names: capitate, hamate, triquetral, lunate … His best drawing so far, done in ink and colored pencils and showing a cross section of the esophageal tract and the airways, was tacked to a rafter above the table. A pewter tankard with its handle missing held all the pencils and pens. The typewriter was a fairly recent Olympia, given to him on his twenty-first by Jack Tallis at a lunchtime party held in the library. Leon had made a speech as well as his father, and Cecilia had been there surely. But Robbie could not remember a single thing they might have said to each other. Was that why she was angry now, because he had ignored her for years? Another pathetic hope.

  At the outer reaches of the desk, various photographs: the cast of Twelfth Night on the college lawn, himself as Malvolio, cross-gartered. How apt. There was another group shot, of himself and the thirty French kids he had taught in a boarding school near Lille. In a belle époque metal frame tinged with verdigris was a photograph of his parents, Grace and Ernest, three days after their wedding. Behind them, just poking into the picture, was the front wing of a car—certainly not theirs, and further off, an oasthouse looming over a brick wall. It was a good honeymoon, Grace always said, two weeks picking hops with her husband’s family, and sleeping in a gypsy caravan parked in a farmyard. His father wore a collarless shirt. The neck scarf and the rope belt around his flannel trousers may have been playful Romany touches. His head and face were round, but the effect was not exactly jovial, for his smile for the camera was not wholehearted enough to part his lips, and rather than hold the hand of his young bride, he had folded his arms. She, by contrast, was leaning into his side, nestling her head on his shoulder and holding on to his shirt at the elbow awkwardly with both hands. Grace, always game and good-natured, was doing the smiling for two. But willing hands and a kind spirit would not be enough. It looked as though Ernest’s mind was already elsewhere, already drifting seven summers ahead to the evening when he would walk away from his job as the Tallises’ gardener, away from the bungalow, without luggage, without even a farewell note on the kitchen table, leaving his wife and their six-year-old son to wonder about him for the rest of their lives.

  Elsewhere, strewn between the revision notes, landscape gardening and anatomy piles, were various letters and cards: unpaid battels, letters from tutors and friends congratulating him on his first, which he still took pleasure in rereading, and others mildly querying his next step. The most recent, scribbled in brownish ink on Whitehall departmental notepaper, was a message from Jack Tallis agreeing to help with fees at medical school. There were application forms, twenty pages long, and thick, densely printed admission handbooks from Edinburgh and London whose methodical, exacting prose seemed to be a foretaste of a new kind of academic rigor. But today they suggested to him, not adventure and a fresh beginning, but exile. He saw it in prospect—the dull terraced street far from here, a floral wallpapered box with a louring wardrobe and candlewick bedspread, the earnest new friends mostly younger than himself, the formaldehyde vats, the echoing lecture room—every element devoid of her.

  From among the landscape books he took the volume on Versailles he had borrowed from the Tallis library. That was the day he first noticed his awkwardness in her presence. Kneeling to remove his work shoes by the front door, he had become aware of the state of his socks—holed at toe and heel and, for all he knew, odorous—and on impulse had removed them. What an idiot he had then felt, padding behind her across the hall and entering the library barefoot. His only thought was to leave as soon as he could. He had escaped through the kitchen and had to get Danny Hardman to go round the front of the house to collect his shoes and socks.

  She probably would not have read this treatise on the hydraulics of Versailles by an eighteenth-century Dane who extolled in Latin the genius of Le Nôtre. With the help of a dictionary, Robbie had read five pages in a morning and then given up and made do with the illustrations instead. It would not be her kind of book, or anyone’s really, but she had handed it to him from the library steps and somewhere on its leather surface were her fingerprints. Willing himself not to, he raised the book to his nostrils and inhaled. Dust, old paper, the scent of soap on his hands, but nothing of her. How had it crept up on him, this advanced stage of fetishizing the love object? Surely Freud had something to say about that in Three Essays on Sexuality. And so did Keats, Shakespeare and Petrarch, and all the rest, and it was in The Romaunt of the Rose. He had spent three years drily studying the symptoms, which had seemed no more than literary conventions, and now, in solitude, like some ruffed and plumed courtier come to the edge of the forest to contemplate a discarded token, he was worshiping her traces—not a handkerchief, but fingerprints!—while he languished in his lady’s scorn.

  For all that, when he fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter he did not forget the carbon. He typed the date and salutation and plunged straight into a conventional apology for his “clumsy and inconsiderate behavior.” Then he paused. Was he going to make any show of feeling at all, and if so, at what level?

  “If it’s any excuse, I’ve noticed just lately that I’m rather lightheaded in your presence. I mean, I’ve never gone barefoot into someone’s house before. It must be the heat!”

  How thin it looked, this self-protective levity. He was like a man with advanced TB pretending to have a cold. He flicked the return lever twice and rewrote: “It’s hardly an excuse, I know, but lately I seem to be awfully lightheaded around you. What was I doing, walking barefoot into your house? And have I ever snapped off the rim of an antique vase before?” He rested his hands on the keys while he confronted the urge to type her name again. “Cee, I don’t think I can blame the heat!” Now jokiness had made way for melodrama, or plaintiveness. The rhetorical questions had a clammy air; the exclamation mark was the first resort of those who shout to make themselves clearer. He forgave this punctuation only in his mother’s letters where a row of five indicated a jolly good joke. He turned the drum and typed an x. “Cecilia, I don’t think I can blame the heat.” Now the humor was removed, and an element of self-pity had crept in. The exclamation mark would have to be reinstated. Volume was obviously not its only business.

  He tinkered with his draft for a further quarter of an hour, then threaded in new sheets and typed up a fair copy. The crucial lines now read: “You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad—wandering into your house barefoot, or snapping your antique vase. The truth is, I feel rather lightheaded and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat! Will you forgive me? Robbie.” Then, after a few moments’ reverie, tilted back on his chair, during which time he thought about the page at which his Anatomy tended to fall open these days, he dropped forward and typed before he could stop himself, “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.”

  There it was—ruined. The draft was ruined. He pulled the sheet clear of the typewriter, set it aside, and wrote his letter out in longhand, confident that the personal touch fitted the occasion. As he looked at his watch he remembered that before setting out he should polish his shoes. He stood up from his desk, careful not to thump his head on the rafter.

  He was without social unease—inappropriately so, in the view of many. At a dinner in Cambridge once, during a sudden silence round the table, someone who disliked Robbie asked loudly about his parents. Robbie held the man’s eye and answered pleasantly that his father had walked out long ago and that his mot
her was a charlady who supplemented her income as an occasional clairvoyant. His tone was of easygoing tolerance of his questioner’s ignorance. Robbie elaborated upon his circumstances, then ended by asking politely about the parents of the other fellow. Some said that it was innocence, or ignorance of the world, that protected Robbie from being harmed by it, that he was a kind of holy fool who could step across the drawing room equivalent of hot coals without harm. The truth, as Cecilia knew, was simpler. He had spent his childhood moving freely between the bungalow and the main house. Jack Tallis was his patron, Leon and Cecilia were his best friends, at least until grammar school. At university, where Robbie discovered that he was cleverer than many of the people he met, his liberation was complete. Even his arrogance need not be on display.

  Grace Turner was happy to take care of his laundry—how else, beyond hot meals, to show mother love when her only baby was twenty-three?—but Robbie preferred to shine his own shoes. In a white singlet and the trousers of his suit, he went down the short straight run of stairs in his stockinged feet carrying a pair of black brogues. By the living room door was a narrow space that ended in the frosted-glass door of the front entrance through which a diffused blood-orange light embossed the beige and olive wallpaper in fiery honeycomb patterns. He paused, one hand on the doorknob, surprised by the transformation, then he entered. The air in the room felt moist and warm, and faintly salty. A session must have just ended. His mother was on the sofa with her feet up and her carpet slippers dangling from her toes.

  “Molly was here,” she said, and moved herself upright to be sociable. “And I’m glad to tell you she’s going to be all right.”

  Robbie fetched the shoeshine box from the kitchen, sat down in the armchair nearest his mother and spread out a page of a three-day-old Daily Sketch on the carpet.

  “Well done you,” he said. “I heard you at it and went up for a bath.”

  He knew he should be leaving soon, he should be polishing his shoes, but instead he leaned back in the chair, stretched his great length and yawned.

  “Weeding! What am I doing with my life?”

  There was more humor than anguish in his tone. He folded his arms and stared at the ceiling while massaging the instep of one foot with the big toe of the other.

  His mother was staring at the space above his head. “Now come on. Something’s up. What’s wrong with you? And don’t say ‘Nothing.’”

  Grace Turner became the Tallises’ cleaner the week after Ernest walked away. Jack Tallis did not have it in him to turn out a young woman and her child. In the village he found a replacement gardener and handyman who was not in need of a tied cottage. At the time it was assumed Grace would keep the bungalow for a year or two before moving on or remarrying. Her good nature and her knack with the polishing—her dedication to the surface of things, was the family joke—made her popular, but it was the adoration she aroused in the six-year-old Cecilia and her eight-year-old brother Leon that was the saving of her, and the making of Robbie. In the school holidays Grace was allowed to bring her own six-year-old along. Robbie grew up with the run of the nursery and those other parts of the house the children were permitted, as well as the grounds. His tree-climbing pal was Leon, Cecilia was the little sister who trustingly held his hand and made him feel immensely wise. A few years later, when Robbie won his scholarship to the local grammar, Jack Tallis took the first step in an enduring patronage by paying for the uniform and textbooks. This was the year Briony was born. The difficult birth was followed by Emily’s long illness. Grace’s helpfulness secured her position: on Christmas Day that year—1922—Leon dressed in top hat and riding breeches, walked through the snow to the bungalow with a green envelope from his father. A solicitor’s letter informed her that the freehold of the bungalow was now hers, irrespective of the position she held with the Tallises. But she had stayed on, returning to housework as the children grew older, with responsibilities for the special polishing.

  Her theory about Ernest was that he had got himself sent to the Front under another name, and never returned. Otherwise, his lack of curiosity about his son was inhuman. Often, in the minutes she had to herself each day as she walked from the bungalow to the house, she would reflect on the benign accidents of her life. She had always been a little frightened of Ernest. Perhaps they would not have been so happy together as she had been living alone with her darling genius son in her own tiny house. If Mr. Tallis had been a different kind of man … Some of the women who came for a shilling’s glimpse of the future had been left by their husbands, even more had husbands killed at the Front. It was a pinched life the women led, and it easily could have been hers.

  “Nothing,” he said in answer to her question. “There’s nothing up with me at all.” As he took up a brush and a tin of blacking, he said, “So the future’s looking bright for Molly.”

  “She’s going to remarry within five years. And she’ll be very happy. Someone from the north with qualifications.”

  “She deserves no less.”

  They sat in comfortable silence while she watched him buffing his brogues with a yellow duster. By his handsome cheekbones the muscles twitched with the movement, and along his forearms they fanned and shifted in complicated rearrangements under the skin. There must have been something right with Ernest to have given her a boy like this.

  “So you’re off out.”

  “Leon was just arriving as I was coming away. He had his friend with him, you know, the chocolate magnate. They persuaded me to join them for dinner tonight.”

  “Oh, and there was me all afternoon, on the silver. And doing out his room.”

  He picked up his shoes and stood. “When I look for my face in my spoon, I’ll see only you.”

  “Get on. Your shirts are hanging in the kitchen.”

  He packed up the shoeshine box and carried it out, and chose a cream linen shirt from the three on the airer. He came back through and was on his way out, but she wanted to keep him a little longer.

  “And those Quincey children. That boy wetting his bed and all. The poor little lambs.”

  He lingered in the doorway and shrugged. He had looked in and seen them round the pool, screaming and laughing through the late morning heat. They would have run his wheelbarrow into the deep end if he had not gone across. Danny Hardman was there too, leering at their sister when he should have been at work.

  “They’ll survive,” he said.

  Impatient to be out, he skipped up the stairs three at a time. Back in his bedroom he finished dressing hurriedly, whistling tunelessly as he stooped to grease and comb his hair before the mirror inside his wardrobe. He had no ear for music at all, and found it impossible to tell if one note was higher or lower than another. Now he was committed to the evening, he felt excited and, strangely, free. It couldn’t be worse than it already was. Methodically, and with pleasure in his own efficiency, as though preparing for some hazardous journey or military exploit, he accomplished the familiar little chores—located his keys, found a ten-shilling note inside his wallet, brushed his teeth, smelled his breath against a cupped hand, from the desk snatched up his letter and folded it into an envelope, loaded his cigarette case and checked his lighter. One last time, he braced himself in front of the mirror. He bared his gums, and turned to present his profile and looked across his shoulder at his image. Finally, he patted his pockets, then loped down the stairs, three at a time again, called a farewell to his mother, and stepped out onto the narrow brick path which led between the flower beds to a gate in the picket fence.

  In the years to come he would often think back to this time, when he walked along the footpath that made a shortcut through a corner of the oak woods and joined the main drive where it curved toward the lake and the house. He was not late, and yet he found it difficult to slow his pace. Many immediate and other less proximal pleasures mingled in the richness of these minutes: the fading, reddish dusk, the warm, still air saturated with the scents of dried grasses and baked earth, his limbs
loosened by the day’s work in the gardens, his skin smooth from his bath, the feel of his shirt and of this, his only suit. The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation—it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him. Other tributaries swelled his happiness; he still derived satisfaction from the thought of his first—the best in his year he was told. And now there was confirmation from Jack Tallis of his continuing support. A fresh adventure ahead, not an exile at all, he was suddenly certain. It was right and good that he should study medicine. He could not have explained his optimism—he was happy and therefore bound to succeed.

  One word contained everything he felt, and explained why he was to dwell on this moment later. Freedom. In his life as in his limbs. Long ago, before he had even heard of grammar schools, he was entered for an exam that led him to one. Cambridge, much as he enjoyed it, was the choice of his ambitious headmaster. Even his subject was effectively chosen for him by a charismatic teacher. Now, finally, with the exercise of will, his adult life had begun. There was a story he was plotting with himself as the hero, and already its opening had caused a little shock among his friends. Landscape gardening was no more than a bohemian fantasy, as well as a lame ambition—so he had analyzed it with the help of Freud—to replace or surpass his absent father. Schoolmastering—in fifteen years’ time, Head of English, Mr. R. Turner, M.A. Cantab.—was not in the story either, nor was teaching at a university. Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures. It was not the necessary priesthood, nor the most vital pursuit of an inquiring mind, nor the first and last defense against a barbarian horde, any more than the study of painting or music, history or science. At various talks in his final year Robbie had heard a psychoanalyst, a Communist trade union official and a physicist each declare for his own field as passionately, as convincingly, as Leavis had for his own. Such claims were probably made for medicine, but for Robbie the matter was simpler and more personal: his practical nature and his frustrated scientific aspirations would find an outlet, he would have skills far more elaborate than the ones he had acquired in practical criticism, and above all he would have made his own decision. He would take lodgings in a strange town—and begin.