Atonement (9 page)

His footsteps quickened in the still summer evening to the rhythm of his exultant thoughts. Ahead of him, about a hundred yards away, was the bridge, and on it, he thought, picked out against the darkness of the road, was a white shape which seemed at first to be part of the pale stone of the parapet. Staring at it dissolved its outlines, but within a few paces it had taken on a vaguely human form. At this distance he was not able to tell whether it faced away or towards him. It was motionless and he assumed he was being watched. He tried for a second or two to entertain himself with the idea of a ghost, but he had no belief in the supernatural, not even in the supremely undemanding being that presided over the Norman church in the village. It was a child, he saw now, and therefore it must be Briony, in the white dress he had seen her wearing earlier in the day. He could see her clearly now and he raised his hand and called out to her, and said, ‘It's me, Robbie,' but still she did not move.

As he approached it occurred to him that it might be preferable for his letter to precede him into the house. Otherwise he might have to pass it to Cecilia in company, watched perhaps by her mother who had been rather cool towards him since
he came down. Or he might be unable to give the letter to Cecilia at all because she would be keeping her distance. If Briony gave it to her, she would have time to read it and reflect in private. The few extra minutes might soften her.

‘I was wondering if you'd do me a favour,' he said as he came up to her.

She nodded and waited.

‘Will you run ahead and give this note to Cee?'

He put the envelope into her hand as he spoke, and she took it without a word.

‘I'll be there in a few minutes,' he started to say, but she had already turned and was running across the bridge. He leaned back against the parapet and took out a cigarette as he watched her bobbing and receding form fade into the dusk. It was an awkward age in a girl, he thought contentedly. Twelve, or was it thirteen? He lost sight of her for a second or two, then saw her as she crossed the island, highlighted against the darker mass of trees. Then he lost her again, and it was only when she reappeared, on the far side of the second bridge, and was leaving the drive to take a shortcut across the grass that he stood suddenly, seized by horror and absolute certainty. An involuntary, wordless shout left him as he took a few hurried steps along the drive, faltered, ran on, then stopped again, knowing that pursuit was pointless. He could no longer see her as he cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed Briony's name. That was pointless too. He stood there, straining his eyes to see her – as if that would help – and straining his memory too, desperate to believe that he was mistaken. But there was no mistake. The handwritten letter he had rested on the open copy of
Gray's Anatomy
, Splanchnology section, page 1546, the vagina. The typed page, left by him near the typewriter, was the one he had taken and folded into the envelope. No need for Freudian smart-aleckry – the explanation was simple and mechanical – the innocuous letter was lying across figure 1236, with its bold spread and rakish crown of pubic hair, while his obscene draft was on the table,
within easy reach. He bellowed Briony's name again, though he knew she must be by the front entrance by now. Sure enough, within seconds, a distant rhombus of ochre light containing her outline widened, paused, then narrowed to nothing as she entered the house and the door was closed behind her.

 

Nine

O
n two occasions within half an hour, Cecilia stepped out of her bedroom, caught sight of herself in the gilt-frame mirror at the top of the stairs and, immediately dissatisfied, returned to her wardrobe to reconsider. Her first resort was a black crêpe de Chine dress which, according to the dressing-table mirror, bestowed by means of clever cutting a certain severity of form. Its air of invulnerability was heightened by the darkness of her eyes. Rather than offset the effect with a string of pearls, she reached in a moment's inspiration for a necklace of pure jet. The lipstick's bow had been perfect at first application. Various tilts of the head to catch perspectives in triptych reassured her that her face was not too long, or not this evening. She was expected in the kitchen on behalf of her mother, and Leon was waiting for her, she knew, in the drawing room. Still, she found time, as she was about to leave, to return to the dressing table and apply her perfume to the points of her elbows, a playful touch in accord with her mood as she closed the door of her bedroom behind her.

But the public gaze of the stairway mirror as she hurried towards it revealed a woman on her way to a funeral, an austere, joyless woman moreover, whose black carapace had affinities with some form of matchbox-dwelling insect. A stag
beetle! It was her future self, at eighty-five, in widow's weeds. She did not linger – she turned on her heel, which was also black, and returned to her room.

She was sceptical, because she knew the tricks the mind could play. At the same time, her mind was – in every sense – where she was to spend the evening, and she had to be at ease with herself. She stepped out of the black crêpe dress where it fell to the floor, and stood in her heels and underwear, surveying the possibilities on the wardrobe racks, mindful of the passing minutes. She hated the thought of appearing austere. Relaxed was how she wanted to feel, and, at the same time, self-contained. Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time. Downstairs the knot of impatience would be tightening in the kitchen, while the minutes she was planning to spend alone with her brother were running out. Soon her mother would appear and want to discuss the table placings, Paul Marshall would come down from his room and be in need of company, and then Robbie would be at the door. How was she to think straight?

She ran a hand along the few feet of personal history, her brief chronicle of taste. Here were the flapper dresses of her teenage years, ludicrous, limp, sexless things they looked now, and though one bore wine stains and another a burn hole from her first cigarette, she could not bring herself to turn them out. Here was a dress with the first timid hint of shoulder pads, and others followed more assertively, muscular older sisters throwing off the boyish years, rediscovering waistlines and curves, dropping their hemlines with self-sufficient disregard for the hopes of men. Her latest and best piece, bought to celebrate the end of finals, before she knew about her miserable third, was the figure-hugging dark green bias-cut backless evening gown with a halter neck. Too dressy to have its first outing at home. She ran her hand further back and brought out a moiré silk dress with a pleated bodice and scalloped hem – a safe choice since the pink was muted and
musty enough for evening wear. The triple mirror thought so too. She changed her shoes, swapped her jet for the pearls, retouched her make-up, rearranged her hair, applied a little perfume to the base of her throat, more of which was now exposed, and was back out in the corridor in less than fifteen minutes.

Earlier in the day she had seen old Hardman going about the house with a wicker basket, replacing electric bulbs. Perhaps there was now a harsher light at the top of the stairs, for she had never had this difficulty with the mirror there before. Even as she approached from a distance of forty feet, she saw that it was not going to let her pass; the pink was in fact innocently pale, the waistline was too high, the dress flared like an eight-year-old's party frock. All it needed was rabbit buttons. As she drew nearer, an irregularity in the surface of the ancient glass foreshortened her image and she confronted the child of fifteen years before. She stopped and experimentally raised her hands to the side of her head and gripped her hair in bunches. This same mirror must have seen her descend the stairs like this on dozens of occasions, on her way to one more friend's afternoon birthday bash. It would not help her state of mind, to go down looking like, or believing she looked like, Shirley Temple.

More in resignation than irritation or panic, she returned to her room. There was no confusion in her mind: these too-vivid, untrustworthy impressions, her self-doubt, the intrusive visual clarity and eerie differences that had wrapped themselves around the familiar were no more than continuations, variations of how she had been seeing and feeling all day. Feeling, but preferring not to think. Besides, she knew what she had to do and she had known it all along. She owned only one outfit that she genuinely liked, and that was the one she should wear. She let the pink dress fall on top of the black and, stepping contemptuously through the pile, reached for the gown, her green backless post-finals gown. As she pulled it on she approved of the firm caress of the bias-cut through the
silk of her petticoat, and she felt sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure; it was a mermaid who rose to meet her in her own full-length mirror. She left the pearls in place, changed back into the black high-heel shoes, once more retouched her hair and make-up, forwent another dab of scent and then, as she opened the door, gave out a shriek of terror. Inches from her was a face and a raised fist. Her immediate, reeling perception was of a radical, Picasso-like perspective in which tears, rimmed and bloated eyes, wet lips and raw, unblown nose blended in a crimson moistness of grief. She recovered herself, placed her hands on the bony shoulders and gently turned the whole body so she could see the left ear. This was Jackson, about to knock on her door. In his other hand there was a grey sock. As she stepped back she noticed he was in ironed grey shorts and white shirt, but was otherwise barefoot.

‘Little fellow! What's the matter?'

For the moment, he could not trust himself to speak. Instead, he held up his sock and with it gestured along the corridor. Cecilia leaned out and saw Pierrot some distance off, also barefoot, also holding a sock, and watching.

‘You've got a sock each then.'

The boy nodded and swallowed, and then at last he was able to say, ‘Miss Betty says we'll get a smack if we don't go down now and have our tea, but there's only one pair of socks.'

‘And you've been fighting over it.'

Jackson shook his head emphatically.

As she went along the corridor with the boys to their room, first one then the other put his hand in hers and she was surprised to find herself so gratified. She could not help thinking about her dress.

‘Didn't you ask your sister to help you?'

‘She's not talking to us at the moment.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘She
hates
us.'

Their room was a pitiful mess of clothes, wet towels, orange
peel, torn-up pieces of a comic arranged around a sheet of paper, upended chairs partly covered by blankets and the mattresses at a slew. Between the beds was a broad damp stain on the carpet in the centre of which lay a bar of soap and damp wads of lavatory paper. One of the curtains hung at a tilt below the pelmet, and though the windows were open, the air was dank, as though exhaled many times. All the drawers in the clothes chest stood open and empty. The impression was of closeted boredom punctuated by contests and schemes – jumping between the beds, building a camp, half devising a board game, then giving up. No one in the Tallis household was looking after the Quincey twins, and to conceal her guilt she said brightly, ‘We'll never find anything with the room in this state.'

She began restoring order, remaking the beds, kicking off her high heels to mount a chair to fix the curtain, and setting the twins small achievable tasks. They were obedient to the letter, but they were quiet and hunched as they went about the work, as though it were retribution rather than deliverance, a scolding rather than kindness, she intended. They were ashamed of their room. Standing on the chair in her clinging dark green dress, watching the bright ginger heads bobbing and bending to their chores, the simple thought came to her, how hopeless and terrifying it was for them to be without love, to construct an existence out of nothing in a strange house.

With difficulty, for she could not bend her knees very far, she stepped down and sat on the edge of a bed and patted a space on each side of her. However, the boys remained standing, watching her expectantly. She used the faintly sing-song tones of a nursery school teacher she had once admired.

‘We don't need to cry over lost socks, do we?'

Pierrot said, ‘Actually, we'd prefer to go home.'

Chastened, she resumed the tones of adult conversation. ‘That's impossible at the moment. Your mother's in Paris with – having a little holiday, and your father's busy in college,
so you'll have to be here for a bit. I'm sorry you've been neglected. But you did have a jolly time in the pool…'

Jackson said, ‘We wanted to be in the play and then Briony walked off and still hasn't come back.'

‘Are you sure?' Someone else to worry about. Briony should have returned long ago. This in turn reminded her of the people downstairs waiting: her mother, the cook, Leon, the visitor, Robbie. Even the warmth of the evening filling the room through the open windows at her back imposed responsibilities; this was the kind of summer's evening one dreamed of all year, and now here it was at last with its heavy fragrance, its burden of pleasures, and she was too distracted by demands and minor distress to respond. But she simply had to. It was wrong not to. It would be paradise outside on the terrace drinking gin and tonics with Leon. It was hardly her fault that Aunt Hermione had run off with some toad who delivered fireside sermons on the wireless every week. Enough sadness. Cecilia stood up and clapped her hands.

‘Yes, it's too bad about the play, but there's nothing we can do. Let's find you some socks and get on.'

A search revealed that the socks they had arrived in were being washed, and that in the obliterating thrill of passion, Aunt Hermione had omitted to pack more than one extra pair. Cecilia went to Briony's bedroom and rummaged in a drawer for the least girlish design – white, ankle length, with red and green strawberries around the tops. She assumed there would be a fight now for the grey socks, but the opposite was the case, and to avoid further sorrow she was obliged to return to Briony's room for another pair. This time she paused to peer out of the window at the dusk and wonder where her sister was. Drowned in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motor car, she thought ritually, a sound principle being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst.

Back with the boys, she tidied Jackson's hair with a comb dipped in water from a vase of flowers, holding his chin tightly
between forefinger and thumb as she carved across his scalp a fine, straight parting. Pierrot patiently waited his turn, then without a word they ran off downstairs together to face Betty.

Cecilia followed at a slow pace, passing the critical mirror with a glance and completely satisfied with what she saw. Or rather, she cared less, for her mood had shifted since being with the twins, and her thoughts had broadened to include a vague resolution which took shape without any particular content and prompted no specific plan; she had to get away. The thought was calming and pleasurable, and not desperate at all. She reached the first-floor landing and paused. Downstairs, her mother, guilt-stricken by her absence from the family, would be spreading anxiety and confusion all about her. To this mix must be added the news, if it was the case, that Briony was missing. Time and worry would be expended before she was found. There would be a phone call from the department to say that Mr Tallis had to work late and would stay up in town. Leon, who had the pure gift of avoiding responsibility, would not assume his father's role. Nominally, it would pass to Mrs Tallis, but ultimately the success of the evening would be in Cecilia's care. All this was clear and not worth struggling against – she would not be abandoning herself to a luscious summer's night, there would be no long session with Leon, she would not be walking barefoot across the lawns under the midnight stars. She felt under her hand the black-stained varnished pine of the bannisters, vaguely neo-Gothic, immovably solid and sham. Above her head there hung by three chains a great cast-iron chandelier which had never been lit in her lifetime. One depended instead on a pair of tasselled wall lights shaded by a quarter-circle of fake parchment. By their soupy yellow glow she moved quietly across the landing to look towards her mother's room. The half-open door, the column of light across the corridor carpet, confirmed that Emily Tallis had risen from her daybed. Cecilia returned to the stairs and hesitated again, reluctant to go down. But there was no choice.

There was nothing new in the arrangements and she was not distressed. Two years ago her father disappeared into the preparation of mysterious consultation documents for the Home Office. Her mother had always lived in an invalid's shadow land, Briony had always required mothering from her older sister, and Leon had always floated free, and she had always loved him for it. She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations. She blamed no one, but she had hung about the house all summer, encouraged by a vague notion she was re-establishing an important connection with her family. But the connections had never been broken, she now saw, and anyway her parents were absent in their different ways, Briony was lost to her fantasies and Leon was in town. Now it was time for her to move on. She needed an adventure. There was an invitation from an uncle and aunt to accompany them to New York. Aunt Hermione was in Paris. She could go to London and find a job – it was what her father expected of her. It was excitement she felt, not restlessness, and she would not allow this evening to frustrate her. There would be other evenings like this, and to enjoy them she would have to be elsewhere.