Atonement: a novel, page 14
“Someone’s come in.”
He opened his eyes. It was a library, in a house, in total silence. He was wearing his best suit. Yes, it all came back to him with relative ease. He strained to look over his shoulder and saw only the dimly illuminated desk, there as before, as though remembered from a dream. From where they were in their corner, it was not possible to see the door. But there was no sound, not a thing. She was mistaken, he was desperate for her to be mistaken and she actually was. He turned back to her, and was about to tell her so, when she tightened her grip on his arm and he looked back once more. Briony moved slowly into their view, stopped by the desk and saw them. She stood there stupidly, staring at them, her arms hanging loose at her sides, like a gunslinger in a Western showdown. In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational. There was nothing personal about it, for he would have hated anyone who came in. There were drinks in the drawing room or on the terrace, and that was where Briony was supposed to be—with her mother, and the brother she adored, and the little cousins. There was no good reason why she should be in the library, except to find him and deny him what was his. He saw it clearly, how it had happened: she had opened a sealed envelope to read his note and been disgusted, and in her obscure way felt betrayed. She had come looking for her sister—no doubt with the exhilarated notion of protecting her, or admonishing her, and had heard a noise from behind the closed library door. Propelled from the depths of her ignorance, silly imagining and girlish rectitude, she had come to call a halt. And she hardly had to do that—of their own accord, they had moved apart and turned away, and now both were discreetly straightening their clothes. It was over.
The main course plates had long been cleared away and Betty had returned with the bread and butter pudding. Was it imagining on his part, Robbie wondered, or malign intent on hers, that made the adults’ portions appear twice the size of the children’s? Leon was pouring from the third bottle of Barsac. He had removed his jacket, thus allowing the other two men to do the same. There was a soft tapping on the windowpanes as various flying creatures of the night threw themselves against the glass. Mrs. Tallis dabbed at her face with a napkin and looked fondly at the twins. Pierrot was whispering in Jackson’s ear.
“No secrets at the dinner table, boys. We’d all like to hear, if you don’t mind.”
Jackson, the delegated voice, swallowed hard. His brother stared at his lap.
“We’d like to be excused, Aunt Emily. Please can we go to the lavatory?”
“Of course. But it’s may, not can. And there’s no need to be quite so specific.”
The twins slipped from their chairs. As they reached the door, Briony squealed and pointed.
“My socks! They’re wearing my strawberry socks!”
The boys halted and turned, and looked in shame from their ankles to their aunt. Briony was half standing. Robbie assumed that powerful emotions in the girl were finding release.
“You went in my room and took them from my drawer.”
Cecilia spoke for the first time during the meal. She too was venting deeper feelings.
“Shut up, for goodness’ sake! You really are a tiresome little prima donna. The boys had no clean socks so I took some of yours.”
Briony stared at her, amazed. Attacked, betrayed, by the one she only longed to protect. Jackson and Pierrot were still looking toward their aunt who dismissed them now with a quizzical tilt of her head and a faint nod. They closed the door behind them with exaggerated, perhaps even satirical, care, and at the moment they released the handle Emily picked up her spoon and the company followed her. She said mildly, “You could be a little less expressive toward your sister.”
As Cecilia turned toward her mother Robbie caught a whiff of underarm perspiration, which put him in mind of freshly cut grass. Soon they would be outside. Briefly, he closed his eyes. A two-pint jug of custard was placed beside him, and he wondered that he had the strength to lift it.
“I’m sorry, Emily. But she has been quite over the top all day long.”
Briony spoke with adult calm. “That’s pretty strong, coming from you.”
“Meaning what?”
That, Robbie knew, was not the question to ask. At this stage in her life Briony inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed unpredictably. In the present situation she was less dangerous as an indignant little girl. In fact, Briony herself had no clear idea of what she meant, but Robbie could not know this as he moved in quickly to change the subject. He turned to Lola on his left, and said in a way that was intended to include the whole table, “They’re nice lads, your brothers.”
“Hah!” Briony was savage, and did not give her cousin time to speak. “That shows what little you know.”
Emily put down her spoon. “Darling, if this continues, I must ask you to leave the table.”
“But look what they did to her. Scratched her face, and gave her a Chinese burn!”
All eyes were on Lola. Her complexion pulsed darker beneath her freckles, making her scratch appear less vivid. Robbie said, “It doesn’t look too bad.”
Briony glared at him. Her mother said, “Little boys’ fingernails. We should get you some ointment.”
Lola appeared brave. “Actually, I’ve put some on. It’s feeling a lot better already.”
Paul Marshall cleared his throat. “I saw it myself—had to break it up and pull them off her. I have to say, I was surprised, little fellows like that. They went for her all right . . .”
Emily had left her chair. She came to Lola’s side and lifted her hands in hers. “Look at your arms! It’s not just chafing. You’re bruised up to your elbows. How on earth did they do that?”
“I don’t know, Aunt Emily.”
Once again, Marshall tilted back in his seat. He spoke behind Cecilia and Robbie’s head to the young girl who stared at him as her eyes filled with tears. “There’s no shame in making a fuss, you know. You’re awfully brave, but you have taken a bad knock.”
Lola was making an effort not to cry. Emily drew her niece toward her midriff and stroked her head. Marshall said to Robbie, “You’re right, they’re nice lads. But I suppose they’ve been through a lot lately.”
Robbie wanted to know why Marshall had not mentioned the matter before if Lola had been so badly harmed, but the table was now in commotion. Leon called across to his mother, “Do you want me to phone a doctor?” Cecilia was rising from the table. Robbie touched her arm and she turned, and for the first time since the library, their eyes met. There was no time to establish anything beyond the connection itself, then she hurried round to be by her mother who began to give instructions for a cold compress. Emily murmured comforting words to the top of her niece’s head. Marshall remained in his seat and filled his glass. Briony also stood up, and as she did so, gave another of her penetrating girlish cries. She took from Jackson’s seat an envelope and held it up to show them.
“A letter!”
She was about to open it. Robbie could not prevent himself asking, “Who’s it addressed to?”
“It says, To everyone.”
Lola disengaged from her aunt and wiped her face with her napkin. Emily drew on a surprising new source of authority. “You will not open it. You will do as you are told and bring it to me.”
Briony caught the unusual tone in her mother’s voice and meekly walked round the table with the envelope. Emily took one step away from Lola as she pulled a scrap of lined paper clear. When she read it, Robbie and Cecilia were able to read it too.
We are gong to run away becase Lola and Betty are horid to us and we want to go home. Sory we took some frute And there was’nt a play.
They had each signed their first names with zigzag flourishes. There was silence after Emily had read it aloud. Lola stood up and took a couple of steps toward a window, then changed her mind and walked back toward the end of the table. She was looking from left to right in a distracted manner and murmuring over and over, “Oh hell, oh hell . . .”
Marshall came and put his hand on her arm. “It’s going to be all right. We’ll make up some search parties and find them in no time.”
“Absolutely,” Leon said. “They’ve only been gone a few minutes.”
But Lola was not listening and seemed to have made up her mind. As she strode toward the door she said, “Mummy will kill me.”
When Leon tried to take her by her shoulder she shrugged away, and then she was through the door. They heard her running across the hall. Leon turned to his sister. “Cee, you and I will go together.”
Marshall said, “There’s no moon. It’s pretty dark out there.”
The group was moving toward the door and Emily was saying, “Someone ought to wait here and that might as well be me.”
Cecilia said, “There are torches behind the cellar door.”
Leon said to his mother, “I think you ought to phone the constable.”
Robbie was the last to leave the dining room and the last, he thought, to adjust to the new situation. His first reaction, which did not fade when he stepped into the relative coolness of the hallway, was that he had been cheated. He could not believe that the twins were in danger. The cows would scare them home. The vastness of the night beyond the house, the dark trees, the welcoming shadows, the cool new-mown grass—all this had been reserved, he had designated it as belonging exclusively to himself and Cecilia. It was waiting for them, theirs to use and claim. Tomorrow, or any time other than now, would not do. But suddenly the house had spilled its contents into a night which now belonged to a half-comic domestic crisis. They would be out there for hours, hallooing and waving their torches, the twins would eventually be found, tired and dirty, Lola would be calmed down, and after some self-congratulation over nightcaps, the evening would be over. Within days, or even hours, it would have become an amusing memory to be wheeled out on family occasions: the night the twins ran away. The search parties were setting off as he reached the front door. Cecilia had linked arms with her brother and as they set off she glanced back and saw him standing in the light. She gave him a look, a shrug, which said—There’s nothing we can do for now. Before he could enact for her some gesture of loving acceptance, she turned, and she and Leon marched on, calling out the boys’ names. Marshall was even further ahead, making his way down the main drive, visible only by the torch he held. Lola was not in sight. Briony was walking around the side of the house. She, of course, would not want to be in Robbie’s company, and that was some relief, for he had already decided: if he could not be with Cecilia, if he could not have her to himself, then he too, like Briony, would go out searching alone. This decision, as he was to acknowledge many times, transformed his life.
Twelve
HOWEVER ELEGANT the old Adam-style building had been, however beautifully it once commanded the parkland, the walls could not have been as sturdy as those of the baronial structure that replaced it, and its rooms could never have possessed the same quality of stubborn silence that occasionally smothered the Tallis home. Emily felt its squat presence now as she closed the front door on the search parties and turned to cross the hallway. She assumed that Betty and her helpers were still eating dessert in the kitchen and would not know that the dining room was deserted. There was no sound. The walls, the paneling, the pervasive heaviness of nearly new fixtures, the colossal firedogs, the walk-in fireplaces of bright new stone referred back through the centuries to a time of lonely castles in mute forests. Her father-in-law’s intention, she supposed, was to create an ambience of solidity and family tradition. A man who spent a lifetime devising iron bolts and locks understood the value of privacy. Noise from outside the house was excluded completely, and even homelier indoor sounds were muffled, and sometimes even eliminated somehow. Emily sighed, failed to hear herself quite, and sighed again. She was by the telephone which stood on a semicircular wrought-iron table by the library door, and her hand rested upon the receiver. To speak to P.C. Vockins, she would first have to talk to his wife, a garrulous woman who liked to chat about eggs and related matters—the price of chicken feed, the foxes, the frailty of the modern paper bag. Her husband refused to display the deference one might expect from a policeman. He had a sincere way with a platitude which he made resonate like hard-won wisdom in his tight-buttoned chest: it never rained but it poured, the devil made work for idle hands, one rotten apple spoiled the barrel. The rumor in the village was that before he joined the Force and grew his mustache, he was a trade unionist. There was a sighting of him, back in the days of the General Strike, carrying pamphlets on a train. Besides, what would she ask of the village constable? By the time he had told her that boys would be boys and raised a search party of half a dozen local men from their beds, an hour would have passed, and the twins would have come back on their own, scared into their senses by the immensity of the world at night. In fact, it was not the boys who were on her mind, but their mother, her sister, or rather her incarnation within the wiry frame of Lola. When Emily rose from the dining table to comfort the girl, she was surprised by a feeling of resentment. The more she felt it, the more she fussed over Lola to hide it. The scratch on her face was undeniable, the bruising on her arm really rather shocking, given that it was inflicted by little boys. But an old antagonism afflicted Emily. It was her sister Hermione she was soothing—Hermione, stealer of scenes, little mistress of histrionics, whom she pressed against her breasts. As of old, the more Emily seethed, the more attentive she became. And when poor Briony found the boys’ letter, it was the same antagonism that had made Emily turn on her with unusual sharpness. How unfair! But the prospect of her daughter, of any girl younger than herself, opening the envelope, and raising the tension by doing it just a little too slowly, and then reading aloud to the company, breaking the news and making herself the center of the drama, called up old memories and ungenerous thoughts. Hermione had lisped and pranced and pirouetted through their childhoods, showing off at every available moment with no thought—so her scowling, silent older sister believed—for how ludicrous and desperate she appeared. There were always adults available to encourage this relentless preening. And when, famously, the eleven-year-old Emily had shocked a roomful of visitors by running into a French window and cutting her hand so badly that a spray of blood had made a scarlet bouquet on the white muslin dress of a nearby child, it was the nine-year-old Hermione who took center stage with a screaming attack. While Emily lay in obscurity on the floor, in the shadow of a sofa, with a medical uncle applying an expert tourniquet, a dozen relatives worked to calm her sister. And now she was in Paris frolicking with a man who worked in the wireless while Emily cared for her children. Plus ça change, P.C. Vockins might have said. And Lola, like her mother, would not be held back. As soon as the letter was read, she upstaged her runaway brothers with her own dramatic exit. Mummy will kill me indeed. But it was Mummy whose spirit she was keeping alive. When the twins came back, it was a certain bet that Lola would still have to be found. Bound by an iron principle of self-love, she would stay out longer in the darkness, wrapping herself in some fabricated misfortune, so that the general relief when she appeared would be all the more intense, and all the attention would be hers. That afternoon, without stirring from her daybed, Emily had guessed that Lola was undermining Briony’s play, a suspicion confirmed by the diagonally ripped poster on the easel. And just as she predicted, Briony had been outside somewhere, sulking and impossible to find. How like Hermione Lola was, to remain guiltless while others destroyed themselves at her prompting. Emily stood irresolutely in the hall, wishing to be in no particular room, straining for the voices of the searchers outside and—if she was honest with herself—relieved she could hear nothing. It was a drama about nothing, the missing boys; it was Hermione’s life imposed upon her own. There was no reason to worry about the twins. They were unlikely to go near the river. Surely, they would tire and come home. She was ringed by thick walls of silence which hissed in her ears, rising and falling in volume to some pattern of its own. She took her hand from the phone and massaged her forehead—no trace of the beast migraine, and thank God for that—and went toward the drawing room. Another reason not to dial P.C. Vockins was that soon Jack would phone with his apologies. The call would be placed through the Ministry operator; then she would hear the young assistant with the nasal, whinnying voice, and finally her husband’s from behind his desk, resonating in the enormous room with the coffered ceiling. That he worked late she did not doubt, but she knew he did not sleep at his club, and he knew that she knew this. But there was nothing to say. Or rather, there was too much. They resembled each other in their dread of conflict, and the regularity of his evening calls, however much she disbelieved them, was a comfort to them both. If this sham was conventional hypocrisy, she had to concede that it had its uses. She had sources of contentment in her life—the house, the park, above all, the children—and she intended to preserve them by not challenging Jack. And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage. Wronged child, wronged wife. But she was not as unhappy as she should be. One role had prepared her for the other. She paused in the entrance to the drawing room and observed that the chocolate-smeared cocktail glasses had yet to be cleared away, and that the doors into the garden still stood open. Now the faintest stirring of a breeze rustled the display of sedge that stood before the fireplace. Two or three stout-bodied moths circled the lamp that stood upon the harpsichord. When would anyone ever play it again? That night creatures were drawn to lights where they could be most easily eaten by other creatures was one of those mysteries that gave her modest pleasure. She preferred not to have it explained away. At a formal dinner once a professor of some science or other, wanting to make small talk, had pointed out a few insects gyrating above a candelabra. He had told her that it was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest place, on the far side of the light—and in this case it was an illusion. It sounded to her like sophistry, or an explanation for its own sake. How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect? Not everything had a cause, and pretending otherwise was an interference in the workings of the world that was futile, and could even lead to grief. Some things were simply so. She did not wish to know why Jack spent so many consecutive nights in London. Or rather, she did not wish to be told. Nor did she wish to know more about the work that kept him late at the Ministry. Months ago, not long after Christmas, she went into the library to wake him from an afternoon sleep and saw a file open upon the desk. It was only the mildest wifely curiosity that prompted her to peep, for she had little interest in civic administration. On one page she saw a list of headings: exchange controls, rationing, the mass evacuation of large towns, the conscription of labor. The facing page was handwritten. A series of arithmetical calculations was interspersed by blocks of text. Jack’s straight-backed, brown-ink copperplate told her to assume a multiplier of fifty. For every one ton of explosive dropped, assume fifty casualties. Assume 100,000 tons of bombs dropped in two weeks. Result: five million casualties. She had not yet woken him and his soft, whistling exhalations blended with winter birdsong that came from somewhere beyond the lawn. Aqueous sunlight rippled over the spines of books and the smell of warm dust was everywhere. She went to the window and stared out, trying to spot the bird among bare oak branches that stood out black against a broken sky of gray and palest blue. She knew well there had to be such forms of bureaucratic supposition. And yes, there were precautions administrators took to indemnify themselves against all eventualities. But these extravagant numbers were surely a form of self-aggrandizement, and reckless to the point of irresponsibility. Jack, the household’s protector, its guarantor of tranquillity, was relied on to take the long view. But this was silly. When she woke him he grunted and leaned forward with a sudden movement to close the files, and then, still seated, pulled her hand to his mouth and kissed it dryly.
