Atonement (1987), page 15
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.
She decided against closing the French windows, and sat down at one end of the Chesterfield. She was not exactly waiting, she felt. No one else she knew had her knack of keeping still, without even a book on her lap, of moving gently through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden. She had learned her patience through years of sidestepping migraine. Fretting, concentrated thought, reading, looking, wanting—all were to be avoided in favor of a slow drift of association, while the minutes accumulated like banked snow and the silence deepened around her. Sitting here now she felt the night air tickle the hem of her dress against her shin. Her childhood was as tangible as the shot silk—a taste, a sound, a smell, all of these, blended into an entity that was surely more than a mood. There was a presence in the room, her aggrieved, overlooked ten-year-old self, a girl even quieter than Briony, who used to wonder at the massive emptiness of time, and marvel that the nineteenth century was about to end. How like her, to sit in the room like this, not ‘joining in.’ This ghost had been summoned not by Lola imitating Hermione, or the inscrutable twins disappearing into the night. It was the slow retraction, the retreat into autonomy which signaled the approaching end of Briony’s childhood. It was haunting Emily once more. Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child. She wasn’t a fool. She knew it was self-pity, this mellow expansiveness as she contemplated what looked like her own ruin: Briony would surely go off to her sister’s college, Girton, and she, Emily, would grow stiffer in the limbs and more irrelevant by the day; age and weariness would return Jack to her, and nothing would be said, or needed to be said. And here was the ghost of her childhood, diffused throughout the room, to remind her of the limited arc of existence. How quickly the story was over. Not massive and empty at all, but headlong. Ruthless.
Her spirits were not particularly lowered by these commonplace reflections. She floated above them, gazing down neutrally, absently braiding them with other preoccupations. She planned to plant a clump of ceanothus along the approach to the swimming pool. Robbie was wanting to persuade her to erect a pergola and train along it a slow-growing wisteria whose flower and scent he liked. But she and Jack would be long buried before the full effect was achieved. The story would be over. She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity? She liked him well enough, and was pleased for Grace Turner that he had turned out to be bright. But really, he was a hobby of Jack’s, living proof of some leveling principle he had pursued through the years. When he spoke about Robbie, which wasn’t often, it was with a touch of self-righteous vindication. Something had been established which Emily took to be a criticism of herself. She had opposed Jack when he proposed paying for the boy’s education, which smacked of meddling to her, and unfair on Leon and the girls. She did not consider herself proved wrong simply because Robbie had come away from Cambridge with a first. In fact, it had made things harder for Cecilia with her third, though it was preposterous of her to pretend to be disappointed. Robbie’s elevation. “Nothing good will come of it” was the phrase she often used, to which Jack would respond smugly that plenty of good had come already.
For all that, Briony had been thoroughly improper at dinner to speak that way to Robbie. If she had resentments of her own, Emily sympathized. It was to be expected. But to express them was undignified. Thinking of the dinner again—how artfully Mr. Marshall had put everyone at ease. Was he suitable? It was a pity about his looks, with one half of his face looking like an overfurnished bedroom. Perhaps in time it would come to seem rugged, this chin like a wedge of cheese. Or chocolate. If he really were to supply the whole of the British Army with Amo bars he could become immensely rich. But Cecilia, having learned modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in chemistry incomplete as a human being. Her very words. She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home—Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else? Even a chemist had his uses. And this one had found a way of making chocolate out of sugar, chemicals, brown coloring and vegetable oil. And no cocoa butter. To produce a ton of the stuff, he had explained over his astonishing cocktail, cost next to nothing. He could undercut his competitors and increase his profit margin. Vulgarly put, but what comfort, what untroubled years might flow from these cheap vats.
More than thirty minutes passed unnoticed as these scraps—memories, judgments, vague resolutions, questions—uncoiled quietly before her, while she barely shifted her position and did not hear the clock strike the quarter hours. She was aware of the breeze strengthening, pushing one French window closed, before dying down once more. She was disturbed later by Betty and her helpers clearing the dining room, then those sounds also subsided and, again, Emily was far out along the branching roads of her reveries, drifting by association, and with the expertise born of a thousand headaches, avoiding all things sudden or harsh. When at last the phone rang she rose immediately, without any start of surprise, and went back out into the hallway, lifted the receiver and called out as she always did on a rising note of a question,
“Tallises?”
There came the switchboard, the nasal assistant, a pause and the crackle of the long-distance line, then Jack’s neutral tone.
“Dearest. Later than usual. I’m terribly sorry.”
It was eleven-thirty. But she did not mind, for he would be back at the weekend, and one day he would be home forever and not an unkind word would be spoken.
She said, “It’s perfectly all right.”
“It’s the revisions to the Statement Relating to Defense. There’s to be a second printing. And then one thing and another.”
“Rearmament,” she said soothingly.
“I’m afraid so.”
“You know, everyone’s against it.”
He chuckled. “Not in this office.”
“And I am.”
“Well, my dear. I hope to persuade you one day.”
“And I you.” The exchange held a trace of affection, and its familiarity was comfort. As usual, he asked for an account of her day. She told him of the great heat, the collapse of Briony’s play, and the arrival of Leon with his friend of whom she said, “He’s in your camp. But he wants more soldiers so that he can sell the government his chocolate bar.”
“I see. Plowshares into tinfoil.”
She described the dinner, and Robbie’s wild look at the table. “Do we really need to be putting him through medical college?”
“We do. It’s a bold move. Typical of him. I know he’ll make a go of it.” Then she gave an account of how the dinner ended with the twins’ note, and the search parties going off into the grounds. “Little scallywags. And where were they after all?”
“I don’t know. I’m still waiting to hear.” There was silence down the line, broken only by distant mechanical clicking. When the senior Civil Servant spoke at last he had already made his decisions. The rare use of her first name conveyed his seriousness. “I’m going to put the telephone down now, Emily, because I’m going to call the police.”
“Is it really necessary? By the time they get here…”
“If you hear any news you’ll let me know straightaway.”
“Wait…” At a sound she had turned. Leon was coming through the main door. Close behind him was Cecilia whose look was one of mute bewilderment. Then came Briony with an arm round her cousin’s shoulders. Lola’s face was so white and rigid, like a clay mask, that Emily, unable to read an expression there, instantly knew the worst. Where were the twins?
Leon crossed the hall toward her, his hand outstretched for the phone. There was a streak of dirt from his trouser cuffs to the knees. Mud, and in such dry weather. His breathing was heavy from exertion, and a greasy lank of hair swung over his face as he snatched the receiver from her and turned his back.
“Is that you, Daddy? Yes. Look, I think you’d better come down. No, we haven’t, and there’s worse. No, no, I can’t tell you now. If you can, tonight. We’ll have to phone them anyway. Best you do it.”
She put her hand over her heart and took a couple of paces back to where Cecilia and the girls stood watching. Leon had lowered his voice and was muttering quickly into the cupped receiver. Emily couldn’t hear a word, and did not want to. She would have preferred to retreat upstairs to her room, but Leon finished the call with an echoing rattle of the Bakelite and turned to her. His eyes were tight and hard, and she wondered if it was anger that she saw. He was trying to take deeper breaths, and he stretched his lips across his teeth in a strange grimace.
He said, “We’ll go in the drawing room where we can sit down.”
She caught his meaning precisely. He wouldn’t tell her now, he wouldn’t have her collapsing on the tiles and cracking her skull. She stared at him, but she did not move.
“Come on, Emily,” he said.
Her son’s hand was hot and heavy on her shoulder, and she felt its dampness through the silk. Helplessly, she let herself be guided toward the drawing room, all her terror concentrated on the simple fact that he wanted her seated before he broke his news.
THIRTEEN
WITHIN THE half hour Briony would commit her crime. Conscious that she was sharing the night expanse with a maniac, she kept close to the shadowed walls of the house at first, and ducked low beneath the sills whenever she passed in front of a lighted window. She knew he would be heading off down the main drive because that was the way her sister had gone with Leon. As soon as she thought a safe distance had opened up, Briony swung out boldly from the house in a wide arc that took her toward the stable block and the swimming pool. It made sense, surely, to see if the twins were there, fooling about with the hoses, or floating facedown in death, indistinguishable to the last. She thought how she might describe it, the way they bobbed on the illuminated water’s gentle swell, and how their hair spread like tendrils and their clothed bodies softly collided and drifted apart. The dry night air slipped between the fabric of her dress and her skin, and she felt smooth and agile in the dark. There was nothing she could not describe: the gentle pad of a maniac’s tread moving sinuously along the drive, keeping to the verge to muffle his approach. But her brother was with Cecilia, and that was a burden lifted. She could describe this delicious air too, the grasses giving off their sweet cattle smell, the hard-fired earth which still held the embers of the day’s heat and exhaled the mineral odor of clay, and the faint breeze carrying from the lake a flavor of green and silver.
