Atonement a novel, p.11
Atonement: a novel, page 11
“Darling, you’re right. You know, I’d hate to let little Leon down.”
And so it was resolved and the roast was saved. With tactful good grace, Betty set Doll to scrubbing new potatoes, and Polly went outside with a knife. As they came away from the kitchen Emily put on her dark glasses and said, “I’m glad that’s settled because what’s really bothering me is Briony. I know she’s upset. She’s moping around outside and I’m going to bring her in.”
“Good idea. I was worried about her too,” Cecilia said. She was not inclined to dissuade her mother from wandering far away from the terrace. The drawing room which had transfixed Cecilia that morning with its parallelograms of light was now in gloom, lit by a single lamp near the fireplace. The open French windows framed a greenish sky, and against that, in silhouette at some distance, the familiar head and shoulders of her brother. As she made her way across the room she heard the tinkle of ice cubes against his glass, and as she stepped out she smelled the pennyroyal, chamomile and feverfew crushed underfoot, and headier now than in the morning. No one remembered the name, or even the appearance, of the temporary gardener who made it his project some years back to plant up the cracks between the paving stones. At the time, no one understood what he had in mind. Perhaps that was why he was sacked.
“Sis! I’ve been out here forty minutes and I’m half stewed.”
“Sorry. Where’s my drink?”
On a low wooden table set against the wall of the house was a paraffin globe lamp and ranged around it a rudimentary bar. At last the gin and tonic was in her hand. She lit a cigarette from his and they chinked glasses.
“I like the frock.”
“Can you see it?”
“Turn round. Gorgeous. I’d forgotten about that mole.”
“How’s the bank?”
“Dull and perfectly pleasant. We live for the evenings and weekends. When are you going to come?”
They wandered off the terrace onto the gravel path between the roses. The Triton pond rose before them, an inky mass whose complicated outline was honed against a sky turning greener as the light fell. They could hear the trickle of water, and Cecilia thought she could smell it too, silvery and sharp. It may have been the drink in her hand. She said after a pause, “I am going a little mad here.”
“Being everyone’s mother again. D’you know, there are girls getting all sorts of jobs now. Even taking the civil service exams. That would please the Old Man.”
“They’d never have me with a third.”
“Once your life gets going you’ll find that stuff doesn’t mean a thing.”
They reached the fountain and turned to face the house, and remained in silence for a while, leaning against the parapet, at the site of her disgrace. Reckless, ridiculous, and above all shaming. Only time, a prudish veil of hours, prevented her brother from seeing her as she had been. But she had no such protection from Robbie. He had seen her, he would always be able to see her, even as time smoothed out the memory to a barroom tale. She was still irritated with her brother about the invitation, but she needed him, she wanted a share in his freedom. Solicitously, she prompted him to give her his news. In Leon’s life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed. Everyone was celebrated at least in some degree, as though it was a cause for wonder that anyone existed at all. He remembered all his friends’ best lines. The effect of one of Leon’s anecdotes was to make his listener warm to humankind and its failings. Everyone was, at a minimal estimate, “a good egg” or “a decent sort,” and motivation was never judged to be at variance with outward show. If there was mystery or contradiction in a friend, Leon took the long view and found a benign explanation. Literature and politics, science and religion did not bore him—they simply had no place in his world, and nor did any matter about which people seriously disagreed. He had taken a degree in law and was happy to have forgotten the whole experience. It was hard to imagine him ever lonely, or bored or despondent; his equanimity was bottomless, as was his lack of ambition, and he assumed that everyone else was much like him. Despite all this, his blandness was perfectly tolerable, even soothing. He talked first of his rowing club. He had been stroke for the second eight recently, and though everyone had been kind, he thought he was happier taking the pace from someone else. Likewise, at the bank there had been mention of promotion and when nothing came of it he was somewhat relieved. Then the girls: the actress Mary, who had been so wonderful in Private Lives, had suddenly removed herself without explanation to Glasgow and no one knew why. He suspected she was tending a dying relative. Francine, who spoke beautiful French and had outraged the world by wearing a monocle, had gone with him to a Gilbert and Sullivan last week and in the interval they had seen the King who had seemed to glance in their direction. The sweet, dependable, well-connected Barbara whom Jack and Emily thought he should marry had invited him to spend a week at her parents’ castle in the Highlands. He thought it would be churlish not to go. Whenever he seemed about to dry up, Cecilia prodded him with another question. Inexplicably, his rent at the Albany had gone down. An old friend had got a girl with a lisp pregnant, had married her and was jolly happy. Another was buying a motorbike. The father of a chum had bought a vacuum cleaner factory and said it was a license to print money. Someone’s grandmother was a brave old stick for walking half a mile on a broken leg. As sweet as the evening air, this talk moved through and round her, conjuring a world of good intentions and pleasant outcomes. Shoulder to shoulder, half standing, half sitting, they faced their childhood home whose architecturally confused medieval references seemed now to be whimsically lighthearted; their mother’s migraine was a comic interlude in a light opera, the sadness of the twins a sentimental extravagance, the incident in the kitchen no more than the merry jostling of lively spirits. When it was her turn to give an account of recent months, it was impossible not to be influenced by Leon’s tone, though her version of it came through, helplessly, as mockery. She ridiculed her own attempts at genealogy; the family tree was wintry and bare, as well as rootless. Grandfather Harry Tallis was the son of a farm laborer who, for some reason, had changed his name from Cartwright and whose birth and marriage were not recorded. As for Clarissa—all those daylight hours curled up on the bed with pins and needles in her arm—it surely proved the case of Paradise Lost in reverse—the heroine became more loathsome as her death-fixated virtue was revealed. Leon nodded and pursed his lips; he would not pretend to know what she was talking about, nor would he interrupt. She gave a farcical hue to her weeks of boredom and solitude, of how she had come to be with the family, and make amends for being away, and had found her parents and sister absent in their different ways. Encouraged by her brother’s generous near-laughter, she attempted comic sketches based on her daily need for more cigarettes, on Briony tearing down her poster, on the twins outside her room with a sock each, and on their mother’s desire for a miracle at the feast—roast potatoes into potato salad. Leon did not take the biblical reference here. There was desperation in all she said, an emptiness at its core, or something excluded or unnamed that made her talk faster, and exaggerate with less conviction. The agreeable nullity of Leon’s life was a polished artifact, its ease deceptive, its limitations achieved by invisible hard work and the accidents of character, none of which she could hope to rival. She linked her arm with his and squeezed. That was another thing about Leon: soft and charming in company, but through his jacket his arm had the consistency of tropical hardwood. She felt soft at every level, and transparent. He was looking at her fondly.
“What’s up, Cee?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“You really ought to come and stay with me and look around.”
There was a figure moving about on the terrace, and lights were coming on in the drawing room. Briony called out to her brother and sister. Leon called back. “We’re over here.”
“We should go in,” Cecilia said, and still arm in arm, they began to walk toward the house. As they passed the roses she wondered if there really was anything she wanted to tell him. Confessing to her behavior this morning was certainly not possible.
“I’d love to come up to town.” Even as she said the words she imagined herself being dragged back, incapable of packing her bag or of making the train. Perhaps she didn’t want to go at all, but she repeated herself a little more emphatically.
“I’d love to come.”
Briony was waiting impatiently on the terrace to greet her brother. Someone addressed her from inside the drawing room and she spoke over her shoulder in reply. As Cecilia and Leon approached, they heard the voice again—it was their mother trying to be stern.
“I’m only saying it one more time. You will go up now and wash and change.”
With a lingering look in their direction, Briony moved toward the French windows. There was something in her hand. Leon said, “We could set you up in no time at all.”
When they stepped into the room, into the light of several lamps, Briony was still there, still barefoot and in her filthy white dress, and her mother was standing by the door on the far side of the room, smiling indulgently. Leon stretched out his arms and did the comic Cockney voice he reserved for her.
“An’ if it ain’t my li’l sis!”
As she hurried past, Briony pushed into Cecilia’s hand a piece of paper folded twice and then she squealed her brother’s name and leaped into his embrace. Conscious of her mother watching her, Cecilia adopted an expression of amused curiosity as she unfolded the sheet. Commendably, it was a look she was able to maintain as she took in the small block of typewriting and in a glance absorbed it whole—a unit of meaning whose force and color was derived from the single repeated word. At her elbow, Briony was telling Leon about the play she had written for him, and lamenting her failure to stage it. The Trials of Arabella, she kept repeating. The Trials of Arabella. Never had she appeared so animated, so weirdly excited. She still had her arms about his neck, and was standing on tiptoe to nuzzle her cheek against his. 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.
