Atonement (2 page)

It was not until five o'clock that afternoon that she was able to assemble her cast in the nursery. She had arranged three stools in a row, while she herself jammed her rump into an ancient baby's high-chair – a bohemian touch that gave her
a tennis umpire's advantage of height. The twins had come with reluctance from the pool where they had been for three hours without a break. They were barefoot and wore singlets over trunks that dripped onto the floorboards. Water also ran down their necks from their matted hair, and both boys were shivering and jiggled their knees to keep warm. The long immersion had puckered and bleached their skin, so that in the relatively low light of the nursery their freckles appeared black. Their sister, who sat between them, with left leg balanced on right knee, was, by contrast, perfectly composed, having liberally applied perfume and changed into a green gingham frock to offset her colouring. Her sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. The sight of these nails gave Briony a constricting sensation around her sternum, and she knew at once that she could not ask Lola to play the prince.

Everyone was settled and the playwright was about to begin her little speech summarising the plot and evoking the excitement of performing before an adult audience tomorrow evening in the library. But it was Pierrot who spoke first.

‘I hate plays and all that sort of thing.'

‘I hate them too, and dressing up,' Jackson said.

It had been explained at lunch that the twins were to be distinguished by the fact that Pierrot was missing a triangle of flesh from his left ear lobe on account of a dog he had tormented when he was three.

Lola looked away. Briony said reasonably, ‘How can you hate plays?'

‘It's just showing off.' Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident truth.

Briony knew he had a point. This was precisely why she loved plays, or hers at least; everyone would adore her. Looking at the boys, under whose chairs water was pooling before spilling between the floorboard cracks, she knew they could never understand her ambition. Forgiveness softened her tone.

‘Do you think Shakespeare was just showing off?'

Pierrot glanced across his sister's lap towards Jackson. This warlike name was faintly familiar, with its whiff of school and adult certainty, but the twins found their courage in each other.

‘Everyone knows he was.'

‘Definitely.'

When Lola spoke, she turned first to Pierrot and halfway through her sentence swung round to finish on Jackson. In Briony's family, Mrs Tallis never had anything to impart that needed saying simultaneously to both daughters. Now Briony saw how it was done.

‘You'll be in this play, or you'll get a clout, and then I'll speak to The Parents.'

‘If you clout us,
we'll
speak to The Parents.'

‘You'll be in this play or I'll speak to The Parents.'

That the threat had been negotiated neatly downwards did not appear to diminish its power. Pierrot sucked on his lower lip.

‘Why do we have to?' Everything was conceded in the question, and Lola tried to ruffle his sticky hair.

‘Remember what The Parents said? We're guests in this house and we make ourselves – what do we make ourselves? Come on. What do we make ourselves?'

‘A-menable,' the twins chorused in misery, barely stumbling over the unusual word.

Lola turned to Briony and smiled. ‘Please tell us about your play.'

The Parents. Whatever institutionalised strength was locked in this plural was about to fly apart, or had already done so, but for now it could not be acknowledged, and bravery was demanded of even the youngest. Briony felt suddenly ashamed at what she had selfishly begun, for it had never occurred to her that her cousins would not want to play their parts in
The Trials of Arabella
. But they had trials, a catastrophe of their own, and now, as guests in her house, they
believed themselves under an obligation. What was worse, Lola had made it clear that she too would be acting on sufferance. The vulnerable Quinceys were being coerced. And yet, Briony struggled to grasp the difficult thought, wasn't there manipulation here, wasn't Lola using the twins to express something on her behalf, something hostile or destructive? Briony felt the disadvantage of being two years younger than the other girl, of having a full two years' refinement weigh against her, and now her play seemed a miserable, embarrassing thing.

Avoiding Lola's gaze the whole while, she proceeded to outline the plot, even as its stupidity began to overwhelm her. She no longer had the heart to invent for her cousins the thrill of the first night.

As soon as she was finished Pierrot said, ‘I want to be the count. I want to be a bad person.'

Jackson said simply, ‘I'm a prince. I'm always a prince.'

She could have drawn them to her and kissed their little faces, but she said, ‘That's all right then.'

Lola uncrossed her legs, smoothed her dress and stood, as though about to leave. She spoke through a sigh of sadness or resignation. ‘I suppose that because you're the one who wrote it, you'll be Arabella…'

‘Oh no,' Briony said. ‘No. Not at all.'

She said no, but she meant yes. Of course she was taking the part of Arabella. What she was objecting to was Lola's ‘because'. She was not playing Arabella because she wrote the play, she was taking the part because no other possibility had crossed her mind, because that was how Leon was to see her, because she
was
Arabella.

But she had said no, and now Lola was saying sweetly, ‘In that case, do you mind if I play her? I think I could do it very well. In fact, of the two of us…'

She let that hang, and Briony stared at her, unable to keep the horror from her expression, and unable to speak. It was slipping away from her, she knew, but there was nothing that
she could think of to say that would bring it back. Into Briony's silence, Lola pressed her advantage.

‘I had a long illness last year, so I could do that part of it well too.'

Too? Briony could not keep up with the older girl. The misery of the inevitable was clouding her thoughts.

One of the twins said proudly, ‘And you were in the school play.'

How could she tell them that Arabella was not a freckled person? Her skin was pale and her hair was black and her thoughts were Briony's thoughts. But how could she refuse a cousin so far from home whose family life was in ruins? Lola was reading her mind because she now played her final card, the unrefusable ace.

‘Do say yes. It would be the only good thing that's happened to me in
months
.'

Yes. Unable to push her tongue against the word, Briony could only nod, and felt as she did so a sulky thrill of self-annihilating compliance spreading across her skin and ballooning outwards from it, darkening the room in throbs. She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone, face-down on her bed and savour the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime. Not only Leon to consider, but what of the antique peach and cream satin dress that her mother was looking out for her, for Arabella's wedding? That would now be given to Lola. How could her mother reject the daughter who had loved her all these years? As she saw the dress make its perfect, clinging fit around her cousin and witnessed her mother's heartless smile, Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead, and barefoot,
or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbon straps…

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent – how the tilt of a skull could change a life! – Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from the floor, and the twins had slipped from their chairs to follow their sister into the space in the centre of the nursery that Briony had cleared the day before. Did she dare leave now? Lola was pacing the floorboards, one hand to her brow as she skimmed through the first pages of the play, muttering the lines from the prologue. She announced that nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning, and now she was casting her brothers as Arabella's parents and describing the opening to them, seeming to know all there was to know about the scene. The advance of Lola's dominion was merciless and made self-pity irrelevant. Or would it be all the more annihilatingly delicious? – for Briony had not even been cast as Arabella's mother, and now was surely the time to sidle from the room and tumble into face-down darkness on the bed. But it was Lola's briskness, her obliviousness to anything beyond her own business, and Briony's certainty that her own feelings would not even register, still less provoke guilt, which gave her the strength to resist.

In a generally pleasant and well-protected life, she had never really confronted anyone before. Now she saw: it was like diving into the swimming pool in early June; you simply had to make yourself do it. As she squeezed out of the high-chair and walked over to where her cousin stood her heart thudded inconveniently and her breath was short.

She took the play from Lola and said in a voice that was constricted and more high-pitched than usual, ‘If you're Arabella, then I'll be the director, thank you very much, and I'll read the prologue.'

Lola put her speckled hand to her mouth. ‘Sor-reeee!' she hooted. ‘I was just trying to get things started.'

Briony was unsure how to respond, so she turned to Pierrot and said, ‘You don't look much like Arabella's mother.'

The countermanding of Lola's casting decision, and the laughter in the boys it provoked, made for a shift in the balance of power. Lola made an exaggerated shrug of her bony shoulders and went to stare out of the window. Perhaps she herself was struggling with the temptation to flounce from the room.

Though the twins began a wrestling match, and their sister suspected the onset of a headache, somehow the rehearsal began. The silence into which Briony read the prologue was tense.

This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella

Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.

It grieved her parents to see their first born

Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne

Without permission…

His wife at his side, Arabella's father stood at the wrought-iron gates of his estate, first pleading with his daughter to reconsider her decision, then in desperation ordering her not to go. Facing him was the sad but stubborn heroine with the count beside her, and their horses, tethered to a nearby oak, were neighing and pawing the ground, impatient to be off. The father's tenderest feelings were supposed to make his voice quaver as he said,

My darling one, you are young and lovely,

But inexperienced, and though you think

The world is at your feet,

It can rise up and tread on you.

Briony positioned her cast; she herself clutched Jackson's arm, Lola and Pierrot stood several feet away, hand in hand. When the boys met each other's eye they had a giggling fit
which the girls shushed at. There had been trouble enough already, but Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution only when Jackson began to read from his sheet in a stricken monotone, as though each word was a name on a list of dead people, and was unable to pronounce ‘inexperienced' even though it was said for him many times, and left out the last two words of his lines – ‘it can rise up and tread'. As for Lola, she spoke her lines correctly but casually, and sometimes smiled inappropriately at some private thought, determined to demonstrate that her nearly adult mind was elsewhere.

And so they went on, the cousins from the north, for a full half an hour, steadily wrecking Briony's creation, and it was a mercy, therefore, when her big sister came to fetch the twins for their bath.

 

Two

P
artly because of her youth and the glory of the day, partly because of her blossoming need for a cigarette, Cecilia Tallis half ran with her flowers along the path that went by the river, by the old diving pool with its mossy brick wall, before curving away through the oak woods. The accumulated inactivity of the summer weeks since finals also hurried her along; since coming home, her life had stood still, and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.

The cool high shade of the woods was a relief, the sculpted intricacies of the tree trunks enchanting. Once through the iron kissing gate, and past the rhododendrons beneath the ha-ha, she crossed the open parkland – sold off to a local farmer to graze his cows on – and came up behind the fountain and its retaining wall and the half-scale reproduction of Bernini's
Triton
in the Piazza Barberini in Rome.

The muscular figure, squatting so comfortably on his shell, could blow through his conch a jet only two inches high, the pressure was so feeble, and water fell back over his head, down his stone locks and along the groove of his powerful spine, leaving a glistening dark green stain. In an alien northern climate he was a long way from home, but he was beautiful in morning sunlight, and so were the four dolphins that supported the wavy-edged shell on which
he sat. She looked at the improbable scales on the dolphins and on the Triton's thighs, and then towards the house. Her quickest way into the drawing room was across the lawn and terrace and through the French windows. But her childhood friend and university acquaintance, Robbie Turner, was on his knees, weeding along a rugosa hedge, and she did not feel like getting into conversation with him. Or at least, not now. Since coming down, landscape gardening was his last craze but one. Now there was talk of medical college, which after a literature degree seemed rather pretentious. And presumptuous too, since it was her father who would have to pay.

She refreshed the flowers by plunging them into the fountain's basin, which was full-scale, deep and cold, and avoided Robbie by hurrying round to the front of the house – it was an excuse, she thought, to stay outside another few minutes. Morning sunlight, or any light, could not conceal the ugliness of the Tallis home – barely forty years old, bright orange brick, squat, lead-paned baronial Gothic, to be condemned one day in an article by Pevsner, or one of his team, as a tragedy of wasted chances, and by a younger writer of the modern school as ‘charmless to a fault'. An Adam-style house had stood here until destroyed by fire in the late 1880s. What remained was the artificial lake and island with its two stone bridges supporting the driveway, and, by the water's edge, a crumbling stuccoed temple. Cecilia's grandfather, who grew up over an ironmonger's shop and made the family fortune with a series of patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps, had imposed on the new house his taste for all things solid, secure and functional. Still, if one turned one's back to the front entrance and glanced down the drive, ignoring the Friesians already congregating in the shade of widely spaced trees, the view was fine enough, giving an impression of timeless, unchanging calm which made her more certain than ever that she must soon be moving on.

She went indoors, quickly crossed the black and white tiled hall – how familiar her echoing steps, how annoying – and
paused to catch her breath in the doorway of the drawing room. Dripping coolly onto her sandalled feet, the untidy bunch of rose-bay willow-herb and irises brought her to a better state of mind. The vase she was looking for was on an American cherry-wood table by the French windows which were slightly ajar. Their south-east aspect had permitted parallelograms of morning sunlight to advance across the powder-blue carpet. Her breathing slowed and her desire for a cigarette deepened, but still she hesitated by the door, momentarily held by the perfection of the scene – by the three faded Chesterfields grouped around the almost new Gothic fireplace in which stood a display of wintry sedge, by the unplayed, untuned harpsichord and the unused rosewood music stands, by the heavy velvet curtains, loosely restrained by an orange and blue tasselled rope, framing a partial view of cloudless sky and the yellow and grey mottled terrace where camomile and feverfew grew between the paving cracks. A set of steps led down to the lawn on whose border Robbie still worked, and which extended to the Triton fountain fifty yards away.

All this – the river and flowers, running, which was something she rarely did these days, the fine ribbing of the oak trunks, the high-ceilinged room, the geometry of light, the pulse in her ears subsiding in the stillness – all this pleased her as the familiar was transformed into a delicious strangeness. But she also felt reproved for her homebound boredom. She had returned from Cambridge with a vague notion that her family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company. But her father remained in town, and her mother, when she wasn't nurturing her migraines, seemed distant, even unfriendly. Cecilia had carried up trays of tea to her mother's room – as spectacularly squalid as her own – thinking some intimate conversations might develop. However, Emily Tallis wanted to share only tiny frets about the household, or she lay back against the pillows, her expression unreadable in the gloom, emptying her cup in wan silence. Briony was lost to her
writing fantasies – what had seemed a passing fad was now an enveloping obsession. Cecilia had seen them on the stairs that morning, her younger sister leading the cousins, poor things, who had arrived only yesterday, up to the nursery to rehearse the play Briony wanted to put on that evening, when Leon and his friend were expected. There was so little time, and already one of the twins had been detained by Betty in the scullery for some wrongdoing or other. Cecilia was not inclined to help – it was too hot, and whatever she did, the project would end in calamity, with Briony expecting too much, and no one, especially the cousins, able to measure up to her frenetic vision.

Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's
Clarissa
. She had made a half-hearted start on a family tree, but on the paternal side, at least until her great-grandfather opened his humble hardware shop, the ancestors were irretrievably sunk in a bog of farm labouring, with suspicious and confusing changes of surnames among the men, and common-law marriages unrecorded in the parish registers. She could not remain here, she knew she should make plans, but she did nothing. There were various possibilities, all equally unpressing. She had a little money in her account, enough to keep her modestly for a year or so. Leon repeatedly invited her to spend time with him in London. University friends were offering to help her find a job – a dull one certainly, but she would have her independence. She had interesting uncles and aunts on her mother's side who were always happy to see her, including wild Hermione, mother of Lola and the boys, who even now was over in Paris with a lover who worked in the wireless.

No one was holding Cecilia back, no one would care particularly if she left. It wasn't torpor that kept her – she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to
feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed. From time to time she persuaded herself she remained for Briony's sake, or to help her mother, or because this really was her last sustained period at home and she would see it through. In fact, the thought of packing a suitcase and taking the morning train did not excite her. Leaving for leaving's sake. Lingering here, bored and comfortable, was a form of self-punishment tinged with pleasure, or the expectation of it; if she went away something bad might happen or, worse, something good, something she could not afford to miss. And there was Robbie, who exasperated her with his affectation of distance, and his grand plans which he would only discuss with her father. They had known each other since they were seven, she and Robbie, and it bothered her that they were awkward when they talked. Even though she felt it was largely his fault – could his first have gone to his head? – she knew this was something she must clear up before she thought of leaving.

Through the open windows came the faint leathery scent of cow dung, always present except on the coldest days, and noticeable only to those who had been away. Robbie had put down his trowel and stood to roll a cigarette, a hangover from his Communist Party time – another abandoned fad, along with his ambitions in anthropology, and the planned hike from Calais to Istanbul. Still, her own cigarettes were two flights up, in one of several possible pockets.

She advanced into the room, and thrust the flowers into the vase. It had once belonged to her Uncle Clem, whose funeral, or re-burial, at the end of the war she remembered quite well: the gun carriage arriving at the country churchyard, the coffin draped in the regimental flag, the raised swords, the bugle at the graveside, and, most memorably for a five-year-old, her father weeping. Clem was his only sibling. The story of how he had come by the vase was told in one of the last letters the young lieutenant wrote home. He was on liaison duties in the French sector and initiated a last-minute evacuation of
a small town west of Verdun before it was shelled. Perhaps fifty women, children and old people were saved. Later, the mayor and other officials led Uncle Clem back through the town to a half-destroyed museum. The vase was taken from a shattered glass case and presented in gratitude. There was no refusing, however inconvenient it might have seemed to fight a war with Meissen porcelain under one arm. A month later the vase was left for safety in a farmhouse, and Lieutenant Tallis waded across a river in spate to retrieve it, returning the same way at midnight to join his unit. In the final days of the war, he was sent on patrol duties and gave the vase to a friend for safekeeping. It slowly found its way back to the regimental headquarters, and was delivered to the Tallis home some months after Uncle Clem's burial.

 

There was really no point trying to arrange wild flowers. They had tumbled into their own symmetry, and it was certainly true that too even a distribution between the irises and the rose-bay willow-herb ruined the effect. She spent some minutes making adjustments in order to achieve a natural chaotic look. While she did so she wondered about going out to Robbie. It would save her from running upstairs. But she felt uncomfortable and hot, and would have liked to check her appearance in the large gilt mirror above the fireplace. But if he turned round – he was standing with his back to the house, smoking – he would see right into the room. At last she was finished and stood back again. Now her brother's friend, Paul Marshall, might believe that the flowers had simply been dropped in the vase in the same carefree spirit with which they had been picked. It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in – but there it was; she couldn't resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone. Her mother wanted flowers in the guest room and Cecilia was happy to oblige. The place to go for water was the kitchen. But Betty was preparing to
cook tonight's meal, and was in terrorising mood. Not only the little boy, Jackson or Pierrot, would be cowering – so too would the extra help from the village. Already, even from the drawing room, it was possible to hear an occasional muffled bad-tempered shout and the clang of a saucepan hitting the hob with unnatural force. If Cecilia went in now she would have to mediate between her mother's vague instructions and Betty's forceful state of mind. It surely made more sense to go outside and fill the vase at the fountain.

Some time in her teens a friend of Cecilia's father who worked in the Victoria and Albert Museum had come to examine the vase and declared it sound. It was genuine Meissen porcelain, the work of the great artist Höroldt, who painted it in 1726. It had most certainly once been the property of King August. Even though it was reckoned to be worth more than the other pieces in the Tallis home, which were mostly junk collected by Cecilia's grandfather, Jack Tallis wanted the vase in use, in honour of his brother's memory. It was not to be imprisoned behind a glass case. If it had survived the war, the reasoning went, then it could survive the Tallises. His wife did not disagree. The truth was, whatever its great value, and beyond its association, Emily Tallis did not much like the vase. Its little painted Chinese figures gathered formally in a garden around a table, with ornate plants and implausible birds, seemed fussy and oppressive. Chinoiserie in general bored her. Cecilia herself had no particular view, though she sometimes wondered just how much it might fetch at Sotheby's. The vase was respected not for Höroldt's mastery of polychrome enamels or the blue and gold interlacing strapwork and foliage, but for Uncle Clem, and the lives he had saved, the river he had crossed at midnight, and his death just a week before the Armistice. Flowers, especially wild flowers, seemed a proper tribute.

Cecilia gripped the cool porcelain in both hands as she stood on one foot, and with the other hooked the French windows open wide. As she stepped out into the brightness,
the rising scent of warmed stone was like a friendly embrace. Two swallows were making passes over the fountain, and a chiff-chaff's song was piercing the air from within the sinewy gloom of the giant Cedar of Lebanon. The flowers swung in the light breeze, tickling her face as she crossed the terrace and carefully negotiated the three crumbly steps down to the gravel path. Robbie turned suddenly at the sound of her approach.

‘I was away in my thoughts,' he began to explain.

‘Would you roll me one of your Bolshevik cigarettes?'

He threw his own cigarette aside, took the tin which lay on his jacket on the lawn and walked alongside her to the fountain. They were silent for a while.