Atonement (14 page)

‘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 towards 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 towards your sister.'

As Cecilia turned towards 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 towards 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 towards a window, then changed her mind and walked back towards 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 towards 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 towards 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

H
owever 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 panelling, the pervasive heaviness of nearly new fixtures, the colossal fire dogs, 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 PC 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 rumour in the village was that before he joined the Force and grew his moustache, 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
centre 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 centre 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
, PC 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 towards the drawing room. Another reason not to dial PC 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 labour. 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 grey 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-aggrandisement, 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 side-stepping migraine. Fretting, concentrated thought, reading, looking, wanting – all were to be avoided in favour 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 signalled 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 levelling 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 sympathised. 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 over-furnished 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 colouring 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.