Atonement (37 page)

He nodded faintly, and took a deep breath which he released slowly as she relaxed her grip and withdrew her hands from his face. In the silence, the room appeared to shrink even
smaller. He put his arms around her, lowered his head and kissed her, a deep, sustained and private kiss. Briony moved away quietly to the other end of the room, towards the window. While she drank a glass of water from the kitchen tap, the kiss continued, binding the couple into their solitude. She felt obliterated, expunged from the room, and was relieved.

She turned her back and looked out at the quiet terraced houses in full sunlight, at the way she had come from the High Street. She was surprised to discover that she had no wish to leave yet, even though she was embarrassed by the long kiss, and dreaded what more there was to come. She watched an old woman dressed in a heavy overcoat, despite the heat. She was on the far pavement walking an ailing swag-bellied dachshund on a lead. Cecilia and Robbie were talking in low voices now, and Briony decided that to respect their privacy she would not turn from the window until she was spoken to. It was soothing to watch the woman unfasten her front gate, close it carefully behind her with fussy exactitude, and then, halfway to her front door, bend with difficulty to pull up a weed from the narrow bed that ran the length of her front path. As she did so, the dog waddled forwards and licked her wrist. The lady and her dog went indoors, and the street was empty again. A blackbird dropped down onto a privet hedge and, finding no satisfactory foothold, flew away. The shadow of a cloud came and swiftly dimmed the light, and passed on. It could be any Saturday afternoon. There was little evidence of a war in this suburban street. A glimpse of blackout blinds in a window across the way, the Ford 8 on its blocks, perhaps.

Briony heard her sister say her name and turned round.

‘There isn't much time. Robbie has to report for duty at six tonight and he's got a train to catch. So sit down. There are some things you're going to do for us.'

It was the ward sister's voice. Not even bossy. She simply described the inevitable. Briony took the chair nearest her, Robbie brought over a stool, and Cecilia sat between them. The breakfast she had prepared was forgotten. The three
empty cups stood in the centre of the table. He lifted the pile of books to the floor. As Cecilia moved the jam jar of harebells to one side where it could not be knocked over, she exchanged a look with Robbie.

He was staring at the flowers as he cleared his throat. When he began to speak, his voice was purged of emotion. He could have been reading from a set of standing orders. He was looking at her now. His eyes were steady, and he had everything under control. But there were drops of sweat on his forehead, above his eyebrows.

‘The most important thing you've already agreed to. You're to go to your parents as soon as you can and tell them everything they need to know to be convinced that your evidence was false. When's your day off?'

‘Sunday week.'

‘That's when you'll go. You'll take our addresses and you'll tell Jack and Emily that Cecilia is waiting to hear from them. The second thing you'll do tomorrow. Cecilia says you'll have an hour at some point. You'll go to a solicitor, a commissioner for oaths, and make a statement which will be signed and witnessed. In it you'll say what you did wrong, and how you're retracting your evidence. You'll send copies to both of us. Is that clear?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then you'll write to me in much greater detail. In this letter you'll put in absolutely everything you think is relevant. Everything that led up to you saying you saw me by the lake. And why, even though you were uncertain, you stuck to your story in the months leading up to my trial. If there were pressures on you, from the police or your parents, I want to know. Have you got that? It needs to be a long letter.'

‘Yes.'

He met Cecilia's look and nodded. ‘And if you can remember anything at all about Danny Hardman, where he was, what he was doing, at what time, who else saw him – anything that might put his alibi in question, then we want to hear it.'

Cecilia was writing out the addresses. Briony was shaking her head and starting to speak, but Robbie ignored her and spoke over her. He had got to his feet and was looking at his watch.

‘There's very little time. We're going to walk you to the tube. Cecilia and I want the last hour together alone before I have to leave. And you'll need to spend the rest of today writing your statement, and letting your parents know you're coming. And you could start thinking about this letter you're sending me.'

With this brittle précis of her obligations he left the table and went towards the bedroom.

Briony stood too and said, ‘Old Hardman was probably telling the truth. Danny was with him all that night.'

Cecilia was about to pass the folded sheet of paper she had been writing on. Robbie had stopped in the bedroom doorway.

Cecilia said, ‘What do you mean by that? What are you saying?'

‘It was Paul Marshall.'

During the silence that followed, Briony tried to imagine the adjustments that each would be making. Years of seeing it a certain way. And yet, however startling, it was only a detail. Nothing essential was changed by it. Nothing in her own role.

Robbie came back to the table. ‘Marshall?'

‘Yes.'

‘You saw him?'

‘I saw a man his height.'

‘My height.'

‘Yes.'

Cecilia now stood and looked around her – a hunt for the cigarettes was about to start. Robbie found them and tossed the packet across the room. Cecilia lit up and said as she exhaled, ‘I find it difficult to believe. He's a fool, I know…'

‘He's a greedy fool,' Robbie said. ‘But I can't imagine him with Lola Quincey, even for the five minutes it took…'

Given all that had happened, and all its terrible consequences, it was frivolous, she knew, but Briony took calm pleasure in delivering her clinching news.

‘I've just come from their wedding.'

Again, the amazed adjustments, the incredulous repetition. Wedding? This morning? Clapham? Then reflective silence, broken by single remarks.

‘I want to find him.'

‘You'll do no such thing.'

‘I want to kill him.'

And then, ‘It's time to go.'

There was so much more that could have been said. But they seemed exhausted, by her presence, or by the subject. Or they simply longed to be alone. Either way, it was clear they felt their meeting was at an end. All curiosity was spent. Everything could wait until she wrote her letter. Robbie fetched his jacket and cap from the bedroom. Briony noted the corporal's single stripe.

Cecilia was saying to him, ‘He's immune. She'll always cover for him.'

Minutes were lost while she searched for her ration book. Finally, she gave up and said to Robbie, ‘I'm sure it's in Wiltshire, in the cottage.'

As they were about to leave, and he was holding the door open for the sisters, Robbie said, ‘I suppose we owe an apology to Able Seaman Hardman.'

Downstairs, Mrs Jarvis did not appear from her sitting room as they went by. They heard clarinets playing on her wireless. Once through the front door, it seemed to Briony that she was stepping into another day. There was a strong, gritty breeze blowing, and the street was in harsh relief, with even more sunlight, fewer shadows than before. There was not enough room on the pavement to go three abreast. Robbie and Cecilia walked behind her, hand in hand. Briony felt her blistered heel
rubbing against her shoe, but she was determined they should not see her limp. She had the impression of being seen off the premises. At one point she turned and told them she would be happy to walk to the tube on her own. But they insisted. They had purchases to make for Robbie's journey. They walked on in silence. Small-talk was not an option. She knew that she did not have the right to ask her sister about her new address, or Robbie where the train was taking him, or about the cottage in Wiltshire. Was that where the harebells came from? Surely there had been an idyll. Nor could she ask when the two of them would see each other again. Together, she and her sister and Robbie had only one subject, and it was fixed in the unchangeable past.

They stood outside Balham tube station, which in three months' time would achieve its terrible form of fame in the Blitz. A thin stream of Saturday shoppers moved around them, causing them, against their will, to stand closer. They made a cool farewell. Robbie reminded her to have money with her when she saw the commissioner for oaths. Cecilia told her she was not to forget to take the addresses with her to Surrey. Then it was over. They stared at her, waiting for her to leave. But there was one thing she had not said.

She spoke slowly. ‘I'm very very sorry. I've caused you such terrible distress.' They continued to stare at her, and she repeated herself. ‘I'm very sorry.'

It sounded so foolish and inadequate, as though she had knocked over a favourite houseplant, or forgotten a birthday.

Robbie said softly, ‘Just do all the things we've asked.'

It was almost conciliatory, that ‘just', but not quite, not yet.

She said, ‘Of course,' and then turned and walked away, conscious of them watching her as she entered the ticket hall and crossed it. She paid her fare to Waterloo. When she reached the barrier, she looked back and they had gone.

She showed her ticket and went through into the dirty yellow light, to the head of the clanking, creaking escalator, and it began to take her down, into the man-made breeze rising from the blackness, the breath of a million Londoners cooling her face and tugging at her cape. She stood still and let herself be carried down, grateful to be moving without scouring her heel. She was surprised at how serene she felt, and just a little sad. Was it disappointment? She had hardly expected to be forgiven. What she felt was more like homesickness, though there was no source for it, no home. But she was sad to leave her sister. It was her sister she missed – or more precisely, it was her sister with Robbie. Their love. Neither Briony nor the war had destroyed it. This was what soothed her as she sank deeper under the city. How Cecilia had drawn him to her with her eyes. That tenderness in her voice when she called him back from his memories, from Dunkirk, or from the roads that led to it. She used to speak like that to her sometimes, when Cecilia was sixteen and she was a child of six and things went impossibly wrong. Or in the night, when Cecilia came to rescue her from a nightmare and take her into her own bed. Those were the words she used.
Come back. It was only a bad dream. Briony, come back.
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten. She was gliding down now, through the soupy brown light, almost to the bottom. There were no other passengers in sight, and the air was suddenly still. She was calm as she considered what she had to do. Together, the note to her parents and the formal statement would take no time at all. Then she would be free for the rest of the day. She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin.

 

BT

London 1999

 

London, 1999

 

W
hat a strange time this has been. Today, on the morning of my seventy-seventh birthday, I decided to make one last visit to the Imperial War Museum library in Lambeth. It suited my peculiar state of mind. The reading room, housed right up in the dome of the building, was formerly the chapel of the Royal Bethlehem Hospital – the old Bedlam. Where the unhinged once came to offer their prayers, scholars now gather to research the collective insanity of war. The car the family was sending was not due until after lunch, so I thought I would distract myself, checking final details, and saying my farewells to the Keeper of Documents, and to the cheerful porters who have been escorting me up and down in the lift during these wintry weeks. I also intended to donate to the archives my dozen long letters from old Mr Nettle. It was a birthday present to myself, I suppose, to pass an hour or two in a half-pretence of seeming busy, fussing about with those little tasks of housekeeping that come at the end, and are part of the reluctant process of letting go. In the same mood, I was busy in my study yesterday afternoon; now the drafts are in order and dated, the photocopied sources labelled, the borrowed books ready for return, and everything is in the right box file. I've always liked to make a tidy finish.

It was too cold and wet, and I was feeling too troubled
to go by public transport. I took a taxi from Regent's Park, and in the long crawl through central London I thought of those sad inmates of Bedlam who were once a source of general entertainment, and I reflected in a self-pitying way on how I was soon to join their ranks. The results of my scan have come through and I went to see my doctor about them yesterday morning. It was not good news. This was the way he put it as soon as I sat down. My headaches, the sensation of tightness around the temples, have a particular and sinister cause. He pointed out some granular smears across a section of the scan. I noticed how the pencil tip quivered in his hand, and I wondered if he too was suffering some neural disorder. In the spirit of shoot the messenger, I rather hoped he was. I was experiencing, he said, a series of tiny, nearly imperceptible strokes. The process will be slow, but my brain, my mind, is closing down. The little failures of memory that dog us all beyond a certain point will become more noticeable, more debilitating, until the time will come when I won't notice them because I will have lost the ability to comprehend anything at all. The days of the week, the events of the morning, or even ten minutes ago, will be beyond my reach. My phone number, my address, my name and what I did with my life will be gone. In two, three or four years' time, I will not recognise my remaining oldest friends, and when I wake in the morning, I will not recognise that I am in my own room. And soon I won't be, because I will need continuous care.

I have vascular dementia, the doctor told me, and there was some comfort to be had. There's the slowness of the undoing, which he must have mentioned a dozen times. Also, it's not as bad as Alzheimer's, with its mood swings and aggression. If I'm lucky, it might turn out to be somewhat benign. I might not be unhappy – just a dim old biddy in a chair, knowing nothing, expecting nothing. I had asked him to be frank, so I could not complain. Now he was hurrying me out. There were twelve people in his waiting room wanting their turn. In summary, as he helped me into my coat, he gave me the route map: loss
of memory, short-and long-term, the disappearance of single words – simple nouns might be the first to go – then language itself, along with balance, and soon after, all motor control, and finally the autonomous nervous system. Bon voyage!

I wasn't distressed, not at first. On the contrary, I was elated and urgently wanted to tell my closest friends. I spent an hour on the phone breaking my news. Perhaps I was already losing my grip. It seemed so momentous. All afternoon I pottered about in my study with my housekeeping chores, and by the time I finished, there were six new box files on the shelves. Stella and John came over in the evening and we ordered in some Chinese food. Between them they drank two bottles of Morgon. I drank green tea. My charming friends were devastated by my description of my future. They're both in their sixties, old enough to start fooling themselves that seventy-seven is still young. Today, in the taxi, as I crossed London at walking pace in the freezing rain, I thought of little else. I'm going mad, I told myself. Let me not be mad. But I couldn't really believe it. Perhaps I was nothing more than a victim of modern diagnostics; in another century it would have been said of me that I was old and therefore losing my mind. What else would I expect? I'm only dying then, I'm fading into unknowing.

My taxi was cutting through the back streets of Bloomsbury, past the house where my father lived after his second marriage, and past the basement flat where I lived and worked all through the fifties. Beyond a certain age, a journey across the city becomes uncomfortably reflective. The addresses of the dead pile up. We crossed the square where Leon heroically nursed his wife, and then raised his boisterous children with a devotion that amazed us all. One day I too will prompt a moment's reflection in the passenger of a passing cab. It's a popular shortcut, the Inner Circle of Regent's Park.

We crossed the river at Waterloo Bridge. I sat forward on the edge of my seat to take in my favourite view of the city, and as I turned my neck, downstream to St Paul's, upstream
to Big Ben, the full panoply of tourist London in between, I felt myself to be physically well and mentally intact, give or take the headaches and a little tiredness. However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe. In the next year or two, however, I will be losing my claim to this familiar protestation. The seriously ill, the deranged, are another race, an inferior race. I won't let anyone persuade me otherwise.

My cabbie was cursing. Over the river, roadworks were forcing us on a detour towards the old County Hall. As we swung off the roundabout there, towards Lambeth, I had a glimpse of St Thomas's Hospital. It took a clobbering in the Blitz – I wasn't there, thank God – and the replacement buildings and the tower block are a national disgrace. I worked in three hospitals in the duration – Alder Hey and the Royal East Sussex as well as St Thomas's – and I merged them in my description to concentrate all my experiences into one place. A convenient distortion, and the least of my offences against veracity.

It was raining less heavily as the driver made a neat U-turn in the middle of the road to bring us outside the main gates of the museum. With the business of gathering up my bag, finding a twenty-pound note and unfolding my umbrella, I did not notice the car parked immediately in front until my cab pulled away. It was a black Rolls. For a moment I thought it was unattended. In fact, the chauffeur was a diminutive fellow almost lost behind the front wheel. I'm not sure that what I am about to describe really rates as a startling coincidence. I occasionally think of the Marshalls whenever I see a parked Rolls without a driver. It's become a habit over the years. They often pass through my mind, usually without generating any particular feeling. I've grown used to the idea of them. They still appear in the newspapers occasionally, in connection with their Foundation and all its good work for medical research, or the collection they've donated to the
Tate, or their generous funding of agricultural projects in sub-Saharan Africa. And her parties, and their vigorous libel actions against national newspapers. It was not remarkable that Lord and Lady Marshall passed through my thoughts as I approached those massive twin guns in front of the museum, but it was a shock to see them coming down the steps towards me.

A posse of officials – I recognised the museum's director – and a single photographer made up a farewell party. Two young men held umbrellas over the Marshalls' heads as they descended the steps by the columns. I held back, slowing my pace rather than stopping and drawing attention to myself. There was a round of handshakes, and a chorus of genial laughter at something Lord Marshall said. He leaned on a walking stick, the lacquered cane that I think has become something of a trademark. He and his wife and the director posed for the camera, then the Marshalls came away, accompanied by the suited young men with the umbrellas. The museum officials remained on the steps. My concern was to see which way the Marshalls would go so that I could avoid a head-on encounter. They chose to pass the guns on their left, so I did the same.

Concealed partly by the raised barrels and their concrete emplacements, partly by my tilted umbrella, I kept hidden, but still managed a good look. They went by in silence. He was familiar from his photographs. Despite the liver spots and the purplish swags under his eyes, he at last appeared the cruelly handsome plutocrat, though somewhat reduced. Age had shrunk his face and delivered the look he had always fallen short of by a fraction. It was his jaw that had scaled itself down – bone-loss had been kind. He was a little doddery and flat-footed, but he walked reasonably well for a man of eighty-eight. One becomes a judge of these things. But his hand was firmly on her arm and the stick was not just for show. It has often been remarked upon, how much good he did in the world. Perhaps he's spent a lifetime making amends. Or
perhaps he just swept onwards without a thought, to live the life that was always his.

As for Lola – my high-living, chain-smoking cousin – here she was, still as lean and fit as a racing dog, and still faithful. Who would have dreamed it? This, as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered. That may sound sour, but it went through my mind as I glanced across at her. She wore a sable coat and a scarlet wide-brimmed fedora. Bold rather than vulgar. Near-on eighty years old, and still wearing high heels. They clicked on the pavement with the sound of a younger woman's stride. There was no sign of a cigarette. In fact, there was an air of the health farm about her, and an indoor tan. She was taller than her husband now, and there was no doubting her vigour. But there was also something comic about her – or was I clutching at straws? She was heavy on the make-up, quite garish around the mouth and liberal with the smoothing cream and powder. I've always been a puritan in this, so I count myself an unreliable witness. I thought there was a touch of the stage villain here – the gaunt figure, the black coat, the lurid lips. A cigarette holder, a lapdog tucked under one arm and she could have been Cruella de Vil.

We passed by each other in a matter of seconds. I went on up the steps, then stopped under the pediment, out of the rain, to watch the group make its way to the car. He was helped in first, and I saw then how frail he was. He couldn't bend at the waist, nor could he take his own weight on one foot. They had to lift him into his seat. The far door was held open for Lady Lola who folded herself in with a terrible agility. I watched the Rolls pull away into the traffic, then I went in. Seeing them laid something heavy on my heart, and I was trying not to think about it, or feel it now. I already had enough to deal with today. But Lola's health was on my mind as I gave my bag in at the cloakroom, and exchanged cheery good mornings with the porters. The rule here is that one must be escorted up to the reading room in a lift, whose cramped space makes small-talk
compulsory as far as I'm concerned. As I made it – shocking weather, but improvements were due by the weekend – I couldn't resist thinking about my encounter outside in the fundamental terms of health: I might outlive Paul Marshall, but Lola would certainly outlive me. The consequences of this are clear. The issue has been with us for years. As my editor put it once, publication equals litigation. But I could hardly face that now. There was already enough that I didn't want to be thinking about. I had come here to be busy.

I spent a while chatting with the Keeper of Documents. I handed over the bundle of letters Mr Nettle wrote me about Dunkirk – most gratefully received. They'll be stored with all the others I've given. The Keeper had found me an obliging old colonel of the Buffs, something of an amateur historian himself, who had read the relevant pages of my typescript and faxed through his suggestions. His notes were handed to me now – irascible, helpful. I was completely absorbed by them, thank God.

‘Absolutely no (underlined twice) soldier serving with the British army would say “On the double”. Only an American would give such an order. The correct term is “At the double”.'

I love these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction.

‘No one would ever think of saying “twenty-five-pound guns”. The term was either “twenty-five pounders” or “twenty-five-pounder guns”. Your usage would sound distinctly bizarre, even to a man who was not with the Royal Artillery.'

Like policemen in a search team, we go on hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth.

‘You have your RAF chappie wearing a beret. I really don't think so. Outside the Tank Corps, even the army didn't have them in 1940. I think you'd better give the man a forage cap.'

Finally, the colonel, who began his letter by addressing me as ‘Miss Tallis', allowed some impatience with my sex to show through. What was our kind doing anyway, meddling in these affairs?

‘Madame (underlined three times) – a Stuka does not carry “a single thousand-ton bomb”. Are you aware that a navy frigate hardly weighs that much? I suggest you look into the matter further.'

Merely a typo. I meant to type ‘pound'. I made a note of these corrections, and wrote a letter of thanks to the colonel. I paid for some photocopies of documents which I arranged into orderly piles for my own archives. I returned the books I had been using to the front desk, and threw away various scraps of paper. The workspace was cleared of all traces of me. As I said my goodbyes to the Keeper, I learned that the Marshall Foundation was about to make a grant to the museum. After a round of handshaking with the other librarians, and my promise to acknowledge the department's help, a porter was called to see me down. Very kindly, the girl in the cloakroom called a taxi, and one of the younger members of the door staff carried my bag all the way out to the pavement.