Atonement (13 page)

For all that,
when he fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter he did not forget the carbon.
He typed the date and salutation and plunged straight into a conventional
apology for his “clumsy and inconsiderate behavior.” Then he
paused. Was he going to make any show of feeling at all, and if so, at what
level?

“If
it’s any excuse, I’ve noticed just lately that I’m rather
lightheaded in your presence. I mean, I’ve never gone barefoot into
someone’s house before. It must be the heat!”

How thin it
looked, this self-protective levity. He was like a man with advanced TB
pretending to have a cold. He flicked the return lever twice and rewrote:
“It’s hardly an excuse, I know, but lately I seem to be awfully
lightheaded around you. What was I doing, walking barefoot into your house? And
have I ever snapped off the rim of an antique vase before?” He rested his
hands on the keys while he confronted the urge to type her name again.
“Cee, I don’t think I can blame the heat!” Now jokiness had made
way for melodrama, or plaintiveness. The rhetorical questions had a clammy air;
the exclamation mark was the first resort of those who shout to make themselves
clearer. He forgave this punctuation only in his mother’s letters where a
row of five indicated a jolly good joke. He turned the drum and typed an
x
.
“Cecilia, I don’t think I can blame the heat.” Now the humor
was removed, and an element of self-pity had crept in. The exclamation mark
would have to be reinstated. Volume was obviously not its only business.

He tinkered with
his draft for a further quarter of an hour, then threaded in new sheets and
typed up a fair copy. The crucial lines now read: “You’d be
forgiven for thinking me mad—wandering into your house barefoot, or
snapping your antique vase. The truth is, I feel rather lightheaded and foolish
in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat! Will you
forgive me? Robbie.” Then, after a few moments’ reverie, tilted
back on his chair, during which time he thought about the page at which his
Anatomy
tended to fall open these days, he dropped forward and typed before he could
stop himself, “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my
thoughts I make love to you all day long.”

There it
was—ruined. The draft was ruined. He pulled the sheet clear of the
typewriter, set it aside, and wrote his letter out in longhand, confident that
the personal touch fitted the occasion. As he looked at his watch he remembered
that before setting out he should polish his shoes. He stood up from his desk,
careful not to thump his head on the rafter.

He was
without social unease—inappropriately so, in the view of many. At a
dinner in Cambridge once, during a sudden silence round the table, someone who
disliked Robbie asked loudly about his parents. Robbie held the man’s eye
and answered pleasantly that his father had walked out long ago and that his
mother was a charlady who supplemented her income as an occasional clairvoyant.
His tone was of easygoing tolerance of his questioner’s ignorance. Robbie
elaborated upon his circumstances, then ended by asking politely about the
parents of the other fellow. Some said that it was innocence, or ignorance of
the world, that protected Robbie from being harmed by it, that he was a kind of
holy fool who could step across the drawing room equivalent of hot coals
without harm. The truth, as Cecilia knew, was simpler. He had spent his
childhood moving freely between the bungalow and the main house. Jack Tallis
was his patron, Leon and Cecilia were his best friends, at least until grammar
school. At university, where Robbie discovered that he was cleverer than many
of the people he met, his liberation was complete. Even his arrogance need not
be on display.

Grace Turner
was happy to take care of his laundry—how else, beyond hot meals, to show
mother love when her only baby was twenty-three?—but Robbie preferred to
shine his own shoes. In a white singlet and the trousers of his suit, he went
down the short straight run of stairs in his stockinged feet carrying a pair of
black brogues. By the living room door was a narrow space that ended in the
frosted-glass door of the front entrance through which a diffused blood-orange
light embossed the beige and olive wallpaper in fiery honeycomb patterns. He
paused, one hand on the doorknob, surprised by the transformation, then he
entered. The air in the room felt moist and warm, and faintly salty. A session
must have just ended. His mother was on the sofa with her feet up and her
carpet slippers dangling from her toes.

“Molly
was here,” she said, and moved herself upright to be sociable. “And
I’m glad to tell you she’s going to be all right.”

Robbie
fetched the shoeshine box from the kitchen, sat down in the armchair nearest
his mother and spread out a page of a three-day-old
Daily Sketch
on
the carpet.

“Well
done you,” he said. “I heard you at it and went up for a
bath.”

He knew he
should be leaving soon, he should be polishing his shoes, but instead he leaned
back in the chair, stretched his great length and yawned.

“Weeding!
What am I doing with my life?”

There was
more humor than anguish in his tone. He folded his arms and stared at the
ceiling while massaging the instep of one foot with the big toe of the other.

His mother
was staring at the space above his head. “Now come on. Something’s
up. What’s wrong with you? And don’t say
‘Nothing.’”

Grace Turner
became the Tallises’ cleaner the week after Ernest walked away. Jack
Tallis did not have it in him to turn out a young woman and her child. In the
village he found a replacement gardener and handyman who was not in need of a
tied cottage. At the time it was assumed Grace would keep the bungalow for a
year or two before moving on or remarrying. Her good nature and her knack with
the polishing—her dedication to the surface of things, was the family
joke—made her popular, but it was the adoration she aroused in the
six-year-old Cecilia and her eight-year-old brother Leon that was the saving of
her, and the making of Robbie. In the school holidays Grace was allowed to
bring her own six-year-old along. Robbie grew up with the run of the nursery
and those other parts of the house the children were permitted, as well as the
grounds. His tree-climbing pal was Leon, Cecilia was the little sister who
trustingly held his hand and made him feel immensely wise. A few years later,
when Robbie won his scholarship to the local grammar, Jack Tallis took the
first step in an enduring patronage by paying for the uniform and textbooks.
This was the year Briony was born. The difficult birth was followed by
Emily’s long illness. Grace’s helpfulness secured her position: on
Christmas Day that year—1922—Leon dressed in top hat and riding
breeches, walked through the snow to the bungalow with a green envelope from
his father. A solicitor’s letter informed her that the freehold of the
bungalow was now hers, irrespective of the position she held with the Tallises.
But she had stayed on, returning to housework as the children grew older, with
responsibilities for the special polishing.

Her theory
about Ernest was that he had got himself sent to the Front under another name,
and never returned. Otherwise, his lack of curiosity about his son was inhuman.
Often, in the minutes she had to herself each day as she walked from the
bungalow to the house, she would reflect on the benign accidents of her life.
She had always been a little frightened of Ernest. Perhaps they would not have
been so happy together as she had been living alone with her darling genius son
in her own tiny house. If Mr. Tallis had been a different kind of man . . .
Some of the women who came for a shilling’s glimpse of the future had
been left by their husbands, even more had husbands killed at the Front. It was
a pinched life the women led, and it easily could have been hers.

“Nothing,”
he said in answer to her question. “There’s nothing up with me at
all.” As he took up a brush and a tin of blacking, he said, “So the
future’s looking bright for Molly.”

“She’s
going to remarry within five years. And she’ll be very happy. Someone
from the north with qualifications.”

“She
deserves no less.”

They sat in
comfortable silence while she watched him buffing his brogues with a yellow
duster. By his handsome cheekbones the muscles twitched with the movement, and
along his forearms they fanned and shifted in complicated rearrangements under
the skin. There must have been something right with Ernest to have given her a
boy like this.

“So
you’re off out.”

“Leon
was just arriving as I was coming away. He had his friend with him, you know,
the chocolate magnate. They persuaded me to join them for dinner
tonight.”

“Oh,
and there was me all afternoon, on the silver. And doing out his room.”

He picked up
his shoes and stood. “When I look for my face in my spoon, I’ll see
only you.”

“Get
on. Your shirts are hanging in the kitchen.”

He packed up
the shoeshine box and carried it out, and chose a cream linen shirt from the
three on the airer. He came back through and was on his way out, but she wanted
to keep him a little longer.

“And
those Quincey children. That boy wetting his bed and all. The poor little
lambs.”

He lingered
in the doorway and shrugged. He had looked in and seen them round the pool,
screaming and laughing through the late morning heat. They would have run his
wheelbarrow into the deep end if he had not gone across. Danny Hardman was
there too, leering at their sister when he should have been at work.

“They’ll
survive,” he said.

Impatient to
be out, he skipped up the stairs three at a time. Back in his bedroom he
finished dressing hurriedly, whistling tunelessly as he stooped to grease and
comb his hair before the mirror inside his wardrobe. He had no ear for music at
all, and found it impossible to tell if one note was higher or lower than
another. Now he was committed to the evening, he felt excited and, strangely,
free. It couldn’t be worse than it already was. Methodically, and with
pleasure in his own efficiency, as though preparing for some hazardous journey
or military exploit, he accomplished the familiar little chores—located his
keys, found a ten-shilling note inside his wallet, brushed his teeth, smelled
his breath against a cupped hand, from the desk snatched up his letter and
folded it into an envelope, loaded his cigarette case and checked his lighter.
One last time, he braced himself in front of the mirror. He bared his gums, and
turned to present his profile and looked across his shoulder at his image.
Finally, he patted his pockets, then loped down the stairs, three at a time
again, called a farewell to his mother, and stepped out onto the narrow brick
path which led between the flower beds to a gate in the picket fence.

In the years
to come he would often think back to this time, when he walked along the
footpath that made a shortcut through a corner of the oak woods and joined the
main drive where it curved toward the lake and the house. He was not late, and
yet he found it difficult to slow his pace. Many immediate and other less
proximal pleasures mingled in the richness of these minutes: the fading,
reddish dusk, the warm, still air saturated with the scents of dried grasses
and baked earth, his limbs loosened by the day’s work in the gardens, his
skin smooth from his bath, the feel of his shirt and of this, his only suit.
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual
pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation—it
might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had
found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him. Other
tributaries swelled his happiness; he still derived satisfaction from the
thought of his first—the best in his year he was told. And now there was
confirmation from Jack Tallis of his continuing support. A fresh adventure
ahead, not an exile at all, he was suddenly certain. It was right and good that
he should study medicine. He could not have explained his optimism—he was
happy and therefore bound to succeed.

One word
contained everything he felt, and explained why he was to dwell on this moment
later. Freedom. In his life as in his limbs. Long ago, before he had even heard
of grammar schools, he was entered for an exam that led him to one. Cambridge,
much as he enjoyed it, was the choice of his ambitious headmaster. Even his
subject was effectively chosen for him by a charismatic teacher. Now, finally,
with the exercise of will, his adult life had begun. There was a story he was
plotting with himself as the hero, and already its opening had caused a little
shock among his friends. Landscape gardening was no more than a bohemian
fantasy, as well as a lame ambition—so he had analyzed it with the help
of Freud—to replace or surpass his absent father.
Schoolmastering—in fifteen years’ time, Head of English, Mr. R.
Turner, M.A. Cantab.—was not in the story either, nor was teaching at a
university. Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in
retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions
about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the
core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures. It was not the necessary
priesthood, nor the most vital pursuit of an inquiring mind, nor the first and
last defense against a barbarian horde, any more than the study of painting or
music, history or science. At various talks in his final year Robbie had heard
a psychoanalyst, a Communist trade union official and a physicist each declare
for his own field as passionately, as convincingly, as Leavis had for his own.
Such claims were probably made for medicine, but for Robbie the matter was
simpler and more personal: his practical nature and his frustrated scientific
aspirations would find an outlet, he would have skills far more elaborate than
the ones he had acquired in practical criticism, and above all he would have
made his own decision. He would take lodgings in a strange town—and
begin.