Atonement (14 page)

He had
emerged from the trees and reached the point where the path joined the drive.
The falling light magnified the dusky expanse of the park, and the soft yellow
glow at the windows on the far side of the lake made the house seem almost
grand and beautiful. She was in there, perhaps in her bedroom, preparing for
dinner—out of view, at the back of the building on the second floor.
Facing over the fountain. He pushed away these vivid, daylight thoughts of her,
not wanting to arrive feeling deranged. The hard soles of his shoes rapped
loudly on the metaled road like a giant clock, and he made himself think about
time, about his great hoard, the luxury of an unspent fortune. He had never
before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such
impatience for the story to begin. There were men at Cambridge who were
mentally agile as teachers, and still played a decent game of tennis, still
rowed, who were twenty years older than him. Twenty years at least in which to
unfold his story at roughly this level of physical well-being—almost as
long as he had already lived. Twenty years would sweep him forward to the
futuristic date of 1955. What of importance would he know then that was obscure
now? Might there be for him another thirty years beyond that time, to be lived
out at some more thoughtful pace?

He thought of
himself in 1962, at fifty, when he would be old, but not quite old enough to be
useless, and of the weathered, knowing doctor he would be by then, with the
secret stories, the tragedies and successes stacked behind him. Also stacked
would be books by the thousand, for there would be a study, vast and gloomy,
richly crammed with the trophies of a lifetime’s travel and thought—rare
rain forest herbs, poisoned arrows, failed electrical inventions, soapstone
figurines, shrunken skulls, aboriginal art. On the shelves, medical reference
and meditations, certainly, but also the books that now filled the cubbyhole in
the bungalow attic—the eighteenth-century poetry that had almost
persuaded him he should be a landscape gardener, his third-edition Jane Austen,
his Eliot and Lawrence and Wilfred Owen, the complete set of Conrad, the
priceless 1783 edition of Crabbe’s
The Village
, his Housman, the
autographed copy of Auden’s
The Dance of Death
. For this was the
point, surely: he would be a better doctor for having read literature. What
deep readings his modified sensibility might make of human suffering, of the
self-destructive folly or sheer bad luck that drive men toward ill health!
Birth, death, and frailty in between. Rise and fall—this was the
doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too. He was thinking of
the nineteenth-century novel. Broad tolerance and the long view, an inconspicuously
warm heart and cool judgment; his kind of doctor would be alive to the
monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable;
he would press the enfeebled pulse, hear the expiring breath, feel the fevered
hand begin to cool and reflect, in the manner that only literature and religion
teach, on the puniness and nobility of mankind . . .

His footsteps
quickened in the still summer evening to the rhythm of his exultant thoughts.
Ahead of him, about a hundred yards away, was the bridge, and on it, he
thought, picked out against the darkness of the road, was a white shape which
seemed at first to be part of the pale stone of the parapet. Staring at it
dissolved its outlines, but within a few paces it had taken on a vaguely human
form. At this distance he was not able to tell whether it faced away or toward
him. It was motionless and he assumed he was being watched. He tried for a
second or two to entertain himself with the idea of a ghost, but he had no
belief in the supernatural, not even in the supremely undemanding being that
presided over the Norman church in the village. It was a child, he saw now, and
therefore it must be Briony, in the white dress he had seen her wearing earlier
in the day. He could see her clearly now and he raised his hand and called out
to her, and said, “It’s me, Robbie,” but still she did not
move.

As he
approached it occurred to him that it might be preferable for his letter to
precede him into the house. Otherwise he might have to pass it to Cecilia in company,
watched perhaps by her mother who had been rather cool toward him since he came
down. Or he might be unable to give the letter to Cecilia at all because she
would be keeping her distance. If Briony gave it to her, she would have time to
read it and reflect in private. The few extra minutes might soften her.

“I was
wondering if you’d do me a favor,” he said as he came up to her.

She nodded
and waited.

“Will
you run ahead and give this note to Cee?”

He put the
envelope into her hand as he spoke, and she took it without a word.

“I’ll
be there in a few minutes,” he started to say, but she had already turned
and was running across the bridge. He leaned back against the parapet and took
out a cigarette as he watched her bobbing and receding form fade into the dusk.
It was an awkward age in a girl, he thought contentedly. Twelve, or was it
thirteen? He lost sight of her for a second or two, then saw her as she crossed
the island, highlighted against the darker mass of trees. Then he lost her
again, and it was only when she reappeared, on the far side of the second
bridge, and was leaving the drive to take a shortcut across the grass that he
stood suddenly, seized by horror and absolute certainty. An involuntary,
wordless shout left him as he took a few hurried steps along the drive,
faltered, ran on, then stopped again, knowing that pursuit was pointless. He
could no longer see her as he cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed
Briony’s name. That was pointless too. He stood there, straining his eyes
to see her—as if that would help—and straining his memory too,
desperate to believe that he was mistaken. But there was no mistake. The
handwritten letter he had rested on the open copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
,
Splanchnology section, page 1546, the vagina. The typed page, left by him near
the typewriter, was the one he had taken and folded into the envelope. No need
for Freudian smart-aleckry—the explanation was simple and
mechanical—the innocuous letter was lying across figure 1236, with its
bold spread and rakish crown of pubic hair, while his obscene draft was on the
table, within easy reach. He bellowed Briony’s name again, though he knew
she must be by the front entrance by now. Sure enough, within seconds, a distant
rhombus of ocher light containing her outline widened, paused, then narrowed to
nothing as she entered the house and the door was closed behind her.

Nine

O
N TWO
occasions within half an hour, Cecilia
stepped out of her bedroom, caught sight of herself in the gilt-frame mirror at
the top of the stairs and, immediately dissatisfied, returned to her wardrobe
to reconsider. Her first resort was a black crêpe de chine dress which,
according to the dressing table mirror, bestowed by means of clever cutting a
certain severity of form. Its air of invulnerability was heightened by the
darkness of her eyes. Rather than offset the effect with a string of pearls,
she reached in a moment’s inspiration for a necklace of pure jet. The
lipstick’s bow had been perfect at first application. Various tilts of
the head to catch perspectives in triptych reassured her that her face was not
too long, or not this evening. She was expected in the kitchen on behalf of her
mother, and Leon was waiting for her, she knew, in the drawing room. Still, she
found time, as she was about to leave, to return to the dressing table and
apply her perfume to the points of her elbows, a playful touch in accord with
her mood as she closed the door of her bedroom behind her.

But the
public gaze of the stairway mirror as she hurried toward it revealed a woman on
her way to a funeral, an austere, joyless woman moreover, whose black carapace
had affinities with some form of matchbox-dwelling insect. A stag beetle! It
was her future self, at eighty-five, in widow’s weeds. She did not
linger—she turned on her heel, which was also black, and returned to her
room.

She was
skeptical, because she knew the tricks the mind could play. At the same time,
her mind was—in every sense—where she was to spend the evening, and
she had to be at ease with herself. She stepped out of the black crêpe
dress where it fell to the floor, and stood in her heels and underwear,
surveying the possibilities on the wardrobe racks, mindful of the passing
minutes. She hated the thought of appearing austere. Relaxed was how she wanted
to feel, and, at the same time, self-contained. Above all, she wanted to look
as though she had not given the matter a moment’s thought, and that would
take time. Downstairs the knot of impatience would be tightening in the
kitchen, while the minutes she was planning to spend alone with her brother
were running out. Soon her mother would appear and want to discuss the table
placings, Paul Marshall would come down from his room and be in need of
company, and then Robbie would be at the door. How was she to think straight?

She ran a
hand along the few feet of personal history, her brief chronicle of taste. Here
were the flapper dresses of her teenage years, ludicrous, limp, sexless things
they looked now, and though one bore wine stains and another a burn hole from
her first cigarette, she could not bring herself to turn them out. Here was a
dress with the first timid hint of shoulder pads, and others followed more
assertively, muscular older sisters throwing off the boyish years,
rediscovering waistlines and curves, dropping their hemlines with
self-sufficient disregard for the hopes of men. Her latest and best piece,
bought to celebrate the end of finals, before she knew about her miserable
third, was the figure-hugging dark green bias-cut backless evening gown with a
halter neck. Too dressy to have its first outing at home. She ran her hand
further back and brought out a moiré silk dress with a pleated bodice
and scalloped hem—a safe choice since the pink was muted and musty enough
for evening wear. The triple mirror thought so too. She changed her shoes,
swapped her jet for the pearls, retouched her makeup, rearranged her hair,
applied a little perfume to the base of her throat, more of which was now
exposed, and was back out in the corridor in less than fifteen minutes.

Earlier in
the day she had seen old Hardman going about the house with a wicker basket,
replacing electric bulbs. Perhaps there was now a harsher light at the top of
the stairs, for she had never had this difficulty with the mirror there before.
Even as she approached from a distance of forty feet, she saw that it was not going
to let her pass; the pink was in fact innocently pale, the waistline was too
high, the dress flared like an eight-year-old’s party frock. All it
needed was rabbit buttons. As she drew nearer, an irregularity in the surface
of the ancient glass foreshortened her image and she confronted the child of
fifteen years before. She stopped and experimentally raised her hands to the
side of her head and gripped her hair in bunches. This same mirror must have
seen her descend the stairs like this on dozens of occasions, on her way to one
more friend’s afternoon birthday bash. It would not help her state of
mind, to go down looking like, or believing she looked like, Shirley Temple.

More in
resignation than irritation or panic, she returned to her room. There was no
confusion in her mind: these too-vivid, untrustworthy impressions, her
self-doubt, the intrusive visual clarity and eerie differences that had wrapped
themselves around the familiar were no more than continuations, variations of
how she had been seeing and feeling all day. Feeling, but preferring not to
think. Besides, she knew what she had to do and she had known it all along. She
owned only one outfit that she genuinely liked, and that was the one she should
wear. She let the pink dress fall on top of the black and, stepping
contemptuously through the pile, reached for the gown, her green backless
post-finals gown. As she pulled it on she approved of the firm caress of the
bias cut through the silk of her petticoat, and she felt sleekly impregnable,
slippery and secure; it was a mermaid who rose to meet her in her own
full-length mirror. She left the pearls in place, changed back into the black
high-heeled shoes, once more retouched her hair and makeup, forwent another dab
of scent and then, as she opened the door, gave out a shriek of terror. Inches
from her was a face and a raised fist. Her immediate, reeling perception was of
a radical, Picasso-like perspective in which tears, rimmed and bloated eyes,
wet lips and raw, unblown nose blended in a crimson moistness of grief. She
recovered herself, placed her hands on the bony shoulders and gently turned the
whole body so she could see the left ear. This was Jackson, about to knock on
her door. In his other hand there was a gray sock. As she stepped back she
noticed he was in ironed gray shorts and white shirt, but was otherwise
barefoot.