Atonement (26 page)

She ran along
the second-floor corridor to Cecilia’s room. What squalor and disorder
her sister lived in! Both wardrobe doors hung wide open. Various dresses were
skewed out of their rows and some were half off their hangers. On the floor two
dresses, one black, one pink, silky expensive-looking things, lay in a tangle,
and round this pile lay kicked-off shoes on their sides. Briony stepped over
and around the mess to get to the dressing table. What was the impulse that
prevented Cecilia from replacing the caps and lids and screwtops of her makeup
and perfumes? Why did she never empty her stinking ashtray? Or make her bed, or
open a window to let in the fresh air? The first drawer she tried opened only a
couple of inches—it was jammed, crammed full of bottles and a cardboard
package. Cecilia might have been ten years older, but there really was
something quite hopeless and helpless about her. Even though Briony was fearful
of the wild look her sister had downstairs, it was right, the younger girl
thought as she pulled open another drawer, that she was there for her, thinking
clearly, on her behalf.

Five minutes
later, when she reentered the drawing room in triumph, no one paid her any
attention, and everything was exactly the same—tired, miserable adults
sipping tea and smoking in silence. In her excitement she had not considered
who it was she should give the letter to; a trick of her imagination had
everyone reading it at once. She decided Leon should have it. She crossed the
room toward her brother, but when she arrived in front of the three men she
changed her mind and put the folded sheet of paper into the hands of the
policeman with the face of granite. If he had an expression, it did not change
as he took the letter nor when he read it, which he did at great speed, almost
at a glance. His eyes met hers, then shifted to take in Cecilia who was facing
away. With the slightest movement of his wrist he indicated that the other
policeman should take the letter. When he was finished it was passed on to Leon
who read it, folded it and returned it to the senior inspector. Briony was
impressed by the muted response—such was the three men’s
worldliness. It was only now that Emily Tallis became aware of the focus of
their interest. In answer to her unemphatic query Leon said, “It’s
just a letter.”

“I’ll
read it.”

For the
second time that evening Emily was obliged to assert her rights over written
messages passing through her household. Feeling that nothing more was required
of her, Briony went to sit on the Chesterfield and watched from her
mother’s perspective the chivalrous unease that shifted between Leon and
the policemen.

“I’ll
read it.”

Ominously,
she did not vary her tone. Leon shrugged and forced an apologetic
smile—what possible objection could he have?—and Emily’s mild
gaze settled on the two inspectors. She belonged to a generation that treated
policemen as menials, whatever their rank. Obedient to the nod from his
superior, the younger inspector crossed the room and presented the letter to
her. At last Cecilia, who must have been a long way off in her thoughts, was
taking an interest. Then the letter lay exposed on her mother’s lap, and
Cecilia was on her feet, then moving toward them from the harpsichord stool.

“How
dare you! How dare you all!”

Leon stood
too and made a calming gesture with his palms. “Cee . . .”

When she made
a lunge to snatch the letter from her mother, she found not only her brother
but the two policemen in her way. Marshall was standing too, but not
interfering.

“It
belongs to me,” she shouted. “You have absolutely no right!”

Emily did not
even look up from her reading, and she gave herself time to read the letter
several times over. When she was done she met her daughter’s fury with
her own colder version.

“If you
had done the right thing, young lady, with all your education, and come to me
with this, then something could have been done in time and your cousin would
have been spared her nightmare.”

For a moment
Cecilia stood alone in the center of the room, fluttering the fingers of her
right hand, staring at them each in turn, unable to believe her association
with such people, unable to begin to tell them what she knew. And though Briony
felt vindicated by the reaction of the adults, and was experiencing the onset
of a sweet and inward rapture, she was also pleased to be down on the sofa with
her mother, partially screened by the standing men from her sister’s
red-eyed contempt. She held them in its grip for several seconds before she
turned and walked out of the room. As she went across the hallway she gave out
a cry of sheer vexation which was amplified by the raw acoustic of the bare
floor tiles. In the drawing room there was a sense of relief, of relaxation
almost, as they heard her go up the stairs. When Briony next remembered to
look, the letter was in Marshall’s hands and he was passing it back to
the inspector who placed it unfolded into a binder which the younger policeman
was holding open for him.

The hours of
the night spun away from her and she remained untired. It occurred to no one to
send her to her bed. Some immeasurable time after Cecilia had gone to her room,
Briony went with her mother to the library to have the first of her formal
interviews with the police. Mrs. Tallis remained standing, while Briony sat on
one side of the writing desk and the inspectors sat on the other. The one with
the face of ancient rock, who was the one who asked the questions, turned out
to be infinitely kind, speaking his unhurried questions in a gruff voice that
was both gentle and sad. Since she was able to show them the precise location
of Robbie’s attack on Cecilia, they all wandered into that corner of the
bookshelves to take a closer look. Briony wedged herself in, with her back to
the books to show them how her sister was positioned, and saw the first
mid-blue touches of dawn in the panes of the library’s high windows. She
stepped out and turned around to demonstrate the attacker’s stance and
showed where she herself had stood.

Emily said,
“But why didn’t you tell me?”

The policemen
looked at Briony and waited. It was a good question, but it would never have
occurred to her to trouble her mother. Nothing but a migraine would have come
of it.

“We
were called into dinner, then the twins ran off.”

She explained
how she came by the letter, on the bridge at dusk. What led her to open it?
Difficult to describe the impulsive moment, when she had not permitted herself
to think of the consequences before acting, or how the writer she had only that
day become needed to know, to understand everything that came her way.

She said,
“I don’t know. I was being horribly nosy. I hated myself.”

It was about
this time that a constable put his head round the door to give news that seemed
at one with the calamity of the night. Mr. Tallis’s driver had rung from
a phone box near Croydon Airport. The departmental car, made available at short
notice through the kindness of the minister, had broken down in the suburbs.
Jack Tallis was asleep under a rug on the backseat and would probably have to
continue by the first morning train. Once these facts had been absorbed and
lamented, Briony was gently returned to the scene itself, to the events on the
lake island. At this early stage, the inspector was careful not to oppress the
young girl with probing questions, and within this sensitively created space
she was able to build and shape her narrative in her own words and establish
the key facts: there was just sufficient light for her to recognize a familiar
face; when he shrank away from her and circled the clearing, his movements and
height were familiar to her as well.

“You
saw him then.”

“I know
it was him.”

“Let’s
forget what you know. You’re saying you saw him.”

“Yes, I
saw him.”

“Just
as you see me.”

“Yes.”

“You
saw him with your own eyes.”

“Yes. I
saw him. I saw him.”

Thus her
first formal interview concluded. While she sat in the drawing room, feeling
her tiredness at last, but unwilling to go to bed, her mother was questioned,
then Leon and Paul Marshall. Old Hardman and his son Danny were brought in for
interview. Briony heard Betty say that Danny was at home all evening with his
father who was able to vouch for him. Various constables came to the front door
from searching for the twins and were shown through to the kitchen. In the
confused and unmemorable time of that early dawn, Briony gathered that Cecilia
was refusing to leave her room, refusing to come down to be interviewed. In the
days to come she would be given no choice and when she finally yielded up her
own account of what happened in the library—in its way, far more shocking
than Briony’s, however consensual the encounter had been—it merely
confirmed the general view that had formed: Mr. Turner was a dangerous man.
Cecilia’s repeated suggestion that it was Danny Hardman they should be
talking to was heard in silence. It was understandable, though poor form, that
this young woman should be covering for her friend by casting suspicion on an
innocent boy.

Sometime
after five, when there was talk of breakfast being prepared, at least for the
constables, for no one else was hungry, the word flashed through the household
that a figure who might be Robbie was approaching across the park. Perhaps
someone had been watching from an upstairs window. Briony did not know how the
decision was made that they should all go outside to wait for him. Suddenly,
they were all there, family, Paul Marshall, Betty and her helpers, the
policemen, a reception party grouped tightly around the front entrance. Only
Lola in a drugged coma and Cecilia with her fury remained upstairs. It might
have been that Mrs. Tallis did not want the polluting presence to step inside
her house. The inspector may have feared violence which was more easily dealt
with outdoors where there was more space to make an arrest. All the magic of
dawn had gone now, and in its place was a gray early morning, distinguished
only by a summer’s mist which was sure to burn off soon.

At first they
saw nothing, though Briony thought she could make out the tread of shoes along
the drive. Then everyone could hear it, and there was a collective murmur and
shifting of weight as they caught sight of an indefinable shape, no more than a
grayish smudge against the white, almost a hundred yards away. As the shape
took form the waiting group fell silent again. No one could quite believe what
was emerging. Surely it was a trick of the mist and light. No one in this age
of telephones and motorcars could believe that giants seven or eight feet high
existed in crowded Surrey. But here it was, an apparition as inhuman as it was
purposeful. The thing was impossible and undeniable, and heading their way.
Betty, who was known to be a Catholic, crossed herself as the little crowd
huddled closer to the entrance. Only the senior inspector took a couple of
paces forward, and as he did so everything became clear. The clue was a second,
tiny shape that bobbed alongside the first. Then it was obvious—this was
Robbie, with one boy sitting up on his shoulders and the other holding his hand
and trailing a little behind. When he was less than thirty feet away, Robbie
stopped, and seemed about to speak, but waited instead as the inspector and the
other policemen approached. The boy on his shoulders appeared to be asleep. The
other boy let his head loll against Robbie’s waist and drew the
man’s hand across his chest for protection or warmth.

Briony’s
immediate feeling was one of relief that the boys were safe. But as she looked
at Robbie waiting calmly, she experienced a flash of outrage. Did he believe he
could conceal his crime behind an apparent kindness, behind this show of being
the good shepherd? This was surely a cynical attempt to win forgiveness for
what could never be forgiven. She was confirmed again in her view that evil was
complicated and misleading. Suddenly, her mother’s hands were pressing
firmly on her shoulders and turning her toward the house, delivering her into
Betty’s care. Emily wanted her daughter well away from Robbie Turner. It
was bedtime at last. Betty took a firm grip of her hand and was leading her in
as her mother and brother went forward to collect the twins. Briony’s
last glimpse back over her shoulder as she was pulled away showed her Robbie
raising two hands, as though in surrender. He lifted the boy clear of his head
and placed him gently on the ground.

An hour later
she was lying on her canopy bed in the clean white cotton nightdress which
Betty had found for her. The curtains were drawn, but the daylight gleam around
their edges was strong, and for all her spinning sensations of tiredness, she
could not sleep. Voices and images were ranged around her bedside, agitated,
nagging presences, jostling and merging, resisting her attempts to set them in
order. Were they all really bounded by a single day, by one period of unbroken
wakefulness, from the innocent rehearsals of her play to the emergence of the
giant from the mist? All that lay between was too clamorous, too fluid to
understand, though she sensed she had succeeded, even triumphed. She kicked the
sheet clear of her legs and turned the pillow to find a cooler patch for her
cheeks. In her dizzy state she was not able to say exactly what her success had
been; if it was to have gained a new maturity, she could hardly feel it now
when she was so helpless, so childish even, through lack of sleep, to the point
where she thought she could easily make herself cry. If it was brave to have
identified a thoroughly bad person, then it was wrong of him to turn up with
the twins like that, and she felt cheated. Who would believe her now, with
Robbie posing as the kindly rescuer of lost children? All her work, all her
courage and clearheadedness, all she had done to bring Lola home—for
nothing. They would turn their backs on her, her mother, the policemen, her
brother, and go off with Robbie Turner to indulge some adult cabal. She wanted
her mother, she wanted to put her arms round her mother’s neck and pull
her lovely face close to hers, but her mother wouldn’t come now, no one
would come to Briony, no one would talk to her now. She turned her face into
the pillow and let her tears drain into it, and felt that yet more was lost,
when there was no witness to her sorrow.