Atonement (4 page)
Cecilia knew
she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying
on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles
spreading up through her arm as she read her way through
Clarissa
.
She had made a halfhearted start on a family tree, but on the paternal side, at
least until her great-grandfather opened his humble hardware shop, the
ancestors were irretrievably sunk in a bog of farm laboring, with suspicious
and confusing changes of surnames among the men, and common-law marriages
unrecorded in the parish registers. She could not remain here, she knew she
should make plans, but she did nothing. There were various possibilities, all
equally unpressing. She had a little money in her account, enough to keep her
modestly for a year or so.
her to spend time with him in
were offering to help her find a job—a dull one certainly, but she would
have her independence. She had interesting uncles and aunts on her
mother’s side who were always happy to see her, including wild Hermione,
mother of Lola and the boys, who even now was over in Paris with a lover who
worked in the wireless.
No one was
holding Cecilia back, no one would care particularly if she left. It
wasn’t torpor that kept her—she was often restless to the point of
irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving,
that she was needed. From time to time she persuaded herself she remained for
Briony’s sake, or to help her mother, or because this really was her last
sustained period at home and she would see it through. In fact, the thought of
packing a suitcase and taking the morning train did not excite her. Leaving for
leaving’s sake. Lingering here, bored and comfortable, was a form of
self-punishment tinged with pleasure, or the expectation of it; if she went
away something bad might happen or, worse, something good, something she could
not afford to miss. And there was Robbie, who exasperated her with his
affectation of distance, and his grand plans which he would only discuss with
her father. They had known each other since they were seven, she and Robbie,
and it bothered her that they were awkward when they talked. Even though she
felt it was largely his fault—could his first have gone to his head?—she
knew this was something she must clear up before she thought of leaving.
Through the
open windows came the faint leathery scent of cow dung, always present except
on the coldest days, and noticeable only to those who had been away. Robbie had
put down his trowel and stood to roll a cigarette, a hangover from his
Communist Party time—another abandoned fad, along with his ambitions in
anthropology, and the planned hike from Calais to Istanbul. Still, her own
cigarettes were two flights up, in one of several possible pockets.
She advanced
into the room, and thrust the flowers into the vase. It had once belonged to
her Uncle Clem, whose funeral, or reburial, at the end of the war she
remembered quite well: the gun carriage arriving at the country churchyard, the
coffin draped in the regimental flag, the raised swords, the bugle at the
graveside, and, most memorably for a five-year-old, her father weeping. Clem
was his only sibling. The story of how he had come by the vase was told in one
of the last letters the young lieutenant wrote home. He was on liaison duties
in the French sector and initiated a last-minute evacuation of a small town
west of
shelled. Perhaps fifty women, children and old people were saved. Later, the
mayor and other officials led Uncle Clem back through the town to a
half-destroyed museum. The vase was taken from a shattered glass case and
presented in gratitude. There was no refusing, however inconvenient it might
have seemed to fight a war with
A month later the vase was left for safety in a farmhouse, and Lieutenant
Tallis waded across a river in spate to retrieve it, returning the same way at
to join his unit. In
the final days of the war, he was sent on patrol duties and gave the vase to a
friend for safekeeping. It slowly found its way back to the regimental
headquarters, and was delivered to the Tallis home some months after Uncle
Clem’s burial.
There was
really no point trying to arrange wildflowers. They had tumbled into their own
symmetry, and it was certainly true that too even a distribution between the
irises and the rosebay willow herb ruined the effect. She spent some minutes
making adjustments in order to achieve a natural chaotic look. While she did so
she wondered about going out to Robbie. It would save her from running
upstairs. But she felt uncomfortable and hot, and would have liked to check her
appearance in the large gilt mirror above the fireplace. But if he turned
round—he was standing with his back to the house, smoking—he would
see right into the room. At last she was finished and stood back again. Now her
brother’s friend, Paul Marshall, might believe that the flowers had
simply been dropped in the vase in the same carefree spirit with which they had
been picked. It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was
in—but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and
not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when
they were alone. Her mother wanted flowers in the guest room and Cecilia was
happy to oblige. The place to go for water was the kitchen. But Betty was
preparing to cook tonight’s meal, and was in a terrorizing mood. Not only
the little boy, Jackson or Pierrot, would be cowering—so too would the
extra help from the village. Already, even from the drawing room, it was
possible to hear an occasional muffled bad-tempered shout and the clang of a
saucepan hitting the hob with unnatural force. If Cecilia went in now she would
have to mediate between her mother’s vague instructions and Betty’s
forceful state of mind. It surely made more sense to go outside and fill the
vase at the fountain.
Sometime in
her teens a friend of Cecilia’s father who worked in the
the vase and declared it sound. It was genuine
of the great artist Höroldt, who painted it in 1726. It had most certainly
once been the property of King August. Even though it was reckoned to be worth
more than the other pieces in the Tallis home, which were mostly junk collected
by Cecilia’s grandfather, Jack Tallis wanted the vase in use, in honor of
his brother’s memory. It was not to be imprisoned behind a glass case. If
it had survived the war, the reasoning went, then it could survive the
Tallises. His wife did not disagree. The truth was, whatever its great value,
and beyond its association, Emily Tallis did not much like the vase. Its little
painted Chinese figures gathered formally in a garden around a table, with ornate
plants and implausible birds, seemed fussy and oppressive. Chinoiserie in
general bored her. Cecilia herself had no particular view, though she sometimes
wondered just how much it might fetch at Sotheby’s. The vase was
respected not for Höroldt’s mastery of polychrome enamels or the
blue and gold interlacing strapwork and foliage, but for Uncle Clem, and the
lives he had saved, the river he had crossed at
, and his death just a
week before the Armistice. Flowers, especially wildflowers, seemed a proper
tribute.
Cecilia
gripped the cool porcelain in both hands as she stood on one foot, and with the
other hooked the French windows open wide. As she stepped out into the
brightness, the rising scent of warmed stone was like a friendly embrace. Two
swallows were making passes over the fountain, and a chiffchaff’s song
was piercing the air from within the sinewy gloom of the giant cedar of
Lebanon. The flowers swung in the light breeze, tickling her face as she
crossed the terrace and carefully negotiated the three crumbly steps down to
the gravel path. Robbie turned suddenly at the sound of her approach.
“I was
away in my thoughts,” he began to explain.
“Would
you roll me one of your Bolshevik cigarettes?”
He threw his
own cigarette aside, took the tin which lay on his jacket on the lawn and
walked alongside her to the fountain. They were silent for a while.
“Beautiful
day,” she then said through a sigh.
He was
looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and
even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded
perverse.
“How’s
Clarissa
?” He was looking down at his fingers rolling the
tobacco.
“Boring.”
“We
mustn’t say so.”
“I wish
she’d get on with it.”
“She
does. And it gets better.”
They slowed,
then stopped so that he could put the finishing touches to her roll-up.
She said,
“I’d rather read Fielding any day.”
She felt she
had said something stupid. Robbie was looking away across the park and the cows
toward the oak wood that lined the river valley, the wood she had run through
that morning. He might be thinking she was talking to him in code, suggestively
conveying her taste for the full-blooded and sensual. That was a mistake, of
course, and she was discomfited and had no idea how to put him right. She liked
his eyes, she thought, the unblended mix of orange and green, made even more
granular in sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall. It was an
interesting combination in a man, intelligence and sheer bulk. Cecilia had
taken the cigarette and he was lighting it for her.
“I know
what you mean,” he said as they walked the remaining few yards to the
fountain. “There’s more life in Fielding, but he can be
psychologically crude compared to
She set down
the vase by the uneven steps that rose to the fountain’s stone basin. The
last thing she wanted was an undergraduate debate on eighteenth-century
literature. She didn’t think Fielding was crude at all, or that
psychologist, but she wasn’t going to be drawn in, defending, defining,
attacking. She was tired of that, and Robbie was tenacious in argument.
Instead she
said, “
did you know?”
“I
heard a rumor. That’s marvelous.”
“He’s
bringing a friend, this man Paul Marshall.”
“The
chocolate millionaire. Oh no! And you’re giving him flowers!”
She smiled.
Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer
understood him. They had fallen out of touch at
difficult to do anything else. She changed the subject.
“The
Old Man says you’re going to be a doctor.”
“I’m
thinking about it.”
“You
must love the student life.”
He looked
away again, but this time for only a second or less, and when he turned to her
she thought she saw a touch of irritation. Had she sounded condescending? She
saw his eyes again, green and orange flecks, like a boy’s marble. When he
spoke he was perfectly pleasant.
“I know
you never liked that sort of thing, Cee. But how else do you become a
doctor?”
“That’s
my point. Another six years. Why do it?”
He
wasn’t offended. She was the one who was overinterpreting, and jittery in
his presence, and she was annoyed with herself.
He was taking
her question seriously. “No one’s really going to give me work as a
landscape gardener. I don’t want to teach, or go in for the civil
service. And medicine interests me . . .” He broke off as a thought
occurred to him. “Look, I’ve agreed to pay your father back.
That’s the arrangement.”
“That’s
not what I meant at all.”
She was
surprised that he should think she was raising the question of money. That was
ungenerous of him. Her father had subsidized Robbie’s education all his
life. Had anyone ever objected? She had thought she was imagining it, but in
fact she was right—there was something trying in Robbie’s manner
lately. He had a way of wrong-footing her whenever he could. Two days before he
had rung the front doorbell—in itself odd, for he had always had the
freedom of the house. When she was called down, he was standing outside asking
in a loud, impersonal voice if he could borrow a book. As it happened, Polly
was on all fours, washing the tiles in the entrance hall. Robbie made a great
show of removing his boots which weren’t dirty at all, and then, as an
afterthought, took his socks off as well, and tiptoed with comic exaggeration
across the wet floor. Everything he did was designed to distance her. He was
playacting the cleaning lady’s son come to the big house on an errand.
They went into the library together, and when he found his book, she asked him
to stay for a coffee. It was a pretense, his dithering refusal—he was one
of the most confident people she had ever met. She was being mocked, she knew.
Rebuffed, she left the room and went upstairs and lay on the bed with
Clarissa
,
and read without taking in a word, feeling her irritation and confusion grow.
She was being mocked, or she was being punished—she did not know which
was worse. Punished for being in a different circle at
charlady for a mother; mocked for her poor degree—not that they actually
awarded degrees to women anyway.
