Atonement (5 page)

Awkwardly,
for she still had her cigarette, she picked up the vase and balanced it on the
rim of the basin. It would have made better sense to take the flowers out
first, but she was too irritable. Her hands were hot and dry and she had to
grip the porcelain all the tighter. Robbie was silent, but she could tell from
his expression—a forced, stretched smile that did not part his
lips—that he regretted what he had said. That was no comfort either. This
was what happened when they talked these days; one or the other was always in
the wrong, trying to call back the last remark. There was no ease, no stability
in the course of their conversations, no chance to relax. Instead, it was
spikes, traps, and awkward turns that caused her to dislike herself almost as
much as she disliked him, though she did not doubt that he was mostly to blame.
She hadn’t changed, but there was no question that he had. He was putting
distance between himself and the family that had been completely open to him
and given him everything. For this reason alone—expectation of his
refusal, and her own displeasure in advance—she had not invited him to
dinner that night. If he wanted distance, then let him have it.

Of the four
dolphins whose tails supported the shell on which the Triton squatted, the one
nearest to Cecilia had its wide-open mouth stopped with moss and algae. Its
spherical stone eyeballs, as big as apples, were iridescent green. The whole
statue had acquired around its northerly surfaces a bluish-green patina, so
that from certain approaches, and in low light, the muscle-bound Triton really
seemed a hundred leagues under the sea. Bernini’s intention must have
been for the water to trickle musically from the wide shell with its irregular
edges into the basin below. But the pressure was too weak, so that instead the
water slid soundlessly down the underside of the shell where opportunistic
slime hung in dripping points, like stalactites in a limestone cave. The basin
itself was over three feet deep and clear. The bottom was of a pale, creamy
stone over which undulating white-edged rectangles of refracted sunlight
divided and overlapped.

Her idea was
to lean over the parapet and hold the flowers in the vase while she lowered it
on its side into the water, but it was at this point that Robbie, wanting to
make amends, tried to be helpful.

“Let me
take that,” he said, stretching out a hand. “I’ll fill it for
you, and you take the flowers.”

“I can
manage, thanks.” She was already holding the vase over the basin.

But he said,
“Look, I’ve got it.” And he had, tightly between forefinger
and thumb. “Your cigarette will get wet. Take the flowers.”

This was a
command on which he tried to confer urgent masculine authority. The effect on
Cecilia was to cause her to tighten her grip. She had no time, and certainly no
inclination, to explain that plunging vase and flowers into the water would
help with the natural look she wanted in the arrangement. She tightened her
hold and twisted her body away from him. He was not so easily shaken off. With
a sound like a dry twig snapping, a section of the lip of the vase came away in
his hand, and split into two triangular pieces which dropped into the water and
tumbled to the bottom in a synchronous, seesawing motion, and lay there,
several inches apart, writhing in the broken light.

Cecilia and
Robbie froze in the attitude of their struggle. Their eyes met, and what she
saw in the bilious mélange of green and orange was not shock, or guilt,
but a form of challenge, or even triumph. She had the presence of mind to set
the ruined vase back down on the step before letting herself confront the
significance of the accident. It was irresistible, she knew, even delicious,
for the graver it was, the worse it would be for Robbie. Her dead uncle, her
father’s dear brother, the wasteful war, the treacherous crossing of the
river, the preciousness beyond money, the heroism and goodness, all the years
backed up behind the history of the vase reaching back to the genius of
Höroldt, and beyond him to the mastery of the arcanists who had reinvented
porcelain.

“You
idiot! Look what you’ve done.”

He looked
into the water, then he looked at back at her, and simply shook his head as he
raised a hand to cover his mouth. By this gesture he assumed full
responsibility, but at that moment, she hated him for the inadequacy of the
response. He glanced toward the basin and sighed. For a moment he thought she
was about to step backward onto the vase, and he raised his hand and pointed,
though he said nothing. Instead he began to unbutton his shirt. Immediately she
knew what he was about. Intolerable. He had come to the house and removed his
shoes and socks—well, she would show him then. She kicked off her sandals,
unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, unfastened her skirt and stepped out of
it and went to the basin wall. He stood with hands on his hips and stared as
she climbed into the water in her underwear. Denying his help, any possibility
of making amends, was his punishment. The unexpectedly freezing water that
caused her to gasp was his punishment. She held her breath, and sank, leaving
her hair fanned out across the surface. Drowning herself would be his
punishment.

When she
emerged a few seconds later with a piece of pottery in each hand, he knew
better than to offer to help her out of the water. The frail white nymph, from
whom water cascaded far more successfully than it did from the beefy Triton,
carefully placed the pieces by the vase. She dressed quickly, turning her wet
arms with difficulty through her silk sleeves, and tucking the unfastened
blouse into the skirt. She picked up her sandals and thrust them under her arm,
put the fragments in the pocket of her skirt and took up the vase. Her
movements were savage, and she would not meet his eye. He did not exist, he was
banished, and this was also the punishment. He stood there dumbly as she walked
away from him, barefoot across the lawn, and he watched her darkened hair swing
heavily across her shoulders, drenching her blouse. Then he turned and looked
into the water in case there was a piece she had missed. It was difficult to
see because the roiling surface had yet to recover its tranquillity, and the
turbulence was driven by the lingering spirit of her fury. He put his hand flat
upon the surface, as though to quell it. She, meanwhile, had disappeared into
the house.

Three

A
CCORDING TO
the poster in the hallway, the date
of the first performance of
The Trials of Arabella
was only one day
after the first rehearsal. However, it was not easy for the writer-director to
find clear time for concentrated work. As on the preceding afternoon, the trouble
lay in assembling the cast. During the night Arabella’s disapproving
father, Jackson, had wet the bed, as troubled small boys far from home will,
and was obliged by current theory to carry his sheets and pajamas down to the
laundry and wash them himself, by hand, under the supervision of Betty who had
been instructed to be distant and firm. This was not represented to the boy as
a punishment, the idea being to instruct his unconscious that future lapses
would entail inconvenience and hard work; but he was bound to feel it as
reproof as he stood at the vast stone sink which rose level to his chest, suds
creeping up his bare arms to soak his rolled-up shirtsleeves, the wet sheets as
heavy as a dead dog and a general sense of calamity numbing his will. Briony
came down at intervals to check on his progress. She was forbidden to help, and
Jackson
, of course, had never
laundered a thing in his life; the two washes, countless rinses and the
sustained two-handed grappling with the mangle, as well as the fifteen
trembling minutes he had afterward at the kitchen table with bread and butter
and a glass of water, took up two hours’ rehearsal time.

Betty told
Hardman when he came in from the morning heat for his pint of ale that it was
enough that she was having to prepare a special roast dinner in such weather,
and that she personally thought the treatment too harsh, and would have
administered several sharp smacks to the buttocks and washed the sheets
herself. This would have suited Briony, for the morning was slipping away. When
her mother came down to see for herself that the task was done, it was
inevitable that a feeling of release should settle on the participants, and in
Mrs. Tallis’s mind a degree of unacknowledged guilt, so that when Jackson
asked in a small voice if he might please now be allowed a swim in the pool and
could his brother come too, his wish was immediately granted, and Briony’s
objections generously brushed aside, as though she were the one who was
imposing unpleasant ordeals on a helpless little fellow. So there was swimming,
and then there had to be lunch.

Rehearsals
had continued without Jackson, but it was undermining not to have the important
first scene, Arabella’s leave-
taking, brought to perfection, and Pierrot was too nervous about the fate of
his brother down in the bowels of the house to be much in the way of a
dastardly foreign count; whatever happened to Jackson would be Pierrot’s
future too. He made frequent trips to the lavatory at the end of the corridor.

When Briony
returned from one of her visits to the laundry, he asked her, “Has he had
the spanking?”

“Not as
yet.”

Like his
brother, Pierrot had the knack of depriving his lines of any sense. He intoned
a roll call of words:
“Do-you-think-you-can-escape-from-my-clutches?” All present and
correct.

“It’s
a question,” Briony cut in. “Don’t you see? It goes up at the
end.”

“What
do you mean?”

“There.
You just did it. You start low and end high. It’s a
question
.”

He swallowed
hard, drew a breath and made another attempt, producing this time a roll call
on a rising chromatic scale.

“At the
end. It goes up at the end!”

Now came a
roll call on the old monotone, with a break of register, a yodel, on the final
syllable.

Lola had come
to the nursery that morning in the guise of the adult she considered herself at
heart to be. She wore pleated flannel trousers that ballooned at the hips and
flared at the ankle, and a short-sleeved sweater made of cashmere. Other tokens
of maturity included a velvet choker of tiny pearls, the ginger tresses
gathered at the nape and secured with an emerald clasp, three loose silver
bracelets around a freckled wrist, and the fact that whenever she moved, the
air about her tasted of rosewater. Her condescension, being wholly restrained,
was all the more potent. She was coolly responsive to Briony’s
suggestions, spoke her lines, which she seemed to have learned overnight, with
sufficient expression, and was gently encouraging to her little brother,
without encroaching at all on the director’s authority. It was as if
Cecilia, or even their mother, had agreed to spend some time with the little
ones by taking on a role in the play, and was determined not to let a trace of
boredom show. What was missing was any demonstration of ragged, childish
enthusiasm. When Briony had shown her cousins the sales booth and the
collection box the evening before, the twins had fought each other for the best
front-of-house roles, but Lola had crossed her arms and paid decorous, grown-up
compliments through a half smile that was too opaque for the detection of
irony.

“How
marvelous. How awfully clever of you, Briony, to think of that. Did you really
make it all by yourself?”

Briony
suspected that behind her older cousin’s perfect manners was a
destructive intent. Perhaps Lola was relying on the twins to wreck the play
innocently, and needed only to stand back and observe.

These
unprovable suspicions,
Jackson
’s detainment in
the laundry, Pierrot’s wretched delivery and the morning’s colossal
heat were oppressive to Briony. It bothered her too when she noticed Danny
Hardman watching from the doorway. He had to be asked to leave. She could not
penetrate Lola’s detachment or coax from Pierrot the common inflections
of everyday speech. What a relief, then, suddenly to find herself alone in the
nursery. Lola had said she needed to reconsider her hair, and her brother had
wandered off down the corridor, to the lavatory, or beyond.

Briony sat on
the floor with her back to one of the tall built-in toy cupboards and fanned
her face with the pages of her play. The silence in the house was
complete—no voices or footfalls downstairs, no murmurs from the plumbing;
in the space between one of the open sash windows a trapped fly had abandoned
its struggle, and outside, the liquid birdsong had evaporated in the heat. She
pushed her knees out straight before her and let the folds of her white muslin
dress and the familiar, endearing, pucker of skin about her knees fill her
view. She should have changed her dress this morning. She thought how she
should take more care of her appearance, like Lola. It was childish not to. But
what an effort it was. The silence hissed in her ears and her vision was faintly
distorted—her hands in her lap appeared unusually large and at the same
time remote, as though viewed across an immense distance. She raised one hand
and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this
thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm,
came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of
its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the
instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving,
when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only
find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself,
that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to
her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was
pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or
being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she
did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in
some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it?
There was no catching herself out. It was either-or. There was no stitching, no
seam, and yet she knew that behind the smooth continuous fabric was the real
self—was it her soul?—which took the decision to cease pretending,
and gave the final command.