Atonement (8 page)

Watching him
during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant
sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously
self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly
handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his
big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns
and football and aeroplanes. She watched him in profile as he turned his head
toward
Leon
. A long muscle
twitched above the line of his jaw as he spoke. A few thick black hairs curled
free of his eyebrow, and from his earholes there sprouted the same black
growth, comically kinked like pubic hair. He should instruct his barber.

The smallest
shift in her gaze brought her
Leon
’s face, but he
was staring politely at his friend and seemed determined not to meet her eye.
As children they used to torment each other with “the look” at the
Sunday lunches their parents gave for elderly relatives. These were awesome
occasions worthy of the ancient silver service; the venerable great-uncles and
-aunts and grandparents were Victorians, from their mother’s side of the
family, a baffled and severe folk, a lost tribe who arrived at the house in
black cloaks having wandered peevishly for two decades in an alien, frivolous
century. They terrified the ten-year-old Cecilia and her twelve-year-old
brother, and a giggling fit was always just a breath away. The one who caught
the look was helpless, the one who bestowed it, immune. Mostly, the power was
with
Leon
, whose look was
mock-solemn, and consisted of drawing the corners of his mouth downward while
rolling his eyes. He might ask Cecilia in the most innocent voice for the salt
to be passed, and though she averted her gaze as she handed it to him, though
she turned her head and inhaled deeply, it could be enough simply to know that
he was doing his look to consign her to ninety minutes of quaking torture.
Meanwhile,
Leon
would be free,
needing only to top her up occasionally if he thought she was beginning to
recover. Only rarely had she reduced him with an expression of haughty pouting.
Since the children were sometimes seated between adults, giving the look had
its dangers—making faces at table could bring down disgrace and an early
bedtime. The trick was to make the attempt while passing between, say, licking
one’s lips and smiling broadly, and at the same time catch the
other’s eye. On one occasion they had looked up and delivered their looks
simultaneously, causing
Leon
to spray soup from
his nostrils onto the wrist of a great-aunt. Both children were banished to
their rooms for the rest of the day.

Cecilia
longed to take her brother aside and tell him that Mr. Marshall had pubic hair
growing from his ears. He was describing the boardroom confrontation with the
man who called him a warmonger. She half raised her arm as though to smooth her
hair. Automatically,
Leon
’s attention was
drawn by the motion, and in that instant she delivered the look he had not seen
in more than ten years. He pursed his lips and turned away, and found something
of interest to stare at near his shoe. As
Marshall
turned to
Cecilia
,
Leon
raised a cupped hand
to shield his face, but could not disguise from his sister the tremor along his
shoulders. Fortunately for him,
Marshall
was reaching his
conclusion.

“ . . .
where one can, as it were, catch one’s breath.”

Immediately,
Leon
was on his feet. He
walked to the edge of the pool and contemplated a sodden red towel left near
the diving board. Then he strolled back to them, hands in pockets, quite
recovered.

He said to
Cecilia, “Guess who we met on the way in.”

“Robbie.”

“I told
him to join us tonight.”

“
Leon
! You
didn’t!”

He was in a
teasing mood. Revenge perhaps. He said to his friend, “So the cleaning
lady’s son gets a scholarship to the local grammar, gets a scholarship to
Cambridge, goes up the same time as Cee—and she hardly speaks to him in
three years! She wouldn’t let him
near
her Roedean chums.”

“You
should have asked me first.”

She was
genuinely annoyed, and observing this,
Marshall
said placatingly,
“I knew some grammar school types at
Oxford
and some of them were
damned clever. But they could be resentful, which was a bit rich, I
thought.”

She said,
“Have you got a cigarette?”

He offered
her one from a silver case, threw one to
Leon
and took one for
himself. They were all standing now, and as Cecilia leaned toward
Marshall
’s lighter,
Leon
said,
“He’s got a first-rate mind, so I don’t know what the hell he’s
doing, messing about in the flower beds.”

She went to
sit on the diving board and tried to give the appearance of relaxing, but her
tone was strained. “He’s wondering about a medical degree.
Leon
, I wish you
hadn’t asked him.”

“The
Old Man’s said yes?”

She shrugged.
“Look, I think you ought to go round to the bungalow now and ask him not
to come.”

Leon
had walked to the
shallow end and stood facing her across the gently rocking sheet of oily blue
water.

“How
can I possibly do that?”

“I
don’t care how you do it. Make an excuse.”

“Something’s
happened between you.”

“No it
hasn’t.”

“Is he
bothering you?”

“For
God’s sake!”

She got up
irritably and walked away, toward the swimming pool pavilion, an open structure
supported by three fluted pillars. She stood, leaning against the central
pillar, smoking and watching her brother. Two minutes before, they had been in
league and now they were at odds—childhood revisited indeed. Paul
Marshall stood halfway between them, turning his head this way and that when
they spoke, as though at a tennis match. He had a neutral, vaguely inquisitive
air, and seemed untroubled by this sibling squabble. That at least, Cecilia
thought, was in his favor.

Her brother
said, “You think he can’t hold a knife and fork.”

“
Leon
, stop it. You had no
business inviting him.”

“What
rot!”

The silence
that followed was partly mitigated by the drone of the filtration pump. There
was nothing she could do, nothing she could make
Leon
do, and she suddenly
felt the pointlessness of argument. She lolled against the warm stone, lazily
finishing her cigarette and contemplating the scene before her—the
foreshortened slab of chlorinated water, the black inner tube of a tractor tire
propped against a deck chair, the two men in cream linen suits of
infinitesimally different hues, bluish-gray smoke rising against the bamboo
green. It looked carved, fixed, and again, she felt it: it had happened a long
time ago, and all outcomes, on all scales—from the tiniest to the most
colossal—were already in place. Whatever happened in the future, however
superficially strange or shocking, would also have an unsurprising, familiar
quality, inviting her to say, but only to herself, Oh yes, of course. That. I
should have known.

She said
lightly, “D’you know what I think?”

“What’s
that?”

“We
should go indoors, and you should mix us a fancy kind of drink.”

Paul Marshall
banged his hands together and the sound ricocheted between the columns and the
back wall of the pavilion. “There’s something I do rather
well,” he called. “With crushed ice, rum and melted dark
chocolate.”

The
suggestion prompted an exchange of glances between Cecilia and her brother, and
thus their discord was resolved.
Leon
was already moving
away, and as Cecilia and Paul Marshall followed him and converged on the gap in
the thicket she said, “I’d rather have something bitter. Or even
sour.”

He smiled,
and since he had reached the gap first, he paused to hand her through, as
though it were a drawing room doorway, and as she passed she felt him touch her
lightly on her forearm.

Or it may
have been a leaf.

Five

N
EITHER THE
twins nor Lola knew precisely what
led Briony to abandon the rehearsals. At the time, they did not even know she
had. They were doing the sickbed scene, the one in which bed-bound Arabella
first receives into her garret the prince disguised as the good doctor, and it
was going well enough, or no worse than usual, with the twins speaking their
lines no more ineptly than before. As for Lola, she didn’t wish to dirty
her cashmere by lying on the floor, and instead slumped in a chair, and the
director could hardly object to that. The older girl entered so fully into the
spirit of her own aloof compliance that she felt beyond reproach. One moment,
Briony was giving patient instructions to
Jackson
, then she paused, and
frowned, as if about to correct herself, and then she was gone. There was no
pivotal moment of creative difference, no storming or flouncing out. She turned
away, and simply drifted out, as though on her way to the lavatory. The others
waited, unaware that the whole project was at an end. The twins thought they
had been trying hard, and
Jackson
in particular,
feeling he was still in disgrace in the Tallis household, thought he might
begin to rehabilitate himself by pleasing Briony.

While they
waited, the boys played football with a wooden brick and their sister gazed out
the window, humming softly to herself. After an immeasurable period of time,
she went out into the corridor and along to the end where there was an open
door to an unused bedroom. From here she had a view of the driveway and the
lake across which lay a column of shimmering phosphorescence, white hot from
the fierce late afternoon heat. Against this column she could just make out
Briony beyond the island temple, standing right by the water’s edge. In
fact, she may even have been standing in the water—against such light it
was difficult to tell. She did not look as if she was about to come back. On
her way out of the room, Lola noticed by the bed a masculine-looking suitcase
of tan leather and heavy straps and faded steamer labels. It reminded her
vaguely of her father, and she paused by it, and caught the faint sooty scent
of a railway carriage. She put her thumb against one of the locks and slid it.
The polished metal was cool, and her touch left little patches of shrinking
condensation. The clasp startled her as it sprang up with a loud chunky sound.
She pushed it back and hurried from the room.

There
followed more formless time for the cousins. Lola sent the twins down to see if
the pool was free—they felt uneasy being there when adults were present.
The twins returned to report that Cecilia was there with two other grown-ups,
but by now Lola was not in the nursery. She was in her tiny bedroom, arranging
her hair in front of a hand mirror propped against the windowsill. The boys lay
on her narrow bed, and tickled each other, and wrestled, and made loud howling
noises. She could not be bothered to send them to their own room. Now there was
no play, and the pool was not available, unstructured time oppressed them.
Homesickness fell upon them when Pierrot said he was hungry—dinner was
hours away, and it would not be proper to go down now and ask for food.
Besides, the boys would not go in the kitchen because they were terrified of Betty
whom they had seen on the stairs grimly carrying red rubber sheets toward their
room.