Atonement (2 page)
The play she
had written for
was her first excursion into drama, and she had found the transition quite
effortless. It was a relief not to be writing out the
she said
s, or
describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine’s
face—beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the
other hand, had infinite variation. A universe reduced to what was said in it
was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of nullity, and to compensate, every
utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling or other, in the
service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable.
The Trials of
Arabella
may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear the
term. The piece was intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief and
instruction, in that order, and the innocent intensity with which Briony set
about the project—the posters, tickets, sales booth—made her
particularly vulnerable to failure. She could easily have welcomed
stories, but it was the news that her cousins from the north were coming to
stay that had prompted this leap into a new form.
That Lola,
who was fifteen, and the nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot, were
refugees from a bitter domestic civil war should have mattered more to Briony.
She had heard her mother criticize the impulsive behavior of her younger sister
Hermione, and lament the situation of the three children, and denounce her
meek, evasive brother-in-law Cecil who had fled to the safety of
mother and sister analyze the latest twists and outrages, charges and
countercharges, and she knew her cousins’ visit was an open-ended one,
and might even extend into term time. She had heard it said that the house
could easily absorb three children, and that the Quinceys could stay as long as
they liked, provided the parents, if they ever visited simultaneously, kept
their quarrels away from the Tallis household. Two rooms near Briony’s had
been dusted down, new curtains had been hung and furniture carried in from
other rooms. Normally, she would have been involved in these preparations, but
they happened to coincide with her two-day writing bout and the beginnings of
the front-of-house construction. She vaguely knew that divorce was an
affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it no
thought. It was a mundane unraveling that could not be reversed, and therefore
offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of
disorder. Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal
neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and
dizzy promise of lifelong union. A good wedding was an unacknowledged
representation of the as yet unthinkable—sexual bliss. In the aisles of
country churches and grand city cathedrals, witnessed by a whole society of
approving family and friends, her heroines and heroes reached their innocent
climaxes and needed to go no further.
If divorce
had presented itself as the dastardly antithesis of all this, it could easily
have been cast onto the other pan of the scales, along with betrayal, illness,
thieving, assault and mendacity. Instead it showed an unglamorous face of dull
complexity and incessant wrangling. Like rearmament and the Abyssinia Question
and gardening, it was simply not a subject, and when, after a long Saturday
morning wait, Briony heard at last the sound of wheels on the gravel below her
bedroom window, and snatched up her pages and ran down the stairs, across the
hallway and out into the blinding light of midday, it was not insensitivity so
much as a highly focused artistic ambition that caused her to shout to the
dazed young visitors huddled together by the trap with their luggage,
“I’ve got your parts, all written out. First performance tomorrow!
Rehearsals start in five minutes!”
Immediately,
her mother and sister were there to interpose a blander timetable. The
visitors—all three were ginger-haired and freckled—were shown their
rooms, their cases were carried up by Hardman’s son Danny, there was
cordial in the kitchen, a tour of the house, a swim in the pool and lunch in
the south garden, under the shade of the vines. All the while, Emily and
Cecilia Tallis maintained a patter that surely robbed the guests of the ease it
was supposed to confer. Briony knew that if she had traveled two hundred miles
to a strange house, bright questions and jokey asides, and being told in a
hundred different ways that she was free to choose, would have oppressed her.
It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left
alone. However, the Quinceys worked hard at pretending to be amused or
liberated, and this boded well for
The Trials of Arabella
: this trio
clearly had the knack of being what they were not, even though they barely
resembled the characters they were to play. Before lunch Briony slipped away to
the empty rehearsal room—the nursery—and walked up and down on the
painted floorboards, considering her casting options.
On the face
of it, Arabella, whose hair was as dark as Briony’s, was unlikely to be
descended from freckled parents, or elope with a foreign freckled count, rent a
garret room from a freckled innkeeper, lose her heart to a freckled prince and
be married by a freckled vicar before a freckled congregation. But all this was
to be so. Her cousins’ coloring was too vivid—virtually
fluorescent!—to be concealed. The best that could be said was that
Arabella’s
lack
of freckles was the sign—the hieroglyph,
Briony might have written—of her distinction. Her purity of spirit would
never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. There was a
further problem with the twins, who could not be told apart by a stranger. Was
it right that the wicked count should so completely resemble the handsome
prince, or that both should resemble Arabella’s father
and
the
vicar? What if Lola were cast as the prince? Jackson and Pierrot seemed typical
eager little boys who would probably do as they were told. But would their
sister play a man? She had green eyes and sharp bones in her face, and hollow
cheeks, and there was something brittle in her reticence that suggested strong
will and a temper easily lost. Merely floating the possibility of the role to
Lola might provoke a crisis, and could Briony really hold hands with her before
the altar, while
Book
of Common Prayer
?
It was not
until
that afternoon that she was able to assemble her cast in the nursery. She had
arranged three stools in a row, while she herself jammed her rump into an
ancient baby’s high chair—a bohemian touch that gave her a tennis
umpire’s advantage of height. The twins had come with reluctance from the
pool where they had been for three hours without a break. They were barefoot
and wore singlets over trunks that dripped onto the floorboards. Water also ran
down their necks from their matted hair, and both boys were shivering and
jiggled their knees to keep warm. The long immersion had puckered and bleached
their skin, so that in the relatively low light of the nursery their freckles
appeared black. Their sister, who sat between them, with left leg balanced on
right knee, was, by contrast, perfectly composed, having liberally applied
perfume and changed into a green gingham frock to offset her coloring. Her
sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. The sight of
these nails gave Briony a constricting sensation around her sternum, and she
knew at once that she could not ask Lola to play the prince.
Everyone was
settled and the playwright was about to begin her little speech summarizing the
plot and evoking the excitement of performing before an adult audience tomorrow
evening in the library. But it was Pierrot who spoke first.
“I hate
plays and all that sort of thing.”
“I hate
them too, and dressing up,”
It had been
explained at lunch that the twins were to be distinguished by the fact that
Pierrot was missing a triangle of flesh from his left earlobe on account of a
dog he had tormented when he was three.
Lola looked
away. Briony said reasonably, “How can you hate plays?”
“It’s
just showing off.” Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident
truth.
Briony knew
he had a point. This was precisely why she loved plays, or hers at least;
everyone would adore her. Looking at the boys, under whose chairs water was
pooling before spilling between the floorboard cracks, she knew they could
never understand her ambition. Forgiveness softened her tone.
“Do you
think Shakespeare was just showing off?”
Pierrot
glanced across his sister’s lap toward
was faintly familiar, with its whiff of school and adult certainty, but the
twins found their courage in each other.
“Everyone
knows he was.”
“Definitely.”
When Lola
spoke, she turned first to Pierrot and halfway through her sentence swung round
to finish on
family, Mrs. Tallis never had anything to impart that needed saying
simultaneously to both daughters. Now Briony saw how it was done.
“You’ll
be in this play, or you’ll get a clout, and then I’ll speak to The
Parents.”
“If you
clout us,
we’ll
speak to The Parents.”
“You’ll
be in this play or I’ll speak to The Parents.”
That the
threat had been negotiated neatly downward did not appear to diminish its
power. Pierrot sucked on his lower lip.
“Why do
we have to?” Everything was conceded in the question, and Lola tried to
ruffle his sticky hair.
“Remember
what The Parents said? We’re guests in this house and we make ourselves—what
do we make ourselves? Come on. What do we make ourselves?”
“A-menable,”
the twins chorused in misery, barely stumbling over the unusual word.
Lola turned
to Briony and smiled. “Please tell us about your play.”
The Parents.
Whatever institutionalized strength was locked in this plural was about to fly
apart, or had already done so, but for now it could not be acknowledged, and
bravery was demanded of even the youngest. Briony felt suddenly ashamed at what
she had selfishly begun, for it had never occurred to her that her cousins
would not want to play their parts in
The Trials of Arabella
. But they
had trials, a catastrophe of their own, and now, as guests in her house, they
believed themselves under an obligation. What was worse, Lola had made it clear
that she too would be acting on sufferance. The vulnerable Quinceys were being
coerced. And yet, Briony struggled to grasp the difficult thought, wasn’t
there manipulation here, wasn’t Lola using the twins to express something
on her behalf, something hostile or destructive? Briony felt the disadvantage
of being two years younger than the other girl, of having a full two
years’ refinement weigh against her, and now her play seemed a miserable,
embarrassing thing.
Avoiding
Lola’s gaze the whole while, she proceeded to outline the plot, even as
its stupidity began to overwhelm her. She no longer had the heart to invent for
her cousins the thrill of the first night.
As soon as
she was finished Pierrot said, “I want to be the count. I want to be a
bad person.”
“I’m a prince. I’m always a prince.”
She could
have drawn them to her and kissed their little faces, but she said,
“That’s all right then.”
Lola
uncrossed her legs, smoothed her dress and stood, as though about to leave. She
spoke through a sigh of sadness or resignation. “I suppose that because
you’re the one who wrote it, you’ll be Arabella . . .”
“Oh
no,” Briony said. “No. Not at all.”
She said no,
but she meant yes. Of course she was taking the part of Arabella. What she was objecting
to was Lola’s “because.” She was not playing Arabella because
she wrote the play, she was taking the part because no other possibility had
crossed her mind, because that was how
because she
was
Arabella.
But she had
said no, and now Lola was saying sweetly, “In that case, do you mind if I
play her? I think I could do it very well. In fact, of the two of us . .
.”
She let that
hang, and Briony stared at her, unable to keep the horror from her expression,
and unable to speak. It was slipping away from her, she knew, but there was
nothing that she could think of to say that would bring it back. Into
Briony’s silence, Lola pressed her advantage.
“I had
a long illness last year, so I could do that part of it well too.”