Atonement (3 page)
Too? Briony could
not keep up with the older girl. The misery of the inevitable was clouding her
thoughts.
One of the
twins said proudly, “And you were in the school play.”
How could she
tell them that Arabella was not a freckled person? Her skin was pale and her
hair was black and her thoughts were Briony’s thoughts. But how could she
refuse a cousin so far from home whose family life was in ruins? Lola was
reading her mind because she now played her final card, the unrefusable ace.
“Do say
yes. It would be the only good thing that’s happened to me in
months
.”
Yes. Unable
to push her tongue against the word, Briony could only nod, and felt as she did
so a sulky thrill of self-annihilating compliance spreading across her skin and
ballooning outward from it, darkening the room in throbs. She wanted to leave,
she wanted to lie alone, facedown on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the
moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point
before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the
full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate
the new regime. Not only Leon to consider, but what of the antique peach and
cream satin dress that her mother was looking out for her, for Arabella’s
wedding? That would now be given to Lola. How could her mother reject the
daughter who had loved her all these years? As she saw the dress make its
perfect, clinging fit around her cousin and witnessed her mother’s
heartless smile, Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run
away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a
bearded woodsman one winter’s dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak,
beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the
pink ribbon straps . . .
Self-pity
needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the
lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent—how the tilt of a
skull could change a life!—Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony’s
manuscript from the floor, and the twins had slipped from their chairs to
follow their sister into the space in the center of the nursery that Briony had
cleared the day before. Did she dare leave now? Lola was pacing the
floorboards, one hand to her brow as she skimmed through the first pages of the
play, muttering the lines from the prologue. She announced that nothing was to
be lost by beginning at the beginning, and now she was casting her brothers as
Arabella’s parents and describing the opening to them, seeming to know
all there was to know about the scene. The advance of Lola’s dominion was
merciless and made self-pity irrelevant. Or would it be all the more
annihilatingly delicious?—for Briony had not even been cast as
Arabella’s mother, and now was surely the time to sidle from the room and
tumble into facedown darkness on the bed. But it was Lola’s briskness,
her obliviousness to anything beyond her own business, and Briony’s
certainty that her own feelings would not even register, still less provoke
guilt, which gave her the strength to resist.
In a
generally pleasant and well-protected life, she had never really confronted
anyone before. Now she saw: it was like diving into the swimming pool in early
June; you simply had to make yourself do it. As she squeezed out of the high
chair and walked over to where her cousin stood her heart thudded
inconveniently and her breath was short.
She took the
play from Lola and said in a voice that was constricted and more high-pitched
than usual, “If you’re Arabella, then I’ll be the director,
thank you very much, and I’ll read the prologue.”
Lola put her
speckled hand to her mouth. “Sor-reeee!” she hooted. “I was
just trying to get things started.”
Briony was
unsure how to respond, so she turned to Pierrot and said, “You
don’t look much like Arabella’s mother.”
The
countermanding of Lola’s casting decision, and the laughter in the boys
it provoked, made for a shift in the balance of power. Lola made an exaggerated
shrug of her bony shoulders and went to stare out of the window. Perhaps she
herself was struggling with the temptation to flounce from the room.
Though the
twins began a wrestling match, and their sister suspected the onset of a
headache, somehow the rehearsal began. The silence into which Briony read the
prologue was tense.
This is the
tale of spontaneous Arabella
Who ran off
with an extrinsic fellow.
It grieved
her parents to see their firstborn
Evanesce from
her home to go to
Without
permission . . .
His wife at
his side, Arabella’s father stood at the wrought-iron gates of his
estate, first pleading with his daughter to reconsider her decision, then in
desperation ordering her not to go. Facing him was the sad but stubborn heroine
with the count beside her, and their horses, tethered to a nearby oak, were
neighing and pawing the ground, impatient to be off. The father’s
tenderest feelings were supposed to make his voice quaver as he said,
My darling
one, you are young and lovely,
But
inexperienced, and though you think
The world is
at your feet,
It can rise
up and tread on you.
Briony
positioned her cast; she herself clutched
Pierrot stood several feet away, hand in hand. When the boys met each
other’s eye they had a giggling fit which the girls shushed at. There had
been trouble enough already, but Briony began to understand the chasm that lay
between an idea and its execution only when Jackson began to read from his
sheet in a stricken monotone, as though each word was a name on a list of dead
people, and was unable to pronounce “inexperienced” even though it
was said for him many times, and left out the last two words of his
lines—“It can rise up and tread.” As for Lola, she spoke her
lines correctly but casually, and sometimes smiled inappropriately at some private
thought, determined to demonstrate that her nearly adult mind was elsewhere.
And so they
went on, the cousins from the north, for a full half an hour, steadily wrecking
Briony’s creation, and it was a mercy, therefore, when her big sister
came to fetch the twins for their bath.
P
ARTLY BECAUSE
of her youth and the glory of the
day, partly because of her blossoming need for a cigarette, Cecilia Tallis half
ran with her flowers along the path that went by the river, by the old diving
pool with its mossy brick wall, before curving away through the oak woods. The
accumulated inactivity of the summer weeks since finals also hurried her along;
since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her
impatient, almost desperate.
The cool high
shade of the woods was a relief, the sculpted intricacies of the tree trunks
enchanting. Once through the iron kissing gate, and past the rhododendrons
beneath the ha-ha, she crossed the open parkland—sold off to a local
farmer to graze his cows on—and came up behind the fountain and its
retaining wall and the half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s
Triton
in the Piazza Barberini in Rome.
The muscular
figure, squatting so comfortably on his shell, could blow through his conch a
jet only two inches high, the pressure was so feeble, and water fell back over
his head, down his stone locks and along the groove of his powerful spine,
leaving a glistening dark green stain. In an alien northern climate he was a
long way from home, but he was beautiful in morning sunlight, and so were the
four dolphins that supported the wavy-edged shell on which he sat. She looked
at the improbable scales on the dolphins and on the Triton’s thighs, and
then toward the house. Her quickest way into the drawing room was across the
lawn and terrace and through the French windows. But her childhood friend and
university acquaintance, Robbie Turner, was on his knees, weeding along a
rugosa hedge, and she did not feel like getting into conversation with him. Or
at least, not now. Since coming down, landscape gardening had become his last
craze but one. Now there was talk of medical college, which after a literature
degree seemed rather pretentious. And presumptuous too, since it was her father
who would have to pay.
She refreshed
the flowers by plunging them into the fountain’s basin, which was
full-scale, deep and cold, and avoided Robbie by hurrying round to the front of
the house—it was an excuse, she thought, to stay outside another few
minutes. Morning sunlight, or any light, could not conceal the ugliness of the
Tallis home—barely forty years old, bright orange brick, squat,
lead-paned baronial Gothic, to be condemned one day in an article by Pevsner,
or one of his team, as a tragedy of wasted chances, and by a younger writer of
the modern school as “charmless to a fault.” An Adam-style house
had stood here until destroyed by fire in the late 1880s. What remained was the
artificial lake and island with its two stone bridges supporting the driveway,
and, by the water’s edge, a crumbling stuccoed temple. Cecilia’s
grandfather, who grew up over an ironmonger’s shop and made the family
fortune with a series of patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps, had
imposed on the new house his taste for all things solid, secure and functional.
Still, if one turned one’s back to the front entrance and glanced down
the drive, ignoring the Friesians already congregating in the shade of widely
spaced trees, the view was fine enough, giving an impression of timeless,
unchanging calm which made her more certain than ever that she must soon be
moving on.
She went
indoors, quickly crossed the black and white tiled hall—how familiar her
echoing steps, how annoying—and paused to catch her breath in the doorway
of the drawing room. Dripping coolly onto her sandaled feet, the untidy bunch
of rosebay willow herb and irises brought her to a better state of mind. The
vase she was looking for was on an American cherry-wood table by the French
windows which were slightly ajar. Their southeast aspect had permitted
parallelograms of morning sunlight to advance across the powder-blue carpet.
Her breathing slowed and her desire for a cigarette deepened, but still she
hesitated by the door, momentarily held by the perfection of the scene—by
the three faded Chesterfields grouped around the almost new Gothic fireplace in
which stood a display of wintry sedge, by the unplayed, untuned harpsichord and
the unused rosewood music stands, by the heavy velvet curtains, loosely
restrained by an orange and blue tasseled rope, framing a partial view of
cloudless sky and the yellow and gray mottled terrace where chamomile and
feverfew grew between the paving cracks. A set of steps led down to the lawn on
whose border Robbie still worked, and which extended to the Triton fountain
fifty yards away.
All
this—the river and flowers, running, which was something she rarely did
these days, the fine ribbing of the oak trunks, the high-ceilinged room, the
geometry of light, the pulse in her ears subsiding in the stillness—all
this pleased her as the familiar was transformed into a delicious strangeness.
But she also felt reproved for her homebound boredom. She had returned from
that her family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company. But her
father remained in town, and her mother, when she wasn’t nurturing her
migraines, seemed distant, even unfriendly. Cecilia had carried up trays of tea
to her mother’s room—as spectacularly squalid as her
own—thinking some intimate conversations might develop. However, Emily
Tallis wanted to share only tiny frets about the household, or she lay back
against the pillows, her expression unreadable in the gloom, emptying her cup
in wan silence. Briony was lost to her writing fantasies—what had seemed
a passing fad was now an enveloping obsession. Cecilia had seen them on the
stairs that morning, her younger sister leading the cousins, poor things, who
had arrived only yesterday, up to the nursery to rehearse the play Briony
wanted to put on that evening, when Leon and his friend were expected. There
was so little time, and already one of the twins had been detained by Betty in
the scullery for some wrongdoing or other. Cecilia was not inclined to
help—it was too hot, and whatever she did, the project would end in
calamity, with Briony expecting too much, and no one, especially the cousins,
able to measure up to her frenetic vision.