Atonement (7 page)

“Darling!
What’s up?”

Her eyes in
fact were dry, and they lowered fractionally to take in the vase, then she
pushed on past, to where the easel stood supporting the poster with the merry,
multicolored title, and a Chagall-like montage of highlights from her play in
watercolor scattered around the lettering—the tearful parents waving, the
moonlit ride to the coast, the heroine on her sickbed, a wedding. She paused
before it, and then, with one violent, diagonal stroke, ripped away more than
half of it and let it fall to the floor. Cecilia put the vase down and hurried
over, and knelt down to retrieve the fragment before her sister began to
trample on it. This would not be the first time she had rescued Briony from
self-destruction.

“Little
Sis. Is it the cousins?”

She wanted to
comfort her sister, for Cecilia had always loved to cuddle the baby of the
family. When she was small and prone to nightmares—those terrible screams
in the night—Cecilia used to go to her room and wake her.
Come back
,
she used to whisper.
It’s only a dream. Come back
. And then she
would carry her into her own bed. She wanted to put her arm round Briony’s
shoulder now, but she was no longer tugging on her lip, and had moved away to
the front door and was resting one hand on the great brass lion’s-head
handle that Mrs. Turner had polished that afternoon.

“The
cousins are stupid. But it’s not only that. It’s . . .” She
trailed away, doubtful whether she should confide her recent revelation.

Cecilia
smoothed the jagged triangle of paper and thought how her little sister was
changing. It would have suited her better had Briony wept and allowed herself
to be comforted on the silk chaise longue in the drawing room. Such stroking
and soothing murmurs would have been a release for Cecilia after a frustrating
day whose various crosscurrents of feeling she had preferred not to examine.
Addressing Briony’s problems with kind words and caresses would have
restored a sense of control. However, there was an element of autonomy in the
younger girl’s unhappiness. She had turned her back and was opening the
door wide.

“But
what is it then?” Cecilia could hear the neediness in her own voice.

Beyond her
sister, far beyond the lake, the driveway curved across the park, narrowed and
converged over rising ground to a point where a tiny shape, made formless by
the warping heat, was growing, and then flickered and seemed to recede. It
would be Hardman, who said he was too old to learn to drive a car, bringing the
visitors in the trap.

Briony
changed her mind and faced her sister. “The whole thing’s a
mistake. It’s the wrong . . .” She snatched a breath and glanced
away, a signal, Cecilia sensed, of a dictionary word about to have its first
outing. “It’s the wrong genre!” She pronounced it, as she
thought, in the French way, monosyllabically, but without quite getting her
tongue round the
r
.

“
Jean?”
Cecilia called after her. “What are you talking about?”

But Briony
was hobbling away on soft white soles across the fiery gravel.

Cecilia went
to the kitchen to fill the vase, and carried it up to her bedroom to retrieve
the flowers from the handbasin. When she dropped them in they once again
refused to fall into the artful disorder she preferred, and instead swung round
in the water into a willful neatness, with the taller stalks evenly distributed
around the rim. She lifted the flowers and let them drop again, and they fell
into another orderly pattern. Still, it hardly mattered. It was difficult to
imagine this Mr. Marshall complaining that the flowers by his bedside were too
symmetrically displayed. She took the arrangement up to the second floor, along
the creaking corridor to what was known as Auntie Venus’s room, and set
the vase on a chest of drawers by a four-poster bed, thus completing the little
commission her mother had set her that morning, eight hours before.

However, she
did not immediately leave, for the room was pleasingly uncluttered by personal
possessions—in fact, apart from Briony’s, it was the only tidy
bedroom. And it was cool here, now that the sun had moved round the house.
Every drawer was empty, every bare surface without so much as a fingerprint. Under
the chintz counterpane the sheets would be starchily pure. She had an impulse
to slip her hand between the covers to feel them, but instead she moved deeper
into Mr. Marshall’s room. At the foot of the four-poster, the seat of a
Chippendale sofa had been so carefully straightened that sitting down would
have seemed a desecration. The air was smooth with the scent of wax, and in the
honeyed light, the gleaming surfaces of the furniture seemed to ripple and
breathe. As her approach altered her angle of view, the revelers on the lid of
an ancient trousseau chest writhed into dance steps. Mrs. Turner must have
passed through that morning. Cecilia shrugged away the association with Robbie.
Being here was a kind of trespass, with the room’s future occupant just a
few hundred yards away from the house.

From where
she had arrived by the window she could see that Briony had crossed the bridge
to the island, and was walking down the grassy bank, and beginning to disappear
among the lakeshore trees that surrounded the island temple. Further off,
Cecilia could just make out the two hatted figures sitting up on the bench
behind Hardman. Now she saw a third figure whom she had not noticed before,
striding along the driveway toward the trap. Surely it was Robbie Turner on his
way home. He stopped, and as the visitors approached, his outline seemed to
fuse with that of the visitors. She could imagine the scene—the manly
punches to the shoulder, the horseplay. She was annoyed that her brother could
not know that Robbie was in disgrace, and she turned from the window with a
sound of exasperation, and set off for her room in search of a cigarette.

She had one
packet remaining, and only after several minutes of irritable raking through
her mess did she find it in the pocket of a blue silk dressing gown on her
bathroom floor. She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing
that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas
about where and when a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any other
public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered,
never from her own supply—notions as self-evident to him as natural
justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her
with the courage to confront him. The lighthearted ironies she might have
deployed among her friends deserted her in his presence, and she heard her own
voice become thin when she attempted some docile contradiction. In fact, being
at odds with her father about anything at all, even an insignificant domestic
detail, made her uncomfortable, and nothing that great literature might have
done to modify her sensibilities, none of the lessons of practical criticism,
could quite deliver her from obedience. Smoking on the stairway when her father
was installed in his
Whitehall
ministry was all the
revolt her education would allow, and still it cost her some effort.

As she
reached the broad landing that dominated the hallway,
Leon
was showing Paul
Marshall through the wide-open front entrance. Danny Hardman was behind them
with their luggage. Old Hardman was just in view outside, gazing mutely at the
five-pound note in his hand. The indirect afternoon light, reflected from the
gravel and filtered through the fanlight, filled the entrance hall with the
yellowish-orange tones of a sepia print. The men had removed their hats and
stood waiting for her, smiling. Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she
met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and
whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her
life—with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.

“Sis-Celia!”
Leon
called. When they
embraced she felt against her collarbone through the fabric of his jacket a
thick fountain pen, and smelled pipe smoke in the folds of his clothes,
prompting a moment’s nostalgia for afternoon tea visits to rooms in
men’s colleges, rather polite and anodyne occasions mostly, but cheery
too, especially in winter.

Paul Marshall
shook her hand and made a faint bow. There was something comically brooding
about his face. His opener was conventionally dull.

“I’ve
heard an awful lot about you.”

“And me
you.” What she could remember was a telephone conversation with her
brother some months before, during which they had discussed whether they had
ever eaten, or would ever eat, an Amo bar.

“Emily’s
lying down.”

It was hardly
necessary to say it. As children they claimed to be able to tell from across
the far side of the park whenever their mother had a migraine by a certain
darkening at the windows.

“And
the Old Man’s staying in town?”

“He
might come later.”

Cecilia was
aware that Paul Marshall was staring at her, but before she could look at him
she needed to prepare something to say.

“The
children were putting on a play, but it rather looks like it’s fallen
apart.”

Marshall
said, “That
might have been your sister I saw down by the lake. She was giving the nettles
a good thrashing.”

Leon
stepped aside to let
Hardman’s boy through with the bags. “Where are we putting Paul?”

“On the
second floor.” Cecilia had inclined her head to direct these words at the
young Hardman. He had reached the foot of the stairs and now stopped and
turned, a leather suitcase in each hand, to face them where they were grouped,
in the center of the checkered, tiled expanse. His expression was of tranquil
incomprehension. She had noticed him hanging around the children lately.
Perhaps he was interested in Lola. He was sixteen, and certainly no boy. The
roundness she remembered in his cheeks had gone, and the childish bow of his
lips had become elongated and innocently cruel. Across his brow a constellation
of acne had a new-minted look, its garishness softened by the sepia light. All
day long, she realized, she had been feeling strange, and seeing strangely, as
though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous
ironies she could not quite grasp.

She said to
him patiently, “The big room past the nursery.”

“Auntie
Venus’s room,”
Leon
said.

Auntie Venus
had been for almost half a century a vital nursing presence across a swath of
the
Northern
Territories
in
Canada
. She was no
one’s aunt particularly, or rather, she was Mr. Tallis’s dead
second cousin’s aunt, but no one questioned her right, after her
retirement, to the room on the second floor where, for most of their
childhoods, she had been a sweet-natured, bedridden invalid who withered away
to an uncomplaining death when Cecilia was ten. A week later Briony was born.

Cecilia led
the visitors into the drawing room, through the French windows, past the roses
toward the swimming pool, which was behind the stable block and was surrounded
on four sides by a high thicket of bamboo, with a tunnel-like gap for an
entrance. They walked through, bending their heads under low canes, and emerged
onto a terrace of dazzling white stone from which the heat rose in a blast. In
deep shadow, set well back from the water’s edge, was a white-painted tin
table with a pitcher of iced punch under a square of cheesecloth.
Leon
unfolded the canvas
chairs and they sat with their glasses in a shallow circle facing the pool.
From his position between Leon and Cecilia,
Marshall
took control of the
conversation with a ten-minute monologue. He told them how wonderful it was, to
be away from town, in tranquillity, in the country air; for nine months, for
every waking minute of every day, enslaved to a vision, he had shuttled between
headquarters, his boardroom and the factory floor. He had bought a large house
on Clapham Common and hardly had time to visit it. The launch of Rainbow Amo had
been a triumph, but only after various distribution catastrophes which had now
been set right; the advertising campaign had offended some elderly bishops so
another was devised; then came the problems of success itself, unbelievable
sales, new production quotas, and disputes about overtime rates, and the search
for a site for a second factory about which the four unions involved had been
generally sullen and had needed to be charmed and coaxed like children; and
now, when all had been brought to fruition, there loomed the greater challenge
yet of Army Amo, the khaki bar with the Pass the Amo! slogan; the concept
rested on an assumption that spending on the Armed Forces must go on increasing
if Mr. Hitler did not pipe down; there was even a chance that the bar could
become part of the standard-issue ration pack; in that case, if there were to
be a general conscription, a further five factories would be needed; there were
some on the board who were convinced there should and would be an accommodation
with Germany and that Army Amo was a dead duck; one member was even accusing
Marshall of being a warmonger; but, exhausted as he was, and maligned, he would
not be turned away from his purpose, his vision. He ended by repeating that it
was wonderful to find oneself “way out here” where one could, as it
were, catch one’s breath.