Atonement (11 page)
And so Emily
lay back against the pillows for another several minutes, her creature having
slunk away, and patiently planned, and revised her plans, and refined an order
for them. She would soothe the household, which seemed to her, from the sickly
dimness of the bedroom, like a troubled and sparsely populated continent from
whose forested vastness competing elements made claims and counterclaims upon
her restless attention. She had no illusions: old plans, if one could ever
remember them, the plans that time had overtaken, tended to have a febrile and
overoptimistic grip on events. She could send her tendrils into every room of
the house, but she could not send them into the future. She also knew that,
ultimately, it was her own peace of mind she strove for; self-interest and
kindness were best not separated. Gently, she pushed herself upright and swung
her feet to the floor and wriggled them into her slippers. Rather than risk drawing
the curtains just yet, she turned on the reading light, and tentatively began
the hunt for her dark glasses. She had already decided where to look first.
T
HE
style of Nicholas Revett in the late 1780s, was intended as a point of
interest, an eye-catching feature to enhance the pastoral ideal, and had of
course no religious purpose at all. It was near enough to the water’s
edge, raised upon a projecting bank, to cast an interesting reflection in the
lake, and from most perspectives the row of pillars and the pediment above them
were charmingly half obscured by the elms and oaks that had grown up around.
Closer to, the temple had a sorrier look: moisture rising through a damaged
damp course had caused chunks of stucco to fall away. Sometime in the late
nineteenth century clumsy repairs were made with unpainted cement which had
turned brown and gave the building a mottled, diseased appearance. Elsewhere,
the exposed laths, themselves rotting away, showed through like the ribs of a
starving animal. The double doors that opened onto a circular chamber with a
domed roof had long ago been removed, and the stone floor was thickly covered
in leaves and leaf mold and the droppings of various birds and animals that
wandered in and out. All the panes were gone from the pretty, Georgian windows,
smashed by Leon and his friends in the late twenties. The tall niches that had
once contained statuary were empty but for the filthy ruins of spiderwebs. The
only furniture was a bench carried in from the village cricket
pitch—again, the youthful Leon and his terrible friends from school. The
legs had been kicked away and used to break the windows, and were lying
outside, softly crumbling into the earth among the nettles and the
incorruptible shards of glass.
Just as the
swimming pool pavilion behind the stable block imitated features of the temple,
so the temple was supposed to embody references to the original Adam house,
though nobody in the Tallis family knew what they were. Perhaps it was the
style of column, or the pediment, or the proportions of the windows. At
different times, but most often at Christmas, when moods were expansive, family
members strolling over the bridges promised to research the matter, but no one
cared to set aside the time when the busy new year began. More than the
dilapidation, it was this connection, this lost memory of the temple’s
grander relation, which gave the useless little building its sorry air. The
temple was the orphan of a grand society lady, and now, with no one to care for
it, no one to look up to, the child had grown old before its time, and let
itself go. There was a tapering soot stain as high as a man on an outside wall
where two tramps had once, outrageously, lit a bonfire to roast a carp that was
not theirs. For a long time there had been a shriveled boot lying exposed on
grass kept trim by rabbits. But when Briony looked today, the boot had
vanished, as everything would in the end. The idea that the temple, wearing its
own black band, grieved for the burned-down mansion, that it yearned for a
grand and invisible presence, bestowed a faintly religious ambience. Tragedy
had rescued the temple from being entirely a fake.
It is hard to
slash at nettles for long without a story imposing itself, and Briony was soon
absorbed and grimly content, even though she appeared to the world like a girl
in the grip of a terrible mood. She had found a slender hazel branch and
stripped it clean. There was work to do, and she set about it. A tall nettle
with a preening look, its head coyly drooping and its middle leaves turned
outward like hands protesting innocence—this was Lola, and though she
whimpered for mercy, the singing arc of a three-foot switch cut her down at the
knees and sent her worthless torso flying. This was too satisfying to let go,
and the next several nettles were Lola too; this one, leaning across to whisper
in the ear of its neighbor, was cut down with an outrageous lie on her lips;
here she was again, standing apart from the others, head cocked in poisonous
scheming; over there she lorded it among a clump of young admirers and was
spreading rumors about Briony. It was regrettable, but the admirers had to die
with her. Then she rose again, brazen with her various sins—pride,
gluttony, avarice, uncooperativeness—and for each she paid with a life.
Her final act of spite was to fall at Briony’s feet and sting her toes.
When Lola had died enough, three pairs of young nettles were sacrificed for the
incompetence of the twins—retribution was indifferent and granted no
special favors to children. Then playwriting itself became a nettle, became
several in fact; the shallowness, the wasted time, the messiness of other
minds, the hopelessness of pretending—in the garden of the arts, it was a
weed and had to die.
No longer a
playwright and feeling all the more refreshed for that, and watching out for
broken glass, she moved further round the temple, working along the fringe
where the nibbled grass met the disorderly undergrowth that spilled out from
among the trees. Flaying the nettles was becoming a self-purification, and it
was childhood she set about now, having no further need for it. One spindly
specimen stood in for everything she had been up until this moment. But that
was not enough. Planting her feet firmly in the grass, she disposed of her old
self year by year in thirteen strokes. She severed the sickly dependency of
infancy and early childhood, and the schoolgirl eager to show off and be
praised, and the eleven-year-old’s silly pride in her first stories and
her reliance on her mother’s good opinion. They flew over her left
shoulder and lay at her feet. The slender tip of the switch made a two-tone
sound as it sliced the air. No more! she made it say. Enough! Take that!
Soon, it was
the action itself that absorbed her, and the newspaper report which she revised
to the rhythm of her swipes. No one in the world could do this better than
Briony Tallis who would be representing her country next year at the Berlin
Olympics and was certain to win the gold. People studied her closely and
marveled at her technique, her preference for bare feet because it improved her
balance—so important in this demanding sport—with every toe playing
its part; the manner in which she led with the wrist and snapped the hand round
only at the end of her stroke, the way she distributed her weight and used the
rotation in her hips to gain extra power, her distinctive habit of extending
the fingers of her free hand—no one came near her. Self-taught, the
youngest daughter of a senior civil servant. Look at the concentration in her
face, judging the angle, never fudging a shot, taking each nettle with inhuman
precision. To reach this level required a lifetime’s dedication. And how
close she had come to wasting that life as a playwright!
She was
suddenly aware of the trap behind her, clattering over the first bridge.
eyes upon her. Was this the kid sister he had last seen on Waterloo Station
only three months ago, and now a member of an international elite? Perversely,
she would not allow herself to turn and acknowledge him; he must learn that she
was independent now of other people’s opinion, even his. She was a grand
master, lost to the intricacies of her art. Besides, he was bound to stop the
trap and come running down the bank, and she would have to suffer the
interruption with good grace.
The sound of
wheels and hooves receding over the second bridge proved, she supposed, that
her brother knew the meaning of distance and professional respect. All the
same, a little sadness was settling on her as she kept hacking away, moving
further round the island temple until she was out of sight of the road. A
ragged line of chopped nettles on the grass marked her progress, as did the
stinging white bumps on her feet and ankles. The tip of the hazel switch sang
through its arc, leaves and stems flew apart, but the cheers of the crowds were
harder to summon. The colors were ebbing from her fantasy, her self-loving
pleasures in movement and balance were fading, her arm was aching. She was
becoming a solitary girl swiping nettles with a stick, and at last she stopped
and tossed it toward the trees and looked around her.
The cost of
oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with
what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in
plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the
actual. It was difficult to come back.
Come back
, her sister used to
whisper when she woke her from a bad dream. Briony had lost her godly power of
creation, but it was only at this moment of return that the loss became
evident; part of a daydream’s enticement was the illusion that she was
helpless before its logic: forced by international rivalry to compete at the
highest level among the world’s finest and to accept the challenges that
came with preeminence in her field—her field of nettle
slashing—driven to push beyond her limits to assuage the roaring crowd,
and to be the best, and, most importantly, unique. But of course, it had all
been her—by her and about her—and now she was back in the world,
not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself
shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she
was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out?
Wasn’t there somewhere else for people to go? She turned her back on the
island temple and wandered slowly over the perfect lawn the rabbits had made,
toward the bridge. In front of her, illuminated by the lowering sun, was a
cloud of insects, each one bobbing randomly, as though fixed on an invisible
elastic string—a mysterious courtship dance, or sheer insect exuberance
that defied her to find a meaning. In a spirit of mutinous resistance, she
climbed the steep grassy slope to the bridge, and when she stood on the
driveway, she decided she would stay there and wait until something significant
happened to her. This was the challenge she was putting to existence—she
would not stir, not for dinner, not even for her mother calling her in. She
would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events,
not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
I
N THE EARLY
evening, high-altitude clouds in
the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer over the hour,
and then thickened until a filtered orange glow hung above the giant crests of
parkland trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches glimpsed among the
foliage oily black, and the desiccated grasses took on the colors of the sky. A
Fauvist dedicated to improbable color might have imagined a landscape this way,
especially once sky and ground took on a reddish bloom and the swollen trunks
of elderly oaks became so black they began to look blue. Though the sun was
weakening as it dropped, the temperature seemed to rise because the breeze that
had brought faint relief all day had faded, and now the air was still and
heavy.