Atonement (18 page)

The change of
subject had worked the trick, for the area around Lola’s eyes which had
been inflamed was freckly and pale once more and she was very much her old
self. She took Briony’s hand. “I think the police should know about
him.”

The constable
in the village was a kindly man with a waxed mustache whose wife kept hens and
delivered fresh eggs on her bicycle. Communicating the letter and its word,
even spelling it out backward for him, was inconceivable. She went to move her
hand away but Lola tightened her grip and seemed to read the younger
girl’s mind.

“We
just need to show them the letter.”

“She
might not agree to it.”

“I bet
she will. Maniacs can attack anyone.”

Lola looked
suddenly thoughtful and seemed about to tell her cousin something new. But
instead she sprang away and took up Briony’s hairbrush and stood in front
of the mirror vigorously brushing out her hair. She had barely started when
they heard Mrs. Tallis calling them down to dinner. Lola was immediately petulant,
and Briony assumed that these rapid changes of mood were part of her recent
upset.

“It’s
hopeless. I’m nowhere near ready,” she said, close to tears again.
“I haven’t even started on my face.”

“I’ll
go down now,” Briony soothed her. “I’ll tell them
you’ll be a little while yet.” But Lola was already on her way out
the room and did not seem to hear.

After Briony
tidied her hair she remained in front of the mirror, studying her own face,
wondering what she might do when she came to “start” on it, which
she knew she must one day soon. Another demand on her time. At least she had no
freckles to conceal or soften, and that surely saved labor. Long ago, at the
age of ten, she decided that lipstick made her seem clownish. That notion was
due for revision. But not yet, when there was so much else to consider. She
stood by the desk and absently replaced the top of her fountain pen. Writing a
story was a hopeless, puny enterprise when such powerful and chaotic forces
were turning about her, and when all day long successive events had absorbed or
transformed what had gone before. There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
She wondered whether she had made a terrible mistake by confiding in her
cousin—Cecilia would hardly be pleased if excitable Lola started
flaunting her knowledge of Robbie’s note. And how was it possible to go
downstairs now and be at table with a maniac? If the police made an arrest,
she, Briony, might be made to appear in court, and say the word aloud, in
proof.

Reluctantly,
she left her room and made her way along the gloomy paneled corridor to the
head of the stairs where she paused to listen. The voices were still in the
drawing room—she heard her mother’s and Mr. Marshall’s, and
then, separately, the twins talking to each other. No Cecilia then, no maniac.
Briony felt her heart rate rise as she began her unwilling descent. Her life
had ceased to be simple. Only three days ago she was finishing off
The
Trials of Arabella
and waiting for her cousins. She had wanted everything
to be different, and here it was; and not only was it bad, it was about to get
worse. She stopped again on the first landing to consolidate a scheme; she
would keep well clear of her skittish cousin, not even catch her eye—she
could not afford to be drawn into a conspiracy, nor did she wish to prompt a
disastrous outburst. And Cecilia, whom she ought to protect, she dared not go
near. Robbie, obviously, she should avoid for safety’s sake. Her mother
with her fussing would not be helpful. It would be impossible to think straight
in her presence. It was the twins she should go for—they would be her
refuge. She would stay close and look after them. These summer dinners always
started so late—it was past ten o’clock—and the boys would be
tired. And otherwise she should be sociable with Mr. Marshall and ask him about
sweets—who thought them up, how they got made. It was a coward’s
plan but she could think of no other. With dinner about to be served, this was
hardly the moment to be summoning P.C. Vockins from the village.

She continued
down the stairs. She should have advised Lola to change in order to conceal the
scratch on her arm. Being asked about it might start her crying again. But
then, it would probably have been impossible to talk her out of a dress that
made it so difficult to walk. Attaining adulthood was all about the eager
acceptance of such impediments. She herself was taking them on. It wasn’t
her scratch, but she felt responsible for it, and for everything that was about
to happen. When her father was home, the household settled around a fixed
point. He organized nothing, he didn’t go about the house worrying on
other people’s behalf, he rarely told anyone what to do—in fact, he
mostly sat in the library. But his presence imposed order and allowed freedom.
Burdens were lifted. When he was there, it no longer mattered that her mother
retreated to her bedroom; it was enough that he was downstairs with a book on
his lap. When he took his place at the dining table, calm, affable, utterly
certain, a crisis in the kitchen became no more than a humorous sketch; without
him, it was a drama that clutched the heart. He knew most things worth knowing,
and when he didn’t know, he had a good idea which authority to consult,
and would take her into the library to help him find it. If he had not been, as
he described it, a slave to the Ministry, and to Eventuality Planning, if he
had been at home, sending Hardman down for the wines, steering the
conversation, deciding without appearing to when it was time to “go
through,” she would not be crossing the hallway now with such heaviness
in her step.

It was these
thoughts of him that made her slow as she passed the library door which,
unusually, was closed. She stopped to listen. From the kitchen, the chink of
metal against porcelain, from the drawing room her mother talking softly, and
closer by, one of the twins saying in a high, clear voice, “It’s
got a
u
in it, actually,” and his brother replying, “I
don’t care. Put it in the envelope.” And then, from behind the
library door, a scraping noise followed by a thump and a murmur that could have
been a man’s or a woman’s. In memory—and Briony later gave
this matter some thought—she had no particular expectations as she placed
her hand on the brass handle and turned it. But she had seen Robbie’s
letter, she had cast herself as her sister’s protector, and she had been
instructed by her cousin: what she saw must have been shaped in part by what
she already knew, or believed she knew.

At first,
when she pushed open the door and stepped in, she saw nothing at all. The only
light was from a single green-glass desk lamp which illuminated little more
than the tooled leather surface on which it stood. When she took another few
steps she saw them, dark shapes in the furthest corner. Though they were
immobile, her immediate understanding was that she had interrupted an attack, a
hand-to-hand fight. The scene was so entirely a realization of her worst fears
that she sensed that her overanxious imagination had projected the figures onto
the packed spines of books. This illusion, or hope of one, was dispelled as her
eyes adjusted to the gloom. No one moved. Briony stared past Robbie’s
shoulder into the terrified eyes of her sister. He had turned to look back at
the intruder, but he did not let Cecilia go. He had pushed his body against
hers, pushing her dress right up above her knee and had trapped her where the
shelves met at right angles. His left hand was behind her neck, gripping her
hair, and with his right he held her forearm which was raised in protest, or
self-defense.

He looked so
huge and wild, and Cecilia with her bare shoulders and thin arms so frail that
Briony had no idea what she could achieve as she started to go toward them. She
wanted to shout, but she could not catch her breath, and her tongue was slow
and heavy. Robbie moved in such a way that her view of her sister was
completely obscured. Then Cecilia was struggling free, and he was letting her
go. Briony stopped and said her sister’s name. When she pushed past
Briony there was no sign in Cecilia of gratitude or relief. Her face was
expressionless, almost composed, and she looked right ahead to the door she was
about to leave by. Then she was gone, and Briony was left alone with him. He
too would not meet her eye. Instead he faced into the corner, and busied
himself straightening his jacket and arranging his tie. Warily, she moved
backward away from him, but he made no move to attack her, and did not even
look up. So she turned and ran from the room to find Cecilia. But the hallway
was empty, and it was not clear which way she had gone.

Eleven

D
ESPITE THE
late addition of chopped fresh mint
to a blend of melted chocolate, egg yolk, coconut milk, rum, gin, crushed
banana and icing sugar, the cocktail was not particularly refreshing. Appetites
already cloyed by the night’s heat were further diminished. Nearly all
the adults entering the airless dining room were nauseated by the prospect of a
roast dinner, or even roast meat with salad, and would have been content with a
glass of cool water. But water was available only to the children, while the
rest were to revive themselves with a dessert wine at room temperature. Three
bottles stood ready opened on the table—in Jack Tallis’s absence
Betty usually made an inspired guess. None of the three tall windows would open
because their frames had warped long ago, and an aroma of warmed dust from the
Persian carpet rose to meet the diners as they entered. One comfort was that
the fishmonger’s van bringing the first course of dressed crab had broken
down.

The effect of
suffocation was heightened by the dark-stained paneling reaching from the floor
and covering the ceiling, and by the room’s only painting, a vast canvas
that hung above a fireplace unlit since its construction—a fault in the
architectural drawings had left no provision for a flue or chimney. The
portrait, in the style of Gainsborough, showed an aristocratic
family—parents, two teenage girls and an infant, all thin-lipped, and
pale as ghouls—posed before a vaguely Tuscan landscape. No one knew who
these people were, but it was likely that Harry Tallis thought they would lend
an impression of solidity to his household.

Emily stood
at the head of the table placing the diners as they came in. She put Leon on
her right, and Paul Marshall on her left. To his right Leon had Briony and the
twins, while Marshall had Cecilia on his left, then Robbie, then Lola. Robbie
stood behind his chair, gripping it for support, amazed that no one appeared to
hear his still-thudding heart. He had escaped the cocktail, but he too had no
appetite. He turned slightly to face away from Cecilia, and as the others took
their places noted with relief that he was seated down among the children.

Prompted by a
nod from his mother, Leon muttered a short suspended grace—For what we
are about to receive—to which the scrape of chairs was the amen. The
silence that followed as they settled and unfolded their napkins would easily
have been dispersed by Jack Tallis introducing some barely interesting topic
while Betty went around with the beef. Instead, the diners watched and listened
to her as she stooped murmuring at each place, scraping the serving spoon and
fork across the silver platter. What else could they attend to, when the only
other business in the room was their own silence? Emily Tallis had always been
incapable of small talk and didn’t much care. Leon, entirely at one with
himself, lolled in his chair, wine bottle in hand, studying its label. Cecilia
was lost to the events of ten minutes before and could not have composed a
simple sentence. Robbie was familiar with the household and would have started
something off, but he too was in turmoil. It was enough that he could pretend
to ignore Cecilia’s bare arm at his side—he could feel its
heat—and the hostile gaze of Briony who sat diagonally across from him.
And even if it had been considered proper for children to introduce a topic,
they too would have been incapable: Briony could think only of what she had
witnessed, Lola was subdued both by the shock of physical assault and an array
of contradictory emotions, and the twins were absorbed in a plan.

It was Paul
Marshall who broke more than three minutes of asphyxiating silence. He moved
back in his chair to speak behind Cecilia’s head to Robbie.

“I say,
are we still on for tennis tomorrow?”

There was a
two-inch scratch, Robbie noticed, from the corner of Marshall’s eye,
running parallel to his nose, drawing attention to the way his features were
set high up in his face, bunched up under the eyes. Only fractions of an inch
kept him from cruel good looks. Instead, his appearance was absurd—the
empty tract of his chin was at the expense of a worried, overpopulated
forehead. Out of politeness, Robbie too had moved back in his seat to hear the
remark, but even in his state he flinched. It was inappropriate, at the
beginning of the meal, for Marshall to turn away from his hostess and begin a
private conversation.