Atonement (22 page)

Wronged
child, wronged wife. But she was not as unhappy as she should be. One role had
prepared her for the other. She paused in the entrance to the drawing room and
observed that the chocolate-smeared cocktail glasses had yet to be cleared
away, and that the doors into the garden still stood open. Now the faintest stirring
of a breeze rustled the display of sedge that stood before the fireplace. Two
or three stout-bodied moths circled the lamp that stood upon the harpsichord.
When would anyone ever play it again? That night creatures were drawn to lights
where they could be most easily eaten by other creatures was one of those
mysteries that gave her modest pleasure. She preferred not to have it explained
away. At a formal dinner once a professor of some science or other, wanting to
make small talk, had pointed out a few insects gyrating above a candelabra. He
had told her that it was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness
beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had
to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest place, on the far side
of the light—and in this case it was an illusion. It sounded to her like
sophistry, or an explanation for its own sake. How could anyone presume to know
the world through the eyes of an insect? Not everything had a cause, and pretending
otherwise was an interference in the workings of the world that was futile, and
could even lead to grief. Some things were simply so.

She did not
wish to know why Jack spent so many consecutive nights in London. Or rather,
she did not wish to be told. Nor did she wish to know more about the work that
kept him late at the Ministry. Months ago, not long after Christmas, she went
into the library to wake him from an afternoon sleep and saw a file open upon
the desk. It was only the mildest wifely curiosity that prompted her to peep,
for she had little interest in civic administration. On one page she saw a list
of headings: exchange controls, rationing, the mass evacuation of large towns,
the conscription of labor. The facing page was handwritten. A series of arithmetical
calculations was interspersed by blocks of text. Jack’s straight-backed,
brown-ink copperplate told her to assume a multiplier of fifty. For every one
ton of explosive dropped, assume fifty casualties. Assume 100,000 tons of bombs
dropped in two weeks. Result: five million casualties. She had not yet woken
him and his soft, whistling exhalations blended with winter birdsong that came
from somewhere beyond the lawn. Aqueous sunlight rippled over the spines of
books and the smell of warm dust was everywhere. She went to the window and
stared out, trying to spot the bird among bare oak branches that stood out
black against a broken sky of gray and palest blue. She knew well there had to
be such forms of bureaucratic supposition. And yes, there were precautions
administrators took to indemnify themselves against all eventualities. But
these extravagant numbers were surely a form of self-aggrandizement, and
reckless to the point of irresponsibility. Jack, the household’s
protector, its guarantor of tranquillity, was relied on to take the long view.
But this was silly. When she woke him he grunted and leaned forward with a
sudden movement to close the files, and then, still seated, pulled her hand to
his mouth and kissed it dryly.

She decided
against closing the French windows, and sat down at one end of the
Chesterfield. She was not exactly waiting, she felt. No one else she knew had
her knack of keeping still, without even a book on her lap, of moving gently
through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden. She had learned her
patience through years of sidestepping migraine. Fretting, concentrated
thought, reading, looking, wanting—all were to be avoided in favor of a
slow drift of association, while the minutes accumulated like banked snow and
the silence deepened around her. Sitting here now she felt the night air tickle
the hem of her dress against her shin. Her childhood was as tangible as the
shot silk—a taste, a sound, a smell, all of these, blended into an entity
that was surely more than a mood. There was a presence in the room, her
aggrieved, overlooked ten-year-old self, a girl even quieter than Briony, who
used to wonder at the massive emptiness of time, and marvel that the nineteenth
century was about to end. How like her, to sit in the room like this, not
“joining in.” This ghost had been summoned not by Lola imitating
Hermione, or the inscrutable twins disappearing into the night. It was the slow
retraction, the retreat into autonomy which signaled the approaching end of
Briony’s childhood. It was haunting Emily once more. Briony was her last,
and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or
pleasurable as the care of a child. She wasn’t a fool. She knew it was
self-pity, this mellow expansiveness as she contemplated what looked like her
own ruin: Briony would surely go off to her sister’s college, Girton, and
she, Emily, would grow stiffer in the limbs and more irrelevant by the day; age
and weariness would return Jack to her, and nothing would be said, or needed to
be said. And here was the ghost of her childhood, diffused throughout the room,
to remind her of the limited arc of existence. How quickly the story was over.
Not massive and empty at all, but headlong. Ruthless.

Her spirits
were not particularly lowered by these commonplace reflections. She floated
above them, gazing down neutrally, absently braiding them with other
preoccupations. She planned to plant a clump of ceanothus along the approach to
the swimming pool. Robbie was wanting to persuade her to erect a pergola and
train along it a slow-growing wisteria whose flower and scent he liked. But she
and Jack would be long buried before the full effect was achieved. The story
would be over. She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something
manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read
about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian
inclination across the borders of insanity? She liked him well enough, and was
pleased for Grace Turner that he had turned out to be bright. But really, he
was a hobby of Jack’s, living proof of some leveling principle he had
pursued through the years. When he spoke about Robbie, which wasn’t
often, it was with a touch of self-righteous vindication. Something had been
established which Emily took to be a criticism of herself. She had opposed Jack
when he proposed paying for the boy’s education, which smacked of
meddling to her, and unfair on Leon and the girls. She did not consider herself
proved wrong simply because Robbie had come away from Cambridge with a first.
In fact, it had made things harder for Cecilia with her third, though it was
preposterous of her to pretend to be disappointed. Robbie’s elevation.
“Nothing good will come of it” was the phrase she often used, to
which Jack would respond smugly that plenty of good had come already.

For all that,
Briony had been thoroughly improper at dinner to speak that way to Robbie. If
she had resentments of her own, Emily sympathized. It was to be expected. But
to express them was undignified. Thinking of the dinner again—how
artfully Mr. Marshall had put everyone at ease. Was he suitable? It was a pity
about his looks, with one half of his face looking like an overfurnished
bedroom. Perhaps in time it would come to seem rugged, this chin like a wedge
of cheese. Or chocolate. If he really were to supply the whole of the British
Army with Amo bars he could become immensely rich. But Cecilia, having learned
modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in
chemistry incomplete as a human being. Her very words. She had lolled about for
three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at
home—Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in
complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as
their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else? Even a chemist
had his uses. And this one had found a way of making chocolate out of sugar,
chemicals, brown coloring and vegetable oil. And no cocoa butter. To produce a
ton of the stuff, he had explained over his astonishing cocktail, cost next to
nothing. He could undercut his competitors
and
increase his profit
margin. Vulgarly put, but what comfort, what untroubled years might flow from these
cheap vats.

More than
thirty minutes passed unnoticed as these scraps—memories, judgments,
vague resolutions, questions—uncoiled quietly before her, while she
barely shifted her position and did not hear the clock strike the quarter
hours. She was aware of the breeze strengthening, pushing one French window
closed, before dying down once more. She was disturbed later by Betty and her
helpers clearing the dining room, then those sounds also subsided and, again,
Emily was far out along the branching roads of her reveries, drifting by
association, and with the expertise born of a thousand headaches, avoiding all
things sudden or harsh. When at last the phone rang she rose immediately,
without any start of surprise, and went back out into the hallway, lifted the
receiver and called out as she always did on a rising note of a question,

“Tallises?”

There came
the switchboard, the nasal assistant, a pause and the crackle of the
long-distance line, then Jack’s neutral tone.

“Dearest.
Later than usual. I’m terribly sorry.”

It was
eleven-thirty. But she did not mind, for he would be back at the weekend, and
one day he would be home forever and not an unkind word would be spoken.

She said,
“It’s perfectly all right.”

“It’s
the revisions to the Statement Relating to Defense. There’s to be a
second printing. And then one thing and another.”

“Rearmament,”
she said soothingly.

“I’m
afraid so.”

“You
know, everyone’s against it.”

He chuckled.
“Not in this office.”

“And I
am.”

“Well,
my dear. I hope to persuade you one day.”

“And I
you.”

The exchange
held a trace of affection, and its familiarity was comfort. As usual, he asked
for an account of her day. She told him of the great heat, the collapse of
Briony’s play, and the arrival of Leon with his friend of whom she said,
“He’s in your camp. But he wants more soldiers so that he can sell
the government his chocolate bar.”

“I see.
Plowshares into tinfoil.”

She described
the dinner, and Robbie’s wild look at the table. “Do we really need
to be putting him through medical college?”

“We do.
It’s a bold move. Typical of him. I know he’ll make a go of
it.”

Then she gave
an account of how the dinner ended with the twins’ note, and the search
parties going off into the grounds.

“Little
scallywags. And where were they after all?”

“I
don’t know. I’m still waiting to hear.”

There was
silence down the line, broken only by distant mechanical clicking. When the
senior Civil Servant spoke at last he had already made his decisions. The rare
use of her first name conveyed his seriousness.

“I’m
going to put the telephone down now, Emily, because I’m going to call the
police.”

“Is it
really necessary? By the time they get here . . .”

“If you
hear any news you’ll let me know straightaway.”

“Wait .
. .”

At a sound
she had turned. Leon was coming through the main door. Close behind him was
Cecilia whose look was one of mute bewilderment. Then came Briony with an arm
round her cousin’s shoulders. Lola’s face was so white and rigid,
like a clay mask, that Emily, unable to read an expression there, instantly
knew the worst. Where were the twins?

Leon crossed
the hall toward her, his hand outstretched for the phone. There was a streak of
dirt from his trouser cuffs to the knees. Mud, and in such dry weather. His
breathing was heavy from exertion, and a greasy lank of hair swung over his
face as he snatched the receiver from her and turned his back.

“Is
that you, Daddy? Yes. Look, I think you’d better come down. No, we
haven’t, and there’s worse. No, no, I can’t tell you now. If
you can, tonight. We’ll have to phone them anyway. Best you do it.”

She put her
hand over her heart and took a couple of paces back to where Cecilia and the
girls stood watching. Leon had lowered his voice and was muttering quickly into
the cupped receiver. Emily couldn’t hear a word, and did not want to. She
would have preferred to retreat upstairs to her room, but Leon finished the
call with an echoing rattle of the Bakelite and turned to her. His eyes were
tight and hard, and she wondered if it was anger that she saw. He was trying to
take deeper breaths, and he stretched his lips across his teeth in a strange
grimace.

He said,
“We’ll go in the drawing room where we can sit down.”

She caught
his meaning precisely. He wouldn’t tell her now, he wouldn’t have
her collapsing on the tiles and cracking her skull. She stared at him, but she
did not move.

“Come
on, Emily,” he said.

Her
son’s hand was hot and heavy on her shoulder, and she felt its dampness
through the silk. Helplessly, she let herself be guided toward the drawing
room, all her terror concentrated on the simple fact that he wanted her seated
before he broke his news.

Thirteen