Atonement (25 page)

She was like
a bride-to-be who begins to feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches,
and dares not speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on her
behalf. The happiness and convenience of so many good people would be put at
risk. These are fleeting moments of private disquiet, only dispelled by
abandoning herself to the joy and excitement of those around her. So many
decent people could not be wrong, and doubts like hers, she’s been told,
are to be expected. Briony did not wish to cancel the whole arrangement. She
did not think she had the courage, after all her initial certainty and two or
three days of patient, kindly interviewing, to withdraw her evidence. However,
she would have preferred to qualify, or complicate, her use of the word
“saw.” Less like seeing, more like knowing. Then she could have
left it to her interrogators to decide whether they would proceed together in the
name of this kind of vision. They were impassive whenever she wavered, and
firmly recalled her to her earliest statements. Was she a silly girl, their
manner implied, who had wasted everybody’s time? And they took an austere
view of the visual. There was enough light, it was established, from stars, and
from the cloud base reflecting streetlights from the nearest town. Either she
saw, or she did not see. There lay nothing in between; they did not say as
much, but their brusqueness implied it. It was in those moments, when she felt
their coolness, that she reached back to revive her first ardor and said it
again. I saw him. I know it was him. Then it was comforting to feel she was
confirming what they already knew.

She would
never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never
was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own
construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist
on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess,
such independence of spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around
her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it
at the altar. Her doubts could be neutralized only by plunging in deeper. By clinging
tightly to what she believed she knew, narrowing her thoughts, reiterating her
testimony, she was able to keep from mind the damage she only dimly sensed she
was doing. When the matter was closed, when the sentence was passed and the
congregation dispersed, a ruthless youthful forgetting, a willful erasing,
protected her well into her teens.

“Well I
can. And I will.”

They sat in
silence for a while, and Lola’s shivering began to subside. Briony
supposed she should get her cousin home, but she was reluctant to break this
closeness for the moment—she had her arms around the older girl’s
shoulders and she seemed to yield now to Briony’s touch. They saw far
beyond the lake a bobbing pinprick of light—a torch being carried along the
drive—but they did not comment on it. When at last Lola spoke her tone
was reflective, as though she were pondering subtle currents of
counterarguments.

“But it
doesn’t make sense. He’s such a close friend of your family. It
might not have been him.”

Briony
murmured, “You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d been with me
in the library.”

Lola sighed
and shook her head slowly, as though trying to reconcile herself to the
unacceptable truth.

They were
silent again and they might have sat longer had it not been for the
damp—not quite yet dew—that was beginning to settle on the grass as
the clouds cleared and the temperature dropped.

When Briony
whispered to her cousin, “Do you think you can walk?” she nodded
bravely. Briony helped her to stand, and arm in arm at first, and then with
Lola’s weight on Briony’s shoulder, they made their way across the
clearing toward the bridge. They reached the bottom of the slope and it was
here that Lola finally began to cry.

“I
can’t go up there,” she had several attempts at saying.
“I’m just too weak.” It would be better, Briony decided, for
her to run to the house and fetch help, and she was just about to explain this
to Lola and settle her on the ground when they heard voices from the road
above, and then torchlight was in their eyes. It was a miracle, Briony thought,
when she heard her brother’s voice. Like the true hero he was, he came
down the bank in several easy strides and without even asking what the trouble
was, took Lola into his arms and picked her up as though she were a small
child. Cecilia was calling down in a voice that sounded hoarse with concern. No
one answered her. Leon was already making his way up the incline at such a pace
it was an effort to keep up with him. Even so, before they reached the
driveway, before he had the chance to set Lola down, Briony was beginning to
tell him what had happened, exactly as she had seen it.

Fourteen

H
ER MEMORIES
of the interrogation and signed
statements and testimony, or of her awe outside the courtroom from which her
youth excluded her, would not trouble her so much in the years to come as her
fragmented recollection of that late night and summer dawn. How guilt refined
the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal
loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

Back in the
house at last, there began a dreamlike time of grave arrivals, tears and
subdued voices and urgent footsteps across the hallway, and her own vile
excitement that kept her drowsiness at bay. Of course, Briony was old enough to
know that the moment was entirely Lola’s, but she was soon led away by
sympathetic womanly hands to her bedroom to await the doctor and his examination.
Briony watched from the foot of the stairs as Lola ascended, sobbing loudly and
flanked by Emily and Betty, and followed by Polly who carried a basin and
towels. Her cousin’s removal left Briony center stage—there was no
sign yet of Robbie—and the way she was listened to, deferred to and
gently prompted seemed at one with her new maturity.

It must have
been about this time that a Humber stopped outside the house and two police
inspectors and two constables were shown in. Briony was their only source, and
she made herself speak calmly. Her vital role fueled her certainty. This was in
the unstructured time before formal interviews, when she was standing facing
the officers in the hallway, with Leon on one side of her and her mother on the
other. But how had her mother materialized so quickly from Lola’s
bedside? The senior inspector had a heavy face, rich in seams, as though carved
from folded granite. Briony was fearful of him as she told her story to this
watchful unmoving mask; as she did so she felt a weight lifting from her and a
warm submissive feeling spread from her stomach to her limbs. It was like love,
a sudden love for this watchful man who stood unquestioningly for the cause of
goodness, who came out at all hours to do battle in its name, and who was
backed by all the human powers and wisdom that existed. Under his neutral gaze
her throat constricted and her voice began to buckle. She wanted the inspector
to embrace her and comfort her and forgive her, however guiltless she was. But
he would only look at her and listen.
It was him. I saw him.
Her tears
were further proof of the truth she felt and spoke, and when her mother’s
hand caressed her nape, she broke down completely and was led toward the
drawing room.

But if she
was there being consoled by her mother on the Chesterfield, how did she come to
remember the arrival of Dr. McLaren in his black waistcoat and his
old-fashioned raised shirt collar, carrying the Gladstone bag that had been
witness to the three births and all the childhood illnesses of the Tallis
household? Leon conferred with the doctor, leaning toward him to murmur a manly
summary of events. Where was Leon’s carefree lightness now? This quiet
consultation was typical of the hours to come. Each fresh arrival was briefed
in this way; people—police, doctor, family members, servants—stood
in knots that unraveled and re-formed in corners of rooms, the hallway and the
terrace outside the French windows. Nothing was brought together, or formulated
in public. Everyone knew the terrible facts of a violation, but it remained
everyone’s secret, shared in whispers among shifting groups that broke
away self-importantly to new business. Even more serious, potentially, was the
matter of the missing children. But the general view, constantly reiterated
like a magic spell, was that they were safely asleep somewhere in the park. In
this way attention remained mostly fixed on the plight of the girl upstairs.

Paul Marshall
came in from searching and learned the news from the inspectors. He walked up
and down the terrace with them, one on each side, and on the turn offered them
cigarettes from a gold case. When their conversation was over, he patted the
senior man on the shoulder and seemed to send them on their way. Then he came
inside to confer with Emily Tallis. Leon led the doctor upstairs who descended
some while later intangibly enlarged by his professional encounter with the
core of all their concerns. He too stood in lengthy conference with the two
plainclothesmen, and then with Leon, and finally with Leon and Mrs. Tallis. Not
long before his departure, the doctor came and placed his familiar small dry
hand on Briony’s forehead, fingered her pulse and was satisfied. He took
up his bag, but before he was gone there was a final muttered interview by the
front door.

Where was
Cecilia? She hovered on the peripheries, speaking to no one, always smoking,
raising the cigarette to her lips with a rapid, hungry movement, and pulling it
away in agitated disgust. At other times she twisted a handkerchief in her hand
as she paced the hallway. Normally, she would have taken control of a situation
like this, directing the care of Lola, reassuring her mother, listening to the
doctor’s advice, consulting with Leon. Briony was close by when her
brother came over to talk to Cecilia, who turned away, unable to help, or even
speak. As for their mother, untypically she rose to the crisis, free of
migraine and the need to be alone. She actually grew as her older daughter
shrank into private misery. There were times when Briony, called on again to
give her account, or some detail of it, saw her sister approach within earshot
and look on with a smoldering impenetrable gaze. Briony became nervous of her
and kept close to her mother’s side. Cecilia’s eyes were bloodshot.
While others stood murmuring in groups, she moved restlessly up and down the
room, or from one room to another, or, on at least two occasions, went to stand
outside the front door. Nervously, she transferred the hankie from one hand to
the other, coiled it between her fingers, unwound it, squeezed it in a ball,
took it in the other hand, lit another cigarette. When Betty and Polly brought
round tea, Cecilia would not touch it.

Word came
down that Lola, sedated by the doctor, was at last asleep, and the news provided
temporary relief. Unusually, everyone had gathered in the drawing room where
tea was taken in exhausted silence. Nobody said it, but they were waiting for
Robbie. Also, Mr. Tallis was expected from London at any moment. Leon and
Marshall were leaning over a map they were drawing of the grounds for the
inspector’s benefit. He took it, studied it and passed it to his
assistant. The two constables had been sent out to join those looking for
Pierrot and Jackson, and more policemen were supposed to be on their way down
to the bungalow in case Robbie had gone there. Like Marshall, Cecilia sat
apart, on the harpsichord stool. At one point she rose to get a light from her
brother, but it was the chief inspector who obliged her with his own lighter.
Briony was next to her mother on the sofa, and Betty and Polly took round the
tray. Briony was to have no memory of what suddenly prompted her. An idea of
great clarity and persuasiveness came from nowhere, and she did not need to
announce her intentions, or ask her sister’s permission. Clinching
evidence, cleanly independent of her own version. Verification. Or even
another, separate crime. She startled the room with her gasp of inspiration,
and almost knocked her mother’s tea from her lap as she stood.

They all watched
as she hurried from the room, but no one questioned her, such was the general
fatigue. She, on the other hand, was taking the stairs two at a time, energized
now by a sense of doing and being good, on the point of springing a surprise
that could only earn her praise. It was rather like that Christmas morning
sensation of being about to give a present that was bound to cause delight, a
joyful feeling of blameless self-love.