Still feeling
nauseous, and now hot, Briony pressed her cheek against the wall. It was no
cooler than her face. She longed for a glass of water, but she did not want to
ask her sister for anything. Briskly, Cecilia moved about her tasks, mixing
milk and water to egg powder, and setting out a pot of jam and three plates and
cups on the table. Briony registered this, but it gave her no comfort. It only
increased her foreboding of the meeting that lay ahead. Did Cecilia really
think that in this situation they could sit together and still have an appetite
for scrambled eggs? Or was she soothing herself by being busy? Briony was
listening out for footsteps on the landing, and it was to distract herself that
she attempted a conversational tone. She had seen the cape hanging on the back
of the door.
“Cecilia,
are you a ward sister now?”
“Yes, I
am.”
She said it
with a downward finality, closing off the subject. Their shared profession was
not going to be a bond. Nothing was, and there was nothing to talk about until
Robbie came back.
At last she
heard the click of the lock on the bathroom door. He was whistling as he
crossed the landing. Briony moved away from the door, further down toward the
darker end of the room. But she was in his sight line as he came in. He had
half raised his right hand in order to shake hers, and his left trailed, about
to close the door behind him. If it was a double take, it was undramatic. As
soon as their eyes met, his hands dropped to his sides and he gave a little
winded sigh as he continued to look at her hard. However intimidated, she felt
she could not look away. She smelled the faint perfume of his shaving soap. The
shock was how much older he looked, especially round the eyes. Did everything
have to be her fault? she wondered stupidly. Couldn’t it also be the
war’s?
“So it
was you,” he said finally. He pushed the door closed behind him with his
foot. Cecilia had come to stand by his side and he looked at her.
She gave an
exact summary, but even if she had wanted, she would not have been able to
withhold her sarcasm.
“Briony’s
going to tell everybody the truth. She wanted to see me first.”
He turned
back to Briony. “Did you think I might be here?”
Her immediate
concern was not to cry. At that moment, nothing would have been more
humiliating. Relief, shame, self-pity, she didn’t know which it was, but
it was coming. The smooth wave rose, tightening her throat, making it
impossible to speak, and then, as she held on, tensing her lips, it fell away
and she was safe. No tears, but her voice was a miserable whisper.
“I
didn’t know if you were alive.”
Cecilia said,
“If we’re going to talk we should sit down.”
“I
don’t know that I can.” He moved away impatiently to the adjacent
wall, a distance of seven feet or so, and leaned against it, arms crossed,
looking from Briony to Cecilia. Almost immediately he moved again, down the
room to the bedroom door where he turned to come back, changed his mind and
stood there, hands in pockets. He was a large man, and the room seemed to have
shrunk. In the confined space he was desperate in his movements, as though
suffocating. He took his hands from his pockets and smoothed the hair at the
back of his neck. Then he rested his hands on his hips. Then he let them drop.
It took all this time, all this movement, for Briony to realize that he was
angry, very angry, and just as she did, he said,
“What
are you doing here? Don’t talk to me about Surrey. No one’s
stopping you going. Why are you here?”
She said,
“I had to talk to Cecilia.”
“Oh
yes. And what about?”
“The
terrible thing that I did.”
Cecilia was
going toward him. “Robbie,” she whispered. “Darling.”
She put her hand on his arm, but he pulled it clear.
“I
don’t know why you let her in.” Then to Briony, “I’ll
be quite honest with you. I’m torn between breaking your stupid neck here
and taking you outside and throwing you down the stairs.”
If it had not
been for her recent experience, she would have been terrified. Sometimes she
heard soldiers on the ward raging against their helplessness. At the height of
their passion, it was foolish to reason with them or try to reassure them. It
had to come out, and it was best to stand and listen. She knew that even
offering to leave now could be provocative. So she faced Robbie and waited for
the rest, her due. But she was not frightened of him, not physically.
He did not
raise his voice, though it was straining with contempt. “Have you any
idea at all what it’s like inside?”
She imagined
small high windows in a cliff face of brick, and thought perhaps she did, the
way people imagined the different torments of hell. She shook her head faintly.
To steady herself she was trying to concentrate on the details of his
transformation. The impression of added height was due to his parade-ground
posture. No Cambridge student ever stood so straight. Even in his distraction
his shoulders were well back, and his chin was raised like an old-fashioned boxer’s.
“No, of
course you don’t. And when I was inside, did that give you
pleasure?”
“No.”
“But
you did nothing.”
She had
thought about this conversation many times, like a child anticipating a
beating. Now it was happening at last, and it was as if she wasn’t quite
here. She was watching from far away and she was numb. But she knew his words
would hurt her later.
Cecilia had
stood back. Now she put her hand again on Robbie’s arm. He had lost
weight, though he looked stronger, with a lean and stringy muscular ferocity.
He half turned to her.
“Remember,”
Cecilia was starting to say, but he spoke over her.
“Do you
think I assaulted your cousin?”
“No.”
“Did
you think it then?”
She fumbled
her words. “Yes, yes and no. I wasn’t certain.”
“And
what’s made you so certain now?”
She
hesitated, conscious that in answering she would be offering a form of defense,
a rationale, and that it might enrage him further.
“Growing
up.”
He stared at
her, lips slightly parted. He really had changed in five years. The hardness in
his gaze was new, and the eyes were smaller and narrower, and in the corners
were the firm prints of crow’s feet. His face was thinner than she
remembered, the cheeks were sunken, like an Indian brave’s. He had grown
a little toothbrush mustache in the military style. He was startlingly
handsome, and there came back to her from years ago, when she was ten or eleven,
the memory of a passion she’d had for him, a real crush that had lasted
days. Then she confessed it to him one morning in the garden and immediately
forgot about it.
She had been
right to be wary. He was gripped by the kind of anger that passes itself off as
wonderment.
“Growing
up,” he echoed. When he raised his voice she jumped. “Goddamnit!
You’re eighteen. How much growing up do you need to do? There are
soldiers dying in the field at eighteen. Old enough to be left to die on the
roads. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
It was a
pathetic source of comfort, that he could not know what she had seen. Strange,
that for all her guilt, she should feel the need to withstand him. It was that,
or be annihilated.
She barely
nodded. She did not dare speak. At the mention of dying, a surge of feeling had
engulfed him, pushing him beyond anger into an extremity of bewilderment and
disgust. His breathing was irregular and heavy, he clenched and unclenched his
right fist. And still he stared at her, into her, with a rigidity, a savagery
in his look. His eyes were bright, and he swallowed hard several times. The
muscles in his throat tensed and knotted. He too was fighting off an emotion he
did not want witnessed. She had learned the little she knew, the tiny,
next-to-nothing scraps that came the way of a trainee nurse, in the safety of
the ward and the bedside. She knew enough to recognize that memories were
crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him
speak. She would never know what scenes were driving this turmoil. He took a
step toward her and she shrank back, no longer certain of his
harmlessness—if he couldn’t talk, he might have to act. Another
step, and he could have reached her with his sinewy arm. But Cecilia slid
between them. With her back to Briony, she faced Robbie and placed her hands on
his shoulders. He turned his face away from her.
“Look
at me,” she murmured. “Robbie. Look at me.”
The reply he
made was lost to Briony. She heard his dissent or denial. Perhaps it was an
obscenity. As Cecilia gripped him tighter, he twisted his whole body away from
her, and they seemed like wrestlers as she reached up and tried to turn his
head toward her. But his face was tilted back, his lips retracted and teeth
bared in a ghoulish parody of a smile. Now with two hands she was gripping his
cheeks tightly, and with an effort she turned his face and drew it toward her
own. At last he was looking into her eyes, but still she kept her grip on his
cheeks. She pulled him closer, drawing him into her gaze, until their faces met
and she kissed him lightly, lingeringly on the lips. With a tenderness that
Briony remembered from years ago, waking in the night, Cecilia said,
“Come back . . . Robbie, come back.”
He nodded
faintly, and took a deep breath which he released slowly as she relaxed her
grip and withdrew her hands from his face. In the silence, the room appeared to
shrink even smaller. He put his arms around her, lowered his head and kissed
her, a deep, sustained and private kiss. Briony moved away quietly to the other
end of the room, toward the window. While she drank a glass of water from the
kitchen tap, the kiss continued, binding the couple into their solitude. She
felt obliterated, expunged from the room, and was relieved.
She turned
her back and looked out at the quiet terraced houses in full sunlight, at the
way she had come from the High Street. She was surprised to discover that she
had no wish to leave yet, even though she was embarrassed by the long kiss, and
dreaded what more there was to come. She watched an old woman dressed in a
heavy overcoat, despite the heat. She was on the far pavement walking an ailing
swag-bellied dachshund on a lead. Cecilia and Robbie were talking in low voices
now, and Briony decided that to respect their privacy she would not turn from
the window until she was spoken to. It was soothing to watch the woman unfasten
her front gate, close it carefully behind her with fussy exactitude, and then,
halfway to her front door, bend with difficulty to pull up a weed from the
narrow bed that ran the length of her front path. As she did so, the dog
waddled forward and licked her wrist. The lady and her dog went indoors, and
the street was empty again. A blackbird dropped down onto a privet hedge and,
finding no satisfactory foothold, flew away. The shadow of a cloud came and
swiftly dimmed the light, and passed on. It could be any Saturday afternoon.
There was little evidence of a war in this suburban street. A glimpse of
blackout blinds in a window across the way, the Ford 8 on its blocks, perhaps.
Briony heard
her sister say her name and turned round.
“There
isn’t much time. Robbie has to report for duty at six tonight and
he’s got a train to catch. So sit down. There are some things
you’re going to do for us.”
It was the
ward sister’s voice. Not even bossy. She simply described the inevitable.
Briony took the chair nearest her, Robbie brought over a stool, and Cecilia sat
between them. The breakfast she had prepared was forgotten. The three empty
cups stood in the center of the table. He lifted the pile of books to the
floor. As Cecilia moved the jam jar of harebells to one side where it could not
be knocked over, she exchanged a look with Robbie.
He was
staring at the flowers as he cleared his throat. When he began to speak, his
voice was purged of emotion. He could have been reading from a set of standing
orders. He was looking at her now. His eyes were steady, and he had everything
under control. But there were drops of sweat on his forehead, above his
eyebrows.
“The
most important thing you’ve already agreed to. You’re to go to your
parents as soon as you can and tell them everything they need to know to be
convinced that your evidence was false. When’s your day off?”
“Sunday
week.”
“That’s
when you’ll go. You’ll take our addresses and you’ll tell
Jack and Emily that Cecilia is waiting to hear from them. The second thing
you’ll do tomorrow. Cecilia says you’ll have an hour at some point.
You’ll go to a solicitor, a commissioner for oaths, and make a statement
which will be signed and witnessed. In it you’ll say what you did wrong,
and how you’re retracting your evidence. You’ll send copies to both
of us. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Then
you’ll write to me in much greater detail. In this letter you’ll
put in absolutely everything you think is relevant. Everything that led up to
you saying you saw me by the lake. And why, even though you were uncertain, you
stuck to your story in the months leading up to my trial. If there were
pressures on you, from the police or your parents, I want to know. Have you got
that? It needs to be a long letter.”