Atonement (12 page)
The scene, or
a tiny portion of it, was visible to Robbie Turner through a sealed skylight
window if he cared to stand up from his bath, bend his knees and twist his
neck. All day long his small bedroom, his bathroom and the cubicle wedged
between them he called his study had baked under the southern slope of the
bungalow’s roof. For over an hour after returning from work he lay in a
tepid bath while his blood and, so it seemed, his thoughts warmed the water.
Above him the framed rectangle of sky slowly shifted through its limited
segment of the spectrum, yellow to orange, as he sifted unfamiliar feelings and
returned to certain memories again and again. Nothing palled. Now and then, an
inch below the water’s surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened
involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm.
Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra.
Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap.
When she climbed out of the pond, a glimpse of the triangular darkness her
knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it
again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of her skin, the
deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her
skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her
sweetly diminishing toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and
something purplish on her calf—a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes.
Adornments.
He had known
her since they were children, and he had never looked at her. At
once with a
someone from her school, when there was a friend of his from Downing there.
They idled away an hour with nervous jokes, and handed cigarettes about.
Occasionally, they passed in the street and smiled. She always seemed to find
it awkward—That’s our cleaning lady’s son, she might have
been whispering to her friends as she walked on. He liked people to know he
didn’t care—There goes my mother’s employer’s daughter,
he once said to a friend. He had his politics to protect him, and his
scientifically based theories of class, and his own rather forced
self-certainty. I am what I am. She was like a sister, almost invisible. That
long, narrow face, the small mouth—if he had ever thought about her at
all, he might have said she was a little horsey in appearance. Now he saw it
was a strange beauty—something carved and still about the face,
especially around the inclined planes of her cheekbones, with a wild flare to
the nostrils, and a full, glistening rosebud mouth. Her eyes were dark and
contemplative. It was a statuesque look, but her movements were quick and
impatient—that vase would still be in one piece if she had not jerked it
so suddenly from his hands. She was restless, that was clear, bored and
confined by the Tallis household, and soon she would be gone.
He would have
to speak to her soon. He stood up at last from his bath, shivering, in no doubt
that a great change was coming over him. He walked naked through his study into
the bedroom. The unmade bed, the mess of discarded clothes, a towel on the
floor, the room’s equatorial warmth were disablingly sensual. He
stretched out on the bed, facedown into his pillow, and groaned. The sweetness
of her, the delicacy, his childhood friend, and now in danger of becoming
unreachable. To strip off like that—yes, her endearing attempt to seem
eccentric, her stab at being bold had an exaggerated, homemade quality. Now she
would be in agonies of regret, and could not know what she had done to him. And
all of this would be very well, it would be rescuable, if she was not so angry
with him over a broken vase that had come apart in his hands. But he loved her
fury too. He rolled onto his side, eyes fixed and unseeing, and indulged a
cinema fantasy: she pounded against his lapels before yielding with a little
sob to the safe enclosure of his arms and letting herself be kissed; she
didn’t forgive him, she simply gave up. He watched this several times
before he returned to what was real: she was angry with him, and she would be
angrier still when she knew he was to be one of the dinner guests. Out there,
in the fierce light, he hadn’t thought quickly enough to refuse
Automatically, he had bleated out his yes, and now he would face her
irritation. He groaned again, and didn’t care if he were heard
downstairs, at the memory of how she had taken off her clothes in front of
him—so indifferently, as though he were an infant. Of course. He saw it
clearly now. The idea was to humiliate him. There it stood, the undeniable
fact. Humiliation. She wanted it for him. She was not mere sweetness, and he
could not afford to condescend to her, for she was a force, she could drive him
out of his depth and push him under.
But
perhaps—he had rolled onto his back—he should not believe in her
outrage. Wasn’t it too theatrical? Surely she must have meant something
better, even in her anger. Even in her anger, she had wanted to show him just
how beautiful she was and bind him to her. How could he trust such a
self-serving idea derived from hope and desire? He had to. He crossed his legs,
clasped his hands behind his head, feeling his skin cool as it dried. What
might Freud say? How about: she hid the unconscious desire to expose herself to
him behind a show of temper. Pathetic hope! It was an emasculation, a sentence,
and this—what he was feeling now—this torture was his punishment
for breaking her ridiculous vase. He should never see her again. He had to see
her tonight. He had no choice anyway—he was going. She would despise him
for coming. He should have refused
but the moment it was made his pulse had leaped and his bleated yes had left
his mouth. He’d be in a room with her tonight, and the body he had seen,
the moles, the pallor, the strawberry mark, would be concealed inside her
clothes. He alone would know, and Emily of course. But only he would be
thinking of them. And Cecilia would not speak to him or look at him. Even that
would be better than lying here groaning. No, it wouldn’t. It would be
worse, but he still wanted it. He had to have it. He wanted it to be worse.
At last he
rose, half dressed and went into his study and sat at his typewriter, wondering
what kind of letter he should write to her. Like the bedroom and bathroom, the
study was squashed under the apex of the bungalow’s roof, and was little
more than a corridor between the two, barely six feet long and five feet wide.
As in the two other rooms, there was a skylight framed in rough pine. Piled in
a corner, his hiking gear—boots, alpenstock, leather knapsack. A
knife-scarred kitchen table took up most of the space. He tilted back his chair
and surveyed his desk as one might a life. At one end, heaped high against the
sloping ceiling, were the folders and exercise books from the last months of
his preparations for finals. He had no further use for his notes, but too much
work, too much success was bound up with them and he could not bring himself to
throw them out yet. Lying partly across them were some of his hiking maps, of
hike to
with slitted sighting mirror he had once used to walk without maps to Lulworth
Cove.
Beyond the
compass were his copies of Auden’s
Poems
and Housman’s
A
Shropshire Lad
. At the other end of the table were various histories,
theoretical treatises and practical handbooks on landscape gardening. Ten
typed-up poems lay beneath a printed rejection slip from
Criterion
magazine, initialed by Mr. Eliot himself. Closest to where Robbie sat were the
books of his new interest.
Gray’s Anatomy
was open by a folio pad
of his own drawings. He had set himself the task of drawing and committing to
memory the bones of the hand. He tried to distract himself by running through
some of them now, murmuring their names: capitate, hamate, triquetral, lunate .
. . His best drawing so far, done in ink and colored pencils and showing a
cross section of the esophageal tract and the airways, was tacked to a rafter
above the table. A pewter tankard with its handle missing held all the pencils
and pens. The typewriter was a fairly recent
twenty-first by Jack Tallis at a lunchtime party held in the library.
well as his father, and Cecilia had been there surely. But Robbie could not
remember a single thing they might have said to each other. Was that why she
was angry now, because he had ignored her for years? Another pathetic hope.
At the outer
reaches of the desk, various photographs: the cast of
Twelfth Night
on
the college lawn, himself as Malvolio, cross-gartered. How apt. There was
another group shot, of himself and the thirty French kids he had taught in a
boarding school near
époque metal frame tinged with verdigris was a photograph of his
parents, Grace and Ernest, three days after their wedding. Behind them, just
poking into the picture, was the front wing of a car—certainly not
theirs, and further off, an oasthouse looming over a brick wall. It was a good
honeymoon, Grace always said, two weeks picking hops with her husband’s
family, and sleeping in a gypsy caravan parked in a farmyard. His father wore a
collarless shirt. The neck scarf and the rope belt around his flannel trousers
may have been playful Romany touches. His head and face were round, but the
effect was not exactly jovial, for his smile for the camera was not
wholehearted enough to part his lips, and rather than hold the hand of his
young bride, he had folded his arms. She, by contrast, was leaning into his
side, nestling her head on his shoulder and holding on to his shirt at the
elbow awkwardly with both hands. Grace, always game and good-natured, was doing
the smiling for two. But willing hands and a kind spirit would not be enough.
It looked as though Ernest’s mind was already elsewhere, already drifting
seven summers ahead to the evening when he would walk away from his job as the
Tallises’ gardener, away from the bungalow, without luggage, without even
a farewell note on the kitchen table, leaving his wife and their six-year-old
son to wonder about him for the rest of their lives.
Elsewhere,
strewn between the revision notes, landscape gardening and anatomy piles, were
various letters and cards: unpaid battels, letters from tutors and friends
congratulating him on his first, which he still took pleasure in rereading, and
others mildly querying his next step. The most recent, scribbled in brownish
ink on
notepaper, was a message from Jack Tallis agreeing to help with fees at medical
school. There were application forms, twenty pages long, and thick, densely
printed admission handbooks from
exacting prose seemed to be a foretaste of a new kind of academic rigor. But
today they suggested to him, not adventure and a fresh beginning, but exile. He
saw it in prospect—the dull terraced street far from here, a floral
wallpapered box with a louring wardrobe and candlewick bedspread, the earnest
new friends mostly younger than himself, the formaldehyde vats, the echoing
lecture room—every element devoid of her.
From among
the landscape books he took the volume on
the Tallis library. That was the day he first noticed his awkwardness in her
presence. Kneeling to remove his work shoes by the front door, he had become
aware of the state of his socks—holed at toe and heel and, for all he
knew, odorous—and on impulse had removed them. What an idiot he had then
felt, padding behind her across the hall and entering the library barefoot. His
only thought was to leave as soon as he could. He had escaped through the kitchen
and had to get Danny Hardman to go round the front of the house to collect his
shoes and socks.
She probably
would not have read this treatise on the hydraulics of
eighteenth-century Dane who extolled in Latin the genius of Le Nôtre.
With the help of a dictionary, Robbie had read five pages in a morning and then
given up and made do with the illustrations instead. It would not be her kind
of book, or anyone’s really, but she had handed it to him from the
library steps and somewhere on its leather surface were her fingerprints.
Willing himself not to, he raised the book to his nostrils and inhaled. Dust,
old paper, the scent of soap on his hands, but nothing of her. How had it crept
up on him, this advanced stage of fetishizing the love object? Surely Freud had
something to say about that in
Three Essays on Sexuality
. And so did
Keats, Shakespeare and Petrarch, and all the rest, and it was in
The
Romaunt
of the Rose
. He had spent three years drily studying the symptoms, which
had seemed no more than literary conventions, and now, in solitude, like some
ruffed and plumed courtier come to the edge of the forest to contemplate a
discarded token, he was worshiping her traces—not a handkerchief, but
fingerprints!—while he languished in his lady’s scorn.