Atonement (17 page)

T
HE VERY
complexity of her feelings confirmed
Briony in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and
dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit. What fairy tale ever
held so much by way of contradiction? A savage and thoughtless curiosity
prompted her to rip the letter from its envelope—she read it in the hall
after Polly had let her in—and though the shock of the message vindicated
her completely, this did not prevent her from feeling guilty. It was wrong to
open people’s letters, but it was right, it was essential, for her to
know everything. She had been delighted to see her brother again, but that did
not prevent her from exaggerating her feelings to avoid her sister’s accusing
question. And afterward she had only pretended to be eagerly obedient to her
mother’s command by running up to her room; as well as wanting to escape
Cecilia, she needed to be alone to consider Robbie afresh, and to frame the
opening paragraph of a story shot through with real life. No more princesses!
The scene by the fountain, its air of ugly threat, and at the end, when both
had gone their separate ways, the luminous absence shimmering above the wetness
on the gravel—all this would have to be reconsidered. With the letter,
something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some
principle of darkness, and even in her excitement over the possibilities, she
did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her
help.

The word: she
tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them
obscenely, a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams—an
uncle and a nut, the Latin for next, an Old English king attempting to turn
back the tide. Rhyming words took their form from children’s
books—the smallest pig in the litter, the hounds pursuing the fox, the
flat-bottomed boats on the Cam by Grantchester meadow. Naturally, she had never
heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No
one in her presence had ever referred to the word’s existence, and what
was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of
that part of her to which—Briony was certain—the word referred. She
had no doubt that that was what it was. The context helped, but more than that,
the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic. The
smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear
as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddling at the foot of the
cross. That the word had been written by a man confessing to an image in his
mind, confiding a lonely preoccupation, disgusted her profoundly.

She had read
the note standing shamelessly in the center of the entrance hall, immediately
sensing the danger contained by such crudity. Something irreducibly human, or
male, threatened the order of their household, and Briony knew that unless she
helped her sister, they would all suffer. It was also clear that she would have
to be helped in a delicate, tactful manner. Otherwise, as Briony knew from
experience, Cecilia would turn on her.

These
thoughts preoccupied her as she washed her hands and face and chose a clean
dress. The socks she wanted to wear were not to be found, but she wasted no
time in hunting. She put on some others, strapped on her shoes and sat at her
desk. Downstairs, they were drinking cocktails and she would have at least
twenty minutes to herself. She could brush her hair on the way out. Outside her
open window a cricket was singing. A sheaf of foolscap from her father’s
office was before her, the desk light threw down its comforting yellow patch,
the fountain pen was in her hand. The orderly troupe of farm animals lined
along the windowsill and the straitlaced dolls poised in the various rooms of
their open-sided mansion waited for the gem of her first sentence. At that
moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she
might write. What she wanted was to be lost to the unfolding of an irresistible
idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of her scratchy silver
nib and coiling into words. But how to do justice to the changes that had made
her into a real writer at last, and to her chaotic swarm of impressions, and to
the disgust and fascination she felt? Order must be imposed. She should begin,
as she had decided earlier, with a simple account of what she had seen at the
fountain. But that episode in the sunlight was not quite so interesting as the
dusk, the idle minutes on the bridge lost to daydreaming, and then Robbie
appearing in the semidarkness, calling to her, holding in his hand the little
white square that contained the letter that contained the word. And what did
the word contain?

She wrote,
“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.”

Surely it was
not too childish to say there had to be a story; and this was the story of a
man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and
finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil. But
wasn’t she—that was, Briony the writer—supposed to be so
worldly now as to be above such nursery-tale ideas as good and evil? There must
be some lofty, godlike place from which all people could be judged alike, not
pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily
jostling together in all their glorious imperfection. If such a place existed,
she was not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind.

Trapped
between the urge to write a simple diary account of her day’s experiences
and the ambition to make something greater of them that would be polished,
self-contained and obscure, she sat for many minutes frowning at her sheet of
paper and its infantile quotation and did not write another word. Actions she
thought she could describe well enough, and she had the hang of dialogue. She
could do the woods in winter, and the grimness of a castle wall. But how to do
feelings? All very well to write,
She felt sad
, or describe what a sad
person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it
could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the
confusion of feeling contradictory things. Pen in hand, she stared across the
room toward her hard-faced dolls, the estranged companions of a childhood she
considered closed. It was a chilly sensation, growing up. She would never sit
on Emily’s or Cecilia’s lap again, or only as a joke. Two summers
ago, on her eleventh birthday, her parents, brother and sister and a fifth
person she could not remember had taken her out onto the lawn and tossed her in
a blanket eleven times, and then once for luck. Could she trust it now, the
hilarious freedom of the upward flight, the blind trust in the kindly grip of
adult wrists, when the fifth person could so easily have been Robbie?

At the sound
of the soft clearing of a female throat, she looked up, startled. It was Lola.
She was leaning apologetically into the room, and as soon as their eyes met she
tapped the door gently with her knuckles.

“Can I
come in?”

She came in
anyway, her movements somewhat restricted by the blue satin sheath dress she
wore. Her hair was loose and she was barefoot. As she approached, Briony put
away her pen and covered her sentence with the corner of a book. Lola sat
herself down on the edge of the bed and blew dramatically through her cheeks.
It was as though they had always had a sisterly end-of-day chat.

“I’ve
had the most appalling evening.”

When Briony
was obliged by her cousin’s fierce stare to raise an eyebrow, she
continued, “The twins have been torturing me.”

She thought
it was a figure of speech until Lola twisted her shoulder to reveal, high on
her arm, a long scratch.

“How
awful!”

She held out
her wrists. Round each were blotchy bands of chafing.

“Chinese
burns!”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll
get some antiseptic for your arm.”

“I’ve
done all that myself.”

It was true,
the womanly tang of Lola’s perfume could not conceal a childish whiff of
Germolene. The least Briony could do was to leave her desk and go to sit beside
her cousin.

“You
poor thing!”

Briony’s
compassion made Lola’s eyes fill, and her voice went husky.

“Everybody
thinks they’re angels just because they look alike, but they’re
little
brutes
.”

She held back
a sob, seeming to bite it down with a tremor along her jaw, and then inhaled
deeply several times through flared nostrils. Briony took her hand and thought
she could see how one might begin to love Lola. Then she went to her chest of
drawers and took out a hankie, unfolded it and gave it to her. Lola was about
to use it, but the sight of its gaily printed motif of cowgirls and lariats
caused her to give out a gentle hooting sound on a rising note, the kind of
noise children make to imitate ghosts. Downstairs the doorbell rang, and
moments later, just discernible, the rapid tick of high heels on the tiled
floor of the hallway. It would be Robbie, and Cecilia was going to the door
herself. Worried that Lola’s crying could be heard downstairs, Briony got
to her feet again and pushed the bedroom door closed. Her cousin’s
distress produced in her a state of restlessness, an agitation that was close
to joy. She went back to the bed and put her arm round Lola who raised her
hands to her face and began to cry. That a girl so brittle and domineering
should be brought this low by a couple of nine-year-old boys seemed wondrous to
Briony, and it gave her a sense of her own power. It was what lay behind this
near-joyful feeling. Perhaps she was not as weak as she always assumed;
finally, you had to measure yourself by other people—there really was
nothing else. Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you
something about yourself. At a loss for words, she gently rubbed her
cousin’s shoulder and reflected that Jackson and Pierrot alone could not
be responsible for such grief; she remembered there was other sorrow in
Lola’s life. The family home in the north—Briony imagined streets
of blackened mills, and grim men trudging to work with sandwiches in tin boxes.
The Quincey home was closed up and might never open again.

Lola was
beginning to recover. Briony asked softly, “What happened?”

The older
girl blew her nose and thought for a moment. “I was getting ready for a
bath. They came bursting in and pounced on me. They got me down on the floor .
. .” At this memory she paused to fight another rising sob.

“But
why would they do that?”

She took a
deep breath and composed herself. She stared unseeingly across the room.
“They want to go home. I said they couldn’t. They think I’m
the one who’s keeping them here.”

The twins
unreasonably venting their frustration on their sister—all this made
sense to Briony. But what was troubling her organized spirit now was the
thought that soon the call would come to go downstairs and her cousin would need
to be in possession of herself.

“They
just don’t understand,” Briony said wisely as she went to the
handbasin and filled it with hot water. “They’re just little kids
who’ve taken a bad knock.”

Full of
sadness, Lola lowered her head and nodded in such a way that Briony felt a rush
of tenderness for her. She guided Lola to the basin and put a flannel in her
hands. And then, from a mixture of motives—a practical need to change the
subject, the desire to share a secret and show the older girl that she too had
worldly experiences, but above all because she warmed to Lola and wanted to
draw her closer—Briony told her about meeting Robbie on the bridge, and
the letter, and how she had opened it, and what was in it. Rather than say the
word out loud, which was unthinkable, she spelled it out for her, backward. The
effect on Lola was gratifying. She raised her dripping face from the basin and
let her mouth fall open. Briony passed her a towel. Some seconds passed while
Lola pretended to find her words. She was hamming it up a bit, but that was
fine, and so was her hoarse whisper.

“Thinking
about it
all the time
?”

Briony nodded
and faced away, as though grappling with tragedy. She could learn to be a
little more expressive from her cousin whose turn it now was to put a
comforting hand on Briony’s shoulder.

“How
appalling for you. The man’s a maniac.”

A maniac. The
word had refinement, and the weight of medical diagnosis. All these years she
had known him and that was what he had been. When she was little he used to carry
her on his back and pretend to be a beast. She had been alone with him many
times at the swimming hole where he taught her one summer how to tread water
and do the breaststroke. Now his condition was named she felt a certain
consolation, though the mystery of the fountain episode deepened. She had
already decided not to tell that story, suspecting that the explanation was
simple and that it would be better not to expose her ignorance.

“What’s
your sister going to do?”

“I just
don’t know.” Again, she did not mention that she dreaded her next
meeting with Cecilia.

“D’you
know, on our first afternoon I thought he was a monster when I heard him
shouting at the twins by the swimming pool.”

Briony tried
to recall similar moments when the symptoms of mania might have been observed.
She said, “He’s always pretended to be rather nice. He’s
deceived us for years.”