Atonement (21 page)

“Hah!”
Briony was savage, and did not give her cousin time to speak. “That shows
what little you know.”

Emily put
down her spoon. “Darling, if this continues, I must ask you to leave the
table.”

“But
look what they did to her. Scratched her face, and gave her a Chinese
burn!”

All eyes were
on Lola. Her complexion pulsed darker beneath her freckles, making her scratch
appear less vivid.

Robbie said,
“It doesn’t look too bad.”

Briony glared
at him. Her mother said, “Little boys’ fingernails. We should get
you some ointment.”

Lola appeared
brave. “Actually, I’ve put some on. It’s feeling a lot better
already.”

Paul Marshall
cleared his throat. “I saw it myself—had to break it up and pull
them off her. I have to say, I was surprised, little fellows like that. They
went for her all right . . .”

Emily had
left her chair. She came to Lola’s side and lifted her hands in hers.
“Look at your arms! It’s not just chafing. You’re bruised up
to your elbows. How on earth did they do that?”

“I
don’t know, Aunt Emily.”

Once again,
Marshall tilted back in his seat. He spoke behind Cecilia and Robbie’s
head to the young girl who stared at him as her eyes filled with tears.
“There’s no shame in making a fuss, you know. You’re awfully
brave, but you have taken a bad knock.”

Lola was
making an effort not to cry. Emily drew her niece toward her midriff and
stroked her head.

Marshall said
to Robbie, “You’re right, they’re nice lads. But I suppose
they’ve been through a lot lately.”

Robbie wanted
to know why Marshall had not mentioned the matter before if Lola had been so
badly harmed, but the table was now in commotion. Leon called across to his
mother, “Do you want me to phone a doctor?” Cecilia was rising from
the table. Robbie touched her arm and she turned, and for the first time since
the library, their eyes met. There was no time to establish anything beyond the
connection itself, then she hurried round to be by her mother who began to give
instructions for a cold compress. Emily murmured comforting words to the top of
her niece’s head. Marshall remained in his seat and filled his glass.
Briony also stood up, and as she did so, gave another of her penetrating
girlish cries. She took from Jackson’s seat an envelope and held it up to
show them.

“A
letter!”

She was about
to open it. Robbie could not prevent himself asking, “Who’s it
addressed to?”

“It
says, To everyone.”

Lola
disengaged from her aunt and wiped her face with her napkin. Emily drew on a
surprising new source of authority. “You will not open it. You will do as
you are told and bring it to me.”

Briony caught
the unusual tone in her mother’s voice and meekly walked round the table
with the envelope. Emily took one step away from Lola as she pulled a scrap of
lined paper clear. When she read it, Robbie and Cecilia were able to read it
too.

We are
gong to run away becase Lola and Betty are horid to us and we want to go home.
Sory we took some frute And there was’nt a play.

They had each
signed their first names with zigzag flourishes.

There was
silence after Emily had read it aloud. Lola stood up and took a couple of steps
toward a window, then changed her mind and walked back toward the end of the
table. She was looking from left to right in a distracted manner and murmuring
over and over, “Oh hell, oh hell . . .”

Marshall came
and put his hand on her arm. “It’s going to be all right.
We’ll make up some search parties and find them in no time.”

“Absolutely,”
Leon said. “They’ve only been gone a few minutes.”

But Lola was
not listening and seemed to have made up her mind. As she strode toward the
door she said, “Mummy will kill me.”

When Leon
tried to take her by her shoulder she shrugged away, and then she was through
the door. They heard her running across the hall.

Leon turned
to his sister. “Cee, you and I will go together.”

Marshall
said, “There’s no moon. It’s pretty dark out there.”

The group was
moving toward the door and Emily was saying, “Someone ought to wait here
and that might as well be me.”

Cecilia said,
“There are torches behind the cellar door.”

Leon said to
his mother, “I think you ought to phone the constable.”

Robbie was
the last to leave the dining room and the last, he thought, to adjust to the
new situation. His first reaction, which did not fade when he stepped into the
relative coolness of the hallway, was that he had been cheated. He could not
believe that the twins were in danger. The cows would scare them home. The
vastness of the night beyond the house, the dark trees, the welcoming shadows,
the cool new-mown grass—all this had been reserved, he had designated it
as belonging exclusively to himself and Cecilia. It was waiting for them,
theirs to use and claim. Tomorrow, or any time other than now, would not do.
But suddenly the house had spilled its contents into a night which now belonged
to a half-comic domestic crisis. They would be out there for hours, hallooing
and waving their torches, the twins would eventually be found, tired and dirty,
Lola would be calmed down, and after some self-congratulation over nightcaps,
the evening would be over. Within days, or even hours, it would have become an
amusing memory to be wheeled out on family occasions: the night the twins ran
away.

The search
parties were setting off as he reached the front door. Cecilia had linked arms
with her brother and as they set off she glanced back and saw him standing in
the light. She gave him a look, a shrug, which said—There’s nothing
we can do for now. Before he could enact for her some gesture of loving
acceptance, she turned, and she and Leon marched on, calling out the
boys’ names. Marshall was even further ahead, making his way down the
main drive, visible only by the torch he held. Lola was not in sight. Briony
was walking around the side of the house. She, of course, would not want to be
in Robbie’s company, and that was some relief, for he had already
decided: if he could not be with Cecilia, if he could not have her to himself,
then he too, like Briony, would go out searching alone. This decision, as he
was to acknowledge many times, transformed his life.

Twelve

H
OWEVER ELEGANT
the old Adam-style building had
been, however beautifully it once commanded the parkland, the walls could not
have been as sturdy as those of the baronial structure that replaced it, and
its rooms could never have possessed the same quality of stubborn silence that
occasionally smothered the Tallis home. Emily felt its squat presence now as
she closed the front door on the search parties and turned to cross the
hallway. She assumed that Betty and her helpers were still eating dessert in
the kitchen and would not know that the dining room was deserted. There was no
sound. The walls, the paneling, the pervasive heaviness of nearly new fixtures,
the colossal firedogs, the walk-in fireplaces of bright new stone referred back
through the centuries to a time of lonely castles in mute forests. Her
father-in-law’s intention, she supposed, was to create an ambience of
solidity and family tradition. A man who spent a lifetime devising iron bolts
and locks understood the value of privacy. Noise from outside the house was
excluded completely, and even homelier indoor sounds were muffled, and
sometimes even eliminated somehow.

Emily sighed,
failed to hear herself quite, and sighed again. She was by the telephone which
stood on a semicircular wrought-iron table by the library door, and her hand
rested upon the receiver. To speak to P.C. Vockins, she would first have to
talk to his wife, a garrulous woman who liked to chat about eggs and related
matters—the price of chicken feed, the foxes, the frailty of the modern
paper bag. Her husband refused to display the deference one might expect from a
policeman. He had a sincere way with a platitude which he made resonate like
hard-won wisdom in his tight-buttoned chest: it never rained but it poured, the
devil made work for idle hands, one rotten apple spoiled the barrel. The rumor
in the village was that before he joined the Force and grew his mustache, he
was a trade unionist. There was a sighting of him, back in the days of the
General Strike, carrying pamphlets on a train.

Besides, what
would she ask of the village constable? By the time he had told her that boys
would be boys and raised a search party of half a dozen local men from their
beds, an hour would have passed, and the twins would have come back on their
own, scared into their senses by the immensity of the world at night. In fact,
it was not the boys who were on her mind, but their mother, her sister, or
rather her incarnation within the wiry frame of Lola. When Emily rose from the
dining table to comfort the girl, she was surprised by a feeling of resentment.
The more she felt it, the more she fussed over Lola to hide it. The scratch on
her face was undeniable, the bruising on her arm really rather shocking, given
that it was inflicted by little boys. But an old antagonism afflicted Emily. It
was her sister Hermione she was soothing—Hermione, stealer of scenes,
little mistress of histrionics, whom she pressed against her breasts. As of
old, the more Emily seethed, the more attentive she became. And when poor
Briony found the boys’ letter, it was the same antagonism that had made
Emily turn on her with unusual sharpness. How unfair! But the prospect of her
daughter, of any girl younger than herself, opening the envelope, and raising
the tension by doing it just a little too slowly, and then reading aloud to the
company, breaking the news and making herself the center of the drama, called
up old memories and ungenerous thoughts.

Hermione had
lisped and pranced and pirouetted through their childhoods, showing off at
every available moment with no thought—so her scowling, silent older
sister believed—for how ludicrous and desperate she appeared. There were
always adults available to encourage this relentless preening. And when,
famously, the eleven-year-old Emily had shocked a roomful of visitors by
running into a French window and cutting her hand so badly that a spray of
blood had made a scarlet bouquet on the white muslin dress of a nearby child,
it was the nine-year-old Hermione who took center stage with a screaming
attack. While Emily lay in obscurity on the floor, in the shadow of a sofa,
with a medical uncle applying an expert tourniquet, a dozen relatives worked to
calm her sister. And now she was in Paris frolicking with a man who worked in
the wireless while Emily cared for her children.
Plus ça change
,
P.C. Vockins might have said.

And Lola,
like her mother, would not be held back. As soon as the letter was read, she
upstaged her runaway brothers with her own dramatic exit. Mummy will kill me
indeed. But it was Mummy whose spirit she was keeping alive. When the twins
came back, it was a certain bet that Lola would still have to be found. Bound
by an iron principle of self-love, she would stay out longer in the darkness,
wrapping herself in some fabricated misfortune, so that the general relief when
she appeared would be all the more intense, and all the attention would be
hers. That afternoon, without stirring from her daybed, Emily had guessed that
Lola was undermining Briony’s play, a suspicion confirmed by the
diagonally ripped poster on the easel. And just as she predicted, Briony had
been outside somewhere, sulking and impossible to find. How like Hermione Lola
was, to remain guiltless while others destroyed themselves at her prompting.

Emily stood
irresolutely in the hall, wishing to be in no particular room, straining for
the voices of the searchers outside and—if she was honest with herself—relieved
she could hear nothing. It was a drama about nothing, the missing boys; it was
Hermione’s life imposed upon her own. There was no reason to worry about
the twins. They were unlikely to go near the river. Surely, they would tire and
come home. She was ringed by thick walls of silence which hissed in her ears,
rising and falling in volume to some pattern of its own. She took her hand from
the phone and massaged her forehead—no trace of the beast migraine, and
thank God for that—and went toward the drawing room. Another reason not
to dial P.C. Vockins was that soon Jack would phone with his apologies. The
call would be placed through the Ministry operator; then she would hear the
young assistant with the nasal, whinnying voice, and finally her husband’s
from behind his desk, resonating in the enormous room with the coffered
ceiling. That he worked late she did not doubt, but she knew he did not sleep
at his club, and he knew that she knew this. But there was nothing to say. Or
rather, there was too much. They resembled each other in their dread of
conflict, and the regularity of his evening calls, however much she disbelieved
them, was a comfort to them both. If this sham was conventional hypocrisy, she
had to concede that it had its uses. She had sources of contentment in her
life—the house, the park, above all, the children—and she intended
to preserve them by not challenging Jack. And she did not miss his presence so
much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like
love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so
elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of
tribute to the importance of their marriage.