Atonement (24 page)

She remained
on the gravel for a minute or two, not quite frightened enough to turn back,
nor confident enough to go on. She could return to her mother and keep her
company in the drawing room while she waited. She could take a safer route,
along the driveway and back, before it entered the woods—and still give
the impression of a serious search. Then, precisely because the day had proved
to her that she was not a child, and that she was now a figure in a richer
story and had to prove herself worthy of it, she forced herself to walk on and
cross the bridge. From beneath her, amplified by the stone arch, came the hiss
of the breeze disturbing the sedge, and a sudden beating of wings against water
which subsided abruptly. These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And
darkness was nothing—it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it
was no more than an absence of light. The bridge led to nothing more than an
artificial island in an artificial lake. It had been there two hundred years
almost, and its detachment marked it out from the rest of the land, and it
belonged to her more than to anyone else. She was the only one who ever came
here. To the others it was no more than a corridor to and from home, a bridge
between the bridges, an ornament so familiar as to be invisible. Hardman came
with his son twice a year to scythe the grass around the temple. The tramps had
passed through. Stray migrating geese sometimes honored the little grassy
shore. Otherwise it was a lonely kingdom of rabbits, water birds and water
rats.

So it should
have been a simple matter, to pick her way down the bank and go across the
grass toward the temple. But again, she hesitated, and simply looked, without
even calling out to the twins. The building’s indistinct pallor shimmered
in the dark. When she stared at it directly it dissolved completely. It stood
about a hundred feet away, and nearer, in the center of the grassy stretch,
there was a shrub she did not remember. Or rather, she remembered it being
closer to the shore. The trees were not right either, what she could see of
them. The oak was too bulbous, the elm too straggly, and in their strangeness
they seemed in league. As she put her hand out to touch the parapet of the
bridge, a duck startled her with a high, unpleasant call, almost human in its
breathy downward note. It was the steepness of the bank, of course, which held
her back, and the idea of descent, and the fact that there was not much point.
But she had made her decision. She went down backward, steadying herself on
clumps of grass, and at the bottom paused only to wipe her hands on her dress.

She walked
directly toward the temple, and had gone seven or eight steps, and was about to
call out the names of the twins, when the bush that lay directly in her
path—the one she thought should be closer to the shore—began to
break up in front of her, or double itself, or waver, and then fork. It was
changing its shape in a complicated way, thinning at the base as a vertical
column rose five or six feet. She would have stopped immediately had she not
still been so completely bound to the notion that this was a bush, and that she
was witnessing some trick of darkness and perspective. Another second or two,
another couple of steps, and she saw that this was not so. Then she stopped.
The vertical mass was a figure, a person who was now backing away from her and
beginning to fade into the darker background of the trees. The remaining darker
patch on the ground was also a person, changing shape again as it sat up and
called her name.

“Briony?”

She heard the
helplessness in Lola’s voice—it was the sound she had thought
belonged to a duck—and in an instant, Briony understood completely. She
was nauseous with disgust and fear. Now the larger figure reappeared, circling
right round the edge of the clearing and heading for the bank down which she
had just come. She knew she should attend to Lola, but she could not help watching
as he mounted the slope quickly and without effort, and disappeared onto the
roadway. She heard his footsteps as he strode toward the house. She had no
doubt. She could describe him. There was nothing she could not describe. She
knelt down beside her cousin.

“Lola.
Are you all right?”

Briony
touched her shoulder, and was groping for her hand without success. Lola was
sitting forward, with her arms crossed around her chest, hugging herself and
rocking slightly. The voice was faint and distorted, as though impeded by
something like a bubble, some mucus in her throat. She needed to clear her
throat. She said, vaguely, “I’m sorry, I didn’t, I’m
sorry . . .”

Briony
whispered, “Who was it?” and before that could be answered, she
added, with all the calm she was capable of, “I saw him. I
saw
him.”

Meekly, Lola
said, “Yes.”

For the
second time that evening, Briony felt a flowering of tenderness for her cousin.
Together they faced real terrors. She and her cousin were close. Briony was on
her knees, trying to put her arms round Lola and gather her to her, but the
body was bony and unyielding, wrapped tight about itself like a seashell. A
winkle. Lola hugged herself and rocked.

Briony said,
“It was him, wasn’t it?”

She felt
against her chest, rather than saw, her cousin nod, slowly, reflectively.
Perhaps it was exhaustion.

After many
seconds Lola said in the same weak, submissive voice, “Yes. It was
him.”

Suddenly,
Briony wanted her to say his name. To seal the crime, frame it with the
victim’s curse, close his fate with the magic of naming.

“Lola,”
she whispered, and could not deny the strange elation she felt. “Lola.
Who was it?”

The rocking
stopped. The island became very still. Without quite shifting her position,
Lola seemed to move away, or to move her shoulders, half shrug, half sway, to
free herself of Briony’s sympathetic touch. She turned her head away and
looked out across the emptiness where the lake was. She may have been about to
speak, she may have been about to embark upon a long confession in which she
would find her feelings as she spoke them and lead herself out of her numbness
toward something that resembled both terror and joy. Turning away may well have
been not a distancing, but an act of intimacy, a way of gathering herself to
begin to speak her feelings to the only person she thought, so far from home,
she could trust herself to talk to. Perhaps she had already drawn breath and
parted her lips. But it did not matter because Briony was about to cut her off
and the opportunity would be lost. So many seconds had passed—thirty?
forty-five?—and the younger girl could no longer hold herself back.
Everything connected. It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that
was writing itself around her.

“It was
Robbie, wasn’t it?”

The maniac.
She wanted to say the word.

Lola said
nothing and did not move.

Briony said
it again, this time without the trace of a question. It was a statement of
fact. “It was Robbie.”

Though she
had not turned, or moved at all, it was clear that something was changing in
Lola, a warmth rising from her skin and a sound of dry swallowing, a heaving
convulsion of muscle in her throat that was audible as a series of sinewy
clicks.

Briony said
it again. Simply. “Robbie.”

From far out
in the lake came the fat, rounded plop of a fish jumping, a precise and
solitary sound, for the breeze had dropped away completely. Nothing scary in
the treetops or among the sedge now. At last Lola turned slowly to face her.

She said,
“You saw him.”

“How
could he,” Briony moaned. “How dare he.”

Lola placed
her hand on her bare forearm and gripped. Her mild words were widely spaced.
“You saw him.”

Briony drew
nearer to her and covered Lola’s hand with her own. “You
don’t even know yet what happened in the library, before dinner, just
after we were talking. He was attacking my sister. If I hadn’t come in, I
don’t know what he would have done . . .”

However close
they were, it was not possible to read expressions. The dark disk of
Lola’s face showed nothing at all, but Briony sensed she was only half
listening, and this was confirmed when she cut in to repeat, “But you saw
him. You actually saw him.”

“Of
course I did. Plain as day. It was him.”

Despite the
warmth of the night, Lola was beginning to shiver and Briony longed for
something she could take off and place round her shoulders.

Lola said,
“He came up behind me, you see. He knocked me to the ground . . . and
then . . . he pushed my head back and his hand was over my eyes. I
couldn’t actually, I wasn’t able . . .”

“Oh
Lola.” Briony put out her hand to touch her cousin’s face and found
her cheek. It was dry, but it wouldn’t be, she knew it wouldn’t be
for long. “Listen to me. I couldn’t mistake him. I’ve known
him all my life. I saw him.”

“Because
I couldn’t say for sure. I mean, I thought it might be him by his
voice.”

“What
did he say?”

“Nothing.
I mean, it was the sound of his voice, breathing, noises. But I couldn’t
see. I couldn’t say for sure.”

“Well I
can. And I will.”

And so their
respective positions, which were to find public expression in the weeks and
months to come, and then be pursued as demons in private for many years
afterward, were established in these moments by the lake, with Briony’s
certainty rising whenever her cousin appeared to doubt herself. Nothing much
was ever required of Lola after that, for she was able to retreat behind an air
of wounded confusion, and as treasured patient, recovering victim, lost child,
let herself be bathed in the concern and guilt of the adults in her life. How
could we have let this happen to a child? Lola could not, and did not need to,
help them. Briony offered her a chance, and she seized it instinctively; less
than that—she simply let it settle over her. She had little more to do
than remain silent behind her cousin’s zeal. Lola did not need to lie, to
look her supposed attacker in the eye and summon the courage to accuse him,
because all that work was done for her, innocently, and without guile by the
younger girl. Lola was required only to remain silent about the truth, banish
it and forget it entirely, and persuade herself not of some contrary tale, but
simply of her own uncertainty. She couldn’t see, his hand was over her
eyes, she was terrified, she couldn’t say for sure.

Briony was
there to help her at every stage. As far as she was concerned, everything
fitted; the terrible present fulfilled the recent past. Events she herself
witnessed foretold her cousin’s calamity. If only she, Briony, had been
less innocent, less stupid. Now she saw, the affair was too consistent, too
symmetrical to be anything other than what she said it was. She blamed herself
for her childish assumption that Robbie would limit his attentions to Cecilia.
What was she thinking of? He was a maniac after all. Anyone would do. And he
was bound to go for the most vulnerable—a spindly girl, stumbling about
in the dark in an unfamiliar place, bravely searching around the island temple
for her brothers. Just as Briony herself had been about to do. That his victim
could easily have been her increased Briony’s outrage and fervor. If her
poor cousin was not able to command the truth, then she would do it for her.
I
can. And I will.

As early as
the week that followed, the glazed surface of conviction was not without its
blemishes and hairline cracks. Whenever she was conscious of them, which was
not often, she was driven back, with a little swooping sensation in her
stomach, to the understanding that what she knew was not literally, or not
only, based on the visible. It was not simply her eyes that told her the truth.
It was too dark for that. Even Lola’s face at eighteen inches was an
empty oval, and this figure was many feet away, and turned from her as it moved
back around the clearing. But nor was this figure invisible, and its size and
manner of moving were familiar to her. Her eyes confirmed the sum of all she
knew and had recently experienced. The truth was in the symmetry, which was to
say, it was founded in common sense. The truth instructed her eyes. So when she
said, over and again, I saw him, she meant it, and was perfectly honest, as
well as passionate. What she meant was rather more complex than what everyone
else so eagerly understood, and her moments of unease came when she felt that
she could not express these nuances. She did not even seriously try. There were
no opportunities, no time, no permission. Within a couple of days, no, within a
matter of hours, a process was moving fast and well beyond her control. Her
words summoned awful powers from the familiar and picturesque local town. It
was as if these terrifying authorities, these uniformed agents, had been lying
in wait behind the façades of pretty buildings for a disaster they knew
must come. They knew their own minds, they knew what they wanted and how to
proceed. She was asked again and again, and as she repeated herself, the burden
of consistency was pressed upon her. What she had said she must say again.
Minor deviations earned her little frowns on wise brows, or a degree of
frostiness and withdrawal of sympathy. She became anxious to please, and
learned quickly that the minor qualifications she might have added would
disrupt the process that she herself had set in train.