Atonement (6 page)

These
thoughts were as familiar to her, and as comforting, as the precise
configuration of her knees, their matching but competing, symmetrical and
reversible, look. A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred
another: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her
sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was?
Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also
have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time
thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including
her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social
world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and
everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s
claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one
was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was
surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but
lacking the bright and private
inside
feeling she had. This was
sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For, though it offended her sense of
order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts
like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn’t
really feel it.

The
rehearsals also offended her sense of order. The self-contained world she had
drawn with clear and perfect lines had been defaced with the scribble of other
minds, other needs; and time itself, so easily sectioned on paper into acts and
scenes, was even now dribbling uncontrollably away. Perhaps she wouldn’t
get
Jackson
back until after
lunch. Leon and his friend were arriving in the early evening, or even sooner,
and the performance was set for
seven o’clock
. And still there had
been no proper rehearsal, and the twins could not act, or even speak, and Lola
had stolen Briony’s rightful role, and nothing could be managed, and it
was hot, ludicrously hot. The girl squirmed in her oppression and stood. Dust
from along the skirting board had dirtied her hands and the back of her dress.
Away in her thoughts, she wiped her palms down her front as she went toward the
window. The simplest way to have impressed
Leon
would have been to
write him a story and put it in his hands herself, and watch as he read it. The
title lettering, the illustrated cover, the pages
bound
—in that
word alone she felt the attraction of the neat, limited and controllable form
she had left behind when she decided to write a play. A story was direct and
simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader—no
intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of
time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to
write it down and you could have the world; in a play you had to make do with
what was available: no horses, no village streets, no seaside. No curtain. It
seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By
means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings
from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace
that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it
were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between
them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the
word
castle
, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in
high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from
the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green
shade . . .

She had
arrived at one of the nursery’s wide-open windows and must have seen what
lay before her some seconds before she registered it. It was a scene that could
easily have accommodated, in the distance at least, a medieval castle. Some
miles beyond the Tallises’ land rose the Surrey Hills and their
motionless crowds of thick crested oaks, their greens softened by a milky heat
haze. Then, nearer, the estate’s open parkland, which today had a dry and
savage look, roasting like a savanna, where isolated trees threw harsh stumpy
shadows and the long grass was already stalked by the leonine yellow of high
summer. Closer, within the boundaries of the balustrade, were the rose gardens
and, nearer still, the Triton fountain, and standing by the basin’s retaining
wall was her sister, and right before her was Robbie Turner. There was
something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back. A
proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. She herself had
written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and
ended by marrying her. What was presented here fitted well. Robbie Turner, only
son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, Robbie who had been
subsidized by Briony’s father through school and university, had wanted
to be a landscape gardener, and now wanted to take up medicine, had the
boldness of ambition to ask for Cecilia’s hand. It made perfect sense.
Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance.

What was less
comprehensible, however, was how Robbie imperiously raised his hand now, as
though issuing a command which Cecilia dared not disobey. It was extraordinary
that she was unable to resist him. At his insistence she was removing her
clothes, and at such speed. She was out of her blouse, now she had let her
skirt drop to the ground and was stepping out of it, while he looked on
impatiently, hands on hips. What strange power did he have over her? Blackmail?
Threats? Briony raised two hands to her face and stepped back a little way from
the window. She should shut her eyes, she thought, and spare herself the sight
of her sister’s shame. But that was impossible, because there were
further surprises. Cecilia, mercifully still in her underwear, was climbing
into the pond, was standing waist deep in the water, was pinching her
nose—and then she was gone. There was only Robbie, and the clothes on the
gravel, and beyond, the silent park and the distant, blue hills.

The sequence
was illogical—the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have
preceded the marriage proposal. Such was Briony’s last thought before she
accepted that she did not understand, and that she must simply watch. Unseen,
from two stories up, with the benefit of unambiguous sunlight, she had
privileged access across the years to adult behavior, to rites and conventions
she knew nothing about, as yet. Clearly, these were the kinds of things that
happened. Even as her sister’s head broke the surface—thank
God!—Briony had her first, weak intimation that for her now it could no
longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here
and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and
what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything
wrong, completely wrong. Cecilia had climbed out of the pond and was fixing her
skirt, and with difficulty pulling her blouse on over her wet skin. She turned
abruptly and picked up from the deep shade of the fountain’s wall a vase
of flowers Briony had not noticed before, and set off with it toward the house.
No words were exchanged with Robbie, not a glance in his direction. He was now
staring into the water, and then he too was striding away, no doubt satisfied,
round the side of the house. Suddenly the scene was empty; the wet patch on the
ground where Cecilia had got out of the pond was the only evidence that
anything had happened at all.

Briony leaned
back against a wall and stared unseeingly down the nursery’s length. It
was a temptation for her to be magical and dramatic, and to regard what she had
witnessed as a tableau mounted for her alone, a special moral for her wrapped
in a mystery. But she knew very well that if she had not stood when she did,
the scene would still have happened, for it was not about her at all. Only
chance had brought her to the window. This was not a fairy tale, this was the
real, the adult world in which frogs did not address princesses, and the only
messages were the ones that people sent. It was also a temptation to run to
Cecilia’s room and demand an explanation. Briony resisted because she
wanted to chase in solitude the faint thrill of possibility she had felt
before, the elusive excitement at a prospect she was coming close to defining,
at least emotionally. The definition would refine itself over the years. She
was to concede that she may have attributed more deliberation than was feasible
to her thirteen-year-old self. At the time there may have been no precise form
of words; in fact, she may have experienced nothing more than impatience to
begin writing again.

As she stood
in the nursery waiting for her cousins’ return she sensed she could write
a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer
like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a
clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could
see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the
nib’s end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points
of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from
the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these
three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did
not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own,
struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t
only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and
misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that
other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these
different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a
story need have.

Six decades
later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way
through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the
European tradition of folktales, through drama with simple moral intent, to
arrive at an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself,
one special morning during a heat wave in 1935. She would be well aware of the
extent of her self-mythologizing, and she gave her account a self-mocking, or
mock-heroic tone. Her fiction was known for its amorality, and like all authors
pressed by a repeated question, she felt obliged to produce a story line, a
plot of her development that contained the moment when she became recognizably
herself. She knew that it was not correct to refer to her dramas in the plural,
that her mockery distanced her from the earnest, reflective child, and that it
was not the long-ago morning she was recalling so much as her subsequent
accounts of it. It was possible that the contemplation of a crooked finger, the
unbearable idea of other minds and the superiority of stories over plays were
thoughts she had had on other days. She also knew that whatever actually
happened drew its significance from her published work and would not have been
remembered without it.

However, she
could not betray herself completely; there could be no doubt that some kind of
revelation occurred. When the young girl went back to the window and looked
down, the damp patch on the gravel had evaporated. Now there was nothing left
of the dumb show by the fountain beyond what survived in memory, in three
separate and overlapping memories. The truth had become as ghostly as
invention. She could begin now, setting it down as she had seen it, meeting the
challenge by refusing to condemn her sister’s shocking near-nakedness, in
daylight, right by the house. Then the scene could be recast, through
Cecilia’s eyes, and then Robbie’s. But now was not the time to
begin. Briony’s sense of obligation, as well as her instinct for order,
was powerful; she must complete what she had initiated, there was a rehearsal
in progress,
Leon
was on his way, the
household was expecting a performance tonight. She should go down once more to
the laundry to see whether the trials of
Jackson
were at an end. The
writing could wait until she was free.

Four

I
T WAS
not until the late afternoon that Cecilia
judged the vase repaired. It had baked all afternoon on a table by a
south-facing window in the library, and now three fine meandering lines in the
glaze, converging like rivers in an atlas, were all that showed. No one would
ever know. As she crossed the library with the vase in both hands, she heard
what she thought was the sound of bare feet on the hallway tiles outside the
library door. Having passed many hours deliberately not thinking about Robbie
Turner, she was outraged that he should be back in the house, once again
without his socks. She stepped out into the hallway, determined to face down
his insolence, or his mockery, and was confronted instead by her sister,
clearly in distress. Her eyelids were swollen and pink, and she was pinching on
her lower lip with forefinger and thumb, an old sign with Briony that some
serious weeping was to be done.