Atonement

“Really, Betty.”

“A cauliflower gratin salad? A horseradish sauce salad?”

“You’re making a great fuss about nothing.”

“A bread and butter pudding salad?”

One of the twins snorted. Even as Cecilia guessed what would come next, it began to happen. Betty turned to her, gripped her arm, and made her appeal. “Miss Cee, it was a roast what was ordered and we’ve been at it all day in temperatures above the boiling point of blood.”

The scene was novel, the spectators were an unusual element, but the dilemma was familiar enough: how to keep the peace and not humiliate her mother. Also, Cecilia had resolved afresh to be with her brother on the terrace; it was therefore important to be with the winning faction and push to a quick conclusion. She took her mother aside, and Betty, who knew the form well enough, ordered everyone back to their business. Emily and Cecilia Tallis stood by the open door that led to the kitchen garden.

“Darling, there’s a heat wave and I’m not going to be talked out of a salad.”

“Emily, I know it’s far too hot, but Leon’s absolutely dying for one of Betty’s roasts. He goes on about them all the time. I heard him boasting about them to Mr. Marshall.”

“Oh my God,” Emily said.

“I’m with you. I don’t want a roast. Best thing is to give everyone a choice. Send Polly out to cut some lettuces. There’s beetroot in the larder. Betty can do some new potatoes and let them cool.”

“Darling, you’re right. You know, I’d hate to let little Leon down.”

And so it was resolved and the roast was saved. With tactful good grace, Betty set Doll to scrubbing new potatoes, and Polly went outside with a knife. As they came away from the kitchen Emily put on her dark glasses and said, “I’m glad that’s settled because what’s really bothering me is Briony. I know she’s upset. She’s moping around outside and I’m going to bring her in.”

“Good idea. I was worried about her too,” Cecilia said. She was not inclined to dissuade her mother from wandering far away from the terrace. The drawing room which had transfixed Cecilia that morning with its parallelograms of light was now in gloom, lit by a single lamp near the fireplace. The open French windows framed a greenish sky, and against that, in silhouette at some distance, the familiar head and shoulders of her brother. As she made her way across the room she heard the tinkle of ice cubes against his glass, and as she stepped out she smelled the pennyroyal, chamomile and feverfew crushed underfoot, and headier now than in the morning. No one remembered the name, or even the appearance, of the temporary gardener who made it his project some years back to plant up the cracks between the paving stones. At the time, no one understood what he had in mind. Perhaps that was why he was sacked.

“Sis! I’ve been out here forty minutes and I’m half stewed.”

“Sorry. Where’s my drink?”

On a low wooden table set against the wall of the house was a paraffin globe lamp and ranged around it a rudimentary bar. At last the gin and tonic was in her hand. She lit a cigarette from his and they chinked glasses.

“I like the frock.”

“Can you see it?”

“Turn round. Gorgeous. I’d forgotten about that mole.”

“How’s the bank?”

“Dull and perfectly pleasant. We live for the evenings and weekends. When are you going to come?”

They wandered off the terrace onto the gravel path between the roses. The Triton pond rose before them, an inky mass whose complicated outline was honed against a sky turning greener as the light fell. They could hear the trickle of water, and Cecilia thought she could smell it too, silvery and sharp. It may have been the drink in her hand. She said after a pause, “I am going a little mad here.”

“Being everyone’s mother again. D’you know, there are girls getting all sorts of jobs now. Even taking the civil service exams. That would please the Old Man.”

“They’d never have me with a third.”

“Once your life gets going you’ll find that stuff doesn’t mean a thing.”

They reached the fountain and turned to face the house, and remained in silence for a while, leaning against the parapet, at the site of her disgrace. Reckless, ridiculous, and above all shaming. Only time, a prudish veil of hours, prevented her brother from seeing her as she had been. But she had no such protection from Robbie. He had seen her, he would always be able to see her, even as time smoothed out the memory to a barroom tale. She was still irritated with her brother about the invitation, but she needed him, she wanted a share in his freedom. Solicitously, she prompted him to give her his news. In Leon’s life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed. Everyone was celebrated at least in some degree, as though it was a cause for wonder that anyone existed at all. He remembered all his friends’ best lines. The effect of one of Leon’s anecdotes was to make his listener warm to humankind and its failings. Everyone was, at a minimal estimate, “a good egg” or “a decent sort,” and motivation was never judged to be at variance with outward show. If there was mystery or contradiction in a friend, Leon took the long view and found a benign explanation. Literature and politics, science and religion did not bore him—they simply had no place in his world, and nor did any matter about which people seriously disagreed. He had taken a degree in law and was happy to have forgotten the whole experience. It was hard to imagine him ever lonely, or bored or despondent; his equanimity was bottomless, as was his lack of ambition, and he assumed that everyone else was much like him. Despite all this, his blandness was perfectly tolerable, even soothing. He talked first of his rowing club. He had been stroke for the second eight recently, and though everyone had been kind, he thought he was happier taking the pace from someone else. Likewise, at the bank there had been mention of promotion and when nothing came of it he was somewhat relieved. Then the girls: the actress Mary, who had been so wonderful in Private Lives, had suddenly removed herself without explanation to Glasgow and no one knew why. He suspected she was tending a dying relative. Francine, who spoke beautiful French and had outraged the world by wearing a monocle, had gone with him to a Gilbert and Sullivan last week and in the interval they had seen the King who had seemed to glance in their direction. The sweet, dependable, well-connected Barbara whom Jack and Emily thought he should marry had invited him to spend a week at her parents’ castle in the Highlands. He thought it would be churlish not to go. Whenever he seemed about to dry up, Cecilia prodded him with another question. Inexplicably, his rent at the Albany had gone down. An old friend had got a girl with a lisp pregnant, had married her and was jolly happy. Another was buying a motorbike. The father of a chum had bought a vacuum cleaner factory and said it was a license to print money. Someone’s grandmother was a brave old stick for walking half a mile on a broken leg. As sweet as the evening air, this talk moved through and round her, conjuring a world of good intentions and pleasant outcomes. Shoulder to shoulder, half standing, half sitting, they faced their childhood home whose architecturally confused medieval references seemed now to be whimsically lighthearted; their mother’s migraine was a comic interlude in a light opera, the sadness of the twins a sentimental extravagance, the incident in the kitchen no more than the merry jostling of lively spirits. When it was her turn to give an account of recent months, it was impossible not to be influenced by Leon’s tone, though her version of it came through, helplessly, as mockery. She ridiculed her own attempts at genealogy; the family tree was wintry and bare, as well as rootless. Grandfather Harry Tallis was the son of a farm laborer who, for some reason, had changed his name from Cartwright and whose birth and marriage were not recorded. As for Clarissa—all those daylight hours curled up on the bed with pins and needles in her arm—it surely proved the case of Paradise Lost in reverse—the heroine became more loathsome as her death-fixated virtue was revealed. Leon nodded and pursed his lips; he would not pretend to know what she was talking about, nor would he interrupt. She gave a farcical hue to her weeks of boredom and solitude, of how she had come to be with the family, and make amends for being away, and had found her parents and sister absent in their different ways. Encouraged by her brother’s generous near-laughter, she attempted comic sketches based on her daily need for more cigarettes, on Briony tearing down her poster, on the twins outside her room with a sock each, and on their mother’s desire for a miracle at the feast—roast potatoes into potato salad. Leon did not take the biblical reference here. There was desperation in all she said, an emptiness at its core, or something excluded or unnamed that made her talk faster, and exaggerate with less conviction. The agreeable nullity of Leon’s life was a polished artifact, its ease deceptive, its limitations achieved by invisible hard work and the accidents of character, none of which she could hope to rival. She linked her arm with his and squeezed. That was another thing about Leon: soft and charming in company, but through his jacket his arm had the consistency of tropical hardwood. She felt soft at every level, and transparent. He was looking at her fondly.

“What’s up, Cee?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You really ought to come and stay with me and look around.”

There was a figure moving about on the terrace, and lights were coming on in the drawing room. Briony called out to her brother and sister. Leon called back. “We’re over here.”

“We should go in,” Cecilia said, and still arm in arm, they began to walk toward the house. As they passed the roses she wondered if there really was anything she wanted to tell him. Confessing to her behavior this morning was certainly not possible.

“I’d love to come up to town.” Even as she said the words she imagined herself being dragged back, incapable of packing her bag or of making the train. Perhaps she didn’t want to go at all, but she repeated herself a little more emphatically.

“I’d love to come.”

Briony was waiting impatiently on the terrace to greet her brother. Someone addressed her from inside the drawing room and she spoke over her shoulder in reply. As Cecilia and Leon approached, they heard the voice again—it was their mother trying to be stern.

“I’m only saying it one more time. You will go up now and wash and change.”

With a lingering look in their direction, Briony moved toward the French windows. There was something in her hand. Leon said, “We could set you up in no time at all.”

When they stepped into the room, into the light of several lamps, Briony was still there, still barefoot and in her filthy white dress, and her mother was standing by the door on the far side of the room, smiling indulgently. Leon stretched out his arms and did the comic Cockney voice he reserved for her.

“An’ if it ain’t my li’l sis!”

As she hurried past, Briony pushed into Cecilia’s hand a piece of paper folded twice and then she squealed her brother’s name and leaped into his embrace. Conscious of her mother watching her, Cecilia adopted an expression of amused curiosity as she unfolded the sheet. Commendably, it was a look she was able to maintain as she took in the small block of typewriting and in a glance absorbed it whole—a unit of meaning whose force and color was derived from the single repeated word. At her elbow, Briony was telling Leon about the play she had written for him, and lamenting her failure to stage it. The Trials of Arabella, she kept repeating. The Trials of Arabella. Never had she appeared so animated, so weirdly excited. She still had her arms about his neck, and was standing on tiptoe to nuzzle her cheek against his. Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia’s thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave? What had made her so blind, so obtuse? Many seconds had passed, and it was no longer plausible to be staring fixedly at the sheet of paper. The act of folding it away brought her to an obvious realization: it could not have been sent unsealed. She turned to look at her sister. Leon was saying to her, “How about this? I’m good at voices, you’re even better. We’ll read it aloud together.”

Cecilia moved round him, into Briony’s view.

“Briony? Briony, did you read this?”

But Briony, engaged in a shrill response to her brother’s suggestion, writhed in his arms and turned her face from her sister and half buried it in Leon’s jacket. From across the room Emily said soothingly, “Calmly now.”

Again, Cecilia shifted her position so that she was on the other side of her brother. “Where’s the envelope?”

Briony turned her face away again and laughed wildly at something Leon was telling her. Then Cecilia was aware of another figure in their presence, at the edge of vision, moving behind her, and when she turned she confronted Paul Marshall. In one hand he held a silver tray on which stood five cocktail glasses, each one half filled with a viscous brown substance. He lifted a glass and presented it to her.

“I insist you try it.”

Ten

THE 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.”

The change of subject had worked the trick, for the area around Lola’s eyes which had been inflamed was freckly and pale once more and she was very much her old self. She took Briony’s hand. “I think the police should know about him.”

The constable in the village was a kindly man with a waxed mustache whose wife kept hens and delivered fresh eggs on her bicycle. Communicating the letter and its word, even spelling it out backward for him, was inconceivable. She went to move her hand away but Lola tightened her grip and seemed to read the younger girl’s mind.

“We just need to show them the letter.”

“She might not agree to it.”

“I bet she will. Maniacs can attack anyone.”

Lola looked suddenly thoughtful and seemed about to tell her cousin something new. But instead she sprang away and took up Briony’s hairbrush and stood in front of the mirror vigorously brushing out her hair. She had barely started when they heard Mrs. Tallis calling them down to dinner. Lola was immediately petulant, and Briony assumed that these rapid changes of mood were part of her recent upset.

“It’s hopeless. I’m nowhere near ready,” she said, close to tears again. “I haven’t even started on my face.”

“I’ll go down now,” Briony soothed her. “I’ll tell them you’ll be a little while yet.” But Lola was already on her way out the room and did not seem to hear. After Briony tidied her hair she remained in front of the mirror, studying her own face, wondering what she might do when she came to “start” on it, which she knew she must one day soon. Another demand on her time. At least she had no freckles to conceal or soften, and that surely saved labor. Long ago, at the age of ten, she decided that lipstick made her seem clownish. That notion was due for revision. But not yet, when there was so much else to consider. She stood by the desk and absently replaced the top of her fountain pen. Writing a story was a hopeless, puny enterprise when such powerful and chaotic forces were turning about her, and when all day long successive events had absorbed or transformed what had gone before. There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. She wondered whether she had made a terrible mistake by confiding in her cousin—Cecilia would hardly be pleased if excitable Lola started flaunting her knowledge of Robbie’s note. And how was it possible to go downstairs now and be at table with a maniac? If the police made an arrest, she, Briony, might be made to appear in court, and say the word aloud, in proof. Reluctantly, she left her room and made her way along the gloomy paneled corridor to the head of the stairs where she paused to listen. The voices were still in the drawing room—she heard her mother’s and Mr. Marshall’s, and then, separately, the twins talking to each other. No Cecilia then, no maniac. Briony felt her heart rate rise as she began her unwilling descent. Her life had ceased to be simple. Only three days ago she was finishing off The Trials of Arabella and waiting for her cousins. She had wanted everything to be different, and here it was; and not only was it bad, it was about to get worse. She stopped again on the first landing to consolidate a scheme; she would keep well clear of her skittish cousin, not even catch her eye—she could not afford to be drawn into a conspiracy, nor did she wish to prompt a disastrous outburst. And Cecilia, whom she ought to protect, she dared not go near. Robbie, obviously, she should avoid for safety’s sake. Her mother with her fussing would not be helpful. It would be impossible to think straight in her presence. It was the twins she should go for—they would be her refuge. She would stay close and look after them. These summer dinners always started so late—it was past ten o’clock—and the boys would be tired. And otherwise she should be sociable with Mr. Marshall and ask him about sweets—who thought them up, how they got made. It was a coward’s plan but she could think of no other. With dinner about to be served, this was hardly the moment to be summoning P.C. Vockins from the village. She continued down the stairs. She should have advised Lola to change in order to conceal the scratch on her arm. Being asked about it might start her crying again. But then, it would probably have been impossible to talk her out of a dress that made it so difficult to walk. Attaining adulthood was all about the eager acceptance of such impediments. She herself was taking them on. It wasn’t her scratch, but she felt responsible for it, and for everything that was about to happen. When her father was home, the household settled around a fixed point. He organized nothing, he didn’t go about the house worrying on other people’s behalf, he rarely told anyone what to do—in fact, he mostly sat in the library. But his presence imposed order and allowed freedom. Burdens were lifted. When he was there, it no longer mattered that her mother retreated to her bedroom; it was enough that he was downstairs with a book on his lap. When he took his place at the dining table, calm, affable, utterly certain, a crisis in the kitchen became no more than a humorous sketch; without him, it was a drama that clutched the heart. He knew most things worth knowing, and when he didn’t know, he had a good idea which authority to consult, and would take her into the library to help him find it. If he had not been, as he described it, a slave to the Ministry, and to Eventuality Planning, if he had been at home, sending Hardman down for the wines, steering the conversation, deciding without appearing to when it was time to “go through,” she would not be crossing the hallway now with such heaviness in her step. It was these thoughts of him that made her slow as she passed the library door which, unusually, was closed. She stopped to listen. From the kitchen, the chink of metal against porcelain, from the drawing room her mother talking softly, and closer by, one of the twins saying in a high, clear voice, “It’s got a u in it, actually,” and his brother replying, “I don’t care. Put it in the envelope.” And then, from behind the library door, a scraping noise followed by a thump and a murmur that could have been a man’s or a woman’s. In memory—and Briony later gave this matter some thought—she had no particular expectations as she placed her hand on the brass handle and turned it. But she had seen Robbie’s letter, she had cast herself as her sister’s protector, and she had been instructed by her cousin: what she saw must have been shaped in part by what she already knew, or believed she knew. At first, when she pushed open the door and stepped in, she saw nothing at all. The only light was from a single green-glass desk lamp which illuminated little more than the tooled leather surface on which it stood. When she took another few steps she saw them, dark shapes in the furthest corner. Though they were immobile, her immediate understanding was that she had interrupted an attack, a hand-to-hand fight. The scene was so entirely a realization of her worst fears that she sensed that her overanxious imagination had projected the figures onto the packed spines of books. This illusion, or hope of one, was dispelled as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. No one moved. Briony stared past Robbie’s shoulder into the terrified eyes of her sister. He had turned to look back at the intruder, but he did not let Cecilia go. He had pushed his body against hers, pushing her dress right up above her knee and had trapped her where the shelves met at right angles. His left hand was behind her neck, gripping her hair, and with his right he held her forearm which was raised in protest, or self-defense. He looked so huge and wild, and Cecilia with her bare shoulders and thin arms so frail that Briony had no idea what she could achieve as she started to go toward them. She wanted to shout, but she could not catch her breath, and her tongue was slow and heavy. Robbie moved in such a way that her view of her sister was completely obscured. Then Cecilia was struggling free, and he was letting her go. Briony stopped and said her sister’s name. When she pushed past Briony there was no sign in Cecilia of gratitude or relief. Her face was expressionless, almost composed, and she looked right ahead to the door she was about to leave by. Then she was gone, and Briony was left alone with him. He too would not meet her eye. Instead he faced into the corner, and busied himself straightening his jacket and arranging his tie. Warily, she moved backward away from him, but he made no move to attack her, and did not even look up. So she turned and ran from the room to find Cecilia. But the hallway was empty, and it was not clear which way she had gone.

Eleven

DESPITE THE late addition of chopped fresh mint to a blend of melted chocolate, egg yolk, coconut milk, rum, gin, crushed banana and icing sugar, the cocktail was not particularly refreshing. Appetites already cloyed by the night’s heat were further diminished. Nearly all the adults entering the airless dining room were nauseated by the prospect of a roast dinner, or even roast meat with salad, and would have been content with a glass of cool water. But water was available only to the children, while the rest were to revive themselves with a dessert wine at room temperature. Three bottles stood ready opened on the table—in Jack Tallis’s absence Betty usually made an inspired guess. None of the three tall windows would open because their frames had warped long ago, and an aroma of warmed dust from the Persian carpet rose to meet the diners as they entered. One comfort was that the fishmonger’s van bringing the first course of dressed crab had broken down. The effect of suffocation was heightened by the dark-stained paneling reaching from the floor and covering the ceiling, and by the room’s only painting, a vast canvas that hung above a fireplace unlit since its construction—a fault in the architectural drawings had left no provision for a flue or chimney. The portrait, in the style of Gainsborough, showed an aristocratic family—parents, two teenage girls and an infant, all thin-lipped, and pale as ghouls—posed before a vaguely Tuscan landscape. No one knew who these people were, but it was likely that Harry Tallis thought they would lend an impression of solidity to his household. Emily stood at the head of the table placing the diners as they came in. She put Leon on her right, and Paul Marshall on her left. To his right Leon had Briony and the twins, while Marshall had Cecilia on his left, then Robbie, then Lola. Robbie stood behind his chair, gripping it for support, amazed that no one appeared to hear his still-thudding heart. He had escaped the cocktail, but he too had no appetite. He turned slightly to face away from Cecilia, and as the others took their places noted with relief that he was seated down among the children. Prompted by a nod from his mother, Leon muttered a short suspended grace—For what we are about to receive—to which the scrape of chairs was the amen. The silence that followed as they settled and unfolded their napkins would easily have been dispersed by Jack Tallis introducing some barely interesting topic while Betty went around with the beef. Instead, the diners watched and listened to her as she stooped murmuring at each place, scraping the serving spoon and fork across the silver platter. What else could they attend to, when the only other business in the room was their own silence? Emily Tallis had always been incapable of small talk and didn’t much care. Leon, entirely at one with himself, lolled in his chair, wine bottle in hand, studying its label. Cecilia was lost to the events of ten minutes before and could not have composed a simple sentence. Robbie was familiar with the household and would have started something off, but he too was in turmoil. It was enough that he could pretend to ignore Cecilia’s bare arm at his side—he could feel its heat—and the hostile gaze of Briony who sat diagonally across from him. And even if it had been considered proper for children to introduce a topic, they too would have been incapable: Briony could think only of what she had witnessed, Lola was subdued both by the shock of physical assault and an array of contradictory emotions, and the twins were absorbed in a plan. It was Paul Marshall who broke more than three minutes of asphyxiating silence. He moved back in his chair to speak behind Cecilia’s head to Robbie.

“I say, are we still on for tennis tomorrow?”

There was a two-inch scratch, Robbie noticed, from the corner of Marshall’s eye, running parallel to his nose, drawing attention to the way his features were set high up in his face, bunched up under the eyes. Only fractions of an inch kept him from cruel good looks. Instead, his appearance was absurd—the empty tract of his chin was at the expense of a worried, overpopulated forehead. Out of politeness, Robbie too had moved back in his seat to hear the remark, but even in his state he flinched. It was inappropriate, at the beginning of the meal, for Marshall to turn away from his hostess and begin a private conversation. Robbie said tersely, “I suppose we are,” and then, to make amends for him, added for general consideration, “Has England ever been hotter?”

Leaning away from the field of Cecilia’s body warmth, and averting his eyes from Briony’s, he found himself pitching the end of his question into the frightened gaze of Pierrot diagonally to his left. The boy gaped, and struggled, as he might in the classroom, with a test in history. Or was it geography? Or science? Briony leaned over Jackson to touch Pierrot’s shoulder, all the while keeping her eyes on Robbie. “Please leave him alone,” she said in a forceful whisper, and then to the little boy, softly, “You don’t have to answer.”

Emily spoke up from her end of the table. “Briony, it was a perfectly bland remark about the weather. You’ll apologize, or go now to your room.”

Whenever Mrs. Tallis exercised authority in the absence of her husband, the children felt obliged to protect her from seeming ineffectual. Briony, who in any case would not have left her sister undefended, lowered her head and said to the tablecloth, “I’m very sorry. I wish I hadn’t said it.”

The vegetables in lidded serving dishes, or on platters of faded Spode, were passed up and down, and such was the collective inattention or the polite desire to conceal a lack of appetite that most ended with roast potatoes and potato salad, Brussels sprouts and beetroot, and lettuce leaves foundering in gravy.

“The Old Man’s not going to be too pleased,” Leon said as he got to his feet. “It’s a 1921 Barsac, but it’s open now.” He filled his mother’s glass, then his sister’s and Marshall’s, and when he was standing by Robbie he said, “And a healing draft for the good doctor. I want to hear about this new plan.”

But he did not wait for a reply. On his way back to his seat he said, “I love England in a heat wave. It’s a different country. All the rules change.”

Emily Tallis picked up her knife and fork and everyone did likewise. Paul Marshall said, “Nonsense. Name a single rule that changes.”

“All right. At the club the only place one’s allowed to remove one’s jacket is the billiard room. But if the temperature reaches ninety degrees before three o’clock, then jackets can be taken off in the upstairs bar the following day.”

“The following day! A different country indeed.”

“You know what I mean. People are more at ease—a couple of days’ sunshine and we become Italians. Last week in Charlotte Street they were eating dinner at pavement tables.”

“It was always the view of my parents,” Emily said, “that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people. Fewer layers of clothing, a thousand more places to meet. Out of doors, out of control. Your grandmother especially was uneasy when it was summer. She would dream up a thousand reasons to keep my sisters and me in the house.”

“Well then,” Leon said. “What do you think, Cee? Have you behaved even worse than usual today?”

All eyes were on her, and the brotherly banter was relentless.

“Good heavens, you’re blushing. The answer must be yes.”

Sensing that he should step in for her, Robbie started to say, “Actually . . .”

But Cecilia spoke up. “I’m awfully hot, that’s all. And the answer is yes. I behaved very badly. I persuaded Emily against her will that we should have a roast in your honor, regardless of the weather. Now you’re sticking to salad while the rest of us are suffering because of you. So pass him the vegetables, Briony, and perhaps he’ll pipe down.”

Robbie thought he heard a tremor in her voice.

“Good old Cee. Top form,” Leon said. Marshall said, “That’s put you in your place.”

“I suppose I’d better pick on someone smaller.” Leon smiled at Briony by his side. “Have you done something bad today on account of the terrible heat? Have you broken the rules? Please tell us you have.” He took her hand in mock-beseeching, but she pulled it away. She was still a child, Robbie thought, not beyond confessing or blurting out that she had read his note, which in turn could lead her to describe what she had interrupted. He was watching her closely as she played for time, taking her napkin, dabbing her lips, but he felt no particular dread. If it had to, let it happen. However appalling, the dinner would not last forever, and he would find a way to be with Cecilia again that night, and together they would confront the extraordinary new fact in their lives—their changed lives—and resume. At the thought, his stomach plunged. Until that time, everything was shadowy irrelevance and he was afraid of nothing. He took a deep pull of the sugary lukewarm wine and waited. Briony said, “It’s boring of me, but I’ve done nothing wrong today.”

He had underestimated her. The emphasis could only have been intended for him and her sister. Jackson at her elbow spoke out. “Oh yes you have. You wouldn’t let there be a play. We wanted to be in the play.” The boy looked around the table, his green eyes shining with the grievance. “And you said you wanted us to.”

His brother was nodding. “Yes. You wanted us to be in it.” No one could know the extent of their disappointment.

“There, you see,” Leon said. “Briony’s hotheaded decision. On a cooler day we’d be in the library watching the theatricals now.”

These harmless inanities, far preferable to silence, allowed Robbie to retreat behind a mask of amused attention. Cecilia’s left hand was cupped above her cheek, presumably to exclude him from her peripheral vision. By appearing to listen to Leon who was now recounting his glimpse of the King in a West End theater, Robbie was able to contemplate her bare arm and shoulder, and while he did so he thought she could feel his breath on her skin, an idea which stirred him. At the top of her shoulder was a little dent, scalloped in the bone, or suspended between two bones, with a fuzz of shadow along its rim. His tongue would soon trace the oval of this rim and push into the hollow. His excitement was close to pain and sharpened by the pressure of contradictions: she was familiar like a sister, she was exotic like a lover; he had always known her, he knew nothing about her; she was plain, she was beautiful; she was capable—how easily she protected herself against her brother—and twenty minutes ago she had wept; his stupid letter repelled her but it unlocked her. He regretted it, and he exulted in his mistake. They would be alone together soon, with more contradictions—hilarity and sensuousness, desire and fear at their recklessness, awe and impatience to begin. In an unused room somewhere on the second floor, or far from the house, beneath the trees by the river. Which? Mrs. Tallis’s mother was no fool. Outdoors. They would wrap themselves in the satin darkness and begin again. And this was no fantasy, this was real, this was his near future, both desirable and unavoidable. But that was what wretched Malvolio thought, whose part he had played once on the college lawn—“Nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.”

Half an hour before there had been no hope at all. After Briony had disappeared into the house with his letter, he kept on walking, agonizing about turning back. Even when he reached the front door, his mind was not made up, and he loitered several minutes under the porch lamp and its single faithful moth, trying to choose the less disastrous of two poor options. It came down to this: go in now and face her anger and disgust, give an explanation which would not be accepted, and most likely be turned away—unbearable humiliation; or go home now without a word, leaving the impression that the letter was what he intended, be tortured all night and for days to come by brooding, knowing nothing of her reaction—even more unbearable. And spineless. He went over it again and it looked the same. There was no way out, he would have to speak to her. He put his hand over the bell push. Still, it remained tempting to walk away. He could write her an apology from the safety of his study. Coward! The cool porcelain was under the tip of his forefinger, and before the arguments could start around again, he made himself press it. He stood back from the door feeling like a man who had just swallowed a suicide pill—nothing to do but wait. From inside he heard steps, staccato female steps across the hall. When she opened the door he saw the folded note in her hand. For several seconds they continued to stare at each other and neither spoke. For all his hesitation he had prepared nothing to say. His only thought was that she was even more beautiful than his fantasies of her. The silk dress she wore seemed to worship every curve and dip of her lithe body, but the small sensual mouth was held tight in disapproval, or perhaps even disgust. The house lights behind her were strong in his eyes, making it hard to read her precise expression. Finally he said, “Cee, it was a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

Voices reached him across the hallway through the open door of the drawing room. He heard Leon’s voice, then Marshall’s. It may have been fear of interruption that caused her to step back and open the door wider for him. He followed her across the hall into the library which was in darkness, and waited by the door while she searched for the switch of a desk lamp. When it came on he pushed the door closed behind him. He guessed that in a few minutes he would be walking back across the park toward the bungalow.

“It wasn’t the version I intended to send.”

“No.”

“I put the wrong one in the envelope.”

“Yes.”

He could gauge nothing by these terse replies and he was still unable to see her expression clearly. She moved beyond the light, down past the shelves. He stepped further into the room, not quite following her, but unwilling to let her out of close range. She could have sent him packing from the front door and now there was a chance of giving an explanation before he left. She said, “Briony read it.”

“Oh God. I’m sorry.”

He had been about to conjure for her a private moment of exuberance, a passing impatience with convention, a memory of reading the Orioli edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which he had bought under the counter in Soho. But this new element—the innocent child—put his lapse beyond mitigation. It would have been frivolous to go on. He could only repeat himself, this time in a whisper.

“I’m sorry . . .”

She was moving further away, toward the corner, into deeper shadow. Even though he thought she was recoiling from him, he took another couple of steps in her direction.

“It was a stupid thing. You were never meant to read it. No one was.”

Still she shrank away. One elbow was resting on the shelves, and she seemed to slide along them, as though about to disappear between the books. He heard a soft, wet sound, the kind that is made when one is about to speak and the tongue unglues from the roof of the mouth. But she said nothing. It was only then that it occurred to him that she might not be shrinking from him, but drawing him with her deeper into the gloom. From the moment he had pressed the bell he had nothing to lose. So he walked toward her slowly as she slipped back, until she was in the corner where she stopped and watched him approach. He too stopped, less than four feet away. He was close enough now, and there was just enough light, to see she was tearful and trying to speak. For the moment it was not possible and she shook her head to indicate that he should wait. She turned aside and made a steeple of her hands to enclose her nose and mouth and pressed her fingers into the corners of her eyes. She brought herself under control and said, “It’s been there for weeks . . .” Her throat constricted and she had to pause. Instantly, he had an idea what she meant, but he pushed it away. She drew a deep breath, then continued more reflectively, “Perhaps it’s months. I don’t know. But today . . . all day it’s been strange. I mean, I’ve been seeing strangely, as if for the first time. Everything has looked different—too sharp, too real. Even my own hands looked different. At other times I seem to be watching events as if they happened long ago. And all day I’ve been furious with you—and with myself. I thought that I’d be perfectly happy never seeing you or speaking to you again. I thought you’d go off to medical school and I’d be happy. I was so angry with you. I suppose it’s been a way of not thinking about it. Rather convenient really . . .”

She gave a tense little laugh. He said, “It?”

Until now, her gaze had been lowered. When she spoke again she looked at him. He saw only the glimmer of the whites of her eyes.

“You knew before me. Something has happened, hasn’t it? And you knew before me. It’s like being close up to something so large you don’t even see it. Even now, I’m not sure I can. But I know it’s there.”

She looked down and he waited.

“I know it’s there because it made me behave ridiculously. And you, of course . . . But this morning, I’ve never done anything like that before. Afterward I was so angry about it. Even as it was happening. I told myself I’d given you a weapon to use against me. Then, this evening, when I began to understand—well, how could I have been so ignorant about myself? And so stupid?” She started, seized by an unpleasant idea. “You do know what I’m talking about. Tell me you do.” She was afraid that there was nothing shared at all, that all her assumptions were wrong and that with her words she had isolated herself further, and he would think she was a fool. He moved nearer. “I do. I know it exactly. But why are you crying? Is there something else?”

He thought she was about to broach an impossible obstacle and he meant, of course, someone, but she didn’t understand. She didn’t know how to answer and she looked at him, quite flummoxed. Why was she crying? How could she begin to tell him when so much emotion, so many emotions, simply engulfed her? He in turn felt that his question was unfair, inappropriate, and he struggled to think of a way of putting it right. They stared at each other in confusion, unable to speak, sensing that something delicately established might slip from them. That they were old friends who had shared a childhood was now a barrier—they were embarrassed before their former selves. Their friendship had become vague and even constrained in recent years, but it was still an old habit, and to break it now in order to become strangers on intimate terms required a clarity of purpose which had temporarily deserted them. For the moment, there seemed no way out with words. He put his hands on her shoulders, and her bare skin was cool to the touch. As their faces drew closer he was uncertain enough to think she might spring away, or hit him, movie-style, across the cheek with her open hand. Her mouth tasted of lipstick and salt. They drew away for a second, he put his arms around her and they kissed again with greater confidence. Daringly, they touched the tips of their tongues, and it was then she made the falling, sighing sound which, he realized later, marked a transformation. Until that moment, there was still something ludicrous about having a familiar face so close to one’s own. They felt watched by their bemused childhood selves. But the contact of tongues, alive and slippery muscle, moist flesh on flesh, and the strange sound it drew from her, changed that. This sound seemed to enter him, pierce him down his length so that his whole body opened up and he was able to step out of himself and kiss her freely. What had been self-conscious was now impersonal, almost abstract. The sighing noise she made was greedy and made him greedy too. He pushed her hard into the corner, between the books. As they kissed she was pulling at his clothes, plucking ineffectually at his shirt, his waistband. Their heads rolled and turned against one another as their kissing became a gnawing. She bit him on the cheek, not quite playfully. He pulled away, then moved back and she bit him hard on his lower lip. He kissed her throat, forcing back her head against the shelves, she pulled his hair and pushed his face down against her breasts. There was some inexpert fumbling until he found her nipple, tiny and hard, and put his mouth around it. Her spine went rigid, then juddered along its length. For a moment he thought she had passed out. Her arms were looped around his head and when she tightened her grip he rose through it, desperate to breathe, up to his full height and enfolded her, crushing her head against his chest. She bit him again and pulled at his shirt. When they heard a button ping against the floorboards, they had to suppress their grins and look away. Comedy would have destroyed them. She trapped his nipple between her teeth. The sensation was unbearable. He tilted her face up, and trapping her against his ribs, kissed her eyes and parted her lips with his tongue. Her helplessness drew from her again the sound like a sigh of disappointment. At last they were strangers, their pasts were forgotten. They were also strangers to themselves who had forgotten who or where they were. The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. His experience was limited and he knew only at second hand that they need not lie down. As for her, beyond all the films she had seen, and all the novels and lyrical poems she had read, she had no experience at all. Despite these limitations, it did not surprise them how clearly they knew their own needs. They were kissing again, her arms were clasped behind his head. She was licking his ear, then biting his earlobe. Cumulatively, these bites aroused him and enraged him, goaded him. Under her dress he felt for her buttocks and squeezed hard, and half turned her to give her a retaliatory slap, but there wasn’t quite the space. Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she reached down to remove her shoes. There was more fumbling now, with buttons and positioning of legs and arms. She had no experience at all. Without speaking, he guided her foot onto the lowest shelf. They were clumsy, but too selfless now to be embarrassed. When he lifted the clinging, silky dress again he thought her look of uncertainty mirrored his own. But there was only one inevitable end, and there was nothing they could do but go toward it. Supported against the corner by his weight, she once again clasped her hands behind his neck, and rested her elbows on his shoulder and continued to kiss his face. The moment itself was easy. They held their breath before the membrane parted, and when it did she turned away quickly, but made no sound—it seemed to be a point of pride. They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return—they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other’s eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away. Of course, there was nothing abstract about a face. The son of Grace and Ernest Turner, the daughter of Emily and Jack Tallis, the childhood friends, the university acquaintances, in a state of expansive, tranquil joy, confronted the momentous change they had achieved. The closeness of a familiar face was not ludicrous, it was wondrous. Robbie stared at the woman, the girl he had always known, thinking the change was entirely in himself, and was as fundamental, as fundamentally biological, as birth. Nothing as singular or as important had happened since the day of his birth. She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty in a face which a lifetime’s habit had taught her to ignore. She whispered his name with the deliberation of a child trying out the distinct sounds. When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word—the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different. Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she had been the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract. They had been motionless for perhaps as long as half a minute. Longer would have required the mastery of some formidable tantric art. They began to make love against the library shelves which creaked with their movement. It is common enough at such times to fantasize arriving in a remote and high place. He imagined himself strolling on a smooth, rounded mountain summit, suspended between two higher peaks. He was in an unhurried, reconnoitering mood, with time to go to a rocky edge and take a glimpse of the near-vertical scree down which he would shortly have to throw himself. It was a temptation to leap into clear space now, but he was a man of the world and he could walk away, and wait. It was not easy, for he was being drawn back and he had to resist. As long as he did not think of the edge, he would not go near it, and would not be tempted. He forced himself to remember the dullest things he knew—bootblack, an application form, a wet towel on his bedroom floor. There was also an upturned dustbin lid with an inch of rainwater inside, and the incomplete tea-ring stain on the cover of his Housman poems. This precious inventory was interrupted by the sound of her voice. She was calling to him, inviting him, murmuring in his ear. Exactly so. They would jump together. He was with her now, peering into an abyss, and they saw how the scree plunged down through the cloud cover. Hand in hand, they would fall backward. She repeated herself, mumbling in his ear, and this time he heard her clearly.

“Someone’s come in.”

He opened his eyes. It was a library, in a house, in total silence. He was wearing his best suit. Yes, it all came back to him with relative ease. He strained to look over his shoulder and saw only the dimly illuminated desk, there as before, as though remembered from a dream. From where they were in their corner, it was not possible to see the door. But there was no sound, not a thing. She was mistaken, he was desperate for her to be mistaken and she actually was. He turned back to her, and was about to tell her so, when she tightened her grip on his arm and he looked back once more. Briony moved slowly into their view, stopped by the desk and saw them. She stood there stupidly, staring at them, her arms hanging loose at her sides, like a gunslinger in a Western showdown. In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational. There was nothing personal about it, for he would have hated anyone who came in. There were drinks in the drawing room or on the terrace, and that was where Briony was supposed to be—with her mother, and the brother she adored, and the little cousins. There was no good reason why she should be in the library, except to find him and deny him what was his. He saw it clearly, how it had happened: she had opened a sealed envelope to read his note and been disgusted, and in her obscure way felt betrayed. She had come looking for her sister—no doubt with the exhilarated notion of protecting her, or admonishing her, and had heard a noise from behind the closed library door. Propelled from the depths of her ignorance, silly imagining and girlish rectitude, she had come to call a halt. And she hardly had to do that—of their own accord, they had moved apart and turned away, and now both were discreetly straightening their clothes. It was over.

The main course plates had long been cleared away and Betty had returned with the bread and butter pudding. Was it imagining on his part, Robbie wondered, or malign intent on hers, that made the adults’ portions appear twice the size of the children’s? Leon was pouring from the third bottle of Barsac. He had removed his jacket, thus allowing the other two men to do the same. There was a soft tapping on the windowpanes as various flying creatures of the night threw themselves against the glass. Mrs. Tallis dabbed at her face with a napkin and looked fondly at the twins. Pierrot was whispering in Jackson’s ear.

“No secrets at the dinner table, boys. We’d all like to hear, if you don’t mind.”

Jackson, the delegated voice, swallowed hard. His brother stared at his lap.

“We’d like to be excused, Aunt Emily. Please can we go to the lavatory?”

“Of course. But it’s may, not can. And there’s no need to be quite so specific.”

The twins slipped from their chairs. As they reached the door, Briony squealed and pointed.

“My socks! They’re wearing my strawberry socks!”

The boys halted and turned, and looked in shame from their ankles to their aunt. Briony was half standing. Robbie assumed that powerful emotions in the girl were finding release.

“You went in my room and took them from my drawer.”

Cecilia spoke for the first time during the meal. She too was venting deeper feelings.

“Shut up, for goodness’ sake! You really are a tiresome little prima donna. The boys had no clean socks so I took some of yours.”

Briony stared at her, amazed. Attacked, betrayed, by the one she only longed to protect. Jackson and Pierrot were still looking toward their aunt who dismissed them now with a quizzical tilt of her head and a faint nod. They closed the door behind them with exaggerated, perhaps even satirical, care, and at the moment they released the handle Emily picked up her spoon and the company followed her. She said mildly, “You could be a little less expressive toward your sister.”

As Cecilia turned toward her mother Robbie caught a whiff of underarm perspiration, which put him in mind of freshly cut grass. Soon they would be outside. Briefly, he closed his eyes. A two-pint jug of custard was placed beside him, and he wondered that he had the strength to lift it.

“I’m sorry, Emily. But she has been quite over the top all day long.”

Briony spoke with adult calm. “That’s pretty strong, coming from you.”

“Meaning what?”

That, Robbie knew, was not the question to ask. At this stage in her life Briony inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed unpredictably. In the present situation she was less dangerous as an indignant little girl. In fact, Briony herself had no clear idea of what she meant, but Robbie could not know this as he moved in quickly to change the subject. He turned to Lola on his left, and said in a way that was intended to include the whole table, “They’re nice lads, your brothers.”

“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

HOWEVER 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. Wronged child, wronged wife. But she was not as unhappy as she should be. One role had prepared her for the other. She paused in the entrance to the drawing room and observed that the chocolate-smeared cocktail glasses had yet to be cleared away, and that the doors into the garden still stood open. Now the faintest stirring of a breeze rustled the display of sedge that stood before the fireplace. Two or three stout-bodied moths circled the lamp that stood upon the harpsichord. When would anyone ever play it again? That night creatures were drawn to lights where they could be most easily eaten by other creatures was one of those mysteries that gave her modest pleasure. She preferred not to have it explained away. At a formal dinner once a professor of some science or other, wanting to make small talk, had pointed out a few insects gyrating above a candelabra. He had told her that it was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest place, on the far side of the light—and in this case it was an illusion. It sounded to her like sophistry, or an explanation for its own sake. How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect? Not everything had a cause, and pretending otherwise was an interference in the workings of the world that was futile, and could even lead to grief. Some things were simply so. She did not wish to know why Jack spent so many consecutive nights in London. Or rather, she did not wish to be told. Nor did she wish to know more about the work that kept him late at the Ministry. Months ago, not long after Christmas, she went into the library to wake him from an afternoon sleep and saw a file open upon the desk. It was only the mildest wifely curiosity that prompted her to peep, for she had little interest in civic administration. On one page she saw a list of headings: exchange controls, rationing, the mass evacuation of large towns, the conscription of labor. The facing page was handwritten. A series of arithmetical calculations was interspersed by blocks of text. Jack’s straight-backed, brown-ink copperplate told her to assume a multiplier of fifty. For every one ton of explosive dropped, assume fifty casualties. Assume 100,000 tons of bombs dropped in two weeks. Result: five million casualties. She had not yet woken him and his soft, whistling exhalations blended with winter birdsong that came from somewhere beyond the lawn. Aqueous sunlight rippled over the spines of books and the smell of warm dust was everywhere. She went to the window and stared out, trying to spot the bird among bare oak branches that stood out black against a broken sky of gray and palest blue. She knew well there had to be such forms of bureaucratic supposition. And yes, there were precautions administrators took to indemnify themselves against all eventualities. But these extravagant numbers were surely a form of self-aggrandizement, and reckless to the point of irresponsibility. Jack, the household’s protector, its guarantor of tranquillity, was relied on to take the long view. But this was silly. When she woke him he grunted and leaned forward with a sudden movement to close the files, and then, still seated, pulled her hand to his mouth and kissed it dryly.

She decided against closing the French windows, and sat down at one end of the Chesterfield. She was not exactly waiting, she felt. No one else she knew had her knack of keeping still, without even a book on her lap, of moving gently through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden. She had learned her patience through years of sidestepping migraine. Fretting, concentrated thought, reading, looking, wanting—all were to be avoided in favor of a slow drift of association, while the minutes accumulated like banked snow and the silence deepened around her. Sitting here now she felt the night air tickle the hem of her dress against her shin. Her childhood was as tangible as the shot silk—a taste, a sound, a smell, all of these, blended into an entity that was surely more than a mood. There was a presence in the room, her aggrieved, overlooked ten-year-old self, a girl even quieter than Briony, who used to wonder at the massive emptiness of time, and marvel that the nineteenth century was about to end. How like her, to sit in the room like this, not “joining in.” This ghost had been summoned not by Lola imitating Hermione, or the inscrutable twins disappearing into the night. It was the slow retraction, the retreat into autonomy which signaled the approaching end of Briony’s childhood. It was haunting Emily once more. Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child. She wasn’t a fool. She knew it was self-pity, this mellow expansiveness as she contemplated what looked like her own ruin: Briony would surely go off to her sister’s college, Girton, and she, Emily, would grow stiffer in the limbs and more irrelevant by the day; age and weariness would return Jack to her, and nothing would be said, or needed to be said. And here was the ghost of her childhood, diffused throughout the room, to remind her of the limited arc of existence. How quickly the story was over. Not massive and empty at all, but headlong. Ruthless. Her spirits were not particularly lowered by these commonplace reflections. She floated above them, gazing down neutrally, absently braiding them with other preoccupations. She planned to plant a clump of ceanothus along the approach to the swimming pool. Robbie was wanting to persuade her to erect a pergola and train along it a slow-growing wisteria whose flower and scent he liked. But she and Jack would be long buried before the full effect was achieved. The story would be over. She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity? She liked him well enough, and was pleased for Grace Turner that he had turned out to be bright. But really, he was a hobby of Jack’s, living proof of some leveling principle he had pursued through the years. When he spoke about Robbie, which wasn’t often, it was with a touch of self-righteous vindication. Something had been established which Emily took to be a criticism of herself. She had opposed Jack when he proposed paying for the boy’s education, which smacked of meddling to her, and unfair on Leon and the girls. She did not consider herself proved wrong simply because Robbie had come away from Cambridge with a first. In fact, it had made things harder for Cecilia with her third, though it was preposterous of her to pretend to be disappointed. Robbie’s elevation. “Nothing good will come of it” was the phrase she often used, to which Jack would respond smugly that plenty of good had come already. For all that, Briony had been thoroughly improper at dinner to speak that way to Robbie. If she had resentments of her own, Emily sympathized. It was to be expected. But to express them was undignified. Thinking of the dinner again—how artfully Mr. Marshall had put everyone at ease. Was he suitable? It was a pity about his looks, with one half of his face looking like an overfurnished bedroom. Perhaps in time it would come to seem rugged, this chin like a wedge of cheese. Or chocolate. If he really were to supply the whole of the British Army with Amo bars he could become immensely rich. But Cecilia, having learned modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in chemistry incomplete as a human being. Her very words. She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home—Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else? Even a chemist had his uses. And this one had found a way of making chocolate out of sugar, chemicals, brown coloring and vegetable oil. And no cocoa butter. To produce a ton of the stuff, he had explained over his astonishing cocktail, cost next to nothing. He could undercut his competitors and increase his profit margin. Vulgarly put, but what comfort, what untroubled years might flow from these cheap vats. More than thirty minutes passed unnoticed as these scraps—memories, judgments, vague resolutions, questions—uncoiled quietly before her, while she barely shifted her position and did not hear the clock strike the quarter hours. She was aware of the breeze strengthening, pushing one French window closed, before dying down once more. She was disturbed later by Betty and her helpers clearing the dining room, then those sounds also subsided and, again, Emily was far out along the branching roads of her reveries, drifting by association, and with the expertise born of a thousand headaches, avoiding all things sudden or harsh. When at last the phone rang she rose immediately, without any start of surprise, and went back out into the hallway, lifted the receiver and called out as she always did on a rising note of a question,

“Tallises?”

There came the switchboard, the nasal assistant, a pause and the crackle of the long-distance line, then Jack’s neutral tone.

“Dearest. Later than usual. I’m terribly sorry.”

It was eleven-thirty. But she did not mind, for he would be back at the weekend, and one day he would be home forever and not an unkind word would be spoken. She said, “It’s perfectly all right.”

“It’s the revisions to the Statement Relating to Defense. There’s to be a second printing. And then one thing and another.”

“Rearmament,” she said soothingly.

“I’m afraid so.”

“You know, everyone’s against it.”

He chuckled. “Not in this office.”

“And I am.”

“Well, my dear. I hope to persuade you one day.”

“And I you.”

The exchange held a trace of affection, and its familiarity was comfort. As usual, he asked for an account of her day. She told him of the great heat, the collapse of Briony’s play, and the arrival of Leon with his friend of whom she said, “He’s in your camp. But he wants more soldiers so that he can sell the government his chocolate bar.”

“I see. Plowshares into tinfoil.”

She described the dinner, and Robbie’s wild look at the table. “Do we really need to be putting him through medical college?”

“We do. It’s a bold move. Typical of him. I know he’ll make a go of it.”

Then she gave an account of how the dinner ended with the twins’ note, and the search parties going off into the grounds.

“Little scallywags. And where were they after all?”

“I don’t know. I’m still waiting to hear.”

There was silence down the line, broken only by distant mechanical clicking. When the senior Civil Servant spoke at last he had already made his decisions. The rare use of her first name conveyed his seriousness.

“I’m going to put the telephone down now, Emily, because I’m going to call the police.”

“Is it really necessary? By the time they get here . . .”

“If you hear any news you’ll let me know straightaway.”

“Wait . . .”

At a sound she had turned. Leon was coming through the main door. Close behind him was Cecilia whose look was one of mute bewilderment. Then came Briony with an arm round her cousin’s shoulders. Lola’s face was so white and rigid, like a clay mask, that Emily, unable to read an expression there, instantly knew the worst. Where were the twins? Leon crossed the hall toward her, his hand outstretched for the phone. There was a streak of dirt from his trouser cuffs to the knees. Mud, and in such dry weather. His breathing was heavy from exertion, and a greasy lank of hair swung over his face as he snatched the receiver from her and turned his back.

“Is that you, Daddy? Yes. Look, I think you’d better come down. No, we haven’t, and there’s worse. No, no, I can’t tell you now. If you can, tonight. We’ll have to phone them anyway. Best you do it.”

She put her hand over her heart and took a couple of paces back to where Cecilia and the girls stood watching. Leon had lowered his voice and was muttering quickly into the cupped receiver. Emily couldn’t hear a word, and did not want to. She would have preferred to retreat upstairs to her room, but Leon finished the call with an echoing rattle of the Bakelite and turned to her. His eyes were tight and hard, and she wondered if it was anger that she saw. He was trying to take deeper breaths, and he stretched his lips across his teeth in a strange grimace. He said, “We’ll go in the drawing room where we can sit down.”

She caught his meaning precisely. He wouldn’t tell her now, he wouldn’t have her collapsing on the tiles and cracking her skull. She stared at him, but she did not move.

“Come on, Emily,” he said. Her son’s hand was hot and heavy on her shoulder, and she felt its dampness through the silk. Helplessly, she let herself be guided toward the drawing room, all her terror concentrated on the simple fact that he wanted her seated before he broke his news.

Thirteen

WITHIN THE half hour Briony would commit her crime. Conscious that she was sharing the night expanse with a maniac, she kept close to the shadowed walls of the house at first, and ducked low beneath the sills whenever she passed in front of a lighted window. She knew he would be heading off down the main drive because that was the way her sister had gone with Leon. As soon as she thought a safe distance had opened up, Briony swung out boldly from the house in a wide arc that took her toward the stable block and the swimming pool. It made sense, surely, to see if the twins were there, fooling about with the hoses, or floating facedown in death, indistinguishable to the last. She thought how she might describe it, the way they bobbed on the illuminated water’s gentle swell, and how their hair spread like tendrils and their clothed bodies softly collided and drifted apart. The dry night air slipped between the fabric of her dress and her skin, and she felt smooth and agile in the dark. There was nothing she could not describe: the gentle pad of a maniac’s tread moving sinuously along the drive, keeping to the verge to muffle his approach. But her brother was with Cecilia, and that was a burden lifted. She could describe this delicious air too, the grasses giving off their sweet cattle smell, the hard-fired earth which still held the embers of the day’s heat and exhaled the mineral odor of clay, and the faint breeze carrying from the lake a flavor of green and silver. She broke into a loping run across the grass and thought she could go on all night, knifing through the silky air, sprung forward by the steely coil of the hard ground under her feet, and by the way darkness doubled the impression of speed. She had dreams in which she ran like this, then tilted forward, spread her arms and, yielding to faith—the only difficult part, but easy enough in sleep—left the ground by simply stepping off it, and swooped low over hedges and gates and roofs, then hurtled upward and hovered exultantly below the cloud base, above the fields, before diving down again. She sensed now how this might be achieved, through desire alone; the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen. And then, when it did, she would describe it. Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination? But there was a maniac treading through the night with a dark, unfulfilled heart—she had frustrated him once already—and she needed to be earthbound to describe him too. She must first protect her sister against him, and then find ways of conjuring him safely on paper. Briony slowed to a walking pace, and thought how he must hate her for interrupting him in the library. And though it horrified her, it was another entry, a moment of coming into being, another first: to be hated by an adult. Children hated generously, capriciously. It hardly mattered. But to be the object of adult hatred was an initiation into a solemn new world. It was promotion. He might have doubled back, and be waiting for her with murderous thoughts behind the stable block. But she was trying not to be afraid. She had held his gaze there in the library while her sister had slipped past her, giving no outward acknowledgment of her deliverance. It was not about thanks, she knew that, it was not about rewards. In matters of selfless love, nothing needed to be said, and she would protect her sister, even if Cecilia failed to acknowledge her debt. And Briony could not be afraid now of Robbie; better by far to let him become the object of her detestation and disgust. They had provided for all manner of pleasant things for him, the Tallis family: the very home he had grown up in, countless trips to France, and his grammar school uniform and books, and then Cambridge—and in return he had used a terrible word against her sister and, in a fantastic abuse of hospitality, used his strength against her too, and sat insolently at their dining table pretending that nothing was different. The pretense, and how she ached to expose it! Real life, her life now beginning, had sent her a villain in the form of an old family friend with strong, awkward limbs and a rugged friendly face who used to carry her on his back, and swim with her in the river, holding her against the current. That seemed about right—truth was strange and deceptive, it had to be struggled for, against the flow of the everyday. This was exactly what no one would have expected, and of course villains were not announced with hisses or soliloquies, they did not come cloaked in black, with ugly expressions. Across the other side of the house, walking away from her, were Leon and Cecilia. She might be telling him about the assault. If she was, he would have his arm around her shoulders. Together, the Tallis children would see this brute off, see him safely out of their lives. They would have to confront and convert their father, and comfort him in his rage and disappointment. That his protégé should turn out to be a maniac! Lola’s word stirred the dust of other words around it—man, mad, ax, attack, accuse—and confirmed the diagnosis. She made her way round the stable block and stopped under the arched entrance, beneath the clock tower. She called out the twins’ names, and heard in reply only the stir and scuff of hooves, and the thump of a heavy body pressing against a stall. She was glad she had never fallen for a horse or pony, for she would surely be neglecting it by this stage of her life. She did not approach the animals now, even though they sensed her presence. In their terms, a genius, a god, was loitering on the periphery of their world and they were straining for her attention. But she turned and continued toward the swimming pool. She wondered whether having final responsibility for someone, even a creature like a horse or a dog, was fundamentally opposed to the wild and inward journey of writing. Protective worrying, engaging with another’s mind as one entered it, taking the dominant role as one guided another’s fate, was hardly mental freedom. Perhaps she might become one of those women—pitied or envied—who chose not to have children. She followed the brick path that led round the outside of the stable block. Like the earth, the sandy bricks radiated the day’s trapped heat. She felt it on her cheek and down her bare calf as she passed along. She stumbled as she hurried through the darkness of the bamboo tunnel, and emerged onto the reassuring geometry of the paving stones. The underwater lights, installed that spring, were still a novelty. The upward bluish gleam gave everything around the pool a colorless, moonlit look, like a photograph. A glass jug, two tumblers and a piece of cloth stood on the old tin table. A third tumbler containing pieces of soft fruit stood poised at the end of the diving board. There were no bodies in the pool, no giggling from the darkness of the pavilion, no shushing from the shadows of the bamboo thickets. She took a slow turn around the pool, no longer searching, but drawn to the glow and glassy stillness of the water. For all the threat the maniac posed to her sister, it was delightful to be out so late, with permission. She did not really think the twins were in danger. Even if they had seen the framed map of the area in the library and were clever enough to read it, and were intending to leave the grounds and walk north all night, they would have to follow the drive into the woods along by the railway line. At this time of year, when the tree canopy was thick over the road, the way was in total blackness. The only other route out was through the kissing gate, down toward the river. But here too there would be no light, no way of keeping to the path or ducking the branches that hung low over it, or dodging the nettles that grew thickly on either side. They would not be bold enough to put themselves in danger. They were safe, Cecilia was with Leon, and she, Briony, was free to wander in the dark and contemplate her extraordinary day. Her childhood had ended, she decided now as she came away from the swimming pool, the moment she tore down her poster. The fairy stories were behind her, and in the space of a few hours she had witnessed mysteries, seen an unspeakable word, interrupted brutal behavior, and by incurring the hatred of an adult whom everyone had trusted, she had become a participant in the drama of life beyond the nursery. All she had to do now was discover the stories, not just the subjects, but a way of unfolding them, that would do justice to her new knowledge. Or did she mean, her wiser grasp of her own ignorance? Staring at water for minutes on end had put her in mind of the lake. Perhaps the boys were hiding in the island temple. It was obscure, but not too cut off from the house, a friendly little place with the consolation of water and not too many shadows. The others might have gone straight across the bridge without looking down there. She decided to keep to her route and reach the lake by circling round the back of the house. Two minutes later she was crossing the rose beds and the gravel path in front of the Triton fountain, scene of another mystery that clearly foretold the later brutalities. As she passed it she thought she heard a faint shout, and thought she saw from the corner of her eye a point of light flash on and off. She stopped, and strained to hear over the sound of trickling water. The shout and the light had come from the woods by the river, a few hundred yards away. She walked in that direction for half a minute, and stopped to listen again. But there was nothing, nothing but the tumbling dark mass of the woods just discernible against the grayish-blue of the western sky. After waiting a while she decided to turn back. In order to pick up her path she was walking directly toward the house, toward the terrace where a paraffin globe lamp shone among glasses, bottles, and an ice bucket. The drawing-room French windows still stood wide open to the night. She could see right into the room. And by the light of a single lamp she could see, partially obscured by the hang of a velvet curtain, one end of a sofa across which there lay at a peculiar angle a cylindrical object that seemed to hover. It was only after she had covered another fifty yards that she understood that she was looking at a disembodied human leg. Closer still, and she grasped the perspectives; it was her mother’s of course, and she would be waiting for the twins. She was mostly obscured by the drapes, and one stockinged leg was supported by the knee of the other, which gave it its curious, slanting and levitated appearance. Briony moved to a window on her left as she came right up to the house in order to be clear of Emily’s sight line. She was positioned too far behind her mother to see her eyes. She could make out only the dip in her cheekbone of her eye socket. Briony was certain her eyes would be closed. Her head was tilted back, and her hands lay lightly clasped in her lap. Her right shoulder rose and fell faintly with her breathing. Briony could not see her mouth, but she knew its downward curve, easily mistaken for the sign—the hieroglyph—of reproach. But it was not so, because her mother was endlessly kind and sweet and good. Looking at her sitting alone, late at night, was sad, but pleasantly so. Briony indulged herself by looking through the window in a spirit of farewell. Her mother was forty-six, dispiritingly old. One day she would die. There would be a funeral in the village at which Briony’s dignified reticence would hint at the vastness of her sorrow. As her friends came up to murmur their condolences they would feel awed by the scale of her tragedy. She saw herself standing alone in a great arena, within a towering colosseum, watched not only by all the people she knew but by all those she would ever know, the whole cast of her life, assembled to love her in her loss. And at the churchyard, in what they called the grandparents’ corner, she and Leon and Cecilia would stand in an interminable embrace in the long grass by the new headstone, again watched. It had to be witnessed. It was the pity of these well-wishers that pricked her eyes. She could have gone in to her mother then and snuggled close beside her and begun a résumé of the day. If she had she would not have committed her crime. So much would not have happened, nothing would have happened, and the smoothing hand of time would have made the evening barely memorable: the night the twins ran away. Was it thirty-four, or five or six? But for no particular reason, apart from the vague obligation of the search and the pleasure of being out so late, she came away, and as she did so her shoulder caught an edge of one of the open French windows, knocking it shut. The sound was sharp—seasoned pine on hardwood—and rang out like a rebuke. To stay she would have to explain herself, so she slipped away into the darkness, tiptoeing quickly over the slabs of stone and the scented herbs that grew between them. Then she was on the lawn between the rose beds where it was possible to run soundlessly. She came round the side of the house to the front, onto the gravel she had hobbled across barefoot that afternoon. Here she slowed as she turned down the driveway toward the bridge. She was back at her starting point and thought she was bound to see the others, or hear their calls. But there was no one. The dark shapes of the widely spaced trees across the park made her hesitate. Someone hated her, that had to be remembered, and he was unpredictable and violent. Leon, Cecilia and Mr. Marshall would be a long way off now. The nearer trees, or at least their trunks, had a human form. Or could conceal one. Even a man standing in front of a tree trunk would not be visible to her. For the first time, she was aware of the breeze pouring through the tops of the trees, and this familiar sound unsettled her. Millions of separate and precise agitations bombarded her senses. When the wind picked up briefly and died, the sound moved away from her, traveling out across the darkened park like a living thing. She stopped and wondered whether she had the courage to keep on to the bridge, cross it, and leave it to go down the steep bank to the island temple. Especially when there really was not much at stake—just a hunch of hers that the boys may have wandered down there. Unlike the adults, she had no torch. Nothing was expected of her, she was a child after all in their eyes. The twins were not in danger. 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. She was like a bride-to-be who begins to feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches, and dares not speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on her behalf. The happiness and convenience of so many good people would be put at risk. These are fleeting moments of private disquiet, only dispelled by abandoning herself to the joy and excitement of those around her. So many decent people could not be wrong, and doubts like hers, she’s been told, are to be expected. Briony did not wish to cancel the whole arrangement. She did not think she had the courage, after all her initial certainty and two or three days of patient, kindly interviewing, to withdraw her evidence. However, she would have preferred to qualify, or complicate, her use of the word “saw.” Less like seeing, more like knowing. Then she could have left it to her interrogators to decide whether they would proceed together in the name of this kind of vision. They were impassive whenever she wavered, and firmly recalled her to her earliest statements. Was she a silly girl, their manner implied, who had wasted everybody’s time? And they took an austere view of the visual. There was enough light, it was established, from stars, and from the cloud base reflecting streetlights from the nearest town. Either she saw, or she did not see. There lay nothing in between; they did not say as much, but their brusqueness implied it. It was in those moments, when she felt their coolness, that she reached back to revive her first ardor and said it again. I saw him. I know it was him. Then it was comforting to feel she was confirming what they already knew. She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence of spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar. Her doubts could be neutralized only by plunging in deeper. By clinging tightly to what she believed she knew, narrowing her thoughts, reiterating her testimony, she was able to keep from mind the damage she only dimly sensed she was doing. When the matter was closed, when the sentence was passed and the congregation dispersed, a ruthless youthful forgetting, a willful erasing, protected her well into her teens.

“Well I can. And I will.”

They sat in silence for a while, and Lola’s shivering began to subside. Briony supposed she should get her cousin home, but she was reluctant to break this closeness for the moment—she had her arms around the older girl’s shoulders and she seemed to yield now to Briony’s touch. They saw far beyond the lake a bobbing pinprick of light—a torch being carried along the drive—but they did not comment on it. When at last Lola spoke her tone was reflective, as though she were pondering subtle currents of counterarguments.

“But it doesn’t make sense. He’s such a close friend of your family. It might not have been him.”

Briony murmured, “You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d been with me in the library.”

Lola sighed and shook her head slowly, as though trying to reconcile herself to the unacceptable truth. They were silent again and they might have sat longer had it not been for the damp—not quite yet dew—that was beginning to settle on the grass as the clouds cleared and the temperature dropped. When Briony whispered to her cousin, “Do you think you can walk?” she nodded bravely. Briony helped her to stand, and arm in arm at first, and then with Lola’s weight on Briony’s shoulder, they made their way across the clearing toward the bridge. They reached the bottom of the slope and it was here that Lola finally began to cry.

“I can’t go up there,” she had several attempts at saying. “I’m just too weak.” It would be better, Briony decided, for her to run to the house and fetch help, and she was just about to explain this to Lola and settle her on the ground when they heard voices from the road above, and then torchlight was in their eyes. It was a miracle, Briony thought, when she heard her brother’s voice. Like the true hero he was, he came down the bank in several easy strides and without even asking what the trouble was, took Lola into his arms and picked her up as though she were a small child. Cecilia was calling down in a voice that sounded hoarse with concern. No one answered her. Leon was already making his way up the incline at such a pace it was an effort to keep up with him. Even so, before they reached the driveway, before he had the chance to set Lola down, Briony was beginning to tell him what had happened, exactly as she had seen it.

Fourteen

HER MEMORIES of the interrogation and signed statements and testimony, or of her awe outside the courtroom from which her youth excluded her, would not trouble her so much in the years to come as her fragmented recollection of that late night and summer dawn. How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime. Back in the house at last, there began a dreamlike time of grave arrivals, tears and subdued voices and urgent footsteps across the hallway, and her own vile excitement that kept her drowsiness at bay. Of course, Briony was old enough to know that the moment was entirely Lola’s, but she was soon led away by sympathetic womanly hands to her bedroom to await the doctor and his examination. Briony watched from the foot of the stairs as Lola ascended, sobbing loudly and flanked by Emily and Betty, and followed by Polly who carried a basin and towels. Her cousin’s removal left Briony center stage—there was no sign yet of Robbie—and the way she was listened to, deferred to and gently prompted seemed at one with her new maturity. It must have been about this time that a Humber stopped outside the house and two police inspectors and two constables were shown in. Briony was their only source, and she made herself speak calmly. Her vital role fueled her certainty. This was in the unstructured time before formal interviews, when she was standing facing the officers in the hallway, with Leon on one side of her and her mother on the other. But how had her mother materialized so quickly from Lola’s bedside? The senior inspector had a heavy face, rich in seams, as though carved from folded granite. Briony was fearful of him as she told her story to this watchful unmoving mask; as she did so she felt a weight lifting from her and a warm submissive feeling spread from her stomach to her limbs. It was like love, a sudden love for this watchful man who stood unquestioningly for the cause of goodness, who came out at all hours to do battle in its name, and who was backed by all the human powers and wisdom that existed. Under his neutral gaze her throat constricted and her voice began to buckle. She wanted the inspector to embrace her and comfort her and forgive her, however guiltless she was. But he would only look at her and listen. It was him. I saw him. Her tears were further proof of the truth she felt and spoke, and when her mother’s hand caressed her nape, she broke down completely and was led toward the drawing room. But if she was there being consoled by her mother on the Chesterfield, how did she come to remember the arrival of Dr. McLaren in his black waistcoat and his old-fashioned raised shirt collar, carrying the Gladstone bag that had been witness to the three births and all the childhood illnesses of the Tallis household? Leon conferred with the doctor, leaning toward him to murmur a manly summary of events. Where was Leon’s carefree lightness now? This quiet consultation was typical of the hours to come. Each fresh arrival was briefed in this way; people—police, doctor, family members, servants—stood in knots that unraveled and re-formed in corners of rooms, the hallway and the terrace outside the French windows. Nothing was brought together, or formulated in public. Everyone knew the terrible facts of a violation, but it remained everyone’s secret, shared in whispers among shifting groups that broke away self-importantly to new business. Even more serious, potentially, was the matter of the missing children. But the general view, constantly reiterated like a magic spell, was that they were safely asleep somewhere in the park. In this way attention remained mostly fixed on the plight of the girl upstairs. Paul Marshall came in from searching and learned the news from the inspectors. He walked up and down the terrace with them, one on each side, and on the turn offered them cigarettes from a gold case. When their conversation was over, he patted the senior man on the shoulder and seemed to send them on their way. Then he came inside to confer with Emily Tallis. Leon led the doctor upstairs who descended some while later intangibly enlarged by his professional encounter with the core of all their concerns. He too stood in lengthy conference with the two plainclothesmen, and then with Leon, and finally with Leon and Mrs. Tallis. Not long before his departure, the doctor came and placed his familiar small dry hand on Briony’s forehead, fingered her pulse and was satisfied. He took up his bag, but before he was gone there was a final muttered interview by the front door. Where was Cecilia? She hovered on the peripheries, speaking to no one, always smoking, raising the cigarette to her lips with a rapid, hungry movement, and pulling it away in agitated disgust. At other times she twisted a handkerchief in her hand as she paced the hallway. Normally, she would have taken control of a situation like this, directing the care of Lola, reassuring her mother, listening to the doctor’s advice, consulting with Leon. Briony was close by when her brother came over to talk to Cecilia, who turned away, unable to help, or even speak. As for their mother, untypically she rose to the crisis, free of migraine and the need to be alone. She actually grew as her older daughter shrank into private misery. There were times when Briony, called on again to give her account, or some detail of it, saw her sister approach within earshot and look on with a smoldering impenetrable gaze. Briony became nervous of her and kept close to her mother’s side. Cecilia’s eyes were bloodshot. While others stood murmuring in groups, she moved restlessly up and down the room, or from one room to another, or, on at least two occasions, went to stand outside the front door. Nervously, she transferred the hankie from one hand to the other, coiled it between her fingers, unwound it, squeezed it in a ball, took it in the other hand, lit another cigarette. When Betty and Polly brought round tea, Cecilia would not touch it. Word came down that Lola, sedated by the doctor, was at last asleep, and the news provided temporary relief. Unusually, everyone had gathered in the drawing room where tea was taken in exhausted silence. Nobody said it, but they were waiting for Robbie. Also, Mr. Tallis was expected from London at any moment. Leon and Marshall were leaning over a map they were drawing of the grounds for the inspector’s benefit. He took it, studied it and passed it to his assistant. The two constables had been sent out to join those looking for Pierrot and Jackson, and more policemen were supposed to be on their way down to the bungalow in case Robbie had gone there. Like Marshall, Cecilia sat apart, on the harpsichord stool. At one point she rose to get a light from her brother, but it was the chief inspector who obliged her with his own lighter. Briony was next to her mother on the sofa, and Betty and Polly took round the tray. Briony was to have no memory of what suddenly prompted her. An idea of great clarity and persuasiveness came from nowhere, and she did not need to announce her intentions, or ask her sister’s permission. Clinching evidence, cleanly independent of her own version. Verification. Or even another, separate crime. She startled the room with her gasp of inspiration, and almost knocked her mother’s tea from her lap as she stood. They all watched as she hurried from the room, but no one questioned her, such was the general fatigue. She, on the other hand, was taking the stairs two at a time, energized now by a sense of doing and being good, on the point of springing a surprise that could only earn her praise. It was rather like that Christmas morning sensation of being about to give a present that was bound to cause delight, a joyful feeling of blameless self-love. She ran along the second-floor corridor to Cecilia’s room. What squalor and disorder her sister lived in! Both wardrobe doors hung wide open. Various dresses were skewed out of their rows and some were half off their hangers. On the floor two dresses, one black, one pink, silky expensive-looking things, lay in a tangle, and round this pile lay kicked-off shoes on their sides. Briony stepped over and around the mess to get to the dressing table. What was the impulse that prevented Cecilia from replacing the caps and lids and screwtops of her makeup and perfumes? Why did she never empty her stinking ashtray? Or make her bed, or open a window to let in the fresh air? The first drawer she tried opened only a couple of inches—it was jammed, crammed full of bottles and a cardboard package. Cecilia might have been ten years older, but there really was something quite hopeless and helpless about her. Even though Briony was fearful of the wild look her sister had downstairs, it was right, the younger girl thought as she pulled open another drawer, that she was there for her, thinking clearly, on her behalf. Five minutes later, when she reentered the drawing room in triumph, no one paid her any attention, and everything was exactly the same—tired, miserable adults sipping tea and smoking in silence. In her excitement she had not considered who it was she should give the letter to; a trick of her imagination had everyone reading it at once. She decided Leon should have it. She crossed the room toward her brother, but when she arrived in front of the three men she changed her mind and put the folded sheet of paper into the hands of the policeman with the face of granite. If he had an expression, it did not change as he took the letter nor when he read it, which he did at great speed, almost at a glance. His eyes met hers, then shifted to take in Cecilia who was facing away. With the slightest movement of his wrist he indicated that the other policeman should take the letter. When he was finished it was passed on to Leon who read it, folded it and returned it to the senior inspector. Briony was impressed by the muted response—such was the three men’s worldliness. It was only now that Emily Tallis became aware of the focus of their interest. In answer to her unemphatic query Leon said, “It’s just a letter.”

“I’ll read it.”

For the second time that evening Emily was obliged to assert her rights over written messages passing through her household. Feeling that nothing more was required of her, Briony went to sit on the Chesterfield and watched from her mother’s perspective the chivalrous unease that shifted between Leon and the policemen.

“I’ll read it.”

Ominously, she did not vary her tone. Leon shrugged and forced an apologetic smile—what possible objection could he have?—and Emily’s mild gaze settled on the two inspectors. She belonged to a generation that treated policemen as menials, whatever their rank. Obedient to the nod from his superior, the younger inspector crossed the room and presented the letter to her. At last Cecilia, who must have been a long way off in her thoughts, was taking an interest. Then the letter lay exposed on her mother’s lap, and Cecilia was on her feet, then moving toward them from the harpsichord stool.

“How dare you! How dare you all!”

Leon stood too and made a calming gesture with his palms. “Cee . . .”

When she made a lunge to snatch the letter from her mother, she found not only her brother but the two policemen in her way. Marshall was standing too, but not interfering.

“It belongs to me,” she shouted. “You have absolutely no right!”

Emily did not even look up from her reading, and she gave herself time to read the letter several times over. When she was done she met her daughter’s fury with her own colder version.

“If you had done the right thing, young lady, with all your education, and come to me with this, then something could have been done in time and your cousin would have been spared her nightmare.”

For a moment Cecilia stood alone in the center of the room, fluttering the fingers of her right hand, staring at them each in turn, unable to believe her association with such people, unable to begin to tell them what she knew. And though Briony felt vindicated by the reaction of the adults, and was experiencing the onset of a sweet and inward rapture, she was also pleased to be down on the sofa with her mother, partially screened by the standing men from her sister’s red-eyed contempt. She held them in its grip for several seconds before she turned and walked out of the room. As she went across the hallway she gave out a cry of sheer vexation which was amplified by the raw acoustic of the bare floor tiles. In the drawing room there was a sense of relief, of relaxation almost, as they heard her go up the stairs. When Briony next remembered to look, the letter was in Marshall’s hands and he was passing it back to the inspector who placed it unfolded into a binder which the younger policeman was holding open for him. The hours of the night spun away from her and she remained untired. It occurred to no one to send her to her bed. Some immeasurable time after Cecilia had gone to her room, Briony went with her mother to the library to have the first of her formal interviews with the police. Mrs. Tallis remained standing, while Briony sat on one side of the writing desk and the inspectors sat on the other. The one with the face of ancient rock, who was the one who asked the questions, turned out to be infinitely kind, speaking his unhurried questions in a gruff voice that was both gentle and sad. Since she was able to show them the precise location of Robbie’s attack on Cecilia, they all wandered into that corner of the bookshelves to take a closer look. Briony wedged herself in, with her back to the books to show them how her sister was positioned, and saw the first mid-blue touches of dawn in the panes of the library’s high windows. She stepped out and turned around to demonstrate the attacker’s stance and showed where she herself had stood. Emily said, “But why didn’t you tell me?”

The policemen looked at Briony and waited. It was a good question, but it would never have occurred to her to trouble her mother. Nothing but a migraine would have come of it.

“We were called into dinner, then the twins ran off.”

She explained how she came by the letter, on the bridge at dusk. What led her to open it? Difficult to describe the impulsive moment, when she had not permitted herself to think of the consequences before acting, or how the writer she had only that day become needed to know, to understand everything that came her way. She said, “I don’t know. I was being horribly nosy. I hated myself.”

It was about this time that a constable put his head round the door to give news that seemed at one with the calamity of the night. Mr. Tallis’s driver had rung from a phone box near Croydon Airport. The departmental car, made available at short notice through the kindness of the minister, had broken down in the suburbs. Jack Tallis was asleep under a rug on the backseat and would probably have to continue by the first morning train. Once these facts had been absorbed and lamented, Briony was gently returned to the scene itself, to the events on the lake island. At this early stage, the inspector was careful not to oppress the young girl with probing questions, and within this sensitively created space she was able to build and shape her narrative in her own words and establish the key facts: there was just sufficient light for her to recognize a familiar face; when he shrank away from her and circled the clearing, his movements and height were familiar to her as well.

“You saw him then.”

“I know it was him.”

“Let’s forget what you know. You’re saying you saw him.”

“Yes, I saw him.”

“Just as you see me.”

“Yes.”

“You saw him with your own eyes.”

“Yes. I saw him. I saw him.”

Thus her first formal interview concluded. While she sat in the drawing room, feeling her tiredness at last, but unwilling to go to bed, her mother was questioned, then Leon and Paul Marshall. Old Hardman and his son Danny were brought in for interview. Briony heard Betty say that Danny was at home all evening with his father who was able to vouch for him. Various constables came to the front door from searching for the twins and were shown through to the kitchen. In the confused and unmemorable time of that early dawn, Briony gathered that Cecilia was refusing to leave her room, refusing to come down to be interviewed. In the days to come she would be given no choice and when she finally yielded up her own account of what happened in the library—in its way, far more shocking than Briony’s, however consensual the encounter had been—it merely confirmed the general view that had formed: Mr. Turner was a dangerous man. Cecilia’s repeated suggestion that it was Danny Hardman they should be talking to was heard in silence. It was understandable, though poor form, that this young woman should be covering for her friend by casting suspicion on an innocent boy. Sometime after five, when there was talk of breakfast being prepared, at least for the constables, for no one else was hungry, the word flashed through the household that a figure who might be Robbie was approaching across the park. Perhaps someone had been watching from an upstairs window. Briony did not know how the decision was made that they should all go outside to wait for him. Suddenly, they were all there, family, Paul Marshall, Betty and her helpers, the policemen, a reception party grouped tightly around the front entrance. Only Lola in a drugged coma and Cecilia with her fury remained upstairs. It might have been that Mrs. Tallis did not want the polluting presence to step inside her house. The inspector may have feared violence which was more easily dealt with outdoors where there was more space to make an arrest. All the magic of dawn had gone now, and in its place was a gray early morning, distinguished only by a summer’s mist which was sure to burn off soon. At first they saw nothing, though Briony thought she could make out the tread of shoes along the drive. Then everyone could hear it, and there was a collective murmur and shifting of weight as they caught sight of an indefinable shape, no more than a grayish smudge against the white, almost a hundred yards away. As the shape took form the waiting group fell silent again. No one could quite believe what was emerging. Surely it was a trick of the mist and light. No one in this age of telephones and motorcars could believe that giants seven or eight feet high existed in crowded Surrey. But here it was, an apparition as inhuman as it was purposeful. The thing was impossible and undeniable, and heading their way. Betty, who was known to be a Catholic, crossed herself as the little crowd huddled closer to the entrance. Only the senior inspector took a couple of paces forward, and as he did so everything became clear. The clue was a second, tiny shape that bobbed alongside the first. Then it was obvious—this was Robbie, with one boy sitting up on his shoulders and the other holding his hand and trailing a little behind. When he was less than thirty feet away, Robbie stopped, and seemed about to speak, but waited instead as the inspector and the other policemen approached. The boy on his shoulders appeared to be asleep. The other boy let his head loll against Robbie’s waist and drew the man’s hand across his chest for protection or warmth. Briony’s immediate feeling was one of relief that the boys were safe. But as she looked at Robbie waiting calmly, she experienced a flash of outrage. Did he believe he could conceal his crime behind an apparent kindness, behind this show of being the good shepherd? This was surely a cynical attempt to win forgiveness for what could never be forgiven. She was confirmed again in her view that evil was complicated and misleading. Suddenly, her mother’s hands were pressing firmly on her shoulders and turning her toward the house, delivering her into Betty’s care. Emily wanted her daughter well away from Robbie Turner. It was bedtime at last. Betty took a firm grip of her hand and was leading her in as her mother and brother went forward to collect the twins. Briony’s last glimpse back over her shoulder as she was pulled away showed her Robbie raising two hands, as though in surrender. He lifted the boy clear of his head and placed him gently on the ground. An hour later she was lying on her canopy bed in the clean white cotton nightdress which Betty had found for her. The curtains were drawn, but the daylight gleam around their edges was strong, and for all her spinning sensations of tiredness, she could not sleep. Voices and images were ranged around her bedside, agitated, nagging presences, jostling and merging, resisting her attempts to set them in order. Were they all really bounded by a single day, by one period of unbroken wakefulness, from the innocent rehearsals of her play to the emergence of the giant from the mist? All that lay between was too clamorous, too fluid to understand, though she sensed she had succeeded, even triumphed. She kicked the sheet clear of her legs and turned the pillow to find a cooler patch for her cheeks. In her dizzy state she was not able to say exactly what her success had been; if it was to have gained a new maturity, she could hardly feel it now when she was so helpless, so childish even, through lack of sleep, to the point where she thought she could easily make herself cry. If it was brave to have identified a thoroughly bad person, then it was wrong of him to turn up with the twins like that, and she felt cheated. Who would believe her now, with Robbie posing as the kindly rescuer of lost children? All her work, all her courage and clearheadedness, all she had done to bring Lola home—for nothing. They would turn their backs on her, her mother, the policemen, her brother, and go off with Robbie Turner to indulge some adult cabal. She wanted her mother, she wanted to put her arms round her mother’s neck and pull her lovely face close to hers, but her mother wouldn’t come now, no one would come to Briony, no one would talk to her now. She turned her face into the pillow and let her tears drain into it, and felt that yet more was lost, when there was no witness to her sorrow. She had been lying in the semidarkness nursing this palatable sadness for half an hour when she heard the sound of the police car parked below her window starting up. It rolled across the gravel, then stopped. There were voices and the crunch of several footsteps. She got up and parted the curtains. The mist was still there, but it was brighter, as though illuminated from within, and she half closed her eyes while they adjusted to the glare. All four doors of the police Humber were wide open, and three constables were waiting by it. The voices came from a group directly below her, by the front door, just out of sight. Then came the sound of footsteps again, and they emerged, the two inspectors, with Robbie between them. And handcuffed! She saw how his arms were forced in front of him, and from her vantage point she saw the silver glint of steel below his shirt cuff. The disgrace of it horrified her. It was further confirmation of his guilt, and the beginning of his punishment. It had the look of eternal damnation. They reached the car and stopped. Robbie half turned, but she could not read his expression. He stood erect, several inches higher than the inspector, with his head lifted up. Perhaps he was proud of what he had done. One of the constables got in the driver’s seat. The junior inspector was walking round to the rear door on the far side and his chief was about to guide Robbie into the backseat. There was the sound of a commotion directly below Briony’s window, and of Emily Tallis’s voice calling sharply, and suddenly a figure was running toward the car as fast as was possible in a tight dress. Cecilia slowed as she approached. Robbie turned and took half a pace toward her and, surprisingly, the inspector stepped back. The handcuffs were in full view, but Robbie did not appear ashamed or even aware of them as he faced Cecilia and listened gravely to what she was saying. The impassive policemen looked on. If she was delivering the bitter indictment Robbie deserved to hear, it did not show on his face. Though Cecilia was facing away from her, Briony thought she was speaking with very little animation. Her accusations would be all the more powerful for being muttered. They had moved closer, and now Robbie spoke briefly, and half raised his locked hands and let them fall. She touched them with her own, and fingered his lapel, and then gripped it and shook it gently. It seemed a kindly gesture and Briony was touched by her sister’s capacity for forgiveness, if this was what it was. Forgiveness. The word had never meant a thing before, though Briony had heard it exulted at a thousand school and church occasions. And all the time, her sister had understood. There was, of course, much that she did not know about Cecilia. But there would be time, for this tragedy was bound to bring them closer. The kindly inspector with the granite face must have thought he had been indulgent enough, for he stepped forward to brush away Cecilia’s hand and interpose himself. Robbie said something to her quickly over the officer’s shoulder, and turned toward the car. Considerately, the inspector raised his own hand to Robbie’s head and pressed down hard on it, so that he did not bang it as he stooped to climb into the backseat. The two inspectors wedged themselves on each side of their prisoner. The doors slammed, and the one constable left behind touched his helmet in salute as the car moved forward. Cecilia remained where she was, facing down the drive, tranquilly watching the car as it receded, but the tremors along the line of her shoulders confided she was crying, and Briony knew she had never loved her sister more than now. It should have ended there, this seamless day that had wrapped itself around a summer’s night, it should have concluded then with the Humber disappearing down the drive. But there remained a final confrontation. The car had gone no more than twenty yards when it began to slow. A figure Briony had not noticed was coming down the center of the drive and showed no intention of standing to one side. It was a woman, rather short, with a rolling walk, wearing a floral print dress and gripping what looked at first like a stick but was in fact a man’s umbrella with a goose’s head. The car stopped and the horn sounded as the woman came up and stood right against the radiator grille. It was Robbie’s mother, Grace Turner. She raised the umbrella and shouted. The policeman in the front passenger seat had got out and was speaking to her, and then took her by the elbow. The other constable, the one who had saluted, was hurrying over. Mrs. Turner shook her arm free, raised the umbrella again, this time with two hands, and brought it down, goose head first, with a crack like a pistol shot, onto the Humber’s shiny bonnet. As the constables half pushed, half carried her to the edge of the drive, she began to shout a single word so loudly that Briony could hear it from her bedroom.

“Liars! Liars! Liars!” Mrs. Turner roared. With its front door wide open, the car moved past her slowly and stopped to let the policeman get back in. On his own, his colleague was having difficulty restraining her. She managed another swipe with her umbrella but the blow glanced off the car’s roof. He wrestled the umbrella from her and tossed it over his shoulder onto the grass.

“Liars! Liars!” Grace Turner shouted again, and took a few hopeless steps after the retreating car, and then stopped, hands on hips, to watch as it went over the first bridge, crossed the island and then the second bridge, and finally vanished into the whiteness.