Atonement (15 page)

“Little
fellow! What’s the matter?”

For the
moment, he could not trust himself to speak. Instead, he held up his sock and
with it gestured along the corridor. Cecilia leaned out and saw Pierrot some
distance off, also barefoot, also holding a sock, and watching.

“You’ve
got a sock each then.”

The boy
nodded and swallowed, and then at last he was able to say, “Miss Betty
says we’ll get a smack if we don’t go down now and have our tea,
but there’s only one pair of socks.”

“And
you’ve been fighting over it.”

Jackson shook
his head emphatically.

As she went
along the corridor with the boys to their room, first one then the other put
his hand in hers and she was surprised to find herself so gratified. She could
not help thinking about her dress.

“Didn’t
you ask your sister to help you?”

“She’s
not talking to us at the moment.”

“Whyever
not?”

“She
hates
us.”

Their room
was a pitiful mess of clothes, wet towels, orange peel, torn-up pieces of a
comic arranged around a sheet of paper, upended chairs partly covered by
blankets and the mattresses at a slew. Between the beds was a broad damp stain
on the carpet in the center of which lay a bar of soap and damp wads of
lavatory paper. One of the curtains hung at a tilt below the pelmet, and though
the windows were open, the air was dank, as though exhaled many times. All the
drawers in the clothes chest stood open and empty. The impression was of
closeted boredom punctuated by contests and schemes—jumping between the
beds, building a camp, half devising a board game, then giving up. No one in
the Tallis household was looking after the Quincey twins, and to conceal her
guilt she said brightly, “We’ll never find anything with the room
in this state.”

She began
restoring order, remaking the beds, kicking off her high heels to mount a chair
to fix the curtain, and setting the twins small achievable tasks. They were
obedient to the letter, but they were quiet and hunched as they went about the
work, as though it were retribution rather than deliverance, a scolding rather
than kindness, she intended. They were ashamed of their room. As she stood on
the chair in her clinging dark green dress, watching the bright ginger heads
bobbing and bending to their chores, the simple thought came to her, how
hopeless and terrifying it was for them to be without love, to construct an
existence out of nothing in a strange house.

With difficulty,
for she could not bend her knees very far, she stepped down and sat on the edge
of a bed and patted a space on each side of her. However, the boys remained
standing, watching her expectantly. She used the faintly singsong tones of a
nursery school teacher she had once admired.

“We
don’t need to cry over lost socks, do we?”

Pierrot said,
“Actually, we’d prefer to go home.”

Chastened,
she resumed the tones of adult conversation. “That’s impossible at
the moment. Your mother’s in Paris with—having a little holiday,
and your father’s busy in college, so you’ll have to be here for a
bit. I’m sorry you’ve been neglected. But you did have a jolly time
in the pool . . .”

Jackson said,
“We wanted to be in the play and then Briony walked off and still
hasn’t come back.”

“Are
you sure?” Someone else to worry about. Briony should have returned long
ago. This in turn reminded her of the people downstairs waiting: her mother,
the cook, Leon, the visitor, Robbie. Even the warmth of the evening filling the
room through the open windows at her back imposed responsibilities; this was
the kind of summer’s evening one dreamed of all year, and now here it was
at last with its heavy fragrance, its burden of pleasures, and she was too
distracted by demands and minor distress to respond. But she simply had to. It
was wrong not to. It would be paradise outside on the terrace drinking gin and
tonics with Leon. It was hardly her fault that Aunt Hermione had run off with
some toad who delivered fireside sermons on the wireless every week. Enough
sadness. Cecilia stood up and clapped her hands.

“Yes,
it’s too bad about the play, but there’s nothing we can do.
Let’s find you some socks and get on.”

A search
revealed that the socks they had arrived in were being washed, and that in the
obliterating thrill of passion, Aunt Hermione had omitted to pack more than one
extra pair. Cecilia went to Briony’s bedroom and rummaged in a drawer for
the least girlish design—white, ankle length, with red and green
strawberries around the tops. She assumed there would be a fight now for the
gray socks, but the opposite was the case, and to avoid further sorrow she was
obliged to return to Briony’s room for another pair. This time she paused
to peer out of the window at the dusk and wonder where her sister was. Drowned
in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motorcar, she thought
ritually, a sound principle being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and
this was an efficient means of excluding the worst.

Back with the
boys, she tidied Jackson’s hair with a comb dipped in water from a vase
of flowers, holding his chin tightly between forefinger and thumb as she carved
across his scalp a fine, straight parting. Pierrot patiently waited his turn,
then without a word they ran off downstairs together to face Betty.

Cecilia
followed at a slow pace, passing the critical mirror with a glance and
completely satisfied with what she saw. Or rather, she cared less, for her mood
had shifted since being with the twins, and her thoughts had broadened to
include a vague resolution which took shape without any particular content and
prompted no specific plan; she had to get away. The thought was calming and
pleasurable, and not desperate at all. She reached the first-floor landing and
paused. Downstairs, her mother, guilt-stricken by her absence from the family,
would be spreading anxiety and confusion all about her. To this mix must be
added the news, if it was the case, that Briony was missing. Time and worry
would be expended before she was found. There would be a phone call from the
department to say that Mr. Tallis had to work late and would stay up in town.
Leon, who had the pure gift of avoiding responsibility, would not assume his
father’s role. Nominally, it would pass to Mrs. Tallis, but ultimately
the success of the evening would be in Cecilia’s care. All this was clear
and not worth struggling against—she would not be abandoning herself to a
luscious summer’s night, there would be no long session with Leon, she
would not be walking barefoot across the lawns under the midnight stars. She
felt under her hand the black-stained varnished pine of the banisters, vaguely
neo-Gothic, immovably solid and sham. Above her head there hung by three chains
a great cast-iron chandelier which had never been lit in her lifetime. One
depended instead on a pair of tasseled wall lights shaded by a quarter circle
of fake parchment. By their soupy yellow glow she moved quietly across the
landing to look toward her mother’s room. The half-open door, the column
of light across the corridor carpet, confirmed that Emily Tallis had risen from
her daybed. Cecilia returned to the stairs and hesitated again, reluctant to go
down. But there was no choice.

There was
nothing new in the arrangements and she was not distressed. Two years ago her
father disappeared into the preparation of mysterious consultation documents
for the Home Office. Her mother had always lived in an invalid’s shadow
land, Briony had always required mothering from her older sister, and Leon had
always floated free, and she had always loved him for it. She had not thought
it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her
fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however,
noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of
their habitual expectations. She blamed no one, but she had hung about the
house all summer, encouraged by a vague notion she was reestablishing an
important connection with her family. But the connections had never been
broken, she now saw, and anyway her parents were absent in their different
ways, Briony was lost to her fantasies and Leon was in town. Now it was time
for her to move on. She needed an adventure. There was an invitation from an
uncle and aunt to accompany them to New York. Aunt Hermione was in Paris. She
could go to London and find a job—it was what her father expected of her.
It was excitement she felt, not restlessness, and she would not allow this
evening to frustrate her. There would be other evenings like this, and to enjoy
them she would have to be elsewhere.

Animated by
this new certainty—choosing the right dress had surely helped—she
crossed the hallway, pushed through the baize door and strode along the
checkered tiled corridor to the kitchen. She entered a cloud in which
disembodied faces hung at different heights, like studies in an artist’s
sketchbook, and all eyes were turned down to a display upon the kitchen table,
obscured to Cecilia by Betty’s broad back. The blurred red glow at ankle level
was the coal fire of the double range whose door was kicked shut just then with
a great clang and an irritable shout. The steam rose thickly from a vat of
boiling water which no one was attending. The cook’s help, Doll, a thin
girl from the village with her hair in an austere bun, was at the sink making a
bad-tempered clatter scouring the saucepan lids, but she too was half turned to
see what Betty had set upon the table. One of the faces was Emily
Tallis’s, another was Danny Hardman’s, a third was his
father’s. Floating above the rest, standing on stools perhaps, were
Jackson and Pierrot, their expressions solemn. Cecilia felt the gaze of the
young Hardman on her. She returned it fiercely, and was gratified when he
turned away. The labor in the kitchen had been long and hard all day in the
heat, and the residue was everywhere: the flagstone floor was slick with the
spilt grease of roasted meat and trodden-in peel; sodden tea towels, tributes
to heroic forgotten labors, drooped above the range like decaying regimental
banners in church; nudging Cecilia’s shin, an overflowing basket of
vegetable trimmings which Betty would take home to feed to her Gloucester Old
Spot, fattening for December. The cook glanced over her shoulder to take in the
newcomer, and before she turned away there was time to see the fury in eyes
that cheek fat had narrowed to gelatinous slices.

“Take
it orf!” she yelled. No doubting that the irritation was directed at Mrs.
Tallis. Doll sprang from sink to range, skidded and almost slipped, and picked
up two rags to drag the cauldron off the heat. The improving visibility
revealed Polly, the chambermaid who everyone said was simple, and who stayed on
late whenever there was a do. Her wide and trusting eyes were also fixed upon
the kitchen table. Cecilia moved round behind Betty to see what everyone else
could see—a huge blackened tray recently pulled from the oven bearing a
quantity of roast potatoes that still sizzled mildly. There were perhaps a
hundred in all, in ragged rows of pale gold down which Betty’s metal
spatula dug and scraped and turned. The undersides held a stickier yellow glow,
and here and there a gleaming edge was picked out in nacreous brown, and the
occasional filigree lacework that blossomed around a ruptured skin. They were,
or would be, perfect.

The last row
was turned and Betty said, “You want these, ma’am, in a potato
salad?”

“Exactly
so. Cut the burnt bits away, wipe off the fat, put them in the big Tuscan bowl
and give them a good dousing in olive oil and then . . .” Emily gestured
vaguely toward a display of fruit by the larder door where there may or may not
have been a lemon.

Betty
addressed the ceiling. “Will you be wanting a Brussels sprouts
salad?”

“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.”