Atonement (23 page)

W
ITHIN 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.