by Ian Mcewan
She refreshed the flowers by plunging them into the fountain’s basin, which was full-scale, deep and cold, and avoided Robbie by hurrying round to the front of the house—it was an excuse, she thought, to stay outside another few minutes. Morning sunlight, or any light, could not conceal the ugliness of the Tallis home—barely forty years old, bright orange brick, squat, lead-paned baronial Gothic, to be condemned one day in an article by Pevsner, or one of his team, as a tragedy of wasted chances, and by a younger writer of the modern school as “charmless to a fault.” An Adam-style house had stood here until destroyed by fire in the late 1880s. What remained was the artificial lake and island with its two stone bridges supporting the driveway, and, by the water’s edge, a crumbling stuccoed temple. Cecilia’s grandfather, who grew up over an ironmonger’s shop and made the family fortune with a series of patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps, had imposed on the new house his taste for all things solid, secure and functional. Still, if one turned one’s back to the front entrance and glanced down the drive, ignoring the Friesians already congregating in the shade of widely spaced trees, the view was fine enough, giving an impression of timeless, unchanging calm which made her more certain than ever that she must soon be moving on.
She went indoors, quickly crossed the black and white tiled hall—how familiar her echoing steps, how annoying—and paused to catch her breath in the doorway of the drawing room. Dripping coolly onto her sandaled feet, the untidy bunch of rosebay willow herb and irises brought her to a better state of mind. The vase she was looking for was on an American cherry-wood table by the French windows which were slightly ajar. Their southeast aspect had permitted parallelograms of morning sunlight to advance across the powder-blue carpet. Her breathing slowed and her desire for a cigarette deepened, but still she hesitated by the door, momentarily held by the perfection of the scene—by the three faded Chesterfields grouped around the almost new Gothic fireplace in which stood a display of wintry sedge, by the unplayed, untuned harpsichord and the unused rosewood music stands, by the heavy velvet curtains, loosely restrained by an orange and blue tasseled rope, framing a partial view of cloudless sky and the yellow and gray mottled terrace where chamomile and feverfew grew between the paving cracks. A set of steps led down to the lawn on whose border Robbie still worked, and which extended to the Triton fountain fifty yards away.
All this—the river and flowers, running, which was something she rarely did these days, the fine ribbing of the oak trunks, the high-ceilinged room, the geometry of light, the pulse in her ears subsiding in the stillness—all this pleased her as the familiar was transformed into a delicious strangeness. But she also felt reproved for her homebound boredom. She had returned from Cambridge with a vague notion that her family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company. But her father remained in town, and her mother, when she wasn’t nurturing her migraines, seemed distant, even unfriendly. Cecilia had carried up trays of tea to her mother’s room—as spectacularly squalid as her own—thinking some intimate conversations might develop. However, Emily Tallis wanted to share only tiny frets about the household, or she lay back against the pillows, her expression unreadable in the gloom, emptying her cup in wan silence. Briony was lost to her writing fantasies—what had seemed a passing fad was now an enveloping obsession. Cecilia had seen them on the stairs that morning, her younger sister leading the cousins, poor things, who had arrived only yesterday, up to the nursery to rehearse the play Briony wanted to put on that evening, when Leon and his friend were expected. There was so little time, and already one of the twins had been detained by Betty in the scullery for some wrongdoing or other. Cecilia was not inclined to help—it was too hot, and whatever she did, the project would end in calamity, with Briony expecting too much, and no one, especially the cousins, able to measure up to her frenetic vision.
Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson’s Clarissa. She had made a halfhearted start on a family tree, but on the paternal side, at least until her great-grandfather opened his humble hardware shop, the ancestors were irretrievably sunk in a bog of farm laboring, with suspicious and confusing changes of surnames among the men, and common-law marriages unrecorded in the parish registers. She could not remain here, she knew she should make plans, but she did nothing. There were various possibilities, all equally unpressing. She had a little money in her account, enough to keep her modestly for a year or so. Leon repeatedly invited her to spend time with him in London. University friends were offering to help her find a job—a dull one certainly, but she would have her independence. She had interesting uncles and aunts on her mother’s side who were always happy to see her, including wild Hermione, mother of Lola and the boys, who even now was over in Paris with a lover who worked in the wireless.
No one was holding Cecilia back, no one would care particularly if she left. It wasn’t torpor that kept her—she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed. From time to time she persuaded herself she remained for Briony’s sake, or to help her mother, or because this really was her last sustained period at home and she would see it through. In fact, the thought of packing a suitcase and taking the morning train did not excite her. Leaving for leaving’s sake. Lingering here, bored and comfortable, was a form of self-punishment tinged with pleasure, or the expectation of it; if she went away something bad might happen or, worse, something good, something she could not afford to miss. And there was Robbie, who exasperated her with his affectation of distance, and his grand plans which he would only discuss with her father. They had known each other since they were seven, she and Robbie, and it bothered her that they were awkward when they talked. Even though she felt it was largely his fault—could his first have gone to his head?—she knew this was something she must clear up before she thought of leaving.
Through the open windows came the faint leathery scent of cow dung, always present except on the coldest days, and noticeable only to those who had been away. Robbie had put down his trowel and stood to roll a cigarette, a hangover from his Communist Party time—another abandoned fad, along with his ambitions in anthropology, and the planned hike from Calais to Istanbul. Still, her own cigarettes were two flights up, in one of several possible pockets.
She advanced into the room, and thrust the flowers into the vase. It had once belonged to her Uncle Clem, whose funeral, or reburial, at the end of the war she remembered quite well: the gun carriage arriving at the country churchyard, the coffin draped in the regimental flag, the raised swords, the bugle at the graveside, and, most memorably for a five-year-old, her father weeping. Clem was his only sibling. The story of how he had come by the vase was told in one of the last letters the young lieutenant wrote home. He was on liaison duties in the French sector and initiated a last-minute evacuation of a small town west of Verdun before it was shelled. Perhaps fifty women, children and old people were saved. Later, the mayor and other officials led Uncle Clem back through the town to a half-destroyed museum. The vase was taken from a shattered glass case and presented in gratitude. There was no refusing, however inconvenient it might have seemed to fight a war with Meissen porcelain under one arm. A month later the vase was left for safety in a farmhouse, and Lieutenant Tallis waded across a river in spate to retrieve it, returning the same way at midnight to join his unit. In the final days of the war, he was sent on patrol duties and gave the vase to a friend for safekeeping. It slowly found its way back to the regimental headquarters, and was delivered to the Tallis home some months after Uncle Clem’s burial.
There was really no point trying to arrange wildflowers. They had tumbled into their own symmetry, and it was certainly true that too even a distribution between the irises and the rosebay willow herb ruined the effect. She spent some minutes making adjustment
s in order to achieve a natural chaotic look. While she did so she wondered about going out to Robbie. It would save her from running upstairs. But she felt uncomfortable and hot, and would have liked to check her appearance in the large gilt mirror above the fireplace. But if he turned round—he was standing with his back to the house, smoking—he would see right into the room. At last she was finished and stood back again. Now her brother’s friend, Paul Marshall, might believe that the flowers had simply been dropped in the vase in the same carefree spirit with which they had been picked. It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in—but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone. Her mother wanted flowers in the guest room and Cecilia was happy to oblige. The place to go for water was the kitchen. But Betty was preparing to cook tonight’s meal, and was in a terrorizing mood. Not only the little boy, Jackson or Pierrot, would be cowering—so too would the extra help from the village. Already, even from the drawing room, it was possible to hear an occasional muffled bad-tempered shout and the clang of a saucepan hitting the hob with unnatural force. If Cecilia went in now she would have to mediate between her mother’s vague instructions and Betty’s forceful state of mind. It surely made more sense to go outside and fill the vase at the fountain.
Sometime in her teens a friend of Cecilia’s father who worked in the Victoria and Albert Museum had come to examine the vase and declared it sound. It was genuine Meissen porcelain, the work of the great artist Höroldt, who painted it in 1726. It had most certainly once been the property of King August. Even though it was reckoned to be worth more than the other pieces in the Tallis home, which were mostly junk collected by Cecilia’s grandfather, Jack Tallis wanted the vase in use, in honor of his brother’s memory. It was not to be imprisoned behind a glass case. If it had survived the war, the reasoning went, then it could survive the Tallises. His wife did not disagree. The truth was, whatever its great value, and beyond its association, Emily Tallis did not much like the vase. Its little painted Chinese figures gathered formally in a garden around a table, with ornate plants and implausible birds, seemed fussy and oppressive. Chinoiserie in general bored her. Cecilia herself had no particular view, though she sometimes wondered just how much it might fetch at Sotheby’s. The vase was respected not for Höroldt’s mastery of polychrome enamels or the blue and gold interlacing strapwork and foliage, but for Uncle Clem, and the lives he had saved, the river he had crossed at midnight, and his death just a week before the Armistice. Flowers, especially wildflowers, seemed a proper tribute.
Cecilia gripped the cool porcelain in both hands as she stood on one foot, and with the other hooked the French windows open wide. As she stepped out into the brightness, the rising scent of warmed stone was like a friendly embrace. Two swallows were making passes over the fountain, and a chiffchaff’s song was piercing the air from within the sinewy gloom of the giant cedar of Lebanon. The flowers swung in the light breeze, tickling her face as she crossed the terrace and carefully negotiated the three crumbly steps down to the gravel path. Robbie turned suddenly at the sound of her approach.
“I was away in my thoughts,” he began to explain.
“Would you roll me one of your Bolshevik cigarettes?”
He threw his own cigarette aside, took the tin which lay on his jacket on the lawn and walked alongside her to the fountain. They were silent for a while.
“Beautiful day,” she then said through a sigh.
He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
“How’s Clarissa?” He was looking down at his fingers rolling the tobacco.
“Boring.”
“We mustn’t say so.”
“I wish she’d get on with it.”
“She does. And it gets better.”
They slowed, then stopped so that he could put the finishing touches to her roll-up.
She said, “I’d rather read Fielding any day.”
She felt she had said something stupid. Robbie was looking away across the park and the cows toward the oak wood that lined the river valley, the wood she had run through that morning. He might be thinking she was talking to him in code, suggestively conveying her taste for the full-blooded and sensual. That was a mistake, of course, and she was discomfited and had no idea how to put him right. She liked his eyes, she thought, the unblended mix of orange and green, made even more granular in sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall. It was an interesting combination in a man, intelligence and sheer bulk. Cecilia had taken the cigarette and he was lighting it for her.
“I know what you mean,” he said as they walked the remaining few yards to the fountain. “There’s more life in Fielding, but he can be psychologically crude compared to Richardson.”
She set down the vase by the uneven steps that rose to the fountain’s stone basin. The last thing she wanted was an undergraduate debate on eighteenth-century literature. She didn’t think Fielding was crude at all, or that Richardson was a fine psychologist, but she wasn’t going to be drawn in, defending, defining, attacking. She was tired of that, and Robbie was tenacious in argument.
Instead she said, “Leon’s coming today, did you know?”
“I heard a rumor. That’s marvelous.”
“He’s bringing a friend, this man Paul Marshall.”
“The chocolate millionaire. Oh no! And you’re giving him flowers!”
She smiled. Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer understood him. They had fallen out of touch at Cambridge. It had been too difficult to do anything else. She changed the subject.
“The Old Man says you’re going to be a doctor.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You must love the student life.”
He looked away again, but this time for only a second or less, and when he turned to her she thought she saw a touch of irritation. Had she sounded condescending? She saw his eyes again, green and orange flecks, like a boy’s marble. When he spoke he was perfectly pleasant.
“I know you never liked that sort of thing, Cee. But how else do you become a doctor?”
“That’s my point. Another six years. Why do it?”
He wasn’t offended. She was the one who was overinterpreting, and jittery in his presence, and she was annoyed with herself.
He was taking her question seriously. “No one’s really going to give me work as a landscape gardener. I don’t want to teach, or go in for the civil service. And medicine interests me …” He broke off as a thought occurred to him. “Look, I’ve agreed to pay your father back. That’s the arrangement.”
“That’s not what I meant at all.”
She was surprised that he should think she was raising the question of money. That was ungenerous of him. Her father had subsidized Robbie’s education all his life. Had anyone ever objected?
She had thought she was imagining it, but in fact she was right—there was something trying in Robbie’s manner lately. He had a way of wrong-footing her whenever he could. Two days before he had rung the front doorbell—in itself odd, for he had always had the freedom of the house. When she was called down, he was standing outside asking in a loud, impersonal voice if he could borrow a book. As it happened, Polly was on all fours, washing the tiles in the entrance hall. Robbie made a great show of removing his boots which weren’t dirty at all, and then, as an afterthought, took his socks off as well, and tiptoed with comic exaggeration across the wet floor. Everything he did was designed to distance her. He was playacting the cleaning lady’s son come to the big house on an errand. They went into the library together, and when he found his book, she asked him to stay for a coffee. It was a pretense, his dithering refusal—he was one of the most confident people she had ever met. She was being mocked, she knew. Rebuffed, she left the room and
went upstairs and lay on the bed with Clarissa, and read without taking in a word, feeling her irritation and confusion grow. She was being mocked, or she was being punished—she did not know which was worse. Punished for being in a different circle at Cambridge, for not having a charlady for a mother; mocked for her poor degree—not that they actually awarded degrees to women anyway.
Awkwardly, for she still had her cigarette, she picked up the vase and balanced it on the rim of the basin. It would have made better sense to take the flowers out first, but she was too irritable. Her hands were hot and dry and she had to grip the porcelain all the tighter. Robbie was silent, but she could tell from his expression—a forced, stretched smile that did not part his lips—that he regretted what he had said. That was no comfort either. This was what happened when they talked these days; one or the other was always in the wrong, trying to call back the last remark. There was no ease, no stability in the course of their conversations, no chance to relax. Instead, it was spikes, traps, and awkward turns that caused her to dislike herself almost as much as she disliked him, though she did not doubt that he was mostly to blame. She hadn’t changed, but there was no question that he had. He was putting distance between himself and the family that had been completely open to him and given him everything. For this reason alone—expectation of his refusal, and her own displeasure in advance—she had not invited him to dinner that night. If he wanted distance, then let him have it.
Of the four dolphins whose tails supported the shell on which the Triton squatted, the one nearest to Cecilia had its wide-open mouth stopped with moss and algae. Its spherical stone eyeballs, as big as apples, were iridescent green. The whole statue had acquired around its northerly surfaces a bluish-green patina, so that from certain approaches, and in low light, the muscle-bound Triton really seemed a hundred leagues under the sea. Bernini’s intention must have been for the water to trickle musically from the wide shell with its irregular edges into the basin below. But the pressure was too weak, so that instead the water slid soundlessly down the underside of the shell where opportunistic slime hung in dripping points, like stalactites in a limestone cave. The basin itself was over three feet deep and clear. The bottom was of a pale, creamy stone over which undulating white-edged rectangles of refracted sunlight divided and overlapped.
