Atonement

by Ian Mcewan

  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 righ
t 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.