Atonement

by Ian Mcewan

  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 reformed 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 screw-tops 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 helples
s 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.