ACCORDING TO the poster in the hallway, the date of the first performance of The Trials of Arabella was only one day after the first rehearsal. However, it was not easy for the writer-director to find clear time for concentrated work. As on the preceding afternoon, the trouble lay in assembling the cast. During the night Arabella’s disapproving father, Jackson, had wet the bed, as troubled small boys far from home will, and was obliged by current theory to carry his sheets and pajamas down to the laundry and wash them himself, by hand, under the supervision of Betty who had been instructed to be distant and firm. This was not represented to the boy as a punishment, the idea being to instruct his unconscious that future lapses would entail inconvenience and hard work; but he was bound to feel it as reproof as he stood at the vast stone sink which rose level to his chest, suds creeping up his bare arms to soak his rolled-up shirtsleeves, the wet sheets as heavy as a dead dog and a general sense of calamity numbing his will. Briony came down at intervals to check on his progress. She was forbidden to help, and Jackson, of course, had never laundered a thing in his life; the two washes, countless rinses and the sustained two-handed grappling with the mangle, as well as the fifteen trembling minutes he had afterward at the kitchen table with bread and butter and a glass of water, took up two hours’ rehearsal time.
Betty told Hardman when he came in from the morning heat for his pint of ale that it was enough that she was having to prepare a special roast dinner in such weather, and that she personally thought the treatment too harsh, and would have administered several sharp smacks to the buttocks and washed the sheets herself. This would have suited Briony, for the morning was slipping away. When her mother came down to see for herself that the task was done, it was inevitable that a feeling of release should settle on the participants, and in Mrs. Tallis’s mind a degree of unacknowledged guilt, so that when Jackson asked in a small voice if he might please now be allowed a swim in the pool and could his brother come too, his wish was immediately granted, and Briony’s objections generously brushed aside, as though she were the one who was imposing unpleasant ordeals on a helpless little fellow. So there was swimming, and then there had to be lunch.
Rehearsals had continued without Jackson, but it was undermining not to have the important first scene, Arabella’s leave-
taking, brought to perfection, and Pierrot was too nervous about the fate of his brother down in the bowels of the house to be much in the way of a dastardly foreign count; whatever happened to Jackson would be Pierrot’s future too. He made frequent trips to the lavatory at the end of the corridor.
When Briony returned from one of her visits to the laundry, he asked her, “Has he had the spanking?”
“Not as yet.”
Like his brother, Pierrot had the knack of depriving his lines of any sense. He intoned a roll call of words: “Do-you-think-you-can-escape-from-my-clutches?” All present and correct.
“It’s a question,” Briony cut in. “Don’t you see? It goes up at the end.”
“What do you mean?”
“There. You just did it. You start low and end high. It’s a question.”
He swallowed hard, drew a breath and made another attempt, producing this time a roll call on a rising chromatic scale.
“At the end. It goes up at the end!”
Now came a roll call on the old monotone, with a break of register, a yodel, on the final syllable.
Lola had come to the nursery that morning in the guise of the adult she considered herself at heart to be. She wore pleated flannel trousers that ballooned at the hips and flared at the ankle, and a short-sleeved sweater made of cashmere. Other tokens of maturity included a velvet choker of tiny pearls, the ginger tresses gathered at the nape and secured with an emerald clasp, three loose silver bracelets around a freckled wrist, and the fact that whenever she moved, the air about her tasted of rosewater. Her condescension, being wholly restrained, was all the more potent. She was coolly responsive to Briony’s suggestions, spoke her lines, which she seemed to have learned overnight, with sufficient expression, and was gently encouraging to her little brother, without encroaching at all on the director’s authority. It was as if Cecilia, or even their mother, had agreed to spend some time with the little ones by taking on a role in the play, and was determined not to let a trace of boredom show. What was missing was any demonstration of ragged, childish enthusiasm. When Briony had shown her cousins the sales booth and the collection box the evening before, the twins had fought each other for the best front-of-house roles, but Lola had crossed her arms and paid decorous, grown-up compliments through a half smile that was too opaque for the detection of irony.
“How marvelous. How awfully clever of you, Briony, to think of that. Did you really make it all by yourself?”
Briony suspected that behind her older cousin’s perfect manners was a destructive intent. Perhaps Lola was relying on the twins to wreck the play innocently, and needed only to stand back and observe.
These unprovable suspicions, Jackson’s detainment in the laundry, Pierrot’s wretched delivery and the morning’s colossal heat were oppressive to Briony. It bothered her too when she noticed Danny Hardman watching from the doorway. He had to be asked to leave. She could not penetrate Lola’s detachment or coax from Pierrot the common inflections of everyday speech. What a relief, then, suddenly to find herself alone in the nursery. Lola had said she needed to reconsider her hair, and her brother had wandered off down the corridor, to the lavatory, or beyond.
Briony sat on the floor with her back to one of the tall built-in toy cupboards and fanned her face with the pages of her play. The silence in the house was complete—no voices or footfalls downstairs, no murmurs from the plumbing; in the space between one of the open sash windows a trapped fly had abandoned its struggle, and outside, the liquid birdsong had evaporated in the heat. She pushed her knees out straight before her and let the folds of her white muslin dress and the familiar, endearing, pucker of skin about her knees fill her view. She should have changed her dress this morning. She thought how she should take more care of her appearance, like Lola. It was childish not to. But what an effort it was. The silence hissed in her ears and her vision was faintly distorted—her hands in her lap appeared unusually large and at the same time remote, as though viewed across an immense distance. She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it? There was no catching herself out. It was either-or. There was no stitching, no seam, and yet she knew that behind the smooth continuous fabric was the real self—was it her soul?—which took the decision to cease pretending, and gave the final command.
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