Part 1 Chapter 4

IT WAS not until the late afternoon that Cecilia judged the vase repaired. It had baked all afternoon on a table by a south-facing window in the library, and now three fine meandering lines in the glaze, converging like rivers in an atlas, were all that showed. No one would ever know. As she crossed the library with the vase in both hands, she heard what she thought was the sound of bare feet on the hallway tiles outside the library door. Having passed many hours deliberately not thinking about Robbie Turner, she was outraged that he should be back in the house, once again without his socks. She stepped out into the hallway, determined to face down his insolence, or his mockery, and was confronted instead by her sister, clearly in distress. Her eyelids were swollen and pink, and she was pinching on her lower lip with forefinger and thumb, an old sign with Briony that some serious weeping was to be done.

“Darling! What’s up?”

Her eyes in fact were dry, and they lowered fractionally to take in the vase, then she pushed on past, to where the easel stood supporting the poster with the merry, multicolored title, and a Chagall-like montage of highlights from her play in watercolor scattered around the lettering—the tearful parents waving, the moonlit ride to the coast, the heroine on her sickbed, a wedding. She paused before it, and then, with one violent, diagonal stroke, ripped away more than half of it and let it fall to the floor. Cecilia put the vase down and hurried over, and knelt down to retrieve the fragment before her sister began to trample on it. This would not be the first time she had rescued Briony from self-destruction.

“Little Sis. Is it the cousins?”

She wanted to comfort her sister, for Cecilia had always loved to cuddle the baby of the family. When she was small and prone to nightmares—those terrible screams in the night—Cecilia used to go to her room and wake her. Come back, she used to whisper. It’s only a dream. Come back. And then she would carry her into her own bed. She wanted to put her arm round Briony’s shoulder now, but she was no longer tugging on her lip, and had moved away to the front door and was resting one hand on the great brass lion’s-head handle that Mrs. Turner had polished that afternoon.

“The cousins are stupid. But it’s not only that. It’s . . .” She trailed away, doubtful whether she should confide her recent revelation.

Cecilia smoothed the jagged triangle of paper and thought how her little sister was changing. It would have suited her better had Briony wept and allowed herself to be comforted on the silk chaise longue in the drawing room. Such stroking and soothing murmurs would have been a release for Cecilia after a frustrating day whose various crosscurrents of feeling she had preferred not to examine. Addressing Briony’s problems with kind words and caresses would have restored a sense of control. However, there was an element of autonomy in the younger girl’s unhappiness. She had turned her back and was opening the door wide.

“But what is it then?” Cecilia could hear the neediness in her own voice.

Beyond her sister, far beyond the lake, the driveway curved across the park, narrowed and converged over rising ground to a point where a tiny shape, made formless by the warping heat, was growing, and then flickered and seemed to recede. It would be Hardman, who said he was too old to learn to drive a car, bringing the visitors in the trap.

Briony changed her mind and faced her sister. “The whole thing’s a mistake. It’s the wrong . . .” She snatched a breath and glanced away, a signal, Cecilia sensed, of a dictionary word about to have its first outing. “It’s the wrong genre!” She pronounced it, as she thought, in the French way, monosyllabically, but without quite getting her tongue round the r.

“Jean?” Cecilia called after her. “What are you talking about?”

But Briony was hobbling away on soft white soles across the fiery gravel.

Cecilia went to the kitchen to fill the vase, and carried it up to her bedroom to retrieve the flowers from the handbasin. When she dropped them in they once again refused to fall into the artful disorder she preferred, and instead swung round in the water into a willful neatness, with the taller stalks evenly distributed around the rim. She lifted the flowers and let them drop again, and they fell into another orderly pattern. Still, it hardly mattered. It was difficult to imagine this Mr. Marshall complaining that the flowers by his bedside were too symmetrically displayed. She took the arrangement up to the second floor, along the creaking corridor to what was known as Auntie Venus’s room, and set the vase on a chest of drawers by a four-poster bed, thus completing the little commission her mother had set her that morning, eight hours before.

However, she did not immediately leave, for the room was pleasingly uncluttered by personal possessions—in fact, apart from Briony’s, it was the only tidy bedroom. And it was cool here, now that the sun had moved round the house. Every drawer was empty, every bare surface without so much as a fingerprint. Under the chintz counterpane the sheets would be starchily pure. She had an impulse to slip her hand between the covers to feel them, but instead she moved deeper into Mr. Marshall’s room. At the foot of the four-poster, the seat of a Chippendale sofa had been so carefully straightened that sitting down would have seemed a desecration. The air was smooth with the scent of wax, and in the honeyed light, the gleaming surfaces of the furniture seemed to ripple and breathe. As her approach altered her angle of view, the revelers on the lid of an ancient trousseau chest writhed into dance steps. Mrs. Turner must have passed through that morning. Cecilia shrugged away the association with Robbie. Being here was a kind of trespass, with the room’s future occupant just a few hundred yards away from the house.

From where she had arrived by the window she could see that Briony had crossed the bridge to the island, and was walking down the grassy bank, and beginning to disappear among the lakeshore trees that surrounded the island temple. Further off, Cecilia could just make out the two hatted figures sitting up on the bench behind Hardman. Now she saw a third figure whom she had not noticed before, striding along the driveway toward the trap. Surely it was Robbie Turner on his way home. He stopped, and as the visitors approached, his outline seemed to fuse with that of the visitors. She could imagine the scene—the manly punches to the shoulder, the horseplay. She was annoyed that her brother could not know that Robbie was in disgrace, and she turned from the window with a sound of exasperation, and set off for her room in search of a cigarette.

She had one packet remaining, and only after several minutes of irritable raking through her mess did she find it in the pocket of a blue silk dressing gown on her bathroom floor. She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where and when a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any other public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply—notions as self-evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with the courage to confront him. The lighthearted ironies she might have deployed among her friends deserted her in his presence, and she heard her own voice become thin when she attempted some docile contradiction. In fact, being at odds with her father about anything at all, even an insignificant domestic detail, made her uncomfortable, and nothing that great literature might have done to modify her sensibilities, none of the lessons of practical criticism, could quite deliver her from obedience. Smoking on the stairway when her father was installed in his Whitehall ministry was all the revolt her education would allow, and still it cost her some effort.

As she reached the broad landing that dominated the hallway, Leon was showing Paul Marshall through the wide-open front entrance. Danny Hardman was behind them with their luggage. Old Hardman was just in view outside, gazing mutely at the five-pound note in his hand. The indirect afternoon light, reflected from the gravel and filtered through the fanlight, filled the entrance hall with the yellowish-orange tones of a sepia print. The men had removed their hats and stood waiting for her, smiling. Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life—with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.

“Sis-Celia!” Leon called. When they embraced she felt against her collarbone through the fabric of his jacket a thick fountain pen, and smelled pipe smoke in the folds of his clothes, prompting a moment’s nostalgia for afternoon tea visits to rooms in men’s colleges, rather polite and anodyne occasions mostly, but cheery too, especially in winter.

Paul Marshall shook her hand and made a faint bow. There was something comically brooding about his face. His opener was conventionally dull.

“I’ve heard an awful lot about you.”

“And me you.” What she could remember was a telephone conversation with her brother some months before, during which they had discussed whether they had ever eaten, or would ever eat, an Amo bar.

“Emily’s lying down.”

It was hardly necessary to say it. As children they claimed to be able to tell from across the far side of the park whenever their mother had a migraine by a certain darkening at the windows.

“And the Old Man’s staying in town?”

“He might come later.”

Cecilia was aware that Paul Marshall was staring at her, but before she could look at him she needed to prepare something to say.

“The children were putting on a play, but it rather looks like it’s fallen apart.”

Marshall said, “That might have been your sister I saw down by the lake. She was giving the nettles a good thrashing.”

Leon stepped aside to let Hardman’s boy through with the bags. “Where are we putting Paul?”

“On the second floor.” Cecilia had inclined her head to direct these words at the young Hardman. He had reached the foot of the stairs and now stopped and turned, a leather suitcase in each hand, to face them where they were grouped, in the center of the checkered, tiled expanse. His expression was of tranquil incomprehension. She had noticed him hanging around the children lately. Perhaps he was interested in Lola. He was sixteen, and certainly no boy. The roundness she remembered in his cheeks had gone, and the childish bow of his lips had become elongated and innocently cruel. Across his brow a constellation of acne had a new-minted look, its garishness softened by the sepia light. All day long, she realized, she had been feeling strange, and seeing strangely, as though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp.

She said to him patiently, “The big room past the nursery.”

“Auntie Venus’s room,” Leon said.

Auntie Venus had been for almost half a century a vital nursing presence across a swath of the Northern Territories in Canada. She was no one’s aunt particularly, or rather, she was Mr. Tallis’s dead second cousin’s aunt, but no one questioned her right, after her retirement, to the room on the second floor where, for most of their childhoods, she had been a sweet-natured, bedridden invalid who withered away to an uncomplaining death when Cecilia was ten. A week later Briony was born.

Cecilia led the visitors into the drawing room, through the French windows, past the roses toward the swimming pool, which was behind the stable block and was surrounded on four sides by a high thicket of bamboo, with a tunnel-like gap for an entrance. They walked through, bending their heads under low canes, and emerged onto a terrace of dazzling white stone from which the heat rose in a blast. In deep shadow, set well back from the water’s edge, was a white-painted tin table with a pitcher of iced punch under a square of cheesecloth. Leon unfolded the canvas chairs and they sat with their glasses in a shallow circle facing the pool. From his position between Leon and Cecilia, Marshall took control of the conversation with a ten-minute monologue. He told them how wonderful it was, to be away from town, in tranquillity, in the country air; for nine months, for every waking minute of every day, enslaved to a vision, he had shuttled between headquarters, his boardroom and the factory floor. He had bought a large house on Clapham Common and hardly had time to visit it. The launch of Rainbow Amo had been a triumph, but only after various distribution catastrophes which had now been set right; the advertising campaign had offended some elderly bishops so another was devised; then came the problems of success itself, unbelievable sales, new production quotas, and disputes about overtime rates, and the search for a site for a second factory about which the four unions involved had been generally sullen and had needed to be charmed and coaxed like children; and now, when all had been brought to fruition, there loomed the greater challenge yet of Army Amo, the khaki bar with the Pass the Amo! slogan; the concept rested on an assumption that spending on the Armed Forces must go on increasing if Mr. Hitler did not pipe down; there was even a chance that the bar could become part of the standard-issue ration pack; in that case, if there were to be a general conscription, a further five factories would be needed; there were some on the board who were convinced there should and would be an accommodation with Germany and that Army Amo was a dead duck; one member was even accusing Marshall of being a warmonger; but, exhausted as he was, and maligned, he would not be turned away from his purpose, his vision. He ended by repeating that it was wonderful to find oneself “way out here” where one could, as it were, catch one’s breath.

Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes. She watched him in profile as he turned his head toward Leon. A long muscle twitched above the line of his jaw as he spoke. A few thick black hairs curled free of his eyebrow, and from his earholes there sprouted the same black growth, comically kinked like pubic hair. He should instruct his barber.

The smallest shift in her gaze brought her Leon’s face, but he was staring politely at his friend and seemed determined not to meet her eye. As children they used to torment each other with “the look” at the Sunday lunches their parents gave for elderly relatives. These were awesome occasions worthy of the ancient silver service; the venerable great-uncles and -aunts and grandparents were Victorians, from their mother’s side of the family, a baffled and severe folk, a lost tribe who arrived at the house in black cloaks having wandered peevishly for two decades in an alien, frivolous century. They terrified the ten-year-old Cecilia and her twelve-year-old brother, and a giggling fit was always just a breath away. The one who caught the look was helpless, the one who bestowed it, immune. Mostly, the power was with Leon, whose look was mock-solemn, and consisted of drawing the corners of his mouth downward while rolling his eyes. He might ask Cecilia in the most innocent voice for the salt to be passed, and though she averted her gaze as she handed it to him, though she turned her head and inhaled deeply, it could be enough simply to know that he was doing his look to consign her to ninety minutes of quaking torture. Meanwhile, Leon would be free, needing only to top her up occasionally if he thought she was beginning to recover. Only rarely had she reduced him with an expression of haughty pouting. Since the children were sometimes seated between adults, giving the look had its dangers—making faces at table could bring down disgrace and an early bedtime. The trick was to make the attempt while passing between, say, licking one’s lips and smiling broadly, and at the same time catch the other’s eye. On one occasion they had looked up and delivered their looks simultaneously, causing Leon to spray soup from his nostrils onto the wrist of a great-aunt. Both children were banished to their rooms for the rest of the day.

Cecilia longed to take her brother aside and tell him that Mr. Marshall had pubic hair growing from his ears. He was describing the boardroom confrontation with the man who called him a warmonger. She half raised her arm as though to smooth her hair. Automatically, Leon’s attention was drawn by the motion, and in that instant she delivered the look he had not seen in more than ten years. He pursed his lips and turned away, and found something of interest to stare at near his shoe. As Marshall turned to Cecilia, Leon raised a cupped hand to shield his face, but could not disguise from his sister the tremor along his shoulders. Fortunately for him, Marshall was reaching his conclusion.

“ . . . where one can, as it were, catch one’s breath.”

Immediately, Leon was on his feet. He walked to the edge of the pool and contemplated a sodden red towel left near the diving board. Then he strolled back to them, hands in pockets, quite recovered.

He said to Cecilia, “Guess who we met on the way in.”

“Robbie.”

“I told him to join us tonight.”

“Leon! You didn’t!”

He was in a teasing mood. Revenge perhaps. He said to his friend, “So the cleaning lady’s son gets a scholarship to the local grammar, gets a scholarship to Cambridge, goes up the same time as Cee—and she hardly speaks to him in three years! She wouldn’t let him near her Roedean chums.”

“You should have asked me first.”

She was genuinely annoyed, and observing this, Marshall said placatingly, “I knew some grammar school types at Oxford and some of them were damned clever. But they could be resentful, which was a bit rich, I thought.”

She said, “Have you got a cigarette?”

He offered her one from a silver case, threw one to Leon and took one for himself. They were all standing now, and as Cecilia leaned toward Marshall’s lighter, Leon said, “He’s got a first-rate mind, so I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, messing about in the flower beds.”

She went to sit on the diving board and tried to give the appearance of relaxing, but her tone was strained. “He’s wondering about a medical degree. Leon, I wish you hadn’t asked him.”

“The Old Man’s said yes?”

She shrugged. “Look, I think you ought to go round to the bungalow now and ask him not to come.”

Leon had walked to the shallow end and stood facing her across the gently rocking sheet of oily blue water.

“How can I possibly do that?”

“I don’t care how you do it. Make an excuse.”

“Something’s happened between you.”

“No it hasn’t.”

“Is he bothering you?”

“For God’s sake!”

She got up irritably and walked away, toward the swimming pool pavilion, an open structure supported by three fluted pillars. She stood, leaning against the central pillar, smoking and watching her brother. Two minutes before, they had been in league and now they were at odds—childhood revisited indeed. Paul Marshall stood halfway between them, turning his head this way and that when they spoke, as though at a tennis match. He had a neutral, vaguely inquisitive air, and seemed untroubled by this sibling squabble. That at least, Cecilia thought, was in his favor.

Her brother said, “You think he can’t hold a knife and fork.”

“Leon, stop it. You had no business inviting him.”

“What rot!”

The silence that followed was partly mitigated by the drone of the filtration pump. There was nothing she could do, nothing she could make Leon do, and she suddenly felt the pointlessness of argument. She lolled against the warm stone, lazily finishing her cigarette and contemplating the scene before her—the foreshortened slab of chlorinated water, the black inner tube of a tractor tire propped against a deck chair, the two men in cream linen suits of infinitesimally different hues, bluish-gray smoke rising against the bamboo green. It looked carved, fixed, and again, she felt it: it had happened a long time ago, and all outcomes, on all scales—from the tiniest to the most colossal—were already in place. Whatever happened in the future, however superficially strange or shocking, would also have an unsurprising, familiar quality, inviting her to say, but only to herself, Oh yes, of course. That. I should have known.

She said lightly, “D’you know what I think?”

“What’s that?”

“We should go indoors, and you should mix us a fancy kind of drink.”

Paul Marshall banged his hands together and the sound ricocheted between the columns and the back wall of the pavilion. “There’s something I do rather well,” he called. “With crushed ice, rum and melted dark chocolate.”

The suggestion prompted an exchange of glances between Cecilia and her brother, and thus their discord was resolved. Leon was already moving away, and as Cecilia and Paul Marshall followed him and converged on the gap in the thicket she said, “I’d rather have something bitter. Or even sour.”

He smiled, and since he had reached the gap first, he paused to hand her through, as though it were a drawing room doorway, and as she passed she felt him touch her lightly on her forearm.

Or it may have been a leaf.