Part 1 Chapter 5

NEITHER THE twins nor Lola knew precisely what led Briony to abandon the rehearsals. At the time, they did not even know she had. They were doing the sickbed scene, the one in which bed-bound Arabella first receives into her garret the prince disguised as the good doctor, and it was going well enough, or no worse than usual, with the twins speaking their lines no more ineptly than before. As for Lola, she didn’t wish to dirty her cashmere by lying on the floor, and instead slumped in a chair, and the director could hardly object to that. The older girl entered so fully into the spirit of her own aloof compliance that she felt beyond reproach. One moment, Briony was giving patient instructions to Jackson, then she paused, and frowned, as if about to correct herself, and then she was gone. There was no pivotal moment of creative difference, no storming or flouncing out. She turned away, and simply drifted out, as though on her way to the lavatory. The others waited, unaware that the whole project was at an end. The twins thought they had been trying hard, and Jackson in particular, feeling he was still in disgrace in the Tallis household, thought he might begin to rehabilitate himself by pleasing Briony.

While they waited, the boys played football with a wooden brick and their sister gazed out the window, humming softly to herself. After an immeasurable period of time, she went out into the corridor and along to the end where there was an open door to an unused bedroom. From here she had a view of the driveway and the lake across which lay a column of shimmering phosphorescence, white hot from the fierce late afternoon heat. Against this column she could just make out Briony beyond the island temple, standing right by the water’s edge. In fact, she may even have been standing in the water—against such light it was difficult to tell. She did not look as if she was about to come back. On her way out of the room, Lola noticed by the bed a masculine-looking suitcase of tan leather and heavy straps and faded steamer labels. It reminded her vaguely of her father, and she paused by it, and caught the faint sooty scent of a railway carriage. She put her thumb against one of the locks and slid it. The polished metal was cool, and her touch left little patches of shrinking condensation. The clasp startled her as it sprang up with a loud chunky sound. She pushed it back and hurried from the room.

There followed more formless time for the cousins. Lola sent the twins down to see if the pool was free—they felt uneasy being there when adults were present. The twins returned to report that Cecilia was there with two other grown-ups, but by now Lola was not in the nursery. She was in her tiny bedroom, arranging her hair in front of a hand mirror propped against the windowsill. The boys lay on her narrow bed, and tickled each other, and wrestled, and made loud howling noises. She could not be bothered to send them to their own room. Now there was no play, and the pool was not available, unstructured time oppressed them. Homesickness fell upon them when Pierrot said he was hungry—dinner was hours away, and it would not be proper to go down now and ask for food. Besides, the boys would not go in the kitchen because they were terrified of Betty whom they had seen on the stairs grimly carrying red rubber sheets toward their room.

A little later the three found themselves back in the nursery which, apart from the bedrooms, was the only room they felt they had a right to be in. The scuffed blue brick was where they had left it, and everything was as before.

They stood about and Jackson said, “I don’t like it here.”

The simplicity of the remark unhinged his brother who went by a wall and found something of interest in the skirting board which he worried with the tip of his shoe.

Lola put her arm across his shoulder and said, “It’s all right. We’ll be going home soon.” Her arm was much thinner and lighter than his mother’s and Pierrot began to sob, but quietly, still mindful of being in a strange house where politeness was all.

Jackson was tearful too, but he was still capable of speech. “It won’t be soon. You’re just saying that. We can’t go home anyway . . .” He paused to gather his courage. “It’s a divorce!”

Pierrot and Lola froze. The word had never been used in front of the children, and never uttered by them. The soft consonants suggested an unthinkable obscenity, the sibilant ending whispered the family’s shame. Jackson himself looked distraught as the word left him, but no wishing could bring it back now, and for all he could tell, saying it out loud was as great a crime as the act itself, whatever that was. None of them, including Lola, quite knew. She was advancing on him, her green eyes narrowed like a cat’s.

“How dare you say that.”

“ ’S true,” he mumbled and looked away. He knew that he was in trouble, that he deserved to be in trouble, and he was about to run for it when she seized him by an ear and put her face close to his.

“If you hit me,” he said quickly, “I’ll tell The Parents.” But he himself had made the invocation useless, a ruined totem of a lost golden age.

“You will never ever use that word again. D’you hear me?”

Full of shame, he nodded, and she let him go.

The boys had been shocked out of tears, and now Pierrot, as usual eager to repair a bad situation, said brightly, “What shall we do now?”

“I’m always asking myself that.”

The tall man in a white suit standing in the doorway may have been there many minutes, long enough to have heard Jackson speak the word, and it was this thought, rather than the shock of his presence, that prevented even Lola from making a response. Did he know about their family? They could only stare and wait to find out. He came toward them and extended his hand.

“Paul Marshall.”

Pierrot, who was the nearest, took the hand in silence, as did his brother. When it was the girl’s turn she said, “Lola Quincey. This is Jackson and that’s Pierrot.”

“What marvelous names you all have. But how am I supposed to tell you two apart?”

“I’m generally considered more pleasant,” Pierrot said. It was a family joke, a line devised by their father which usually made strangers laugh when they put the question. But this man did not even smile as he said, “You must be the cousins from the north.”

They waited tensely to hear what else he knew, and watched as he walked the length of the nursery’s bare boards and stooped to retrieve the brick which he tossed in the air and caught smartly with a snap of wood against skin.

“I’m staying in a room along the corridor.”

“I know,” Lola said. “Auntie Venus’s room.”

“Exactly so. Her old room.”

Paul Marshall lowered himself into the armchair lately used by the stricken Arabella. It really was a curious face, with the features scrunched up around the eyebrows, and a big empty chin like Desperate Dan’s. It was a cruel face, but his manner was pleasant, and this was an attractive combination, Lola thought. He settled his trouser creases as he looked from Quincey to Quincey. Lola’s attention was drawn to the black and white leather of his brogues, and he was aware of her admiring them and waggled one foot to a rhythm in his head.

“I’m sorry to hear about your play.”

The twins moved closer together, prompted from below the threshold of awareness to close ranks by the consideration that if he knew more than they did about the rehearsals, he must know a great deal besides. Jackson spoke from the heart of their concern.

“Do you know our parents?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Quincey?”

“Yes!”

“I’ve read about them in the paper.”

The boys stared at him as they absorbed this and could not speak, for they knew that the business of newspapers was momentous: earthquakes and train crashes, what the government and nations did from day to day, and whether more money should be spent on guns in case Hitler attacked England. They were awed, but not completely surprised, that their own disaster should rank with these godly affairs. This had the ring of confirming truth.

To steady herself, Lola put her hands on her hips. Her heart was beating painfully hard and she could not trust herself to speak, even though she knew she had to. She thought a game was being played which she did not understand, but she was certain there had been an impropriety, or even an insult. Her voice gave out when she began, and she was obliged to clear her throat and start again.

“What have you read about them?”

He raised his eyebrows, which were thick and fused together, and blew a dismissive, blubbery sound through his lips. “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing at all. Silly things.”

“Then I’ll thank you not to talk about them in front of the children.”

It was a construction she must have once overheard, and she had uttered it in blind faith, like an apprentice mouthing the incantation of a magus.

It appeared to work. Marshall winced in acknowledgment of his error, and leaned toward the twins. “Now you two listen carefully to me. It’s clear to everybody that your parents are absolutely wonderful people who love you very much and think about you all the time.”

Jackson and Pierrot nodded in solemn agreement. Job done, Marshall turned his attention back to Lola. After two strong gin cocktails in the drawing room with Leon and his sister, Marshall had come upstairs to find his room, unpack and change for dinner. Without removing his shoes, he had stretched out on the enormous four-poster and, soothed by the country silence, the drinks and the early evening warmth, dropped away into a light sleep in which his young sisters had appeared, all four of them, standing around his bedside, prattling and touching and pulling at his clothes. He woke, hot across his chest and throat, uncomfortably aroused, and briefly confused about his surroundings. It was while he was sitting on the edge of his bed, drinking water, that he heard the voices that must have prompted his dream. When he went along the creaky corridor and entered the nursery, he had seen three children. Now he saw that the girl was almost a young woman, poised and imperious, quite the little Pre-Raphaelite princess with her bangles and tresses, her painted nails and velvet choker.

He said to her, “You’ve jolly good taste in clothes. Those trousers suit you especially well, I think.”

She was pleased rather than embarrassed and her fingers lightly brushed the fabric where it ballooned out across her narrow hips. “We got them in Liberty’s when my mother brought me to London to see a show.”

“And what did you see?”

“Hamlet.” They had in fact seen a matinee pantomime at the London Palladium during which Lola had spilled a strawberry drink down her frock, and Liberty’s was right across the street.

“One of my favorites,” Paul said. It was fortunate for her that he too had neither read nor seen the play, having studied chemistry. But he was able to say musingly, “To be or not to be.”

“That is the question,” she agreed. “And I like your shoes.”

He tilted his foot to examine the craftsmanship. “Yes. Ducker’s in The Turl. They make a wooden thingy of your foot and keep it on a shelf forever. Thousands of them down in a basement room, and most of the people are long dead.”

“How simply awful.”

“I’m hungry,” Pierrot said again.

“Ah well,” Paul Marshall said, patting his pocket. “I’ve got something to show you if you can guess what I do for a living.”

“You’re a singer,” Lola said. “At least, you have a nice voice.”

“Kind but wrong. D’you know, you remind me of my favorite sister . . .”

Jackson interrupted. “You make chocolates in a factory.”

Before too much glory could be heaped upon his brother, Pierrot added, “We heard you talking at the pool.”

“Not a guess then.”

He drew from his pocket a rectangular bar wrapped in greaseproof paper and measuring about four inches by one. He placed it on his lap and carefully unwrapped it and held it up for their inspection. Politely, they moved nearer. It had a smooth shell of drab green against which he clicked his fingernail.

“Sugar casing, see? Milk chocolate inside. Good for any conditions, even if it melts.”

He held his hand higher and tightened his grip, and they could see the tremor in his fingers exaggerated by the bar.

“There’ll be one of these inside the kit bag of every soldier in the land. Standard issue.”

The twins looked at each other. They knew that an adult had no business with sweets. Pierrot said, “Soldiers don’t eat chocolate.”

His brother added, “They like cigarettes.”

“And anyway, why should they all get free sweets and not the children?”

“Because they’ll be fighting for their country.”

“Our dad says there isn’t going to be a war.”

“Well, he’s wrong.”

Marshall sounded a little testy, and Lola said reassuringly, “Perhaps there will be one.”

He smiled up at her. “We’re calling it the Army Amo.”

“Amo amas amat,” she said.

“Exactly.”

Jackson said, “I don’t see why everything you buy has to end in o.”

“It’s really boring,” Pierrot said. “Like Polo and Aero.”

“And Oxo and Brillo.”

“I think what they’re trying to tell me,” Paul Marshall said to Lola as he presented her the bar, “is that they don’t want any.”

She took it solemnly, and then for the twins, gave a serves-you-right look. They knew this was so. They could hardly plead for Amo now. They watched her tongue turn green as it curled around the edges of the candy casing. Paul Marshall sat back in the armchair, watching her closely over the steeple he made with his hands in front of his face.

He crossed and uncrossed his legs. Then he took a deep breath. “Bite it,” he said softly. “You’ve got to bite it.”

It cracked loudly as it yielded to her unblemished incisors, and there was revealed the white edge of the sugar shell, and the dark chocolate beneath it. It was then that they heard a woman calling up the stairs from the floor below, and then she called again, more insistently, from just along the corridor, and this time the twins recognized the voice and a look of sudden bewilderment passed between them.

Lola was laughing through her mouthful of Amo. “There’s Betty looking for you. Bathtime! Run along now. Run along.”