THE VERY complexity of her feelings confirmed Briony in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit. What fairy tale ever held so much by way of contradiction? A savage and thoughtless curiosity prompted her to rip the letter from its envelope—she read it in the hall after Polly had let her in—and though the shock of the message vindicated her completely, this did not prevent her from feeling guilty. It was wrong to open people’s letters, but it was right, it was essential, for her to know everything. She had been delighted to see her brother again, but that did not prevent her from exaggerating her feelings to avoid her sister’s accusing question. And afterward she had only pretended to be eagerly obedient to her mother’s command by running up to her room; as well as wanting to escape Cecilia, she needed to be alone to consider Robbie afresh, and to frame the opening paragraph of a story shot through with real life. No more princesses! The scene by the fountain, its air of ugly threat, and at the end, when both had gone their separate ways, the luminous absence shimmering above the wetness on the gravel—all this would have to be reconsidered. With the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness, and even in her excitement over the possibilities, she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her help.
The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them obscenely, a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams—an uncle and a nut, the Latin for next, an Old English king attempting to turn back the tide. Rhyming words took their form from children’s books—the smallest pig in the litter, the hounds pursuing the fox, the flat-bottomed boats on the Cam by Grantchester meadow. Naturally, she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No one in her presence had ever referred to the word’s existence, and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her to which—Briony was certain—the word referred. She had no doubt that that was what it was. The context helped, but more than that, the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddling at the foot of the cross. That the word had been written by a man confessing to an image in his mind, confiding a lonely preoccupation, disgusted her profoundly.
She had read the note standing shamelessly in the center of the entrance hall, immediately sensing the danger contained by such crudity. Something irreducibly human, or male, threatened the order of their household, and Briony knew that unless she helped her sister, they would all suffer. It was also clear that she would have to be helped in a delicate, tactful manner. Otherwise, as Briony knew from experience, Cecilia would turn on her.
These thoughts preoccupied her as she washed her hands and face and chose a clean dress. The socks she wanted to wear were not to be found, but she wasted no time in hunting. She put on some others, strapped on her shoes and sat at her desk. Downstairs, they were drinking cocktails and she would have at least twenty minutes to herself. She could brush her hair on the way out. Outside her open window a cricket was singing. A sheaf of foolscap from her father’s office was before her, the desk light threw down its comforting yellow patch, the fountain pen was in her hand. The orderly troupe of farm animals lined along the windowsill and the straitlaced dolls poised in the various rooms of their open-sided mansion waited for the gem of her first sentence. At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. What she wanted was to be lost to the unfolding of an irresistible idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of her scratchy silver nib and coiling into words. But how to do justice to the changes that had made her into a real writer at last, and to her chaotic swarm of impressions, and to the disgust and fascination she felt? Order must be imposed. She should begin, as she had decided earlier, with a simple account of what she had seen at the fountain. But that episode in the sunlight was not quite so interesting as the dusk, the idle minutes on the bridge lost to daydreaming, and then Robbie appearing in the semidarkness, calling to her, holding in his hand the little white square that contained the letter that contained the word. And what did the word contain?
She wrote, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.”
Surely it was not too childish to say there had to be a story; and this was the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil. But wasn’t she—that was, Briony the writer—supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such nursery-tale ideas as good and evil? There must be some lofty, godlike place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection. If such a place existed, she was not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind.
Trapped between the urge to write a simple diary account of her day’s experiences and the ambition to make something greater of them that would be polished, self-contained and obscure, she sat for many minutes frowning at her sheet of paper and its infantile quotation and did not write another word. Actions she thought she could describe well enough, and she had the hang of dialogue. She could do the woods in winter, and the grimness of a castle wall. But how to do feelings? All very well to write, She felt sad, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things. Pen in hand, she stared across the room toward her hard-faced dolls, the estranged companions of a childhood she considered closed. It was a chilly sensation, growing up. She would never sit on Emily’s or Cecilia’s lap again, or only as a joke. Two summers ago, on her eleventh birthday, her parents, brother and sister and a fifth person she could not remember had taken her out onto the lawn and tossed her in a blanket eleven times, and then once for luck. Could she trust it now, the hilarious freedom of the upward flight, the blind trust in the kindly grip of adult wrists, when the fifth person could so easily have been Robbie?
At the sound of the soft clearing of a female throat, she looked up, startled. It was Lola. She was leaning apologetically into the room, and as soon as their eyes met she tapped the door gently with her knuckles.
“Can I come in?”
She came in anyway, her movements somewhat restricted by the blue satin sheath dress she wore. Her hair was loose and she was barefoot. As she approached, Briony put away her pen and covered her sentence with the corner of a book. Lola sat herself down on the edge of the bed and blew dramatically through her cheeks. It was as though they had always had a sisterly end-of-day chat.
“I’ve had the most appalling evening.”
When Briony was obliged by her cousin’s fierce stare to raise an eyebrow, she continued, “The twins have been torturing me.”
She thought it was a figure of speech until Lola twisted her shoulder to reveal, high on her arm, a long scratch.
“How awful!”
She held out her wrists. Round each were blotchy bands of chafing.
“Chinese burns!”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll get some antiseptic for your arm.”
“I’ve done all that myself.”
It was true, the womanly tang of Lola’s perfume could not conceal a childish whiff of Germolene. The least Briony could do was to leave her desk and go to sit beside her cousin.
“You poor thing!”
Briony’s compassion made Lola’s eyes fill, and her voice went husky.
“Everybody thinks they’re angels just because they look alike, but they’re little brutes.”
She held back a sob, seeming to bite it down with a tremor along her jaw, and then inhaled deeply several times through flared nostrils. Briony took her hand and thought she could see how one might begin to love Lola. Then she went to her chest of drawers and took out a hankie, unfolded it and gave it to her. Lola was about to use it, but the sight of its gaily printed motif of cowgirls and lariats caused her to give out a gentle hooting sound on a rising note, the kind of noise children make to imitate ghosts. Downstairs the doorbell rang, and moments later, just discernible, the rapid tick of high heels on the tiled floor of the hallway. It would be Robbie, and Cecilia was going to the door herself. Worried that Lola’s crying could be heard downstairs, Briony got to her feet again and pushed the bedroom door closed. Her cousin’s distress produced in her a state of restlessness, an agitation that was close to joy. She went back to the bed and put her arm round Lola who raised her hands to her face and began to cry. That a girl so brittle and domineering should be brought this low by a couple of nine-year-old boys seemed wondrous to Briony, and it gave her a sense of her own power. It was what lay behind this near-joyful feeling. Perhaps she was not as weak as she always assumed; finally, you had to measure yourself by other people—there really was nothing else. Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself. At a loss for words, she gently rubbed her cousin’s shoulder and reflected that Jackson and Pierrot alone could not be responsible for such grief; she remembered there was other sorrow in Lola’s life. The family home in the north—Briony imagined streets of blackened mills, and grim men trudging to work with sandwiches in tin boxes. The Quincey home was closed up and might never open again.
Lola was beginning to recover. Briony asked softly, “What happened?”
The older girl blew her nose and thought for a moment. “I was getting ready for a bath. They came bursting in and pounced on me. They got me down on the floor . . .” At this memory she paused to fight another rising sob.
“But why would they do that?”
She took a deep breath and composed herself. She stared unseeingly across the room. “They want to go home. I said they couldn’t. They think I’m the one who’s keeping them here.”
The twins unreasonably venting their frustration on their sister—all this made sense to Briony. But what was troubling her organized spirit now was the thought that soon the call would come to go downstairs and her cousin would need to be in possession of herself.
“They just don’t understand,” Briony said wisely as she went to the handbasin and filled it w............