by Ian Mcewan
Cecilia took a cigarette from a packet by the cooker, and then, remembering that her sister was no longer a child, offered one to her. There were two kitchen chairs by the table, but Cecilia, who leaned with her back to the sink, did not invite Briony to sit down. The two women smoked and waited, so it seemed to Briony, for the air to clear of the landlady’s presence.
Cecilia said in a quiet level voice, “When I got your letter I went to see a solicitor. It’s not straightforward, unless there’s hard new evidence. Your change of heart won’t be enough. Lola will go on saying she doesn’t know. Our only hope was old Hardman and now he’s dead.”
“Hardman?” The contending elements—the fact of his death, his relevance to the case—confused Briony and she struggled with her memory. Was Hardman out that night looking for the twins? Did he see something? Was something said in court that she didn’t know about?
“Didn’t you know he was dead?”
“No. But …”
“Unbelievable.”
Cecilia’s attempts at a neutral, factual tone were coming apart. Agitated, she came away from the cooking area, squeezed past the table and went to the other end of the room and stood by the bedroom door. Her voice was breathy as she tried to control her anger.
“How odd that Emily didn’t include that in her news along with the corn and the evacuees. He had cancer. Perhaps with the fear of God in him he was saying something in his last days that was rather too inconvenient for everyone at this stage.”
“But Cee …”
She snapped, “Don’t call me that!” She repeated in a softer voice, “Please don’t call me that.” Her fingers were on the handle of the bedroom door and it looked like the interview was coming to an end. She was about to disappear.
With an implausible display of calm, she summarized for Briony.
“What I paid two guineas to discover is this. There isn’t going to be an appeal just because five years on you’ve decided to tell the truth.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying …” Briony wanted to get back to Hardman, but Cecilia needed to tell her what must have gone through her head many times lately.
“It isn’t difficult. If you were lying then, why should a court believe you now? There are no new facts, and you’re an unreliable witness.”
Briony carried her half-smoked cigarette to the sink. She was feeling sick. She took a saucer for an ashtray from the plate rack. Her sister’s confirmation of her crime was terrible to hear. But the perspective was unfamiliar. Weak, stupid, confused, cowardly, evasive—she had hated herself for everything she had been, but she had never thought of herself as a liar. How strange, and how clear it must seem to Cecilia. It was obvious, and irrefutable. And yet, for a moment she even thought of defending herself. She hadn’t intended to mislead, she hadn’t acted out of malice. But who would believe that?
She stood where Cecilia had stood, with her back to the sink and, unable to meet her sister’s eye, said, “What I did was terrible. I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said soothingly, and in the second or two during which she drew deeply on her cigarette, Briony flinched as her hopes lifted unreally. “Don’t worry,” her sister resumed. “I won’t ever forgive you.”
“And if I can’t go to court, that won’t stop me telling everyone what I did.”
As her sister gave a wild little laugh, Briony realized how frightened she was of Cecilia. Her derision was even harder to confront than her anger. This narrow room with its stripes like bars contained a history of feeling that no one could imagine. Briony pressed on. She was, after all, in a part of the conversation she had rehearsed.
“I’ll go to Surrey and speak to Emily and the Old Man. I’ll tell them everything.”
“Yes, you said that in your letter. What’s stopping you? You’ve had five years. Why haven’t you been?”
“I wanted to see you first.”
Cecilia came away from the bedroom door and stood by the table. She dropped her stub into the neck of a stout bottle. There was a brief hiss and a thin line of smoke rose from the black glass. Her sister’s action made Briony feel nauseous again. She had thought the bottles were full. She wondered if she had ingested something unclean with her breakfast.
Cecilia said, “I know why you haven’t been. Because your guess is the same as mine. They don’t want to hear anything more about it. That unpleasantness is all in the past, thank you very much. What’s done is done. Why stir things up now? And you know very well they believed Hardman’s story.”
Briony came away from the sink and stood right across the table from her sister. It was not easy to look into that beautiful mask.
She said very deliberately, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. What’s he got to do with this? I’m sorry he’s dead, I’m sorry I didn’t know …”
At a sound, she started. The bedroom door was opening and Robbie stood before them. He wore army trousers and shirt and polished boots, and his braces hung free at his waist. He was unshaven and tousled, and his gaze was on Cecilia only. She had turned to face him, but she did not go toward him. In the seconds during which they looked at each other in silence, Briony, partly obscured by her sister, shrank into her uniform.
He spoke to Cecilia quietly, as though they were alone. “I heard voices and I guessed it was something to do with the hospital.”
“That’s all right.”
He looked at his watch. “Better get moving.”
As he crossed the room, just before he went out onto the landing, he made a brief nod in Briony’s direction. “Excuse me.”
They heard the bathroom door close. Into the silence Cecilia said, as if there were nothing between her and her sister, “He sleeps so deeply. I didn’t want to wake him.” Then she added, “I thought it would be better if you didn’t meet.”
Briony’s knees were actually beginning to tremble. Supporting herself with one hand on the table, she moved away from the kitchen area so that Cecilia could fill the kettle. Briony longed to sit down. She would not do so until invited, and she would never ask. So she stood by the wall, pretending not to lean against it, and watched her sister. What was surprising was the speed with which her relief that Robbie was alive was supplanted by her dread of confronting him. Now she had seen him walk across the room, the other possibility, that he could have been killed, seemed outlandish, against all the odds. It would have made no sense. She was staring at her sister’s back as she moved about the tiny kitchen. Briony wanted to tell her how wonderful it was that Robbie had come back safely. What deliverance. But how banal that would have sounded. And she had no business saying it. She feared her sister, and her scorn.
Still feeling nauseous, and now hot, Briony pressed her cheek against the wall. It was no cooler than her face. She longed for a glass of water, but she did not want to ask her sister for anything. Briskly, Cecilia moved about her tasks, mixing milk and water to egg powder, and setting out a pot of jam and three plates and cups on the table. Briony registered this, but it gave her no comfort. It only increased her foreboding of the meeting that lay ahead. Did Cecilia really think that in this situation they could sit together and still have an appetite for scrambled eggs? Or was she soothing herself by being busy? Briony was listening out for footsteps on the landing, and it was to distract herself that she attempted a conversational tone. She had seen the cape hanging on the back of the door.
“Cecilia, are you a ward sister now?”
“Yes, I am.”
She said it with a downward finality, closing off the subject. Their shared profession was not going to be a bond. Nothing was, and there was nothing to talk about until Robbie came back.
At last she heard the click of the lock on the bathroom door. He was whistling as he crossed the landing. Briony moved away from the door, further down toward the darker end of the room. But she was in his sight line as he came in. He had half raised his right hand in order to shake hers, and hi
s left trailed, about to close the door behind him. If it was a double take, it was undramatic. As soon as their eyes met, his hands dropped to his sides and he gave a little winded sigh as he continued to look at her hard. However intimidated, she felt she could not look away. She smelled the faint perfume of his shaving soap. The shock was how much older he looked, especially round the eyes. Did everything have to be her fault? she wondered stupidly. Couldn’t it also be the war’s?
“So it was you,” he said finally. He pushed the door closed behind him with his foot. Cecilia had come to stand by his side and he looked at her.
She gave an exact summary, but even if she had wanted, she would not have been able to withhold her sarcasm.
“Briony’s going to tell everybody the truth. She wanted to see me first.”
He turned back to Briony. “Did you think I might be here?”
Her immediate concern was not to cry. At that moment, nothing would have been more humiliating. Relief, shame, self-pity, she didn’t know which it was, but it was coming. The smooth wave rose, tightening her throat, making it impossible to speak, and then, as she held on, tensing her lips, it fell away and she was safe. No tears, but her voice was a miserable whisper.
“I didn’t know if you were alive.”
Cecilia said, “If we’re going to talk we should sit down.”
“I don’t know that I can.” He moved away impatiently to the adjacent wall, a distance of seven feet or so, and leaned against it, arms crossed, looking from Briony to Cecilia. Almost immediately he moved again, down the room to the bedroom door where he turned to come back, changed his mind and stood there, hands in pockets. He was a large man, and the room seemed to have shrunk. In the confined space he was desperate in his movements, as though suffocating. He took his hands from his pockets and smoothed the hair at the back of his neck. Then he rested his hands on his hips. Then he let them drop. It took all this time, all this movement, for Briony to realize that he was angry, very angry, and just as she did, he said,
“What are you doing here? Don’t talk to me about Surrey. No one’s stopping you going. Why are you here?”
She said, “I had to talk to Cecilia.”
“Oh yes. And what about?”
“The terrible thing that I did.”
Cecilia was going toward him. “Robbie,” she whispered. “Darling.” She put her hand on his arm, but he pulled it clear.
“I don’t know why you let her in.” Then to Briony, “I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m torn between breaking your stupid neck here and taking you outside and throwing you down the stairs.”
If it had not been for her recent experience, she would have been terrified. Sometimes she heard soldiers on the ward raging against their helplessness. At the height of their passion, it was foolish to reason with them or try to reassure them. It had to come out, and it was best to stand and listen. She knew that even offering to leave now could be provocative. So she faced Robbie and waited for the rest, her due. But she was not frightened of him, not physically.
He did not raise his voice, though it was straining with contempt. “Have you any idea at all what it’s like inside?”
She imagined small high windows in a cliff face of brick, and thought perhaps she did, the way people imagined the different torments of hell. She shook her head faintly. To steady herself she was trying to concentrate on the details of his transformation. The impression of added height was due to his parade-ground posture. No Cambridge student ever stood so straight. Even in his distraction his shoulders were well back, and his chin was raised like an old-fashioned boxer’s.
“No, of course you don’t. And when I was inside, did that give you pleasure?”
“No.”
“But you did nothing.”
She had thought about this conversation many times, like a child anticipating a beating. Now it was happening at last, and it was as if she wasn’t quite here. She was watching from far away and she was numb. But she knew his words would hurt her later.
Cecilia had stood back. Now she put her hand again on Robbie’s arm. He had lost weight, though he looked stronger, with a lean and stringy muscular ferocity. He half turned to her.
“Remember,” Cecilia was starting to say, but he spoke over her.
“Do you think I assaulted your cousin?”
“No.”
“Did you think it then?”
She fumbled her words. “Yes, yes and no. I wasn’t certain.”
“And what’s made you so certain now?”
She hesitated, conscious that in answering she would be offering a form of defense, a rationale, and that it might enrage him further.
“Growing up.”
He stared at her, lips slightly parted. He really had changed in five years. The hardness in his gaze was new, and the eyes were smaller and narrower, and in the corners were the firm prints of crow’s feet. His face was thinner than she remembered, the cheeks were sunken, like an Indian brave’s. He had grown a little toothbrush mustache in the military style. He was startlingly handsome, and there came back to her from years ago, when she was ten or eleven, the memory of a passion she’d had for him, a real crush that had lasted days. Then she confessed it to him one morning in the garden and immediately forgot about it.
She had been right to be wary. He was gripped by the kind of anger that passes itself off as wonderment.
“Growing up,” he echoed. When he raised his voice she jumped. “Goddamnit! You’re eighteen. How much growing up do you need to do? There are soldiers dying in the field at eighteen. Old enough to be left to die on the roads. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
It was a pathetic source of comfort, that he could not know what she had seen. Strange, that for all her guilt, she should feel the need to withstand him. It was that, or be annihilated.
She barely nodded. She did not dare speak. At the mention of dying, a surge of feeling had engulfed him, pushing him beyond anger into an extremity of bewilderment and disgust. His breathing was irregular and heavy, he clenched and unclenched his right fist. And still he stared at her, into her, with a rigidity, a savagery in his look. His eyes were bright, and he swallowed hard several times. The muscles in his throat tensed and knotted. He too was fighting off an emotion he did not want witnessed. She had learned the little she knew, the tiny, next-to-nothing scraps that came the way of a trainee nurse, in the safety of the ward and the bedside. She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving this turmoil. He took a step toward her and she shrank back, no longer certain of his harmlessness—if he couldn’t talk, he might have to act. Another step, and he could have reached her with his sinewy arm. But Cecilia slid between them. With her back to Briony, she faced Robbie and placed her hands on his shoulders. He turned his face away from her.
“Look at me,” she murmured. “Robbie. Look at me.” The reply he made was lost to Briony. She heard his dissent or denial. Perhaps it was an obscenity. As Cecilia gripped him tighter, he twisted his whole body away from her, and they seemed like wrestlers as she reached up and tried to turn his head toward her. But his face was tilted back, his lips retracted and teeth bared in a ghoulish parody of a smile. Now with two hands she was gripping his cheeks tightly, and with an effort she turned his face and drew it toward her own. At last he was looking into her eyes, but still she kept her grip on his cheeks. She pulled him closer, drawing him into her gaze, until their faces met and she kissed him lightly, lingeringly on the lips. With a tenderness that Briony remembered from years ago, waking in the night, Cecilia said, “Come back … Robbie, come back.”
He nodded faintly, and took a deep breath which he released slowly as she relaxed her grip and withdrew her hands from his face. In the silence, the room appeared to shrink even smaller. He put his arms around her, lowered his head and kissed her, a deep, sustained and private kiss. Briony moved away quietly to t
he other end of the room, toward the window. While she drank a glass of water from the kitchen tap, the kiss continued, binding the couple into their solitude. She felt obliterated, expunged from the room, and was relieved.
She turned her back and looked out at the quiet terraced houses in full sunlight, at the way she had come from the High Street. She was surprised to discover that she had no wish to leave yet, even though she was embarrassed by the long kiss, and dreaded what more there was to come. She watched an old woman dressed in a heavy overcoat, despite the heat. She was on the far pavement walking an ailing swag-bellied dachshund on a lead. Cecilia and Robbie were talking in low voices now, and Briony decided that to respect their privacy she would not turn from the window until she was spoken to. It was soothing to watch the woman unfasten her front gate, close it carefully behind her with fussy exactitude, and then, halfway to her front door, bend with difficulty to pull up a weed from the narrow bed that ran the length of her front path. As she did so, the dog waddled forward and licked her wrist. The lady and her dog went indoors, and the street was empty again. A blackbird dropped down onto a privet hedge and, finding no satisfactory foothold, flew away. The shadow of a cloud came and swiftly dimmed the light, and passed on. It could be any Saturday afternoon. There was little evidence of a war in this suburban street. A glimpse of blackout blinds in a window across the way, the Ford 8 on its blocks, perhaps.
Briony heard her sister say her name and turned round.
“There isn’t much time. Robbie has to report for duty at six tonight and he’s got a train to catch. So sit down. There are some things you’re going to do for us.”
It was the ward sister’s voice. Not even bossy. She simply described the inevitable. Briony took the chair nearest her, Robbie brought over a stool, and Cecilia sat between them. The breakfast she had prepared was forgotten. The three empty cups stood in the center of the table. He lifted the pile of books to the floor. As Cecilia moved the jam jar of harebells to one side where it could not be knocked over, she exchanged a look with Robbie.