介绍:
All this—the river and flowers, running, which was something she rarely did these days, the
fine ribbing of the oak trunks, the high-ceilinged room, the geometry of light, the pulse in
her ears subsiding in the stillness—all this pleased her as the familiar was transformed
into a delicious strangeness. But she also felt reproved for her homebound boredom. She had
returned from Cambridge with a vague notion that her family was owed an uninterrupted
stretch of her company. But her father remained in town, and her mother, when she wasn’t
nurturing her migraines, seemed distant, even unfriendly. Cecilia had carried up trays of
tea to her mother’s room—as spectacularly squalid as her own—thinking some intimate
conversations might develop. However, Emily Tallis wanted to share only tiny frets about the
household, or she lay back against the pillows, her expression unreadable in the gloom,
emptying her cup in wan silence. Briony was lost to her writing fantasies—what had seemed a
passing fad was now an enveloping obsession. Cecilia had seen them on the stairs that
morning, her younger sister leading the cousins, poor things, who had arrived only
yesterday, up to the nursery to rehearse the play Briony wanted to put on that evening, when
Leon and his friend were expected. There was so little time, and already one of the twins
had been detained by Betty in the scullery for some wrongdoing or other. Cecilia was not
inclined to help—it was too hot, and whatever she did, the project would end in calamity,
with Briony expecting too much, and no one, especially the cousins, able to measure up to
her frenetic vision.
Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying
on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up
through her arm as she read her way through Richardson’s Clarissa. She had made a
halfhearted start on a family tree, but on the paternal side, at least until her great-
grandfather opened his humble hardware shop, the ancestors were irretrievably sunk in a bog
of farm laboring, with suspicious and confusing changes of surnames among the men, and
common-law marriages unrecorded in the parish registers. She could not remain here, she knew
she should make plans, but she did nothing. There were various possibilities, all equally
unpressing. She had a little money in her account, enough to keep her modestly for a year or
so. Leon repeatedly invited her to spend time with him in London. University friends were
offering to help her find a job—a dull one certainly, but she would have her independence.
She had interesting uncles and aunts on her mother’s side who were always happy to see her,
including wild Hermione, mother of Lola and the boys, who even now was over in Paris with a
lover who worked in the wireless.
No one was holding Cecilia back, no one would care particularly if she left. It wasn’t
torpor that kept her—she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked
to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed. From time to time she
persuaded herself she remained for Briony’s sake, or to help her mother, or because this
really was her last sustained period at home and she would see it through. In fact, the
thought of packing a suitcase and taking the morning train did not excite her. Leaving for
leaving’s sake. Lingering here, bored and comfortable, was a form of self-punishment tinged
with pleasure, or the expectation of it; if she went away something bad might happen or,
worse, something good, something she could not afford to miss. And there was Robbie, who
exasperated her with his affectation of distance, and his grand plans which he would only
discuss with her father. They had known each other since they were seven, she and Robbie,
and it bothered her that they were awkward when they talked. Even though she felt it was
largely his fault—could his first have gone to his head?—she knew this was something she
must clear up before she thought of leaving.
Through the open windows came the faint leathery scent of cow dung, always present except on
the coldest days, and noticeable only to those who had been away. Robbie had put down his
trowel and stood to roll a cigarette, a hangover from his Communist Party time—another
abandoned fad, along with his ambitions in anthropology, and the planned hike from Calais to
Istanbul. Still, her own cigarettes were two flights up, in one of several possible pockets.
She advanced into the room, and thrust the flowers into the vase. It had once belonged to
her Uncle Clem, whose funeral, or reburial, at the end of the war she remembered quite well:
the gun carriage arriving at the country churchyard, the coffin draped in the regimental
flag, the raised swords, the bugle at the graveside, and, most memorably for a five-year-
old, her father weeping. Clem was his only sibling. The story of how he had come by the vase
was told in one of the last letters the young lieutenant wrote home. He was on liaison
duties in the French sector and initiated a last-minute evacuation of a small town west of
Verdun before it was shelled. Perhaps fifty women, children and old people were saved.
Later, the mayor and other officials led Uncle Clem back through the town to a half-
destroyed museum. The vase was taken from a shattered glass case and presented in gratitude.
There was no refusing, however inconvenient it might have seemed to fight a war with Meissen
porcelain under one arm. A month later the vase was left for safety in a farmhouse, and
Lieutenant Tallis waded across a river in spate to retrieve it, returning the same way at
midnight to join his unit. In the final days of the war, he was sent on patrol duties and
gave the vase to a friend for safekeeping. It slowly found its way back to the regimental
headquarters, and was delivered to the Tallis home some months after Uncle Clem’s burial.
大家还在听
