介绍:
Four
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.
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