介绍:
“Sis-Celia!” Leon called. When they embraced she felt against her collarbone through the
fabric of his jacket a thick fountain pen, and smelled pipe smoke in the folds of his
clothes, prompting a moment’s nostalgia for afternoon tea visits to rooms in men’s
colleges, rather polite and anodyne occasions mostly, but cheery too, especially in winter.
Paul Marshall shook her hand and made a faint bow. There was something comically brooding
about his face. His opener was conventionally dull.
“I’ve heard an awful lot about you.”
“And me you.” What she could remember was a telephone conversation with her brother some
months before, during which they had discussed whether they had ever eaten, or would ever
eat, an Amo bar.
“Emily’s lying down.”
It was hardly necessary to say it. As children they claimed to be able to tell from across
the far side of the park whenever their mother had a migraine by a certain darkening at the
windows.
“And the Old Man’s staying in town?”
“He might come later.”
Cecilia was aware that Paul Marshall was staring at her, but before she could look at him
she needed to prepare something to say.
“The children were putting on a play, but it rather looks like it’s fallen apart.”
Marshall said, “That might have been your sister I saw down by the lake. She was giving the
nettles a good thrashing.”
Leon stepped aside to let Hardman’s boy through with the bags. “Where are we putting Paul?
”
“On the second floor.” Cecilia had inclined her head to direct these words at the young
Hardman. He had reached the foot of the stairs and now stopped and turned, a leather
suitcase in each hand, to face them where they were grouped, in the center of the checkered,
tiled expanse. His expression was of tranquil incomprehension. She had noticed him hanging
around the children lately. Perhaps he was interested in Lola. He was sixteen, and certainly
no boy. The roundness she remembered in his cheeks had gone, and the childish bow of his
lips had become elongated and innocently cruel. Across his brow a constellation of acne had
a new-minted look, its garishness softened by the sepia light. All day long, she realized,
she had been feeling strange, and seeing strangely, as though everything was already long in
the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp.
She said to him patiently, “The big room past the nursery.”
“Auntie Venus’s room,” Leon said.
Auntie Venus had been for almost half a century a vital nursing presence across a swath of
the Northern Territories in Canada. She was no one’s aunt particularly, or rather, she was
Mr. Tallis’s dead second cousin’s aunt, but no one questioned her right, after her
retirement, to the room on the second floor where, for most of their childhoods, she had
been a sweet-natured, bedridden invalid who withered away to an uncomplaining death when
Cecilia was ten. A week later Briony was born.
Cecilia led the visitors into the drawing room, through the French windows, past the roses
toward the swimming pool, which was behind the stable block and was surrounded on four sides
by a high thicket of bamboo, with a tunnel-like gap for an entrance. They walked through,
bending their heads under low canes, and emerged onto a terrace of dazzling white stone from
which the heat rose in a blast. In deep shadow, set well back from the water’s edge, was a
white-painted tin table with a pitcher of iced punch under a square of cheesecloth. Leon
unfolded the canvas chairs and they sat with their glasses in a shallow circle facing the
pool. From his position between Leon and Cecilia, Marshall took control of the conversation
with a ten-minute monologue. He told them how wonderful it was, to be away from town, in
tranquillity, in the country air; for nine months, for every waking minute of every day,
enslaved to a vision, he had shuttled between headquarters, his boardroom and the factory
floor. He had bought a large house on Clapham Common and hardly had time to visit it. The
launch of Rainbow Amo had been a triumph, but only after various distribution catastrophes
which had now been set right; the advertising campaign had offended some elderly bishops so
another was devised; then came the problems of success itself, unbelievable sales, new
production quotas, and disputes about overtime rates, and the search for a site for a second
factory about which the four unions involved had been generally sullen and had needed to be
charmed and coaxed like children; and now, when all had been brought to fruition, there
loomed the greater challenge yet of Army Amo, the khaki bar with the Pass the Amo! slogan;
the concept rested on an assumption that spending on the Armed Forces must go on increasing
if Mr. Hitler did not pipe down; there was even a chance that the bar could become part of
the standard-issue ration pack; in that case, if there were to be a general conscription, a
further five factories would be needed; there were some on the board who were convinced
there should and would be an accommodation with Germany and that Army Amo was a dead duck;
one member was even accusing Marshall of being a warmonger; but, exhausted as he was, and
maligned, he would not be turned away from his purpose, his vision. He ended by repeating
that it was wonderful to find oneself “way out here” where one could, as it were, catch
one’s breath.
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