介绍:
In the school holidays Grace was allowed to bring her own six-year-old along. Robbie grew up with the run of the nursery and those other parts of the house the children were permitted, as well as the grounds. His tree-climbing pal was Leon, Cecilia was the little sister who trustingly held his hand and made him feel immensely wise. A few years later, when Robbie won his scholarship to the local grammar, Jack Tallis took the first step in an enduring patronage by paying for the uniform and textbooks. This was the year Briony was born. The difficult birth was followed by Emily’s long illness. Grace’s helpfulness secured her position: on Christmas Day that year—1922—Leon dressed in top hat and riding breeches, walked through the snow to the bungalow with a green envelope from his father. A solicitor’s letter informed her that the freehold of the bungalow was now hers, irrespective of the position she held with the Tallises. But she had stayed on, returning to housework as the children grew older, with responsibilities for the special polishing.
Her theory about Ernest was that he had got himself sent to the Front under another name, and never returned. Otherwise, his lack of curiosity about his son was inhuman. Often, in the minutes she had to herself each day as she walked from the bungalow to the house, she would reflect on the benign accidents of her life. She had always been a little frightened of Ernest. Perhaps they would not have been so happy together as she had been living alone with her darling genius son in her own tiny house. If Mr. Tallis had been a different kind of man . . . Some of the women who came for a shilling’s glimpse of the future had been left by their husbands, even more had husbands killed at the Front. It was a pinched life the women led, and it easily could have been hers.
“Nothing,” he said in answer to her question. “There’s nothing up with me at all.” As he took up a brush and a tin of blacking, he said, “So the future’s looking bright for Molly.”
“She’s going to remarry within five years. And she’ll be very happy. Someone from the north with qualifications.”
“She deserves no less.”
They sat in comfortable silence while she watched him buffing his brogues with a yellow duster. By his handsome cheekbones the muscles twitched with the movement, and along his forearms they fanned and shifted in complicated rearrangements under the skin. There must have been something right with Ernest to have given her a boy like this.
“So you’re off out.”
“Leon was just arriving as I was coming away. He had his friend with him, you know, the chocolate magnate. They persuaded me to join them for dinner tonight.”
“Oh, and there was me all afternoon, on the silver. And doing out his room.”
He picked up his shoes and stood. “When I look for my face in my spoon, I’ll see only you.”
“Get on. Your shirts are hanging in the kitchen.”
He packed up the shoeshine box and carried it out, and chose a cream linen shirt from the three on the airer. He came back through and was on his way out, but she wanted to keep him a little longer.
“And those Quincey children. That boy wetting his bed and all. The poor little lambs.”
He lingered in the doorway and shrugged. He had looked in and seen them round the pool, screaming and laughing through the late morning heat. They would have run his wheelbarrow into the deep end if he had not gone across. Danny Hardman was there too, leering at their sister when he should have been at work.
“They’ll survive,” he said.
Impatient to be out, he skipped up the stairs three at a time. Back in his bedroom he finished dressing hurriedly, whistling tunelessly as he stooped to grease and comb his hair before the mirror inside his wardrobe. He had no ear for music at all, and found it impossible to tell if one note was higher or lower than another. Now he was committed to the evening, he felt excited and, strangely, free. It couldn’t be worse than it already was. Methodically, and with pleasure in his own efficiency, as though preparing for some hazardous journey or military exploit, he accomplished the familiar little chores—located his keys, found a ten-shilling note inside his wallet, brushed his teeth, smelled his breath against a cupped hand, from the desk snatched up his letter and folded it into an envelope, loaded his cigarette case and checked his lighter. One last time, he braced himself in front of the mirror. He bared his gums, and turned to present his profile and looked across his shoulder at his image. Finally, he patted his pockets, then loped down the stairs, three at a time again, called a farewell to his mother, and stepped out onto the narrow brick path which led between the flower beds to a gate in the picket fence.
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