“What’s up, Cee?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“You really ought to come and stay with me and look around.”
There was a figure moving about on the terrace, and lights were coming on in the drawing room. Briony called out to her brother and sister. Leon called back. “We’re over here.”
“We should go in,” Cecilia said, and still arm in arm, they began to walk toward the house. As they passed the roses she wondered if there really was anything she wanted to tell him. Confessing to her behavior this morning was certainly not possible.
“I’d love to come up to town.” Even as she said the words she imagined herself being dragged back, incapable of packing her bag or of making the train. Perhaps she didn’t want to go at all, but she repeated herself a little more emphatically.
“I’d love to come.”
Briony was waiting impatiently on the terrace to greet her brother. Someone addressed her from inside the drawing room and she spoke over her shoulder in reply. As Cecilia and Leon approached, they heard the voice again—it was their mother trying to be stern.
“I’m only saying it one more time. You will go up now and wash and change.”
With a lingering look in their direction, Briony moved toward the French windows. There was something in her hand. Leon said, “We could set you up in no time at all.”
When they stepped into the room, into the light of several lamps, Briony was still there, still barefoot and in her filthy white dress, and her mother was standing by the door on the far side of the room, smiling indulgently. Leon stretched out his arms and did the comic Cockney voice he reserved for her.
“An’ if it ain’t my li’l sis!”
As she hurried past, Briony pushed into Cecilia’s hand a piece of paper folded twice and then she squealed her brother’s name and leaped into his embrace. Conscious of her mother watching her, Cecilia adopted an expression of amused curiosity as she unfolded the sheet. Commendably, it was a look she was able to maintain as she took in the small block of typewriting and in a glance absorbed it whole—a unit of meaning whose force and color was derived from the single repeated word. At her elbow, Briony was telling Leon about the play she had written for him, and lamenting her failure to stage it. The Trials of Arabella, she kept repeating. The Trials of Arabella. Never had she appeared so animated, so weirdly excited. She still had her arms about his neck, and was standing on tiptoe to nuzzle her cheek against his. Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia’s thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave? What had made her so blind, so obtuse? Many seconds had passed, and it was no longer plausible to be staring fixedly at the sheet of paper. The act of folding it away brought her to an obvious realization: it could not have been sent unsealed. She turned to look at her sister. Leon was saying to her, “How about this? I’m good at voices, you’re even better. We’ll read it aloud together.”
Cecilia moved round him, into Briony’s view.
“Briony? Briony, did you read this?”
But Briony, engaged in a shrill response to her brother’s suggestion, writhed in his arms and turned her face from her sister and half buried it in Leon’s jacket. From across the room Emily said soothingly, “Calmly now.”
Again, Cecilia shifted her position so that she was on the other side of her brother. “Where’s the envelope?”
Briony turned her face away again and laughed wildly at something Leon was telling her. Then Cecilia was aware of another figure in their presence, at the edge of vision, moving behind her, and when she turned she confronted Paul Marshall. In one hand he held a silver tray on which stood five cocktail glasses, each one half filled with a viscous brown substance. He lifted a glass and presented it to her.