“Let me take that,” he said, stretching out a hand. “I’ll fill it for you, and you take the flowers.”
“I can manage, thanks.” She was already holding the vase over the basin. But he said, “Look, I’ve got it.” And he had, tightly between forefinger and thumb. “Your cigarette will get wet. Take the flowers.”
This was a command on which he tried to confer urgent masculine authority. The effect on Cecilia was to cause her to tighten her grip. She had no time, and certainly no inclination, to explain that plunging vase and flowers into the water would help with the natural look she wanted in the arrangement. She tightened her hold and twisted her body away from him. He was not so easily shaken off. With a sound like a dry twig snapping, a section of the lip of the vase came away in his hand, and split into two triangular pieces which dropped into the water and tumbled to the bottom in a synchronous, seesawing motion, and lay there, several inches apart, writhing in the broken light. Cecilia and Robbie froze in the attitude of their struggle. Their eyes met, and what she saw in the bilious mélange of green and orange was not shock, or guilt, but a form of challenge, or even triumph. She had the presence of mind to set the ruined vase back down on the step before letting herself confront the significance of the accident. It was irresistible, she knew, even delicious, for the graver it was, the worse it would be for Robbie. Her dead uncle, her father’s dear brother, the wasteful war, the treacherous crossing of the river, the preciousness beyond money, the heroism and goodness, all the years backed up behind the history of the vase reaching back to the genius of Höroldt, and beyond him to the mastery of the arcanists who had reinvented porcelain.
“You idiot! Look what you’ve done.”
He looked into the water, then he looked at back at her, and simply shook his head as he raised a hand to cover his mouth. By this gesture he assumed full responsibility, but at that moment, she hated him for the inadequacy of the response. He glanced toward the basin and sighed. For a moment he thought she was about to step backward onto the vase, and he raised his hand and pointed, though he said nothing. Instead he began to unbutton his shirt. Immediately she knew what he was about. Intolerable. He had come to the house and removed his shoes and socks—well, she would show him then. She kicked off her sandals, unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, unfastened her skirt and stepped out of it and went to the basin wall. He stood with hands on his hips and stared as she climbed into the water in her underwear. Denying his help, any possibility of making amends, was his punishment. The unexpectedly freezing water that caused her to gasp was his punishment. She held her breath, and sank, leaving her hair fanned out across the surface. Drowning herself would be his punishment. When she emerged a few seconds later with a piece of pottery in each hand, he knew better than to offer to help her out of the water. The frail white nymph, from whom water cascaded far more successfully than it did from the beefy Triton, carefully placed the pieces by the vase. She dressed quickly, turning her wet arms with difficulty through her silk sleeves, and tucking the unfastened blouse into the skirt. She picked up her sandals and thrust them under her arm, put the fragments in the pocket of her skirt and took up the vase. Her movements were savage, and she would not meet his eye. He did not exist, he was banished, and this was also the punishment. He stood there dumbly as she walked away from him, barefoot across the lawn, and he watched her darkened hair swing heavily across her shoulders, drenching her blouse. Then he turned and looked into the water in case there was a piece she had missed. It was difficult to see because the roiling surface had yet to recover its tranquillity, and the turbulence was driven by the lingering spirit of her fury. He put his hand flat upon the surface, as though to quell it. She, meanwhile, had disappeared into the house.
Three
ACCORDING TO the poster in the hallway, the date of the first performance of The Trials of Arabella was only one day after the first rehearsal. However, it was not easy for the writer-director to find clear time for concentrated work. As on the preceding afternoon, the trouble lay in assembling the cast. During the night Arabella’s disapproving father, Jackson, had wet the bed, as troubled small boys far from home will, and was obliged by current theory to carry his sheets and pajamas down to the laundry and wash them himself, by hand, under the supervision of Betty who had been instructed to be distant and firm. This was not represented to the boy as a punishment, the idea being to instruct his unconscious that future lapses would entail inconvenience and hard work; but he was bound to feel it as reproof as he stood at the vast stone sink which rose level to his chest, suds creeping up his bare arms to soak his rolled-up shirtsleeves, the wet sheets as heavy as a dead dog and a general sense of calamity numbing his will. Briony came down at intervals to check on his progress. She was forbidden to help, and Jackson, of course, had never laundered a thing in his life; the two washes, countless rinses and the sustained two-handed grappling with the mangle, as well as the fifteen trembling minutes he had afterward at the kitchen table with bread and butter and a glass of water, took up two hours’ rehearsal time. Betty told Hardman when he came in from the morning heat for his pint of ale that it was enough that she was having to prepare a special roast dinner in such weather, and that she personally thought the treatment too harsh, and would have administered several sharp smacks to the buttocks and washed the sheets herself. This would have suited Briony, for the morning was slipping away. When her mother came down to see for herself that the task was done, it was inevitable that a feeling of release should settle on the participants, and in Mrs. Tallis’s mind a degree of unacknowledged guilt, so that when Jackson asked in a small voice if he might please now be allowed a swim in the pool and could his brother come too, his wish was immediately granted, and Briony’s objections generously brushed aside, as though she were the one who was imposing unpleasant ordeals on a helpless little fellow. So there was swimming, and then there had to be lunch. Rehearsals had continued without Jackson, but it was undermining not to have the important first scene, Arabella’s leave- taking, brought to perfection, and Pierrot was too nervous about the fate of his brother down in the bowels of the house to be much in the way of a dastardly foreign count; whatever happened to Jackson would be Pierrot’s future too. He made frequent trips to the lavatory at the end of the corridor. When Briony returned from one of her visits to the laundry, he asked her, “Has he had the spanking?”