Atonement Read Online Free PDF Page B

back.
That’s the arrangement.”
    “That’s
not what I meant at all.”
    She was
surprised that he should think she was raising the question of money. That was
ungenerous of him. Her father had subsidized Robbie’s education all his
life. Had anyone ever objected? She had thought she was imagining it, but in
fact she was right—there was something trying in Robbie’s manner
lately. He had a way of wrong-footing her whenever he could. Two days before he
had rung the front doorbell—in itself odd, for he had always had the
freedom of the house. When she was called down, he was standing outside asking
in a loud, impersonal voice if he could borrow a book. As it happened, Polly
was on all fours, washing the tiles in the entrance hall. Robbie made a great
show of removing his boots which weren’t dirty at all, and then, as an
afterthought, took his socks off as well, and tiptoed with comic exaggeration
across the wet floor. Everything he did was designed to distance her. He was
playacting the cleaning lady’s son come to the big house on an errand.
They went into the library together, and when he found his book, she asked him
to stay for a coffee. It was a pretense, his dithering refusal—he was one
of the most confident people she had ever met. She was being mocked, she knew.
Rebuffed, she left the room and went upstairs and lay on the bed with
Clarissa
,
and read without taking in a word, feeling her irritation and confusion grow.
She was being mocked, or she was being punished—she did not know which
was worse. Punished for being in a different circle at
Cambridge
, for not having a
charlady for a mother; mocked for her poor degree—not that they actually
awarded degrees to women anyway.
    Awkwardly,
for she still had her cigarette, she picked up the vase and balanced it on the
rim of the basin. It would have made better sense to take the flowers out
first, but she was too irritable. Her hands were hot and dry and she had to
grip the porcelain all the tighter. Robbie was silent, but she could tell from
his expression—a forced, stretched smile that did not part his
lips—that he regretted what he had said. That was no comfort either. This
was what happened when they talked these days; one or the other was always in
the wrong, trying to call back the last remark. There was no ease, no stability
in the course of their conversations, no chance to relax. Instead, it was
spikes, traps, and awkward turns that caused her to dislike herself almost as
much as she disliked him, though she did not doubt that he was mostly to blame.
She hadn’t changed, but there was no question that he had. He was putting
distance between himself and the family that had been completely open to him
and given him everything. For this reason alone—expectation of his
refusal, and her own displeasure in advance—she had not invited him to
dinner that night. If he wanted distance, then let him have it.
    Of the four
dolphins whose tails supported the shell on which the Triton squatted, the one
nearest to Cecilia had its wide-open mouth stopped with moss and algae. Its
spherical stone eyeballs, as big as apples, were iridescent green. The whole
statue had acquired around its northerly surfaces a bluish-green patina, so
that from certain approaches, and in low light, the muscle-bound Triton really
seemed a hundred leagues under the sea. Bernini’s intention must have
been for the water to trickle musically from the wide shell with its irregular
edges into the basin below. But the pressure was too weak, so that instead the
water slid soundlessly down the underside of the shell where opportunistic
slime hung in dripping points, like stalactites in a limestone cave. The basin
itself was over three feet deep and clear. The bottom was of a pale, creamy
stone over which undulating white-edged rectangles of refracted sunlight
divided and overlapped.
    Her idea was
to lean over the parapet and hold the flowers in the vase while she lowered it
on its side