Atonement Ian McEwan

him out of his depth and push him under. But perhaps—he had rolled onto his back—he should not
believe in her outrage. Wasn’t it too theatrical? Surely she must have meant something better, even in
her anger. Even in her anger, she had wanted to show him just how beautiful she was and bind him to
her. How could he trust such a self-serving idea derived from hope and desire? He had to. He
crossed his legs, clasped his hands behind his head, feeling his skin cool as it dried. What might
Freud say? How about: she hid the unconscious desire to expose herself to him behind a show of
temper. Pathetic hope! It was an emasculation, a sentence, and this—what he was feeling now—this
torture was his punishment for breaking her ridiculous vase. He should never see her again. He had to
see her tonight. He had no choice anyway—he was going. She would despise him for coming. He
should have refused Leon’s invitation, but the moment it was made his pulse had leaped and his
bleated yes had left his mouth. He’d be in a room with her tonight, and the body he had seen, the
moles, the pallor, the strawberry mark, would be concealed inside her clothes. He alone would know,
and Emily of course. But only he would be thinking of them. And Cecilia would not speak to him or
look at him. Even that would be better than lying here groaning. No, it wouldn’t. It would be worse,
but he still wanted it. He had to have it. He wanted it to be worse. At last he rose, half dressed and
went into his study and sat at his typewriter, wondering what kind of letter he should write to her.
Like the bedroom and bathroom, the study was squashed under the apex of the bungalow’s roof, and
was little more than a corridor between the two, barely six feet long and five feet wide. As in the two
other rooms, there was a skylight framed in rough pine. Piled in a corner, his hiking gear—boots,
alpenstock, leather knapsack. A knife-scarred kitchen table took up most of the space. He tilted back
his chair and surveyed his desk as one might a life. At one end, heaped high against the sloping
ceiling, were the folders and exercise books from the last months of his preparations for finals. He
had no further use for his notes, but too much work, too much success was bound up with them and he
could not bring himself to throw them out yet. Lying partly across them were some of his hiking maps,
of North Wales, Hampshire and Surrey and of the abandoned hike to Istanbul. There was a compass
with slitted sighting mirror he had once used to walk without maps to Lulworth Cove. Beyond the
compass were his copies of Auden’s Poems and Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. At the other end of the
table were various histories, theoretical treatises and practical handbooks on landscape gardening.
Ten typed-up poems lay beneath a printed rejection slip from Criterion magazine, initialed by Mr.
Eliot himself. Closest to where Robbie sat were the books of his new interest. Gray’s Anatomy was
open by a folio pad of his own drawings. He had set himself the task of drawing and committing to
memory the bones of the hand. He tried to distract himself by running through some of them now,
murmuring their names: capitate, hamate, triquetral, lunate . . . His best drawing so far, done in ink
and colored pencils and showing a cross section of the esophageal tract and the airways, was tacked
to a rafter above the table. A pewter tankard with its handle missing held all the pencils and pens.
The typewriter was a fairly recent Olympia, given to him on his twenty-first by Jack Tallis at a
lunchtime party held in the library. Leon had made a speech as well as his father, and Cecilia had
been there surely. But Robbie could not remember a single thing they might have said to each other.
Was that why she was angry now, because he had ignored her for years? Another pathetic hope. At
the outer reaches of the desk, various photographs: the cast of Twelfth Night on the college lawn,
himself as Malvolio, cross-gartered. How apt. There was another group shot, of himself and the thirty
French kids he had taught in a boarding school near Lille. In a belle époque metal frame tinged with
verdigris was a photograph of his parents, Grace and Ernest, three days after their wedding. Behind
them, just poking into the picture, was the front wing of a car—certainly not theirs, and further off, an
oasthouse looming over a brick wall. It was a good honeymoon, Grace always said, two weeks