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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

    A CCORDING 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?”
    “Not as
yet.”
    Like his
brother, Pierrot had the knack of depriving his lines of any sense. He intoned
a roll call of words:
“Do-you-think-you-can-escape-from-my-clutches?” All present and
correct.
    “It’s
a question,” Briony cut in. “Don’t you see? It goes up at the
end.”
    “What
do you mean?”
    “There.
You just did it. You start low and end high. It’s a
question
.”
    He swallowed
hard, drew a breath and made another attempt, producing this time a roll call
on a rising chromatic scale.
    “At the
end. It goes up at the end!”
    Now came a
roll call on the old monotone, with a break of register, a yodel, on the final
syllable.
    Lola had come
to the nursery that morning in the guise of the adult she considered herself at
heart to be. She wore pleated flannel trousers that ballooned at the