Auntie Venus's Room

Auntie Venus's Room is a second-floor guest bedroom in the Tallis house that becomes Paul Marshall's quarters during his 1935 visit, and later serves as Briony Tallis's suite during the 1999 family reunion at Tilney's Hotel. The room is a charged space where Marshall first encounters the Quincey children, where Cecilia arranges flowers and experiences a premonitory sense of fate, and where, decades later, Briony reflects on her lifelong project of atonement.

Identity and Setting

Auntie Venus's Room was named for a woman who had been a vital nursing presence across swaths of the Northern Territories in Canada for almost half a century. She was no one's aunt particularly—she was Mr. Tallis's dead second cousin's aunt—but no one questioned her right, after her retirement, to the room on the second floor where, for most of the Tallis children's childhoods, she had been a sweet-natured, bedridden invalid who withered away to an uncomplaining death when Cecilia was ten. A week later Briony was born. The room was the only tidy bedroom in the house apart from Briony's, and it was pleasingly uncluttered by personal possessions. Every drawer was empty, every bare surface without so much as a fingerprint. Under the chintz counterpane the sheets would be starchily pure. The air was smooth with the scent of wax, and in the honeyed light, the gleaming surfaces of the furniture seemed to ripple and breathe. Mrs. Turner must have passed through that morning. The room had a four-poster bed, a Chippendale sofa whose seat had been so carefully straightened that sitting down would have seemed a desecration, and an ancient trousseau chest whose lid depicted revelers that seemed to writhe into dance steps as one's approach altered the angle of view.

Marshall's Occupation and the Encounter with the Quincey Children

When Paul Marshall arrived at the Tallis house in the late afternoon of the fateful day in 1935, Cecilia directed Danny Hardman to take his luggage to "the big room past the nursery"—Auntie Venus's Room. After two strong gin cocktails in the drawing room with Leon and his sister, Marshall came upstairs to find his room, unpack and change for dinner. Without removing his shoes, he stretched out on the enormous four-poster and, soothed by the country silence, the drinks and the early evening warmth, dropped away into a light sleep in which his young sisters appeared, all four of them, standing around his bedside, prattling and touching and pulling at his clothes. He woke, hot across his chest and throat, uncomfortably aroused, and briefly confused about his surroundings. It was while he was sitting on the edge of his bed, drinking water, that he heard the voices that must have prompted his dream. When he went along the creaky corridor and entered the nursery, he found the three Quincey children. Lola, who had earlier noticed the masculine-looking suitcase of tan leather and heavy straps and faded steamer labels by the bed in the unused bedroom, recognized the room as Auntie Venus's. Marshall lowered himself into the armchair lately used by the stricken Arabella in the abandoned play, and drew from his pocket a rectangular bar wrapped in greaseproof paper—the Army Amo, the khaki bar with the "Pass the Amo!" slogan. He presented it to Lola, who bit into it, cracking the sugar casing, as the twins looked on.

Cecilia's Visit and a Premonition

Earlier that same afternoon, Cecilia had taken the Meissen vase filled with wildflowers up to the second floor, along the creaking corridor to Auntie Venus's Room, and set the vase on a chest of drawers by the four-poster bed, completing the little commission her mother had set her that morning, eight hours before. She did not immediately leave, for the room was pleasingly uncluttered by personal possessions—in fact, apart from Briony's, it was the only tidy bedroom. And it was cool there, now that the sun had moved round the house. She had an impulse to slip her hand between the covers to feel them, but instead she moved deeper into Mr. Marshall's room. From the window she could see that Briony had crossed the bridge to the island, and was walking down the grassy bank, beginning to disappear among the lakeshore trees that surrounded the island temple. Further off, she could just make out the two hatted figures sitting up on the bench behind Hardman. Now she saw a third figure whom she had not noticed before, striding along the driveway toward the trap. Surely it was Robbie Turner on his way home. He stopped, and as the visitors approached, his outline seemed to fuse with that of the visitors. She could imagine the scene—the manly punches to the shoulder, the horseplay. She was annoyed that her brother could not know that Robbie was in disgrace, and she turned from the window with a sound of exasperation. Being here was a kind of trespass, with the room's future occupant just a few hundred yards away from the house. The room seemed to her to be suspended in a strange, premonitory stillness; she felt as though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp.

The 1999 Reunion

More than sixty years later, during the 1999 family reunion at Tilney's Hotel—the converted Tallis house—Briony Tallis was given the room that had once been Auntie Venus's. Charles, Pierrot's grandson and the organizing spirit, had reserved it for her, always considered to have the best view in the house, over the lake, the driveway, the woods and the hills beyond. It was a pleasant surprise, stepping in. Rooms on either side had been incorporated to make a grand suite. On a low glass table stood a giant spray of hothouse flowers. The huge high bed Auntie Venus had occupied for so long without complaint had gone, and so had the carved trousseau chest and the green silk sofa. They were now the property of the eldest son by Leon's second marriage and installed in a castle somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. But the new furnishings were fine. Briony explored her sitting room which had a writing desk and a good lamp, and was impressed by the vastness of the bathroom with its potpourri and stacks of towels on a heated rack. She stood at the window to admire the sunlight slanting over the golf course, and burnishing the bare trees on the distant hills. She could not quite accept the absence of the lake, but it could be restored one day perhaps, and the building itself surely embraced more human happiness now, as a hotel, than it did when she lived here. Later that night, after the birthday dinner and the performance of The Trials of Arabella, Briony returned to her room and sat at the writing desk until five in the morning, thinking over her strange two days. She reflected on her fifty-nine-year assignment—the novel that should have been her first—and on the impossibility of atonement for a novelist who, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, is also God. She thought of Robbie and Cecilia, and of her final decision to let them survive and flourish, a stand against oblivion and despair. The room, once a guest chamber for a chocolate magnate, became the site of her final reckoning with her own narrative power and its limits.