Chapter One
The play, for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets,constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, andlined the collection box in red crepe paper, was written by her in a two-daytempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When thepreparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finisheddraft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. Therewould be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At somemoments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heartwhose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not builda foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine,Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when shecontracts cholera during an impetuous dash towards a seaside town with herintended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, shediscovers in herself a sense of humour. Fortune presents her a second chance inthe form of an impoverished doctor—in fact, a prince in disguise who haselected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciouslythis time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding withthe medical prince on ‘a windy sunlit day in spring’.
Mrs Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at herdressing table, with the author's arm around her shoulder the whole while.Briony studied her mother's face for every trace of shifting emotion, and EmilyTallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, gratefulsmiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her arms, onto herlap—ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and stillnot gone from her, not quite yet—and said that the play was 'stupendous', andagreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl's ear, that thisword could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrancehall by the ticket booth.
Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point offulfilment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams andfrustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out,burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she made her heart thudwith luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one ofwhich featured Leon. In one, his big, good-natured face buckled in grief asArabella sank in loneliness and despair. In another, there he was, cocktail inhand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group offriends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely haveheard of her. In a third he punched the air in exultation as the final curtainfell, although there was no curtain, there was no possibility of a curtain. Herplay was not for her cousins, it was for her brother, to celebrate his return,provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession ofgirlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him toreturn to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony's servicesas a bridesmaid.
She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so.Whereas her big sister's room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes,unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony's was a shrine to her controlling demon:the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals,but all facing one way—towards their owner—as if about to break into song, andeven the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact, Briony's was the onlytidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomedmansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; thevarious thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressingtable—cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice—suggested by their even ranksand spacing a citizen's army awaiting orders.
A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was apassion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was openedby pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here shekept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her owninvention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters andpostcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboardbeneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to herninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool's gold, arain-making spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel's skull as light as a leaf.
But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not concealfrom Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious,organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem anddestruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her tobe cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relativeisolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summerholidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life wassufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about thesquirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this wasparticularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once asolution had been found.
At the age of eleven she wrote her first story—a foolish affair, imitative ofhalf a dozen folk tales and lacking, she realised later, that vital knowingnessabout the ways of the world which compels a reader's respect. But this firstclumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets:once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was tootentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing outthe she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing toknow about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable themoment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculatethat she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only whena story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at bothends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished storyin the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins,bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take thefinished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.
Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallisesbegan to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and afacility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionaryand thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: thecoins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric', a hoodlum caughtstealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation', the heroine on herthoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory' journey through the night, the king'sfurrowed brow was the 'hieroglyph' of his displeasure. Briony was encouraged toread her stories aloud in the library and it surprised her parents and oldersister to hear their quiet girl perform so boldly, making big gestures with herfree arm, arching her eyebrows as she did the voices, and looking up from thepage for seconds at a time as she read in order to gaze into one face after theother, unapologetically demanding her family's total attention as she cast hernarrative spell.
Even without their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Briony could nothave been held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as hadmany writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful. Cecilia'senthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescensionperhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister wanted each bound story cataloguedand placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath Tagore and QuintusTertullian. If this was supposed to be a joke, Briony ignored it. She was oncourse now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not onlyinvolved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A worldcould be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm.The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlitdash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling inlove could be achieved in a single word—a glance. The pages of a recentlyfinished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained.Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be madejust so. A crisis in a heroine's life could be made to coincide with hailstones,gales and thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light andsoft breezes. A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with deathand marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set asideexclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until thefinal page.
The play she had written for Leon's homecoming was her first excursion intodrama, and she had found the transition quite effortless. It was a relief not tobe writing out the she saids, or describing the weather or the onset of springor her heroine's face—beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band.Ugliness, on the other hand, had infinite variation. A universe reduced to whatwas said in it was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of nullity, and tocompensate, every utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling orother, in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable. TheTrials of Arabella may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear theterm. The piece was intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief andinstruction, in that order, and the innocent intensity with which Briony setabout the project—the posters, tickets, sales booth—made her particularlyvulnerable to failure. She could easily have welcomed Leon with another of herstories, but it was the news that her cousins from the north were coming to staythat had prompted this leap into a new form.
That Lola, who was fifteen, and the nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot,were refugees from a bitter domestic civil war should have mattered more toBriony. She had heard her mother criticise the impulsive behaviour of heryounger sister Hermione, and lament the situation of the three children, anddenounce her meek, evasive brother-in-law Cecil who had fled to the safety ofAll Souls' College, Oxford. Briony had heard her parents and sister analyse thelatest twists and outrages, charges and counter charges, and she knew the visitwas an open-ended one, and might even extend into term time. She had heard itsaid that the house could easily absorb three children, and that the Quinceyscould stay as long as they liked, provided the parents, if they ever visitedsimultaneously, kept their quarrels away from the Tallis household. Two roomsnear Briony's had been dusted down, new curtains had been hung and furniturecarried in from other rooms. Normally, she would have been involved in thesepreparations, but they happened to coincide with her two-day writing bout andthe beginnings of the front-of-house construction. She vaguely knew that divorcewas an affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it nothought. It was a mundane unravelling that could not be reversed, and thereforeoffered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm ofdisorder. Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formalneatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, anddizzy promise of lifelong union. A good wedding was an unacknowledgedrepresentation of the as yet unthinkable—sexual bliss. In the aisles of countrychurches and grand city cathedrals, witnessed by a whole society of approvingfamily and friends, her heroines and heroes reached their innocent climaxes andneeded to go no further.
If divorce had presented itself as the dastardly antithesis of all this, itcould easily have been cast onto the other pan of the scales, along withbetrayal, illness, thieving, assault and mendacity. Instead it showed anunglamorous face of dull complexity and incessant wrangling. Like re-armamentand the Abyssinia Question and gardening, it was simply not a subject, and when,after a long Saturday morning wait, Briony heard at last the sound of wheels onthe gravel below her bedroom window, and snatched up her pages and ran down thestairs, across the hallway and out into the blinding light of midday, it was notinsensitivity so much as a highly focused artistic ambition that caused her toshout to the dazed young visitors huddled together by the trap with theirluggage, 'I've got your parts, all written out. First performance tomorrow!Rehearsals start in five minutes!'
Immediately, her mother and sister were there to interpose a blander timetable.The visitors—all three were ginger-haired and freckled—were shown their rooms,their cases were carried up by Hardman's son Danny, there was orange juice inthe kitchen, a tour of the house, a swim in the pool and lunch in the southgarden, under the shade of the vines. All the while, Emily and Cecilia Tallismaintained a patter that surely robbed the guests of the ease it was supposed toconfer. Briony knew that if she had travelled two hundred miles to a strangehouse, bright questions and jokey asides, and being told in a hundred differentways that she was free to choose, would have oppressed her. It was not generallyrealised that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone. However, theQuinceys worked hard at pretending to be amused or liberated, and this bode wellfor The Trials of Arabella: this trio clearly had the knack of being what theywere not, even though they barely resembled the characters they were to play.Before lunch Briony slipped away to the empty rehearsal room—the nursery—andwalked up and down on the painted floorboards, considering her casting options.
On the face of it, Arabella, whose hair was as dark as Briony's, was unlikely tobe descended from freckled parents, or elope with a foreign freckled count, renta garret room from a freckled innkeeper, lose her heart to a freckled prince andbe married by a freckled vicar before a freckled congregation. But all this wasto be so. Her cousins' colouring was too vivid—virtually fluorescent!—to beconcealed. The best that could be said was that Arabella's lack of freckles wasthe sign—the hieroglyph, Briony might have written—of her distinction. Herpurity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemishedworld. There was a further problem with the twins, who could not be told apartby a stranger. Was it right that the wicked count should so completely resemblethe handsome prince, or that both should resemble Arabella's father and thevicar? What if Lola were cast as the prince? Jackson and Pierrot seemed typicaleager little boys who would probably do as they were told. But would theirsister play a man? She had green eyes and sharp bones in her face, and hollowcheeks, and there was something brittle in her reticence that suggested strongwill and a temper easily lost. Merely floating the possibility of the role toLola might provoke a crisis, and could Briony really hold hands with her beforethe altar, while Jackson intoned from the Book of Common Prayer?
Continues...
Excerpted from Atonementby Ian McEwan Copyright © 2006 by Ian McEwan. Excerpted by permission.
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