Atonement: Part One, Chapters 1–3

Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humor.

The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were “esoteric,” a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in “shameless auto-exculpation,” the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a “cursory” journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the “hieroglyph” of his displeasure.

The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were “esoteric,” a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in “shameless auto-exculpation,” the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a “cursory” journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the “hieroglyph” of his displeasure.

The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were “esoteric,” a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in “shameless auto-exculpation,” the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a “cursory” journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the “hieroglyph” of his displeasure.

It was a mundane unraveling that could not be reversed, and therefore offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder.

However, the Quinceys worked hard at pretending to be amused or liberated, and this boded well for The Trials of Arabella: this trio clearly had the knack of being what they were not, even though they barely resembled the characters they were to play.

She had green eyes and sharp bones in her face, and hollow cheeks, and there was something brittle in her reticence that suggested strong will and a temper easily lost.

Merely floating the possibility of the role to Lola might provoke a crisis, and could Briony really hold hands with her before the altar, while Jackson intoned from the Book of Common Prayer?

She had arranged three stools in a row, while she herself jammed her rump into an ancient baby’s high chair—a bohemian touch that gave her a tennis umpire’s advantage of height.

In Briony’s family, Mrs. Tallis never had anything to impart that needed saying simultaneously to both daughters.

“You'll be in this play, or you'll get a clout, and then I'll speak to The Parents."
“If you clout us, we'll speak to The Parents.”

She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone, facedown on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began.

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent—how the tilt of a skull could change a life!—Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony’s manuscript from the floor, and the twins had slipped from their chairs to follow their sister into the space in the center of the nursery that Briony had cleared the day before.

Briony had not even been cast as Arabella’s mother, and now was surely the time to sidle from the room and tumble into facedown darkness on the bed.

Perhaps she herself was struggling with the temptation to flounce from the room.

This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella
Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.

The father’s tenderest feelings were supposed to make his voice quaver as he said,
My darling one, you are young and lovely,
But inexperienced, and though you think
The world is at your feet,
It can rise up and tread on you.

Her breathing slowed and her desire for a cigarette deepened, but still she hesitated by the door, momentarily held by the perfection of the scene...the yellow and gray mottled terrace where chamomile and feverfew grew between the paving cracks.

However, Emily Tallis wanted to share only tiny frets about the household, or she lay back against the pillows, her expression unreadable in the gloom, emptying her cup in wan silence.

It wasn't torpor that kept her—she was often restless to the point of irritability.

And there was Robbie, who exasperated her with his affectation of distance, and his grand plans which he would only discuss with her father.

But she felt uncomfortable and hot, and would have liked to check her appearance in the large gilt mirror above the fireplace.

Two swallows were making passes over the fountain, and a chiffchaffs song was piercing the air from within the sinewy gloom of the giant cedar of Lebanon.

There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.

That was a mistake, of course, and she was discomfited and had no idea how to put him right.

It was a pretense, his dithering refusal—he was one of the most confident people she had ever met.

It was a pretense, his dithering refusal—he was one of the most confident people she had ever met.

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.

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.

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 into the water, but it was at this point that Robbie, wanting to make amends, tried to be helpful.

With a sound like a dry twig snapping, a section of the lip of the vase came away in his hand, and split into two triangular pieces which dropped into the water and tumbled to the bottom in a synchronous, seesawing motion, and lay there, several inches apart, writhing in the broken light.

Their eyes met, and what she saw in the bilious melange of green and orange was not shock, or guilt, but a form of challenge, or even triumph.

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.

When Briony had shown her cousins the sales booth and the collection box the evening before, the twins had fought each other for the best front-of-house roles, but Lola had crossed her arms and paid decorous, grown-up compliments through a half smile that was too opaque for the detection of irony.

She could not penetrate Lola’s detachment or coax from Pierrot the common inflections of everyday speech.

Then, nearer, the estates open parkland, which today had a dry and savage look, roasting like a savanna, where isolated trees threw harsh stumpy shadows and the long grass was already stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer.

What was less comprehensible, however, was how Robbie imperiously raised his hand now, as though issuing a command which Cecilia dared not disobey.

Even as her sister’s head broke the surface—thank God!—Briony had her first, weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong.

It was a temptation for her to be magical and dramatic, and to regard what she had witnessed as a tableau mounted for her alone, a special moral for her wrapped in a mystery.