Atonement
ATONEMENT
A Novel
IAN M
C
EWAN
DOUBLEDAY
Contents
“Dear
Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have
entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age
in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult
your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of
what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities?
Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known in a
country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing,
where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where
roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have
you been admitting?”
They
had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her
own room.
Jane Austen,
Northanger
Abbey
PART ONE
T
HE PLAY
—for which Briony had designed the
posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding
screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe
paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her
to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had
nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of
her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of
rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others
desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a
rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense
was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign
count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous
dash toward a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly
everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of
humor. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished
doctor—in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the
needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded
by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on
“a windy sunlit day in spring.”
Mrs. Tallis
read the seven pages of
The Trials of Arabella
in her bedroom, at her
dressing 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 Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at
the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her
arms, onto her lap—ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from
its infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet—and said that the
play was “stupendous,” and agreed instantly, murmuring into the
tight whorl of the girl’s ear, that this word could be quoted on the
poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth.
Briony was
hardly to know it then, but this was the project’s highest point of fulfillment.
Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration.
There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, when she
burrowed in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, and made her heart thud with
luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which
featured
good-natured face buckled in grief as Arabella sank in loneliness and despair.
In another, there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering
hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony
Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of her. In a third, he punched
the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain,
there was no possibility of a curtain. Her play 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 of girlfriends, toward the right form of
wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who
would sweetly request Briony’s services as 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—toward their owner—as if about to
break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact,
Briony’s was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her
straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict
instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be
found standing about her dressing table—cowboys, deep-sea divers,
humanoid mice—suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen’s
army awaiting orders.
A taste for
the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for
secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing
against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a
diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention.
In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An
old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed.
In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday
when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rainmaking
spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf.
But hidden
drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from
Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious,
organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and
destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to
be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative
isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer
holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was
sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the
squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this
was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect,
once a solution had been found.
At the age of
eleven she wrote her first story—a foolish affair, imitative of half a
dozen folktales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about
the ways of the world which compels a reader’s respect. But this first
clumsy 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 too
tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing
out the
she said
s, the
and then
s, made her wince, and she
felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being.
Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character’s weakness;
the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other
authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved
and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this
one respect, every other finished story in 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 the finished work to show to her
mother, or her father, when he was home.
Her efforts
received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to
understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility
with words. 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. Briony was encouraged to read her stories aloud in the library and
it surprised her parents and older sister to hear their quiet girl perform so
boldly, making big gestures with her free arm, arching her eyebrows as she did
the voices, and looking up from the page for seconds at a time as she read in
order to gaze into one face after the other, unapologetically demanding her
family’s total attention as she cast her narrative spell.
Even without
their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Briony could not have been
held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as had many
writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful. Cecilia’s
enthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescension
perhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister wanted each bound story catalogued
and placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath Tagore and Quintus
Tertullian. If this was supposed to be a joke, Briony ignored it. She was on
course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not
only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturization. A
world could 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
moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence,
falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a
glance
. The
pages of a recently finished 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 made just 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 and soft breezes. A love of order also shaped the
principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of
housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious,
the latter a reward withheld until the final page.