Atonement Read Free

room—the nursery—and walked 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 to be
descended from freckled parents, or elope with a foreign freckled count, rent a
garret room from a freckled innkeeper, lose her heart to a freckled prince and
be married by a freckled vicar before a freckled congregation. But all this was
to be so. Her cousins’ coloring was too vivid—virtually
fluorescent!—to be concealed. The best that could be said was that
Arabella’s
lack
of freckles was the sign—the hieroglyph,
Briony might have written—of her distinction. Her purity of spirit would
never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. There was a
further problem with the twins, who could not be told apart by a stranger. Was
it right that the wicked count should so completely resemble the handsome
prince, or that both should resemble Arabella’s father
and
the
vicar? What if Lola were cast as the prince? Jackson and Pierrot seemed typical
eager little boys who would probably do as they were told. But would their
sister play a man? 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
?
    It was not
until
five
o’clock
that afternoon that she was able to assemble her cast in the nursery. 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. The twins had come with reluctance from the
pool where they had been for three hours without a break. They were barefoot
and wore singlets over trunks that dripped onto the floorboards. Water also ran
down their necks from their matted hair, and both boys were shivering and
jiggled their knees to keep warm. The long immersion had puckered and bleached
their skin, so that in the relatively low light of the nursery their freckles
appeared black. Their sister, who sat between them, with left leg balanced on
right knee, was, by contrast, perfectly composed, having liberally applied
perfume and changed into a green gingham frock to offset her coloring. Her
sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. The sight of
these nails gave Briony a constricting sensation around her sternum, and she
knew at once that she could not ask Lola to play the prince.
    Everyone was
settled and the playwright was about to begin her little speech summarizing the
plot and evoking the excitement of performing before an adult audience tomorrow
evening in the library. But it was Pierrot who spoke first.
    “I hate
plays and all that sort of thing.”
    “I hate
them too, and dressing up,”
Jackson
said.
    It had been
explained at lunch that the twins were to be distinguished by the fact that
Pierrot was missing a triangle of flesh from his left earlobe on account of a
dog he had tormented when he was three.
    Lola looked
away. Briony said reasonably, “How can you hate plays?”
    “It’s
just showing off.” Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident
truth.
    Briony knew
he had a point. This was precisely why she loved plays, or hers at least;
everyone would adore her. Looking at the boys, under whose chairs water was
pooling before spilling between the floorboard cracks, she knew they could
never understand her ambition. Forgiveness softened her tone.
    “Do you
think Shakespeare was just showing off?”
    Pierrot
glanced across his sister’s lap toward
Jackson
. This warlike name
was faintly familiar, with its whiff of school and adult certainty, but the
twins found their courage in each other.
    “Everyone
knows he