Atonement Read Free Page B

thoughts were Briony’s thoughts. But how could she
refuse a cousin so far from home whose family life was in ruins? Lola was
reading her mind because she now played her final card, the unrefusable ace.
    “Do say
yes. It would be the only good thing that’s happened to me in
months
.”
    Yes. Unable
to push her tongue against the word, Briony could only nod, and felt as she did
so a sulky thrill of self-annihilating compliance spreading across her skin and
ballooning outward from it, darkening the room in throbs. 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. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the
full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate
the new regime. Not only Leon to consider, but what of the antique peach and
cream satin dress that her mother was looking out for her, for Arabella’s
wedding? That would now be given to Lola. How could her mother reject the
daughter who had loved her all these years? As she saw the dress make its
perfect, clinging fit around her cousin and witnessed her mother’s
heartless smile, Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run
away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a
bearded woodsman one winter’s dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak,
beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the
pink ribbon straps . . .
    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. Did she dare leave now? Lola was pacing the
floorboards, one hand to her brow as she skimmed through the first pages of the
play, muttering the lines from the prologue. She announced that nothing was to
be lost by beginning at the beginning, and now she was casting her brothers as
Arabella’s parents and describing the opening to them, seeming to know
all there was to know about the scene. The advance of Lola’s dominion was
merciless and made self-pity irrelevant. Or would it be all the more
annihilatingly delicious?—for 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. But it was Lola’s briskness,
her obliviousness to anything beyond her own business, and Briony’s
certainty that her own feelings would not even register, still less provoke
guilt, which gave her the strength to resist.
    In a
generally pleasant and well-protected life, she had never really confronted
anyone before. Now she saw: it was like diving into the swimming pool in early
June; you simply had to make yourself do it. As she squeezed out of the high
chair and walked over to where her cousin stood her heart thudded
inconveniently and her breath was short.
    She took the
play from Lola and said in a voice that was constricted and more high-pitched
than usual, “If you’re Arabella, then I’ll be the director,
thank you very much, and I’ll read the prologue.”
    Lola put her
speckled hand to her mouth. “Sor-reeee!” she hooted. “I was
just trying to get things started.”
    Briony was
unsure how to respond, so she turned to Pierrot and said, “You
don’t look much like Arabella’s mother.”
    The
countermanding of Lola’s casting decision, and the laughter in the boys
it provoked, made for a shift in the balance of power. Lola made an exaggerated
shrug of her bony shoulders and went to stare out of the window. Perhaps she
herself was struggling with the temptation to flounce from the room.
    Though