Atonement Read Free Page B

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 centre 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 face-down 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 the twins began a wrestling match, and their sister suspected the onset of a headache, somehow the rehearsal began. The silence into which Briony read the prologue was tense.

    This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella
    Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.
    It grieved her parents to see their first born
    Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne
    Without permission…

    His wife at his side, Arabella’s father stood at the wrought-iron gates of his estate, first pleading with his daughter to reconsider her decision, then in desperation ordering her not to go. Facing him was the sad but stubborn heroine with the count beside her, and their horses, tethered to a nearby oak, were neighing and pawing the ground, impatient to be off. 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