Atonement Ian McEwan

fragments in the pocket of her skirt and took up the vase. Her movements were savage, and she would
not meet his eye. He did not exist, he was banished, and this was also the punishment. He stood there
dumbly as she walked away from him, barefoot across the lawn, and he watched her darkened hair
swing heavily across her shoulders, drenching her blouse. Then he turned and looked into the water in
case there was a piece she had missed. It was difficult to see because the roiling surface had yet to
recover its tranquillity, and the turbulence was driven by the lingering spirit of her fury. He put his
hand flat upon the surface, as though to quell it. She, meanwhile, had disappeared into the house.
Three
ACCORDING TO the poster in the hallway, the date of the first performance of The Trials of
Arabella was only one day after the first rehearsal. However, it was not easy for the writer-director
to find clear time for concentrated work. As on the preceding afternoon, the trouble lay in assembling
the cast. During the night Arabella’s disapproving father, Jackson, had wet the bed, as troubled small
boys far from home will, and was obliged by current theory to carry his sheets and pajamas down to
the laundry and wash them himself, by hand, under the supervision of Betty who had been instructed
to be distant and firm. 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. Briony came down at intervals to check on his progress. She was
forbidden to help, and Jackson, of course, had never laundered a thing in his life; the two washes,
countless rinses and the sustained two-handed grappling with the mangle, as well as the fifteen
trembling minutes he had afterward at the kitchen table with bread and butter and a glass of water,
took up two hours’ rehearsal time. Betty told Hardman when he came in from the morning heat for his
pint of ale that it was enough that she was having to prepare a special roast dinner in such weather,
and that she personally thought the treatment too harsh, and would have administered several sharp
smacks to the buttocks and washed the sheets herself. This would have suited Briony, for the morning
was slipping away. When her mother came down to see for herself that the task was done, it was
inevitable that a feeling of release should settle on the participants, and in Mrs. Tallis’s mind a
degree of unacknowledged guilt, so that when Jackson asked in a small voice if he might please now
be allowed a swim in the pool and could his brother come too, his wish was immediately granted,
and Briony’s objections generously brushed aside, as though she were the one who was imposing
unpleasant ordeals on a helpless little fellow. So there was swimming, and then there had to be lunch.
Rehearsals had continued without Jackson, but it was undermining not to have the important first
scene, Arabella’s leave- taking, brought to perfection, and Pierrot was too nervous about the fate of
his brother down in the bowels of the house to be much in the way of a dastardly foreign count;
whatever happened to Jackson would be Pierrot’s future too. He made frequent trips to the lavatory at
the end of the corridor. When Briony returned from one of her visits to the laundry, he asked her,
“Has he had the spanking?”
“Not as yet.”
Like his brother, Pierrot had the knack of depriving his lines of any sense. He intoned a roll call
of words: “Do-you-think-you-can-escape-from-my-clutches?” All present and correct.
“It’s a question,” Briony cut in. “Don’t you see? It goes up at the end.”
“What do you mean?”
“There. You just did it. You start low and end high. It’s a question.”