Atonement Ian McEwan

The silence that followed was partly mitigated by the drone of the filtration pump. There was
nothing she could do, nothing she could make Leon do, and she suddenly felt the pointlessness of
argument. She lolled against the warm stone, lazily finishing her cigarette and contemplating the scene
before her—the foreshortened slab of chlorinated water, the black inner tube of a tractor tire propped
against a deck chair, the two men in cream linen suits of infinitesimally different hues, bluish-gray
smoke rising against the bamboo green. It looked carved, fixed, and again, she felt it: it had happened
a long time ago, and all outcomes, on all scales—from the tiniest to the most colossal—were already
in place. Whatever happened in the future, however superficially strange or shocking, would also
have an unsurprising, familiar quality, inviting her to say, but only to herself, Oh yes, of course. That.
I should have known. She said lightly, “D’you know what I think?”
“What’s that?”
“We should go indoors, and you should mix us a fancy kind of drink.”
Paul Marshall banged his hands together and the sound ricocheted between the columns and the
back wall of the pavilion. “There’s something I do rather well,” he called. “With crushed ice, rum
and melted dark chocolate.”
The suggestion prompted an exchange of glances between Cecilia and her brother, and thus their
discord was resolved. Leon was already moving away, and as Cecilia and Paul Marshall followed
him and converged on the gap in the thicket she said, “I’d rather have something bitter. Or even sour.”
He smiled, and since he had reached the gap first, he paused to hand her through, as though it
were a drawing room doorway, and as she passed she felt him touch her lightly on her forearm. Or it
may have been a leaf.
Five
NEITHER THE twins nor Lola knew precisely what led Briony to abandon the rehearsals. At
the time, they did not even know she had. They were doing the sickbed scene, the one in which bedbound
Arabella first receives into her garret the prince disguised as the good doctor, and it was going
well enough, or no worse than usual, with the twins speaking their lines no more ineptly than before.
As for Lola, she didn’t wish to dirty her cashmere by lying on the floor, and instead slumped in a
chair, and the director could hardly object to that. The older girl entered so fully into the spirit of her
own aloof compliance that she felt beyond reproach. One moment, Briony was giving patient
instructions to Jackson, then she paused, and frowned, as if about to correct herself, and then she was
gone. There was no pivotal moment of creative difference, no storming or flouncing out. She turned
away, and simply drifted out, as though on her way to the lavatory. The others waited, unaware that
the whole project was at an end. The twins thought they had been trying hard, and Jackson in
particular, feeling he was still in disgrace in the Tallis household, thought he might begin to
rehabilitate himself by pleasing Briony. While they waited, the boys played football with a wooden
brick and their sister gazed out the window, humming softly to herself. After an immeasurable period
of time, she went out into the corridor and along to the end where there was an open door to an
unused bedroom. From here she had a view of the driveway and the lake across which lay a column
of shimmering phosphorescence, white hot from the fierce late afternoon heat. Against this column she
could just make out Briony beyond the island temple, standing right by the water’s edge. In fact, she
may even have been standing in the water—against such light it was difficult to tell. She did not look
as if she was about to come back. On her way out of the room, Lola noticed by the bed a masculinelooking
suitcase of tan leather and heavy straps and faded steamer labels. It reminded her vaguely of
her father, and she paused by it, and caught the faint sooty scent of a railway carriage. She put her