介绍:
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
PART ONE
One
THE PLAY—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the
sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red
crêpe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a
breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but
contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant
north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some
moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose
message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on
good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign
count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash toward
a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a
garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humor. Fortune presents her a second chance in
the form of an impoverished doctor—in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work
among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by
reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on “a windy sunlit day
in spring.”
Mrs. Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at her dressing
table, with the author’s arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mother
’s face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm,
snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her
daughter in her arms, onto her lap—ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its
infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet—and said that the play was
“stupendous,” and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl’s ear,
that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance
hall by the ticket booth.
Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project’s highest point of fulfillment.
Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were
moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, when she burrowed in the delicious gloom
of her canopy bed, and made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little
playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon. In one, his big, good-natured face
buckled in grief as Arabella sank in loneliness and despair. In another, there he was,
cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of
friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of
her. In a third, he punched the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there
was no curtain, there was no possibility of a curtain. Her play was not for her cousins, it
was for her brother, to celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away from
his careless succession of girlfriends, toward the right form of wife, the one who would
persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony’s
services as a bridesmaid.
She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her
big sister’s room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied
ashtrays, Briony’s was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a
deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way—toward their owner
—as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact,
Briony’s was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their
many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the
various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table—cowboys, deep-sea
divers, humanoid mice—suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen’s army awaiting
orders.
A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for
secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the
grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and
a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret
numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a
removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years,
to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a
rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf.
But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony
the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her
the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her
tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child,
as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long
summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently
interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her
bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it
appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.
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