介绍:
The play she had written for Leon’s homecoming was her first excursion into drama, and she
had found the transition quite effortless. It was a relief not to be writing out the she
saids, or describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine’s face—beauty, she
had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, had infinite variation.
A universe reduced to what was said in it was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of
nullity, and to compensate, every utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling
or other, in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable. The Trials of
Arabella may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear the term. The piece was
intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief and instruction, in that order, and the
innocent intensity with which Briony set about the project—the posters, tickets, sales
booth—made her particularly vulnerable to failure. She could easily have welcomed Leon with
another of her stories, but it was the news that her cousins from the north were coming to
stay that had prompted this leap into a new form.
That Lola, who was fifteen, and the nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot, were refugees
from a bitter domestic civil war should have mattered more to Briony. She had heard her
mother criticize the impulsive behavior of her younger sister Hermione, and lament the
situation of the three children, and denounce her meek, evasive brother-in-law Cecil who had
fled to the safety of All Souls College, Oxford. Briony had heard her mother and sister
analyze the latest twists and outrages, charges and countercharges, and she knew her cousins
’ visit was an open-ended one, and might even extend into term time. She had heard it said
that the house could easily absorb three children, and that the Quinceys could stay as long
as they liked, provided the parents, if they ever visited simultaneously, kept their
quarrels away from the Tallis household. Two rooms near Briony’s had been dusted down, new
curtains had been hung and furniture carried in from other rooms. Normally, she would have
been involved in these preparations, but they happened to coincide with her two-day writing
bout and the beginnings of the front-of-house construction. She vaguely knew that divorce
was an affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it no thought. It
was a mundane unraveling that could not be reversed, and therefore offered no opportunities
to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder. Marriage was the thing, or rather,
a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and
banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union. A good wedding was an unacknowledged
representation of the as yet unthinkable—sexual bliss. In the aisles of country churches
and grand city cathedrals, witnessed by a whole society of approving family and friends, her
heroines and heroes reached their innocent climaxes and needed to go no further.
If divorce had presented itself as the dastardly antithesis of all this, it could easily
have been cast onto the other pan of the scales, along with betrayal, illness, thieving,
assault and mendacity. Instead it showed an unglamorous face of dull complexity and
incessant wrangling. Like rearmament and the Abyssinia Question and gardening, it was simply
not a subject, and when, after a long Saturday morning wait, Briony heard at last the sound
of wheels on the gravel below her bedroom window, and snatched up her pages and ran down the
stairs, across the hallway and out into the blinding light of midday, it was not
insensitivity so much as a highly focused artistic ambition that caused her to shout to the
dazed young visitors huddled together by the trap with their luggage, “I’ve got your
parts, all written out. First performance tomorrow! Rehearsals start in five minutes!”
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