介绍:
Pierrot glanced across his sister’s lap toward Jackson. This warlike name was faintly
familiar, with its whiff of school and adult certainty, but the twins found their courage in
each other.
“Everyone knows he was.”
“Definitely.”
When Lola spoke, she turned first to Pierrot and halfway through her sentence swung round to
finish on Jackson. In Briony’s family, Mrs. Tallis never had anything to impart that needed
saying simultaneously to both daughters. Now Briony saw how it was done.
“You’ll be in this play, or you’ll get a clout, and then I’ll speak to The Parents.”
“If you clout us, we’ll speak to The Parents.”
“You’ll be in this play or I’ll speak to The Parents.”
That the threat had been negotiated neatly downward did not appear to diminish its power.
Pierrot sucked on his lower lip.
“Why do we have to?” Everything was conceded in the question, and Lola tried to ruffle his
sticky hair.
“Remember what The Parents said? We’re guests in this house and we make ourselves—what do
we make ourselves? Come on. What do we make ourselves?”
“A-menable,” the twins chorused in misery, barely stumbling over the unusual word.
Lola turned to Briony and smiled. “Please tell us about your play.”
The Parents. Whatever institutionalized strength was locked in this plural was about to fly
apart, or had already done so, but for now it could not be acknowledged, and bravery was
demanded of even the youngest. Briony felt suddenly ashamed at what she had selfishly begun,
for it had never occurred to her that her cousins would not want to play their parts in The
Trials of Arabella. But they had trials, a catastrophe of their own, and now, as guests in
her house, they believed themselves under an obligation. What was worse, Lola had made it
clear that she too would be acting on sufferance. The vulnerable Quinceys were being
coerced. And yet, Briony struggled to grasp the difficult thought, wasn’t there
manipulation here, wasn’t Lola using the twins to express something on her behalf,
something hostile or destructive? Briony felt the disadvantage of being two years younger
than the other girl, of having a full two years’ refinement weigh against her, and now her
play seemed a miserable, embarrassing thing.
Avoiding Lola’s gaze the whole while, she proceeded to outline the plot, even as its
stupidity began to overwhelm her. She no longer had the heart to invent for her cousins the
thrill of the first night.
As soon as she was finished Pierrot said, “I want to be the count. I want to be a bad
person.”
Jackson said simply, “I’m a prince. I’m always a prince.”
She could have drawn them to her and kissed their little faces, but she said, “That’s all
right then.”
Lola uncrossed her legs, smoothed her dress and stood, as though about to leave. She spoke
through a sigh of sadness or resignation. “I suppose that because you’re the one who wrote
it, you’ll be Arabella . . .”
“Oh no,” Briony said. “No. Not at all.”
She said no, but she meant yes. Of course she was taking the part of Arabella. What she was
objecting to was Lola’s “because.” She was not playing Arabella because she wrote the
play, she was taking the part because no other possibility had crossed her mind, because
that was how Leon was to see her, because she was Arabella.
But she had said no, and now Lola was saying sweetly, “In that case, do you mind if I play
her? I think I could do it very well. In fact, of the two of us . . .”
She let that hang, and Briony stared at her, unable to keep the horror from her expression,
and unable to speak. It was slipping away from her, she knew, but there was nothing that she
could think of to say that would bring it back. Into Briony’s silence, Lola pressed her
advantage.
“I had a long illness last year, so I could do that part of it well too.”
Too? Briony could not keep up with the older girl. The misery of the inevitable was clouding
her thoughts.
One of the twins said proudly, “And you were in the school play.”
How could she tell them that Arabella was not a freckled person? Her skin was pale and her
hair was black and her thoughts were Briony’s thoughts. But how could she refuse a cousin
so far from home whose family life was in ruins? Lola was reading her mind because she now
played her final card, the unrefusable ace.
“Do say yes. It would be the only good thing that’s happened to me in months.”
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