介绍:
Yes. Unable to push her tongue against the word, Briony could only nod, and felt as she did
so a sulky thrill of self-annihilating compliance spreading across her skin and ballooning
outward from it, darkening the room in throbs. She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone,
facedown on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of
branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate
with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to
anticipate the new regime. Not only Leon to consider, but what of the antique peach and
cream satin dress that her mother was looking out for her, for Arabella’s wedding? That
would now be given to Lola. How could her mother reject the daughter who had loved her all
these years? As she saw the dress make its perfect, clinging fit around her cousin and
witnessed her mother’s heartless smile, Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would
be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a
bearded woodsman one winter’s dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and
dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbon straps . . .
Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the
lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent—how the tilt of a skull could change a
life!—Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony’s manuscript from the floor, and the twins
had slipped from their chairs to follow their sister into the space in the center of the
nursery that Briony had cleared the day before. Did she dare leave now? Lola was pacing the
floorboards, one hand to her brow as she skimmed through the first pages of the play,
muttering the lines from the prologue. She announced that nothing was to be lost by
beginning at the beginning, and now she was casting her brothers as Arabella’s parents and
describing the opening to them, seeming to know all there was to know about the scene. The
advance of Lola’s dominion was merciless and made self-pity irrelevant. Or would it be all
the more annihilatingly delicious?—for Briony had not even been cast as Arabella’s mother,
and now was surely the time to sidle from the room and tumble into facedown darkness on the
bed. But it was Lola’s briskness, her obliviousness to anything beyond her own business,
and Briony’s certainty that her own feelings would not even register, still less provoke
guilt, which gave her the strength to resist.
In a generally pleasant and well-protected life, she had never really confronted anyone
before. Now she saw: it was like diving into the swimming pool in early June; you simply had
to make yourself do it. As she squeezed out of the high chair and walked over to where her
cousin stood her heart thudded inconveniently and her breath was short.
She took the play from Lola and said in a voice that was constricted and more high-pitched
than usual, “If you’re Arabella, then I’ll be the director, thank you very much, and I’
ll read the prologue.”
Lola put her speckled hand to her mouth. “Sor-reeee!” she hooted. “I was just trying to
get things started.”
Briony was unsure how to respond, so she turned to Pierrot and said, “You don’t look much
like Arabella’s mother.”
The countermanding of Lola’s casting decision, and the laughter in the boys it provoked,
made for a shift in the balance of power. Lola made an exaggerated shrug of her bony
shoulders and went to stare out of the window. Perhaps she herself was struggling with the
temptation to flounce from the room.
Though the twins began a wrestling match, and their sister suspected the onset of a
headache, somehow the rehearsal began. The silence into which Briony read the prologue was
tense.
This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella
Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.
It grieved her parents to see their firstborn
Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne
Without permission . . .
His wife at his side, Arabella’s father stood at the wrought-iron gates of his estate,
first pleading with his daughter to reconsider her decision, then in desperation ordering
her not to go. Facing him was the sad but stubborn heroine with the count beside her, and
their horses, tethered to a nearby oak, were neighing and pawing the ground, impatient to be
off. The father’s tenderest feelings were supposed to make his voice quaver as he said,
My darling one, you are young and lovely,
But inexperienced, and though you think
The world is at your feet,
It can rise up and tread on you.
Briony positioned her cast; she herself clutched Jackson’s arm, Lola and Pierrot stood
several feet away, hand in hand. When the boys met each other’s eye they had a giggling fit
which the girls shushed at. There had been trouble enough already, but Briony began to
understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution only when Jackson began to
read from his sheet in a stricken monotone, as though each word was a name on a list of dead
people, and was unable to pronounce “inexperienced” even though it was said for him many
times, and left out the last two words of his lines—“It can rise up and tread.” As for
Lola, she spoke her lines correctly but casually, and sometimes smiled inappropriately at
some private thought, determined to demonstrate that her nearly adult mind was elsewhere.
And so they went on, the cousins from the north, for a full half an hour, steadily wrecking
Briony’s creation, and it was a mercy, therefore, when her big sister came to fetch the
twins for their bath.
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