介绍:
No longer a playwright and feeling all the more refreshed for that, and watching out for broken glass, she moved further round the temple, working along the fringe where the nibbled grass met the disorderly undergrowth that spilled out from among the trees. Flaying the nettles was becoming a self-purification, and it was childhood she set about now, having no further need for it. One spindly specimen stood in for everything she had been up until this moment. But that was not enough. Planting her feet firmly in the grass, she disposed of her old self year by year in thirteen strokes. She severed the sickly dependency of infancy and early childhood, and the schoolgirl eager to show off and be praised, and the eleven-year-old’s silly pride in her first stories and her reliance on her mother’s good opinion. They flew over her left shoulder and lay at her feet. The slender tip of the switch made a two-tone sound as it sliced the air. No more! she made it say. Enough! Take that!
Soon, it was the action itself that absorbed her, and the newspaper report which she revised to the rhythm of her swipes. No one in the world could do this better than Briony Tallis who would be representing her country next year at the Berlin Olympics and was certain to win the gold. People studied her closely and marveled at her technique, her preference for bare feet because it improved her balance—so important in this demanding sport—with every toe playing its part; the manner in which she led with the wrist and snapped the hand round only at the end of her stroke, the way she distributed her weight and used the rotation in her hips to gain extra power, her distinctive habit of extending the fingers of her free hand—no one came near her. Self-taught, the youngest daughter of a senior civil servant. Look at the concentration in her face, judging the angle, never fudging a shot, taking each nettle with inhuman precision. To reach this level required a lifetime’s dedication. And how close she had come to wasting that life as a playwright!
She was suddenly aware of the trap behind her, clattering over the first bridge. Leon at last. She felt his eyes upon her. Was this the kid sister he had last seen on Waterloo Station only three months ago, and now a member of an international elite? Perversely, she would not allow herself to turn and acknowledge him; he must learn that she was independent now of other people’s opinion, even his. She was a grand master, lost to the intricacies of her art. Besides, he was bound to stop the trap and come running down the bank, and she would have to suffer the interruption with good grace.
The sound of wheels and hooves receding over the second bridge proved, she supposed, that her brother knew the meaning of distance and professional respect. All the same, a little sadness was settling on her as she kept hacking away, moving further round the island temple until she was out of sight of the road. A ragged line of chopped nettles on the grass marked her progress, as did the stinging white bumps on her feet and ankles. The tip of the hazel switch sang through its arc, leaves and stems flew apart, but the cheers of the crowds were harder to summon. The colors were ebbing from her fantasy, her self-loving pleasures in movement and balance were fading, her arm was aching. She was becoming a solitary girl swiping nettles with a stick, and at last she stopped and tossed it toward the trees and looked around her.
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back. Come back, her sister used to whisper when she woke her from a bad dream. Briony had lost her godly power of creation, but it was only at this moment of return that the loss became evident; part of a daydream’s enticement was the illusion that she was helpless before its logic: forced by international rivalry to compete at the highest level among the world’s finest and to accept the challenges that came with preeminence in her field—her field of nettle slashing—driven to push beyond her limits to assuage the roaring crowd, and to be the best, and, most importantly, unique. But of course, it had all been her—by her and about her—and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn’t there somewhere else for people to go? She turned her back on the island temple and wandered slowly over the perfect lawn the rabbits had made, toward the bridge. In front of her, illuminated by the lowering sun, was a cloud of insects, each one bobbing randomly, as though fixed on an invisible elastic string—a mysterious courtship dance, or sheer insect exuberance that defied her to find a meaning. In a spirit of mutinous resistance, she climbed the steep grassy slope to the bridge, and when she stood on the driveway, she decided she would stay there and wait until something significant happened to her. This was the challenge she was putting to existence—she would not stir, not for dinner, not even for her mother calling her in. She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
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