介绍:
Cecilia had climbed out of the pond and was fixing her
skirt, and with difficulty pulling her blouse on over her wet skin. She turned abruptly and
picked up from the deep shade of the fountain’s wall a vase of flowers Briony had not
noticed before, and set off with it toward the house. No words were exchanged with Robbie,
not a glance in his direction. He was now staring into the water, and then he too was
striding away, no doubt satisfied, round the side of the house. Suddenly the scene was
empty; the wet patch on the ground where Cecilia had got out of the pond was the only
evidence that anything had happened at all.
Briony leaned back against a wall and stared unseeingly down the nursery’s length. It was a
temptation for her to be magical and dramatic, and to regard what she had witnessed as a
tableau mounted for her alone, a special moral for her wrapped in a mystery. But she knew
very well that if she had not stood when she did, the scene would still have happened, for
it was not about her at all. Only chance had brought her to the window. This was not a fairy
tale, this was the real, the adult world in which frogs did not address princesses, and the
only messages were the ones that people sent. It was also a temptation to run to Cecilia’s
room and demand an explanation. Briony resisted because she wanted to chase in solitude the
faint thrill of possibility she had felt before, the elusive excitement at a prospect she
was coming close to defining, at least emotionally. The definition would refine itself over
the years. She was to concede that she may have attributed more deliberation than was
feasible to her thirteen-year-old self. At the time there may have been no precise form of
words; in fact, she may have experienced nothing more than impatience to begin writing
again.
As she stood in the nursery waiting for her cousins’ return she sensed she could write a
scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She
could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and
her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating
telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib’s end. She could write the scene three times over,
from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered
from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three
was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a
moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that
other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people
unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the
simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these
different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need
have.
Six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way
through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European
tradition of folktales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial
psychological realism which she had discovered for herself, one special morning during a
heat wave in 1935. She would be well aware of the extent of her self-mythologizing, and she
gave her account a self-mocking, or mock-heroic tone. Her fiction was known for its
amorality, and like all authors pressed by a repeated question, she felt obliged to produce
a story line, a plot of her development that contained the moment when she became
recognizably herself. She knew that it was not correct to refer to her dramas in the plural,
that her mockery distanced her from the earnest, reflective child, and that it was not the
long-ago morning she was recalling so much as her subsequent accounts of it. It was possible
that the contemplation of a crooked finger, the unbearable idea of other minds and the
superiority of stories over plays were thoughts she had had on other days. She also knew
that whatever actually happened drew its significance from her published work and would not
have been remembered without it.
However, she could not betray herself completely; there could be no doubt that some kind of
revelation occurred. When the young girl went back to the window and looked down, the damp
patch on the gravel had evaporated. Now there was nothing left of the dumb show by the
fountain beyond what survived in memory, in three separate and overlapping memories. The
truth had become as ghostly as invention. She could begin now, setting it down as she had
seen it, meeting the challenge by refusing to condemn her sister’s shocking near-nakedness,
in daylight, right by the house. Then the scene could be recast, through Cecilia’s eyes,
and then Robbie’s. But now was not the time to begin. Briony’s sense of obligation, as
well as her instinct for order, was powerful; she must complete what she had initiated,
there was a rehearsal in progress, Leon was on his way, the household was expecting a
performance tonight. She should go down once more to the laundry to see whether the trials
of Jackson were at an end. The writing could wait until she was free.
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