Atonement: Part One, Chapters 4–8

It would have suited her better had Briony wept and allowed herself to be comforted on the silk chaise longue in the drawing room.

When she dropped them in they once again refused to fall into the artful disorder she preferred, and instead swung round in the water into a willful neatness, with the taller stalks evenly distributed around the rim.

At the foot of the four-poster, the seat of a Chippendale sofa had been so carefully straightened that sitting down would have seemed a desecration.

As her approach altered her angle of view, the revelers on the lid of an ancient trousseau chest writhed into dance steps.

Marshall said, “That might have been your sister I saw down by the lake. She was giving the nettles a good thrashing.”

Across his brow a constellation of acne had a new-minted look, its garishness softened by the sepia light.

Auntie Venus had been for almost half a century a vital nursing presence across a swath of the Northern Territories in Canada.

...if there were to be a general conscription, a further five factories would be needed...

These were awesome occasions worthy of the ancient silver service; the venerable great-uncles and -aunts and grandparents were Victorians, from their mother’s side of the family, a baffled and severe folk, a lost tribe who arrived at the house in black cloaks having wandered peevishly for two decades in an alien, frivolous century.

He might ask Cecilia in the most innocent voice for the salt to be passed, and though she averted her gaze as she handed it to him, though she turned her head and inhaled deeply, it could be enough simply to know that he was doing his look to consign her to ninety minutes of quaking torture.

She shrugged. “Look, I think you ought to go round to the bungalow now and ask him not to come.”

The older girl entered so fully into the spirit of her own aloof compliance that she felt beyond reproach.

The soft consonants suggested an unthinkable obscenity, the sibilant ending whispered the family’s shame.

“If you hit me,” he said quickly, “I’ll tell The Parents.” But he himself had made the invocation useless, a ruined totem of a lost golden age.

She lay supine on her bed without a pillow, a glass of water within easy reach and, at her side, a book she knew she could not read.

She had been educated at home until the age of sixteen, and was sent to Switzerland for two years which were shortened to one for economy, and she knew for a fact that the whole performance, women at the Varsity, was childish really, at best an innocent lark, like the girls' rowing eight, a little posturing alongside their brothers dressed up in the solemnity of social progress.

She had been educated at home until the age of sixteen, and was sent to Switzerland for two years which were shortened to one for economy, and she knew for a fact that the whole performance, women at the Varsity, was childish really, at best an innocent lark, like the girls' rowing eight, a little posturing alongside their brothers dressed up in the solemnity of social progress.

But how to protect her against failure, against that Lola, the incarnation of Emily’s youngest sister who had been just as precocious and scheming at that age, and who had recently plotted her way out of a marriage, into what she wanted everyone to call a nervous breakdown.

Emily wondered if they were being impertinent, for each twin seemed to behave as though his social obligations were halved.

She would talk herself past the terse woman on the switchboard, and the pompous young fellow in the outer office, and she would reassure her husband that there was no need to feel guilt.

Finding her would mean exposure to unadulterated sunlight, and even the diminishing rays of early evening could provoke an attack.

She had no illusions: old plans, if one could ever remember them, the plans that time had overtaken, tended to have a febrile and overoptimistic grip on events.

The island temple, built in the style of Nicholas Revett in the late 1780s, was intended as a point of interest, an eye-catching feature to enhance the pastoral ideal, and had of course no religious purpose at all.

A tall nettle with a preening look, its head coyly drooping and its middle leaves turned outward like hands protesting innocence—this was Lola, and though she whimpered for mercy, the singing arc of a three-foot switch cut her down at the knees and sent her worthless torso flying.

Then she rose again, brazen with her various sins—pride, gluttony, avarice, uncooperativeness—and for each she paid with a life.

Then she rose again, brazen with her various sins—pride, gluttony, avarice, uncooperativeness—and for each she paid with a life.

Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual.

...driven to push beyond her limits to assuage the roaring crowd, and to be the best, and, most importantly, unique.

Above him the framed rectangle of sky slowly shifted through its limited segment of the spectrum, yellow to orange, as he sifted unfamiliar feelings and returned to certain memories again and again. Nothing palled.

At the other end of the table were various histories, theoretical treatises and practical handbooks on landscape gardening.

In a belle époque metal frame tinged with verdigris was a photograph of his parents, Grace and Ernest, three days after their wedding.

She probably would not have read this treatise on the hydraulics of Versailles by an eighteenth-century Dane who extolled in Latin the genius of Le Notre.

He had spent three years drily studying the symptoms, which had seemed no more than literary conventions, and now, in solitude, like some ruffed and plumed courtier come to the edge of the forest to contemplate a discarded token, he was worshiping her traces—not a handkerchief, but fingerprints!—while he languished in his lady’s scorn.

How thin it looked, this self-protective levity.

Now jokiness had made way for melodrama, or plaintiveness.

By the living room door was a narrow space that ended in the frosted-glass door of the front entrance through which a diffused blood-orange light embossed the beige and olive wallpaper in fiery honeycomb patterns.

“Leon was just arriving as I was coming away. He had his friend with him, you know, the chocolate magnate. They persuaded me to join them for dinner tonight.”

Finally, he patted his pockets, then loped down the stairs, three at a time again, called a farewell to his mother, and stepped out onto the narrow brick path which led between the flower beds to a gate in the picket fence.

Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence.

No need for Freudian smart-aleckry—the explanation was simple and mechanical—the innocuous letter was lying across figure 1236...