Atonement

Read Atonement for Free Online Page B

Book: Read Atonement for Free Online
Authors: Ian McEwan
Tags: Fiction, Unread
hips and
flared at the ankle, and a short-sleeved sweater made of cashmere. Other tokens
of maturity included a velvet choker of tiny pearls, the ginger tresses
gathered at the nape and secured with an emerald clasp, three loose silver
bracelets around a freckled wrist, and the fact that whenever she moved, the
air about her tasted of rosewater. Her condescension, being wholly restrained,
was all the more potent. She was coolly responsive to Briony’s
suggestions, spoke her lines, which she seemed to have learned overnight, with
sufficient expression, and was gently encouraging to her little brother,
without encroaching at all on the director’s authority. It was as if
Cecilia, or even their mother, had agreed to spend some time with the little
ones by taking on a role in the play, and was determined not to let a trace of
boredom show. What was missing was any demonstration of ragged, childish
enthusiasm. When Briony had shown her cousins the sales booth and the
collection box the evening before, the twins had fought each other for the best
front-of-house roles, but Lola had crossed her arms and paid decorous, grown-up
compliments through a half smile that was too opaque for the detection of
irony.
    “How
marvelous. How awfully clever of you, Briony, to think of that. Did you really
make it all by yourself?”
    Briony
suspected that behind her older cousin’s perfect manners was a
destructive intent. Perhaps Lola was relying on the twins to wreck the play
innocently, and needed only to stand back and observe.
    These
unprovable suspicions,
Jackson
’s detainment in
the laundry, Pierrot’s wretched delivery and the morning’s colossal
heat were oppressive to Briony. It bothered her too when she noticed Danny
Hardman watching from the doorway. He had to be asked to leave. She could not
penetrate Lola’s detachment or coax from Pierrot the common inflections
of everyday speech. What a relief, then, suddenly to find herself alone in the
nursery. Lola had said she needed to reconsider her hair, and her brother had
wandered off down the corridor, to the lavatory, or beyond.
    Briony sat on
the floor with her back to one of the tall built-in toy cupboards and fanned
her face with the pages of her play. The silence in the house was
complete—no voices or footfalls downstairs, no murmurs from the plumbing;
in the space between one of the open sash windows a trapped fly had abandoned
its struggle, and outside, the liquid birdsong had evaporated in the heat. She
pushed her knees out straight before her and let the folds of her white muslin
dress and the familiar, endearing, pucker of skin about her knees fill her
view. She should have changed her dress this morning. She thought how she
should take more care of her appearance, like Lola. It was childish not to. But
what an effort it was. The silence hissed in her ears and her vision was faintly
distorted—her hands in her lap appeared unusually large and at the same
time remote, as though viewed across an immense distance. She raised one hand
and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this
thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm,
came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of
its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the
instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving,
when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only
find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself,
that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to
her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was
pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or
being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she
did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in
some part of her mind. When

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