by Ian Mcewan
Suddenly, she was right there before me, that busy, priggish, conceited little girl, and she was not dead either, for when people tittered appreciatively at “evanesce” my feeble heart—ridiculous vanity!—made a little leap. The boy recited with a thrilling clarity, and a jarring touch of what my generation would call Cockney, though I have no idea these days what the significance is of a glottal t. I knew the words were mine, but I barely remembered them, and it was hard to concentrate, with so many questions, so much feeling, crowding in. Where had they found the copy, and was this unearthly confidence a symptom of a different age? I glanced at my neighbor, Pierrot. He had his handkerchief out and was dabbing at his eyes, and I don’t think it was only great-grand-fatherly pride. I also suspected that this was all his idea. The prologue rose to its reasonable climax:
For that fortuitous girl the sweet day dawned
To wed her gorgeous prince. But be warned,
Because Arabella almost learned too late,
That before we love, we must cogitate!
We made a rowdy applause. There was even some vulgar whistling. That dictionary, that Oxford Concise. Where was it now? Northwest Scotland? I wanted it back. The boy made a bow and retreated a couple of yards and was joined by four other children who had come up, unnoticed by me, and were waiting in what would have been the wings.
And so The Trials of Arabella began, with a leave-taking from the anxious, saddened parents. I recognized the heroine immediately as Leon’s great-granddaughter, Chloe. What a lovely solemn girl she is, with her rich low voice and her mother’s Spanish blood. I remember being at her first birthday party, and it seemed only months ago. I watched her fall convincingly into poverty and despair, once abandoned by the wicked count—who was the prologue speaker in his black cloak. In less than ten minutes it was over. In memory, distorted by a child’s sense of time, it had always seemed the length of a Shakespeare play. I had completely forgotten that after the wedding ceremony Arabella and the medical prince link arms and, speaking in unison, step forward to address to the audience a final couplet.
Here’s the beginning of love at the end of our travail.
So farewell, kind friends, as into the sunset we sail!
Not my best, I thought. But the whole room, except for Leon, Pierrot and myself, rose for the applause. How practiced these children were, right down to the curtain call. Hand in hand, they stood in line abreast, taking their cue from Chloe, stepped back two paces, came forward, bowed again. In the uproar, no one noticed that poor Pierrot was completely overcome and put his face in his hands. Was he reliving that lonely, terrifying time here after his parents’ divorce? They’d so much wanted to be in the play, the twins, for that evening in the library, and here it was at last, sixty-four years late, and his brother long dead.
I was helped out of my comfortable chair and made a little speech of thanks. Competing with a wailing baby at the back of the room, I tried to evoke that hot summer of 1935, when the cousins came down from the north. I turned to the cast and told them that our production would have been no match for theirs. Pierrot was nodding emphatically. I explained that it was entirely my fault the rehearsals fell apart, because halfway through I had decided to become a novelist. There was indulgent laughter, more applause, then Charles announced that it was dinner. And so the pleasant evening unraveled—the noisy meal at which I even drank a little wine, the presents, bedtime for the younger children, while their bigger brothers and sisters went off to watch television. Then speeches over coffee and much good-natured laughter, and by ten o’clock I was beginning to think of my splendid room upstairs, not because I was tired, but because I was tired of being in company and the object of so much attention, however kindly. Another half hour passed in good nights and farewells before Charles and his wife Annie escorted me to my room.
Now it is five in the morning and I am still at the writing desk, thinking over my strange two days. It’s true about the old not needing sleep—at least, not in the night. I still have so much to consider, and soon, within the year perhaps, I’ll have far less of a mind to do it with. I’ve been thinking about my last novel, the one that should have been my first. The earliest version, January 1940, the latest, March 1999, and in between, half a dozen different drafts. The second draft, June 1947, the third … who cares to know? My fifty-nine-year assignment is over. There was our crime—Lola’s, Marshall’s, mine—and from the second version onward, I set out to describe it. I’ve regarded it as my duty to disguise nothing—the names, the places, the exact circumstances—I put it all there as a matter of historical record. But as a matter of legal reality, so various editors have told me over the years, my forensic memoir could never be published while my fellow criminals were alive. You may only libel yourself and the dead. The Marshalls have been active about the courts since the late forties, defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity. They could ruin a publishing house with ease from their current accounts. One might almost think they had something to hide. Think, yes, but not write. The obvious suggestions have been made—displace, transmute, dissemble. Bring down the fogs of the imagination! What are novelists for? Go just so far as is necessary, set up camp inches beyond the reach, the fingertips of the law. But no one knows these precise distances until a judgment is handed down. To be safe, one would have to be bland and obscure. I know I cannot publish until they are dead. And as of this morning, I accept that will not be until I am. No good, just one of them going. Even with Lord Marshall’s bone-shrunk mug on the obituary pages at last, my cousin from the north would not tolerate an accusation of criminal conspiracy.
There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.
The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always a
n impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.
I’ve been standing at the window, feeling waves of tiredness beat the remaining strength from my body. The floor seems to be undulating beneath my feet. I’ve been watching the first gray light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness. I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration … Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible.
But now I must sleep.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the staff of the Department of Documents in the Imperial War Museum for allowing me to see unpublished letters, journals and reminiscences of soldiers and nurses serving in 1940. I am also indebted to the following authors and books: Gregory Blaxland, Destination Dunkirk; Walter Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk; Lucilla Andrews, No Time for Romance. I am grateful to Claire Tomalin, and to Craig Raine and Tim Garton-Ash for their incisive and helpful comments, and above all to my wife, Annalena McAfee, for all her encouragement and formidable close reading.
—IM
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2003
Copyright © 2001 by Ian McEwan
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 2001 and subsequently in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:
McEwan, Ian.
Atonement: a novel / Ian McEwan.—1st ed. in the USA
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-4000-7555-3
1. Dunkerque (France), Battle of, 1940—Fiction. 2. Country life—Fiction.
3. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. 5. Sisters—Fiction. 6. Guilt—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6063.C4 A88 2002
823′.914—dc21 2001044291
CIP
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