Atonement (52 page)
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 an 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.
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
I
AN
M
C
E
WAN
has written two collections of stories,
First
Love, Last Rites
and
In Between the Sheets,
and eight novels,
The
Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black
Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love
and
Amsterdam.
He has also
written several film scripts, including
The Imitation Game, The
Ploughman’s Lunch, Sour Sweet, The Good Son
and
The Innocent.
He won the Booker Prize for
Amsterdam
in 1998.
First
Love, Last Rites
In
Between the Sheets
The
Cement Garden
The
Comfort of Strangers
The Child
in Time
The
Innocent
Black
Dogs
The
Daydreamer
Enduring
Love
Amsterdam
The
Imitation Game
(plays for
television)
Or Shall
We Die?
(libretto for
oratorio by Michael Berkeley)
The
Ploughman’s Lunch
(film script)
Sour
Sweet
(film script)
an imprint of
Doubleday
a division of Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036
D
OUBLEDAY
is a trademark of Doubleday a division
of Random House, Inc.
First
published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape
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.
Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McEwan, Ian.
Atonement : a
novel / Ian McEwan.—1st ed. in the
p. cm.
1. Dunkerque
(France),
1940—Fiction. 2. Country life—Fiction.
3. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 4.
6. Guilt—Fiction. I. Title.