1999 birthday performance of The Trials of Arabella

On the evening of her seventy-seventh birthday, Briony Tallis was led into the old library of Tilney's Hotel—the house where she had grown up, now converted into a hotel—to find fifty relatives assembled in her honor. After drinks and greetings, chairs were set out facing one way, and Charles, the organizing spirit and Pierrot Quincey's grandson, announced an entertainment. A pale, freckled, ginger-haired boy of about nine or ten, wearing a black cloak, stepped forward and recited the prologue to The Trials of Arabella in a clear treble: "This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella / Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow." The audience, which included Briony's brother Leon, now eighty-nine and slumped in a wheelchair with a napkin at his throat, and Pierrot Quincey himself, much shriveled and with a shining pate, listened as the boy delivered lines Briony had written sixty-four years earlier. The prologue rose to its climax with the couplet: "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!" The boy then retreated and was joined by four other children, and the full play began, with Leon's great-granddaughter Chloe taking the role of Arabella. The performance lasted less than ten minutes, ending with the heroine and the medical prince linking arms and speaking in unison: "Here's the beginning of love at the end of our travail. / So farewell, kind friends, as into the sunset we sail!" The entire room except for Leon, Pierrot, and Briony herself rose in applause. Pierrot was completely overcome, putting his face in his hands, reliving the lonely, terrifying time after his parents' divorce when he and his twin brother Jackson had so desperately wanted to be in the original production. Briony was helped out of her chair and made a speech, evoking the hot summer of 1935 when the cousins came down from the north, and explaining that it was entirely her fault the rehearsals fell apart because she had decided to become a novelist. The evening continued with a noisy dinner, presents, and speeches, but by ten o'clock Briony was thinking of her room, not from tiredness but from being tired of company. Now, at five in the morning, she sits at the writing desk in her suite—Auntie Venus's old room, with the best view in the house—thinking over her strange two days. She reflects on her fifty-nine-year assignment, the multiple drafts of her novel, and the legal reality that her forensic memoir could never be published while the Marshalls were alive. She acknowledges that she has given her lovers a happy ending in this final version, though she knows that Robbie Turner actually died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, and Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. She never saw them in that year; her walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. The letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. But she could not do it to them—she is too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life she has remaining. She faces an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. She no longer possesses the courage of her pessimism. When she is dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, they will only exist as her inventions. The answer to what really happened is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of her final draft, then her spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love. She has been standing at the window, 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. She likes to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let her lovers live and to unite them at the end. She gave them happiness, but she was not so self-serving as to let them forgive her. Not quite, not yet. If she had the power to conjure them at her 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 she must sleep.