Chloe

Chloe is a great-granddaughter of Leon Tallis, and she appears only in the 1999 epilogue of the novel, where she plays the heroine Arabella in a revival of Briony Tallis's childhood play The Trials of Arabella. The performance is staged as a surprise entertainment during Briony's seventy-seventh birthday celebration at Tilney's Hotel, the converted Tallis family home. Chloe's role in this family reunion marks the culmination of a narrative thread that began sixty-four years earlier, when the original production of the play collapsed due to the cousins' reluctance and Briony's own distraction.

Identity and Background

Chloe is described as a "lovely solemn girl" with a "rich low voice" and Spanish blood inherited from her mother. Briony recalls attending Chloe's first birthday party, which seemed to her "only months ago" despite the intervening years. Chloe is part of the extensive Tallis-Quincey family network that gathers for the birthday celebration; the room contains fifty relatives, including Leon Tallis in a wheelchair, Pierrot Quincey, and the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the twins Jackson and Pierrot. Chloe's precise lineage is not specified, but she is identified as Leon's great-granddaughter, placing her in the fourth generation of the Tallis family.

Role in the Performance

Chloe takes the lead role of Arabella in the revival of The Trials of Arabella, which is performed by a cast of five children. The prologue is delivered by a pale, freckled, ginger-haired Quincey boy of about nine or ten, who also plays the wicked count. Chloe is joined by four other children who appear as Arabella's parents, the count, the prince, and the vicar. The performance follows the original play's structure: Arabella's leave-taking from her parents, her abandonment by the wicked count, her fall into poverty and despair, and finally her rescue by the medical prince. The play concludes with Arabella and the prince speaking a final couplet in unison: "Here's the beginning of love at the end of our travail. / So farewell, kind friends, as into the sunset we sail!" Chloe leads the curtain call, stepping back two paces, coming forward, and bowing again, demonstrating a practiced professionalism that earns the room's applause.

Thematic Significance

Chloe's performance serves as a poignant bookend to Briony's life and career. The play that Briony wrote as a thirteen-year-old in 1935, which was never performed due to the chaos of that fateful day, is finally staged sixty-four years later at her birthday celebration. The revival is organized by Charles, Pierrot's grandson, and is clearly intended as a tribute to Briony. The performance triggers powerful emotions: Pierrot Quincey is completely overcome, putting his face in his hands, presumably reliving the traumatic summer of 1935 when he and his brother Jackson were refugees from their parents' divorce. Briony herself is moved, recognizing the words she wrote as a child but barely remembering them. The revival also underscores the novel's central theme of atonement through art: Briony, who abandoned the play to become a novelist, now sees her earliest work brought to life, and the performance becomes part of the final, fictionalized version of events she has crafted. Chloe, as the embodiment of Arabella, represents the happy ending Briony chooses to give her characters—a choice she explicitly acknowledges in the epilogue's closing pages, where she reflects on letting "my lovers survive and flourish."