Emily's Bedroom

Emily Tallis's bedroom is the darkened, migraine-haunted sanctuary from which she exerts a sixth-sense surveillance over the Tallis household during the climactic day of 1935, and it later becomes the site of Robbie Turner's sleepless prison-cell memories of his own confinement, as well as the metaphorical space for Briony Tallis's final diagnosis of vascular dementia in 1999.

The Migraine Sanctuary and the Sixth Sense

Emily Tallis's bedroom is a cool, darkened retreat from the white glare of the 1935 heat wave. She lies supine on her bed without a pillow, a glass of water within easy reach, retreating before the threat of a migraine. The presence she feels in the top right corner of her brain is like "the inert body weight of some curled and sleeping animal" that, once provoked, would bring knifing pains that obliterate all thought. From this dimness, she develops a "tentacular awareness" that reaches through the house, claiming to know everything through the muffled sounds that penetrate the walls. She hears the thud of feet from the nursery, the clang of a saucepan lid from the kitchen, and the careful tread of Cecilia taking flowers to the guest room. She even detects the faint tang of a cigarette on the stairs, despite having asked a thousand times for Cecilia not to smoke there. The bedroom is the command post of her invalid authority, where she lies rigidly apprehensive, knowing that fear will not let her sleep and that her only hope is in keeping still.

The Creature of Migraine and the Household's Troubles

From her bed, Emily contemplates the vast heat that suffocates the Home Counties and the baking railway tracks bringing Leon and his friend. She frets about Leon's diminishing prospects, Cecilia's Cambridge pretensions, and Briony's vulnerability to the scheming Lola. She hears the collapse of Briony's play rehearsals and the twins' fooling about. When the creature of migraine begins to stir, she lets her thoughts move away from her eldest daughter and sends the tendrils of a worrying disposition out toward her youngest. The bedroom is where she gauges the state of the household by straining to listen, and where she decides that the only contribution she can make is to remain still. When the presence fades, she eases herself onto an elbow, arranges pillows, and begins to plan her interventions—the kitchen, the twins, Briony, the phone call to Jack. But she knows that old plans tend to have a febrile and overoptimistic grip on events.

The Prison Cell of Memory

Robbie Turner, lying on his back in a French barn during the retreat to Dunkirk, finds himself unable to sleep. The darkness of the barn's cavernous roof and the snores of the corporals transport him back to his prison cell. He can smell the concrete floor, the piss in the bucket, and the gloss paint on the walls. He recalls three and a half years of nights like these, unable to sleep, thinking of another vanished boy, another vanished life that was once his own, waiting for dawn and slop-out and another wasted day. The hand squeezing on his throat is a physical memory of the claustrophobia and stupidity of prison. He contrasts this with his present situation—sheltering in a barn with an army in rout, where a child's limb in a tree is something ordinary men can ignore—and finds it better than being there, on a narrow bed under a dim electric light, waiting for nothing.

The Diagnosis of Forgetting

In 1999, Briony Tallis, now seventy-seven, receives the results of a brain scan in a doctor's office. The doctor points out granular smears across a section of the scan, and his pencil tip quivers in his hand. He tells her she is experiencing a series of tiny, nearly imperceptible strokes. The process will be slow, but her brain, her mind, is closing down. The little failures of memory will become more debilitating until she loses the ability to comprehend anything at all—her phone number, her address, her name, and what she did with her life. She has vascular dementia, not Alzheimer's, which offers some comfort: she might not be unhappy, just a dim old biddy in a chair, knowing nothing, expecting nothing. The doctor gives her the route map: loss of memory, short- and long-term, the disappearance of single words, then language itself, balance, motor control, and finally the autonomous nervous system. She is not distressed at first; on the contrary, she is elated and urgently wants to tell her closest friends. She spends an hour on the phone breaking her news. But later, in the back of a taxi, she experiences for the first time something like desperation—claustrophobia, helpless confinement within a process of decay, and a sensation of shrinking. She asks the driver to turn on his music to drown out the thoughts.

The Final Return to the House

On the morning of her seventy-seventh birthday, Briony makes one last visit to the Imperial War Museum library. She is haunted by the thought of Lola, the severity of that gaunt old painted face, her vitality, ducking into the Rolls-Royce. She reflects that she will not be able to publish her novel in her lifetime because the Marshalls are still alive and litigious. Later, at Tilney's Hotel, the converted Tallis house, she is given Auntie Venus's room, always considered to have the best view. She stands 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 Robbie was driven away into the whiteness. She thinks about her final novel, the one that should have been her first, and the fifty-nine-year assignment that is over. She decides to let her lovers survive and flourish, to give them happiness, but not to let them forgive her. Not quite, not yet. She knows that the attempt was all, and that there is no atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists.