Tilney's Hotel
Tilney's Hotel occupies the site of the old Tallis house, the squat, bright orange brick baronial Gothic building that was the setting for the catastrophic summer of 1935. By 1999, more than twenty-five years after Briony's last visit for Emily's funeral, the estate has been radically remade. The parkland trees are gone, the giant elms lost to disease and the remaining oaks cleared to make way for a golf course. The lake has vanished entirely, replaced by a perfect lawn where the island temple once stood; in its place is a wooden bench, a litter basket, and a gravel path looping around a long mound of smooth grass planted with rhododendrons. The house itself, always ugly in Briony's estimation, now has a stark, unprotected look, stripped of the ivy that once softened its bright red façade.
Arrival and the Changed Landscape
Briony arrives by minicab on the morning of her birthday, driven by Michael, a cheerful West Indian law graduate. The hotel's reception area occupies the old hall, where needlecord carpet now covers the black and white tiles, and concealed speakers burble Vivaldi. A rosewood desk with a computer screen and a vase of flowers stands between two suits of armor; mounted on the paneling are crossed halberds and a coat of arms, and above them hangs the portrait of the aristocratic family that Harry Tallis imported to give the house lineage. Briony is given the key to a suite on the second floor, which she recognizes as Auntie Venus's room, always considered to have the best view. The room has been expanded by incorporating adjacent chambers, and the old furniture—the carved trousseau chest and green silk sofa—has been removed to a castle in the Scottish Highlands. From her window she surveys the golf course and the bare trees on the distant hills, unable quite to accept the absence of the lake.
The Birthday Celebration
At six-fifteen, Charles, Pierrot's grandson and the organizing spirit of the event, escorts Briony down to the old library, now stripped of all its books and shelves, to make an entrance before fifty assembled relatives. The room is filled with the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the twins, Jackson and Pierrot, and of Leon, who is present in a wheelchair, paralyzed on one side, a napkin at his throat. Briony makes a progress around the room, reacquainting herself with the family, and is greeted with kindness and admiration for her books. The centerpiece of the evening is a performance of The Trials of Arabella, the play Briony wrote at thirteen, recited by a pale, freckled, ginger-haired Quincey boy in a black cloak. The prologue, with its lines about "evanesce" and "extrinsic fellow," is delivered with thrilling clarity, and the full play follows, with Leon's great-granddaughter Chloe as the heroine. Briony makes a little speech, evoking the hot summer of 1935 and taking the blame for the failed rehearsals, claiming she decided to become a novelist instead.
The Final Reckoning
After the dinner, the presents, and the speeches, Briony returns to her room and sits at the writing desk through the night, reflecting on her fifty-nine-year assignment. She acknowledges that her final novel, the one that should have been her first, has been through half a dozen drafts since January 1940. She has always regarded it as her duty to disguise nothing—the names, the places, the exact circumstances—but legal reality has prevented publication while her fellow criminals, Lola and Paul Marshall, are alive. The Marshalls have defended their good names with expensive ferocity, and Briony knows she cannot publish until they are dead. As of this morning, she accepts that will not be until she is. She confronts the central problem of her art: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one outside her to forgive her. The attempt was all. In a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, she has chosen to let her lovers, Robbie and Cecilia, survive and flourish, united at the end, even though she knows the truth—that Robbie died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, and Cecilia was killed by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station in September of the same year. She gives them happiness, but she does not let them forgive her. Not quite, not yet. As the first gray light brings into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake, she thinks of the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness, and she decides she must sleep.
