Three

30
The trouble lay in assembling the cast _; _
He was bound to feel it as a reproof
Suds creeping up his bare arms to soak his rolled-up shirtsleeves ;
_
A general sense of calamity numbing his will
Countless rinses and the sustained two-handed grappling with the mangle
__
31
When he came in from the morning heat for his pint of ale ;
_
Would have administered several sharp smacks to the buttocks and
washed the sheets herself _; ; ; ; _
;
His brother down in the bowels of the house to be much in the way of a
dastardly foreign count _; _
Has he had the spanking?
Deprive his lines of every sense
323
He swallowed hard
Producing this time a roll call on a rising chromatic scale
_
A yodel on the final syllable ;
Lola had come to the nursery that morning in the guise of the adult she
considered herself at heat to be ;
She wore pleated flannel trousers that ballooned at the hips and flared at
the ankle, and a short-sleeved sweater mad of cashmere. Other tokens of
maturity included a velvet choker of tiny pearls, the ginger tresses
gathered at the nape and secured with an emerald clasp, three loose
silver bracelets around a freckled wrist... ___
_______; __
___
Was gently encouraging to her little brother, without encroaching at all on
the directors authority ;
Ragged, childish enthusiasm
Best front-of-house roles
Paid decorous compliments through a half smile that was too opaque for
the detection of irony ;
Behind her older cousins perfect manner was a destructive intent

These Unprovable suspicions, Jacksons detainment in the laundry,

Pierrots wretched delivery and the mornings colossal heat were
oppression to Briony. ; ; ; _
She could not penetrate Lolas detachment or coax from Pierrot the
common inflections of everyday speech.
33
Fanned her face with the pages of her play
No murmurs from the plumbing
Liquid birdsong
In the space between one of the open sash window a trapped fly had
abandoned its struggle
The folds of her white muslin dress ; _
Pucker of skin about her knees fill her view ;
Flexed its fingers
This fleshy spider on the end of her arm
If she could only find herself at the crest
34
There was no stitching, no seam _
One could drown in irrelevance
This was sinister and lonely ; ;
She knew that it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had
thoughts like hers.
The self-contained world had been defaced with the scribble of other
minds, other needs _;
Time itself was not dribbling uncontrollably away ;
35
Ludicrously hot
The girl squirmed in her oppression and stood. ;
Dust from along the skirting board had dirtied her hands.
The title lettering
No intermediaries with their private ambitions
A story was a form of telepathy
As with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them.
There was no gap during which The symbols were unraveled.
A castle with the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the
blacksmiths forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade
___
Motionless crowds of thick crested oaks _; _
A milky heat haze
36
A dry and savage look
The estates open parkland roasting like a savanna, where isolated trees
threw harsh stumpy shadows and the long grass was already stalked by
the leonine yellow of high summer ; __;
_; _
Within The boundaries of the balustrade

Spare herself the sight of her sisters shame

Cecilia, mercifully still in her underwear
Pinching her nose
37
She had privileged access across the years to adult behavior

Briony had her first, Weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be
fairy-tale castles and princesses
Set off with it toward the house
Stride away
The wet patch
A tableau mounted for her alone _;
Frogs did not address princesses ()
She wanted to chase in solitude the faint thrill of possibility she had felt
before, the elusive excitement at a prospect she was coming close to
defining. _; _
38
The definition would refine itself over the years.
She was to concede that she may have attributed more deliberations than
was feasible to her thirteen-year-old self. __
_
She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols,
unfurling at the nibs end. _
Her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from
the cumbrous struggle between good and bad.
It wasnt only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy
;
She would be well aware of the extent of her self-mythologizing

39
A crooked finger
The dumb show
The truth had become as ghostly as invention