Atonement （截取自原文，有删减） By Ian McEwan

The Debut of Briony in The Book   

1.The play for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe /kreip/ paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at her dressing table, with the author’s arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mother’s face for every trace of shifting emotion.She took her daughter in her arms, onto her lap and said that the play was “stupendous,”.Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project’s highest point of fulfillment.

The Debut of Cecilia and Robbie in The Book            

2.Partly because of her youth and the glory of the day, partly because of her blossoming need for a cigarette, Cecilia Tallis half ran with her flowers along the path that went by the river, by the old diving pool with its mossy brick wall, before curving away through the oak woods. The accumulated inactivity of the summer weeks since finals also hurried her along; since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.

The cool high shade of the woods was a relief, the sculpted intricacies of the tree trunks enchanting. Once through the iron kissing gate, and past the rhododendrons beneath the ha-ha, she crossed the open parkland—sold off to a local farmer to graze his cows on—and came up behind the fountain and its retaining wall and the half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton➊ in the Piazza Barberini in Rome.

3.She looked at the improbable scales on the dolphins and on the Triton’s thighs, and then toward the house. Her quickest way into the drawing room was across the lawn and terrace and through the French windows. But her childhood friend and university acquaintance, Robbie Turner, was on his knees, weeding along a rugosa hedge, and she did not feel like getting into conversation with him. Or at least, not now. Since coming down, landscape gardening had become his last craze but one. Now there was talk of medical college, which after a literature degree seemed rather pretentious. And presumptuous too, since it was her father who would have to pay.

➊海神喷泉：位于罗马的巴贝里尼广场，是意大利巴洛克巨匠贝尼尼的杰作，其形象为海神端坐在四只海豚上，仰首拿着一个大法螺在吹水。Cecilia家有一个原作一半大小的复制版。

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Cecilia准备用叔叔的遗物花瓶去喷泉取水，插上新采摘的野花来迎接晚宴的客人，她向窗外望去，Robbie就在喷泉附近，最近他们之间总是话不投机半句多，也不知是怎么了。她对镜整理了一下仪容，抱着花瓶走了出去：

（Robbie：男，下人之子，帅气有学识，剑桥文学系，学费由女主父亲资助，接下来准备上医学院。女主青梅竹马，喜欢女主，但自尊与自卑作祟，让他无法坦诚心意。）

（Cecilia：女，贵族之女，风华正茂，剑桥文学系，对未来迷茫。男主青梅竹马，在大学因社交圈子不同与男主渐行渐远，正因此而苦恼，也被他最近莫名的态度搞得有些小脾气。）

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第一幕.The conflict

4.Cecilia gripped the cool porcelainin both hands as she stood on one foot, and with the other hooked the French windows open wide. As she stepped out into the brightness, the rising scent of warmed stone was like a friendly embrace. The flowers swung in the light breeze,tickling her face as she crossed the terrace and carefully negotiated the three crumbly steps down to the gravel Robbie turned suddenly at the sound of her approach.

“I was away in my thoughts,” he began to explain. “Would you roll me one of your Bolshevik cigarettes?”He threw his own cigarette aside, took the tin which lay on his jacket on the lawn and walked alongside her to the fountain. They were silent for a while.

“Beautiful day,” she then said through a sigh.

He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.

“How’s Clarissa➋?” He was looking down at his fingers rolling the tobacco.

“Boring.”

 “We mustn’t say so.” 

“I wish she’d get on with it.” 

“She does. And it gets better.”

5.They slowed, then stopped so that he could put the finishing touches to her roll-up.

She said, “I’d rather read Fielding any day.”

She felt she had said something stupid. Robbie was looking away across the park and the cows toward the oak wood that lined the river valley, the wood she had run through that morning. He might be thinking she was talking to him in code, suggestively conveying her taste for the full-blooded and sensual. That was a mistake, of course, and she was discomfited and had no idea how to put him right. She liked his eyes, she thought, the unblended mix of orange and green, made even more granular in sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall. It was an interesting combination in a man, intelligence and sheer bulk. Cecilia had taken the cigarette and he was lighting it for her.

6.“I know what you mean,”he said as they walked the remaining few yards to the fountain. “There’s more life in Fielding➌, but he can be psychologically crude compared to Richardson➍.”

She set down the vase by the uneven steps that rose to the fountain’s stone basin. The last thing she wanted was an undergraduate debate on eighteenth-century literature. She didn’t think Fielding was crude at all, or that Richardson was a fine psychologist, but she wasn’t going to be drawn in, defending, defining, attacking. She was tired of that, and Robbie was tenacious in argument.

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➋《克拉丽莎》是英国小说家塞缪尔·理查逊创作的书信体小说。女主拒绝父母把她嫁给年迈富翁的安排，与家庭断绝联系。困苦中得到罗伯特的帮助，但此人心思不纯，多次求欢未果后，用药物得逞，后用求婚弥补，被女主拒绝。同时失去家人和爱人的女主在悲愤中离世。罗伯特在与女主表兄的决斗中被枪杀。双死悲剧。

➌Henry Fielding，18世纪最杰出的英国小说家、戏剧家，被沃尔特·司各特称为“英国小说之父”。

➍塞缪尔·理查逊，《克拉丽莎》的作者。

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7.Instead she said, “Leon’s coming today, did you know?”

“I heard a rumor. That’s marvelous.”

“He’s bringing a friend, this man Paul Marshall.”

“The chocolate millionaire. Oh no! And you’re giving him flowers!”

She smiled. Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer understood him. They had fallen out of touch at Cambridge. It had been too difficult to do anything else. She changed the subject.

“The Old Man says you’re going to be a doctor.”

 “I’m thinking about it.”

“You must love the student life.”

He looked away again, but this time for only a second or less, and when he turned to her she thought she saw a touch of irritation. Had she sounded condescending? She saw his eyes again, green and orange flecks, like a boy’s marble. When he spoke he was perfectly pleasant.

“I know you never liked that sort of thing, Cee. But how else do you become a doctor?”

“That’s my point. Another six years. Why do it?”

He wasn’t offended. She was the one who was overinterpreting, and jittery in his presence, and she was annoyed with herself.

He was taking her question seriously. “No one’s really going to give me work as a landscape gardener. I don’t want to teach, or go in for the civil service. And medicine interests me . . .” He broke off as a thought occurred to him. “Look, I’ve agreed to pay your father back. That’s the arrangement.”

“That’s not what I meant at all.”

8.She was surprised that he should think she was raising the question of money. That was ungenerous of him. Her father had subsidized Robbie’s education all his life. Had anyone ever objected? She had thought she was imagining it, but in fact she was right—there was something trying in Robbie’s manner lately. He had a way of wrong-footing her whenever he could.Robbie was silent, but she could tell from his expression—a forced, stretched smile that did not part his lips—that he regretted what he had said. That was no comfort either. This was what happened when they talked these days; one or the other was always in the wrong, trying to call back the last remark. She hadn’t changed, but there was no question that he had. He was putting distance between himself and the family that had been completely open to him and given him everything. For this reason alone—expectation of his refusal, and her own displeasure in advance—she had not invited him to dinner that night. If he wanted distance, then let him have it.

9.Her idea was to lean over the parapet and hold the flowers in the vase while she lowered it on its side into the water, but it was at this point that Robbie, wanting to make amends, tried to be helpful.

“Let me take that,” he said, stretching out a hand. “I’ll fill it for you, and you take the flowers.”

“I can manage, thanks.” She was already holding the vase over the basin.