Atonement

Briony searches for the twins in the night. “Within the half hour [she] would commit her crime.” As she walks the grounds, she thinks about the maniac who is also on the prowl. She thinks of her obligation to protect her sister from Robbie, and wonders if Robbie’s hatred for her is such that he will ambush her murderously in the darkness. Briony tells herself that she must not fear him, and longs to expose the way Robbie has wronged her sister, in spite of all the help that the Tallises have given him.

Briony continues searching for the twins. She moves towards the pool and admires the water’s calm glow; it is nice to be outside late at night, with parental permission. She continues to walk the grounds, thinking more about the “brutal” acts she has witnessed Robbie commit. Through the window, she sees her aging mother, and imagines how dignified she will get to seem at her mother’s funeral.

At this point, Briony could have gone inside to spend time with her mother. If she had, she would not have committed her crime, and a great deal of things would not have happened. However, she decides to stay outside. Briony moves towards the temple in the lake. In her path, she sees a bush in her path start to move. It breaks up and turns into two figures, one of whom runs into the darkness, the other of whom stays seated and calls for Briony. It is Lola, who sounds helpless.

Briony now feels that she completely understands what has happened. She rushes to comfort Lola, and tells her that she saw Lola being assaulted. She asks Lola who did it, but Lola doesn’t respond. “It was Robbie, wasn’t it?” Briony asks, and still, Lola does not answer. “It was Robbie,” Briony tells her cousin. Lola asks if she saw him do it, but Briony is already bemoaning Robbie’s maniacal nature. Lola asks again if Briony saw Robbie commit the crime, and Briony responds “of course I did. Plain as day. It was him.”

Lola then explains how her assault transpired. Briony emphasizes her conviction that she saw Robbie do it, though Lola tells her that she could not say for sure who her assailant was. In this way, the two girls’ roles are determined: Lola the confused victim, and Briony the definitive witness. Seeing Robbie commit this crime solidifies the terrible suspicions Briony has held towards him, and she sees the novelistic qualities of his villainy.

The narration fast-forwards to describe what happens when Briony spreads her story of seeing Robbie. As more people hear and believe Briony’s story, she loses the ability to control how they respond, and its repercussions grow. Whenever she qualifies the story or makes it seem less ironclad, people seem confused and disapproving. In her anxiety to please, she glosses over her hesitations. As the affair spirals out of her control, Briony knows she lacks the courage to withdraw her testimony. She tries to equivocate, but is afraid to seem like a silly, self-indulgent girl who wanted to be the center of attention. Still, she cannot take comfort in thinking she was bullied into confessing that she saw Robbie commit the crime—this testimony was entirely her own doing. She tries to counteract her doubts by repeating them with more and more conviction.

Briony leads Lola back to the house. She hears Leon’s voice, and her brother comes heroically to pick up Lola. On their way towards the house, Briony starts to tell Leon about what has taken place, “exactly as she had seen it.”