"Finally he said, 'Cee, it was a mistake.'
'A mistake?'
Voices reached him across the hallway through the open door of the drawing room. He heard Leon's voice, then Marshall's. It may have been fear of interruption that caused her to step back and open the door wider for him. He followed her across the hall into the library which was in darkness, and waited by the door while she searched for the switch of a desk lamp. When it came on he pushed the door closed behind him. He guessed that in a few minutes he would be walking across the park towards the bungalow.
'It wasn't the version I intended to send.'
'No.'
'I put the wrong one in the envelope.'
'Yes.'
He could gauge nothing by these terse replies and he was still unable to see her expression clearly. She moved beyond the light, down past the shelves. He stepped further into the room, not quite following her, but unwilling to let her out of close range. She could have sent him packing from the front door and now there was a chance of giving an explanation before he left.
She said, 'Briony read it.'
'Oh God. I'm sorry.'
He had been about to conjure for her a private moment of exuberance, a passing impatience with convention, a memory of reading the Orioli edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which he had bought under the counter in Soho. But this new element ─the innocent child─ put his lapse beyond mitigation. It would have been frivolous to go on. He could only repeat himself, this time in a whisper.
'I’m sorry ... '
She was moving further away, towards the corner, into deeper shadow. Even though he thought she was recoiling from him, he took another couple of steps in her direction.
'It was a stupid thing. You were never meant to read it. No one was.'
Still she shrank away. One elbow was resting on the shelves, and she seemed to slide along them, as though about to disappear between the books. He heard a soft, wet sound, the kind that is made when one is about to speak and the tongue unglues from the roof of the mouth. But she said nothing. It was only then that it occurred to him that she might not be shrinking from him, but drawing him with her deeper into the gloom. From the moment he had pressed the bell he had nothing to lose. So he walked towards her slowly as she slipped back, until she was in the comer where she stopped and watched him approach. He too stopped, less than four feet away. He was close enough now, and there was just enough light, to see she was tearful and trying to speak. For the moment it was not possible and she shook her head to indicate that he should wait. She turned aside and made a steeple of her hands to enclose her nose and mouth and pressed her fingers into the corners of her eyes."
Ian McEwan,
Atonement, London, Vintage, 2002, pp.132-33 [2001].
