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Pierrot and Jackson are nine-year-old twins when they first arrive at the Tallis household, along with their older sister, Lola. Sent away from home due to their parents’ difficult and public divorce, Pierrot and Jackson are painfully homesick but are kept in the dark about the truth of their family’s disintegration. Lola and the Tallis family understand the scandal and public scrutiny that follows the divorce of a wealthy couple and encourage the twins to stay silent on the matter of their parents’ domestic struggles. Additionally, because Briony and Lola are busy playing grown-up, and Emily and Cecilia are kept from caring for the twins due to their own biases and distractions, the boys are neglected. As such, they are often depressed and lonely, and they remain deeply attached to one another. Pierrot and Jackson operate as a single entity; when one is punished, the other is severely anxious and cannot focus on his own tasks. They share the same feelings about their new circumstances and conspire together to run away, the event that sets the novel’s plot into motion. Their strong connection makes one of the reveals at the end of the novel—that Jackson died 15 years before the family reunion at Briony’s 77th birthday party—particularly saddening, as we feel the weight of not only Briony’s separation from Cecilia and Robbie but also Pierrot’s separation from his twin, as well as his living but estranged sister.

Although the twins’ appearances in the novel are brief, it is established that they too suffer from Paul Marshall’s crime and Briony’s mistaken accusation. Lola’s eventual marriage to Marshall separates her from her brothers entirely: in merging with the Marshall family, Lola leaves behind her roots. While Briony maintains a consistent relationship with Pierrot and Jackson throughout her life, neither she nor the twins seem to have any communication with Lola. In this sense, Marshall maintains the violent control over the Quincey and Tallis family that began the night of the rape. When the frightened Lola chooses to remain silent rather than challenge her physically abusive suitor, and later convinces herself that their relationship was a consensual love match in an attempt to forget her trauma, she slips further under Marshall’s power. Ultimately, she is severed—or severs herself—from her brothers and Briony. The twins’ loss of Lola is another consequence of Briony’s mistake.

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