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Part One

Chapters One & Two

Summary: Chapter One

Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis has written a play, The Trials of Arabella, to be performed for the occasion of her brother Leon’s visit home. The play is about a woman, Arabella, who falls in love with a foreign count and, after escaping to a seaside town with him, is punished by fate when she contracts cholera. Arabella, abandoned by the count as well as her family, then falls in love with the doctor, who tends to her as she is bedbound and ill. The play ends with the wedding of the doctor and Arabella, who is once again accepted by her family. Having received praise from her mother, Emily Tallis, Briony is looking forward to impressing her brother with the play as well. Briony has had a passion for writing since the age of eleven, finding satisfaction in creating whole worlds and having secrets in her otherwise mundane life. However, The Trials of Arabella is the first play Briony has written, to be performed by her cousins, fifteen-year-old Lola and nine-year-old twins Jackson and Pierrot, who are visiting as their parents are in the middle of a bitter divorce and their mother, Hermione, has gone off to Paris for the weekend.

Upon the arrival of her cousins, Briony tells them of the play and that they will rehearse that afternoon and perform the next day. However, Briony becomes dismayed to see that her cousins all have red hair and freckles, which does not match her description of the characters in The Trials of Arabella. Once Briony has gathered her cousins in the nursery for a rehearsal, she finds that the twins, Pierrot and Jackson, are uncooperative while Lola attempts to indulge Briony, coming off as condescending. Briony becomes increasingly embarrassed by how childlike she feels in comparison to Lola and is horrified when Lola asks if she can play the part of Arabella, which Briony had assumed she would play. Briony feels obligated to say yes to the older Lola even though Lola is not at all the image Briony had in mind for Arabella while writing the play. Briony pictures Lola receiving all the adulation Briony had imagined for herself and suddenly sees herself running away from her family in shame. She is also dismayed by her own weakness in allowing Lola take charge of the situation. Briony attempts to regain control by asserting herself as the director and beginning the rehearsal, but her anger only grows as her cousins’ performances do not match what she had envisioned in her head.

Summary: Chapter Two

The next morning, Cecilia Tallis, Briony’s older sister by ten years, spends hours collecting flowers to put in another visitor’s room at the request of her mother. Returning to the house, she sees Robbie Turner, the son of the family’s charlady, weeding hedges along the fountain near the house, and tries to avoid him. Although they were childhood friends, since Robbie and his mother live in a bungalow on the Tallis property, Cecilia and Robbie grew apart as they got older. Though they both attended Cambridge at the same time, they did not acknowledge each other often when they crossed paths. Robbie, having graduated from Cambridge with a literature degree, is now planning on attending medical school, which Cecilia finds pretentious as well as presumptuous, as Cecilia’s father has taken on the role of Robbie’s benefactor and pays for his education. Cecilia has also graduated from Cambridge but has been spending the summer at home with no real plans for the future.

Cecilia finds a vase that belonged to her uncle Clem, which he acquired during the first World War from villagers who were grateful for his role in evacuating them. Uncle Clem gave the vase to a friend for safekeeping, and it was returned to the family after Clem’s funeral. Despite the vase being worth a great deal, Cecilia’s grandfather wanted it to be kept in the family instead of sold to a museum. Cecilia attempts to arrange the flowers to look more natural than symmetrical, wondering whether the person for whom they are intended, her brother’s friend Paul Marshall, will even notice. Since the cook, Betty, is preparing dinner in the kitchen and is in a foul mood, Cecilia decides to fill the vase with water from the fountain outside. She goes outside and asks Robbie for a cigarette, and the two make awkward conversation. Cecilia recalls their encounter two days prior, when Robbie rang the doorbell of the house, took off his shoes and socks when he entered, and asked Cecilia if he could borrow a book. Cecilia took his actions as meaning to mock and distance her.

While Cecilia attempts to lean over the fountain and fill the vase with water, Robbie tries to help her by taking the vase. During the short struggle, the lip of the vase breaks, and two sections fall to the floor of the fountain. Cecilia scolds Robbie, who takes responsibility before beginning to unbutton his shirt to go in the fountain to get the pieces. Cecilia, adamant that she will not accept Robbie’s help, strips down to her underwear and dives into the fountain herself, retrieving the broken pieces of the vase. While not speaking a word to Robbie, Cecilia dresses and goes back inside the house.

Analysis: Chapters One & Two

In Chapter One, Briony is introduced along with several of her traits, both positive and negative. Her ability to write a play at the age of thirteen shows that she is a precocious and creative child. However, her love of storytelling is entwined with her need for control. Briony, as a sort of only child with siblings more than ten years older than she is, is used to having her way and expects her cousins to do as she says. Especially in her writing, she feels that she can play an omniscient god-like role and finds it unfathomable that someone would interpret her words in any way other than how she intended. As her vision for the play unravels, Briony finds herself unraveling as well. The juxtaposition of thirteen-year-old Briony and fifteen-year-old Lola also shows how Briony, though still a child, finds herself on the cusp of adulthood. Although Briony was proud of her play before the arrival of her cousins, Lola’s condescension makes Briony feel childish in comparison and, perhaps for the first time, embarrassed by her own childishness. Although Briony saw herself as the lead in the play, she knows that making a fuss would only make her seem more immature compared to her seemingly sophisticated cousin.

Cecilia, as compared to Briony, is introduced as rather aimless. After graduating from Cambridge, she has no idea what the next step in her life will be. That her only task for an entire morning is collecting flowers shows just how adrift Cecilia finds herself. Her anger toward Robbie for taking off his shoes and socks in their house is indicative of both how Cecilia may have too much time on her hands and is reading too much into Robbie’s actions, and that Cecilia may care more about Robbie than she lets on. Her frustration at him trying to help her with the vase and then her refusal to let him retrieve the pieces from the fountain seem like an outsized reaction to the situation, suggesting there is more between them than meets the eye.

Two of the novel’s major symbols that foreshadow events to come are introduced in these chapters: The Trials of Arabella and Uncle Clem’s vase. The Trials of Arabella ends with a love story between a heroine and a doctor—the profession Robbie is now seeking. The play also symbolizes Briony’s inability to control everything despite her intentions, a struggle she will face throughout her life. Although she has a specific image in mind for the play, she cannot make other people bring it to life in that way. The vase is fractured during Cecilia and Robbie’s exchange, suggesting that something has broken open between the two of them and that their relationship may soon change.

Next section Chapters Three & Four

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