Chapter 8 Chapter VII

The island's temple, built in the late 1780s in the style of Nicolas Rivet, is a striking sight and completes the pastoral life, without any religious purpose.The temple is built on a protruding bank, very close to the water's edge, and casts an interesting shadow on the lake.Seen from a distance, the row of pillars of the temple and the gable above it are all hidden among the elms and oaks growing around, which has a special charm.Up close, the temple doesn't look too good: moisture evaporating through a damaged moisture barrier has caused the plaster to peel off in patches.Sometime in the late nineteenth century, someone had done a poor job of repairing the temple with cement, which had turned brown from being unpainted, giving the building a mottled, dilapidated appearance.Elsewhere, the exposed slats themselves have rotted away, looking like the ribs of a starving animal.The two doors to the dome-shaped rotunda had long since been dismantled, and the stone floor was covered with a thick layer of leaf humus and the droppings of various birds and animals that passed in and out.The glass in the beautiful Georgian windows had all been smashed by Leon and his friends in the late twenties.The tall alcoves where the statues once stood were empty save for tattered and filthy cobwebs.The only piece of furniture in the room was a bench, which had also been brought in from the village cricket ground by young Leon and his gang of mischievous schoolmates.The stool legs had been kicked off to smash the window panes.Now they lay outside, crumbling to dust among nettle bushes and shards of incorruptible glass.

Just as the pavilion by the swimming pool behind the corral imitated the style of the temple, so the temple is thought to embody some remnants of the original Adamic architecture, though no one in the Tallis family knows exactly which.Maybe it's the style of the columns, maybe the gables, maybe the proportions of the windows.Sometimes, mostly during the Christmas season, when the family is walking on the bridge in a good mood, everyone wants to find out, but when the busy new year begins, no one wants to make time for it.It is this connection, this forgotten memory of the importance of the temple's relation to the original Adamic architecture, which, compared with the dilapidation of the temple, gives this useless little building a tinge of regret.This temple was the orphan of a certain dignified lady-in-waiting.Now with no one to look after and no one to admire, the orphan has aged prematurely and is left to decay.On one of the outer walls, there is a cone-shaped soot smear as tall as a man, where two homeless men once lawlessly built a bonfire and roasted a carp that did not belong to them.There was a long time in the past when a shrunken boot lay out in the grass, which had been nibbled neatly by rabbits.However, when Briony looked for it today, she found that the boots had disappeared, just as everything disappears eventually.The idea of ​​a black-veiled temple in mourning for a burned-out mansion, longing for a grand and invisible presence, carries a faintly religious air.Tragedy saved the temple from becoming an outright impostor.

It's hard to chop nettles for a long time without a good excuse.And Briony quickly engrossed herself in it and got great satisfaction, even though she was seen as a hot-tempered girl in everyone's eyes.She had found a slender hazel branch and stripped it of its bark.When there is work to do, she starts to do it.A tall, well-groomed nettle, with its head drooping shyly and its middle leaves stretched out like hands, as if in protest of its innocence—this is Lola, though she whimpers Begging for mercy, the windy three-foot slender arc cut her at the knees and tossed her useless torso in the air.It's so satisfying, Briony won't let it go.The next few nettles followed in the same way as Laura; this one, which had leaned over to whisper to its neighbor, was bitten down by her lips; and here was her twin sister again, who Standing tall, head held high, plotting vicious schemes; there, she looms large over a group of young admirers, spreading rumors about Briony.But it's a pity that these admirers had to go with her to meet Hades.Then, with all her shameless sins—arrogance, gluttony, greed, noncooperation—she tried to make a comeback, only to pay with her life for each of her sins.Her last act of hostility was to fall at Briony's feet, to sting her toes.When Lola is hacked to pieces, three pairs of young nettles also fall prey to the cowardice and incompetence of the twins—the punishment is impartial, and no special care is given to children.Then screenwriting itself became a nettle—indeed, several nettles; the superficiality of the script, the wasted time, the other mess of thoughts, the hopeless affectation—in the garden of art, It is a weed and must be removed.

She's no longer a playwright, and she's all the more refreshed for that.The clearing between the trees was cluttered with shrubs, and she circled the temple, wary of the broken glass, and continued on the rough road where the shards of glass and the shrubs met.The whipping of the nettles was doing a kind of self-purification, and she was beating childhood now, because she no longer needed it.A slender nettle took the place of everything before her at this moment.But that's not enough.She planted her feet on the grass, swung the branches thirteen times, and let go of her old self year by year.She broke with her morbid dependence in infancy, with that schoolgirl eager to show off and be praised, with her foolish pride in her first writing at the age of eleven, and with her dependence on her mother's good words-a clean break.They flew over her left shoulder one by one and landed at her feet.The thin tips of the slender branches made a double tone as they cut through the air.Enough is enough! she forced Twig to say.Enough! Enough!

Soon, it was the movement itself that attracted her.With the rhythm of swiping, she corrected the reports in the newspaper.No one in the sporting world does it better than Briony Tallis.She will represent her country at the Olympic Games in Berlin next year and will definitely win a gold medal.People scrutinized her, marveling at her technique and her love of going barefoot, which enhanced her balance - so important in this demanding sport - with every toe making a difference the way she strikes with her wrist and then only at the very end of her stroke with a quick twist of her wrist, the way she places her center of gravity and uses the rotation of her hips for extra power, her unique habit of stretching her free-handed fingers— No one can match her.The youngest daughter of a senior civil servant, she is all self-taught.Look at the concentration on her face, she judges the angle, she never fluffs her shots, and hits every nettle with superhuman precision.It takes a lifetime of dedication to get there.And she almost became a playwright, wasting her life!

She was suddenly aware of a buggy coming behind her, clattering across the first bridge.Leon finally arrived.She felt him staring at her.Today she is one of the elite players in international competitions.Is she still the same little sister he had last seen at Waterloo Station just three months ago? She obstinately forced herself not to turn to greet him; his opinion.She is a master, reveling in the intricacies of her craft.Besides, he was bound to stop the carriage and run down the embankment, and she had to gladly bear the interruption. The sound of wheels and horseshoes receded from the second bridge.This, she supposed, proved that her brother understood the value of distance and respect for a profession.Even so, she still felt a bit of soreness in her heart when she hacked all the way around the temple on the island until she disappeared at the end of the road.A row of jagged, whipped nettles in the grass and white bumps from stings on her feet and ankles marked her progress along the way.The tips of the slender hazel branches bowed and sang, and the leaves and stalks flew in all directions, but it was difficult to elicit cheers from the audience.Her colorful fantasies were fading, the self-loving joy of movement and balance was fading, and her arms ached.She became a lonely girl waving a nettle with a branch.Finally she stopped, threw the branch in her hand towards the trees, and looked around.

The price of haunting daydreams always returns in this moment, the re-alignment of past and present as if for the worse.Her daydreams, which were once full of seemingly real details, have become a burst of ignorance that evaporated in the face of real reality.Getting back to reality is tough. "Wake up," her sister used to whisper to her, to wake her from her nightmares.Briony had lost her godlike creativity, but only in this moment of sobriety did the loss become apparent.Part of the trigger for the daydream was an involuntary delusion she had in the face of its logic: the competition of international competitions forced her to compete at the highest level against the best players in the world, and to accept that in her field— In her field of chopping nettles—with greatness comes the challenge, and it drives her to push her limits, quell roaring crowds, claim the crown, and most importantly, dominate.Of course, the dreams were all hers—she was dreaming her own—and now she was back in the real world.This is not the world she can create, but the world that created her.She felt herself growing smaller and smaller under the evening sky.She's tired of being outside, but she's not going home yet.Is that really what life is all about being inside or being out? Is there nowhere else for people to go? She turns her back on the temple on the island and wanders slowly among the rabbits On the perfectly gnawed lawn, walk towards the bridge.In front of her, illuminated by the setting sun, each insect dances aimlessly up and down as if attached to an invisible rubber band—a mysterious courtship dance, Or sheer insect energy—she couldn't see any point in that.Dominated by unruly defiance, she climbed the steep slope of green grass leading to the small bridge.She stood in the driveway, determined to stay there and wait for something big to happen to her.It was a challenge of her own making—she wouldn't move, not because of dinner, not even if her mother told her to come home.She just waited on the bridge calmly and obstinately until the event, the real event, not her own fantasy, came to accept her challenge and dispel her own sense of insignificance.