Tragedy had rescued the temple from being entirely a fake.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.

... and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her ...

She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not yet ready to go in.

This was the challenge she was putting to existence - she would not stir, not for dinner, not even for her mother calling her in. She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

Then, after a few moments' reverie, tilted back on his chair, during which time he thought about the page at which his Anatomy tended to fall open these days, he dropped forward and typed before he could stop himself, "In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long."

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation - it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love and it thrilled him.

There was no confusion in her mind: these too-vivid, untrustworthy impressions, her self-doubt, the intrusive visual clarity and eerie differences that had wrapped themselves around the familiar were no more than continuations, variations of how she had been seeing and feeling all day.

Feeling but preferring not to think.

As she stood on the chair in her clinging dark green dress, watching the bright ginger heads bobbing and bending to their chores, the simple thought came to her, how hopeless and terrifying it was for them to be without love, to construct an existence out of nothing in a strange house.

In Leon's life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed. Everyone was celebrated at least in some degree, as though it was a cause for wonder that anyone existed at all. He remembered all his friends' best lines. The effect of one of Leon's anecdotes was to make his listener warm to humankind and its failings. Everyone was, at a minimal estimate, "a good egg" or a "decent sort", and motivation was never judged to be at variance with outward show. If there was mystery or contradiction in a friend, Leon took the long view and found a benign explanation. Literature and politics, science and religion did not bore him - they simply had no place in his world, and nor did any matter about which people seriously disagreed. He had taken a degree in law and was happy to have forgotten the whole experience. It was hard to imagine him ever lonely, or bored by despondent; his equanimity was boundless, as was his lack of ambition, and he assumed that everyone else was much like him. Despite all this, his blandness was perfectly tolerable, even soothing.

There was desperation in all she said, an emptiness at its core, or something excluded or unnamed that made her talk faster, and exaggerate with less conviction.

The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them obscenely, a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams - an uncle and a nut, the Latin for next, an old English kind attempting to turn back the tide. Rhyming words took their form from children's books - the smallest pig in the litter, the hounds pursuing the fox, the flat-bottomed boats on the Cam by Grantchester meadow. Naturally, she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No one in her presence had ever referred to the word's existence, and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her which - Briony was certain - the word referred. She had no doubt that that was it was. The context helped, but more than that, the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddling at the foot of the cross. That the word had been written by a man confessing to an image in his mind, confiding a lonely preoccupation, disgusted her profoundly.

There must be some lofty, godlike place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection.

But how to do feelings? All very well to write, she felt sad, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy?

Could she trust it now, the hilarious freedom of the upward flight, the blind trust in the kindly grip of adult wrists...

Perhaps she was not as weak as she always assumed; finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else.

A maniac. The word had refinement, and the weight of medical diagnosis.

One rotten apple spoiled the barrel...

Not everything had a cause, and pretending otherwise was an interference in the workings of the world that was futile, and could even lend to grief. Some things were simply so.

They resembled each other in their dread of conflict ...

If this sham was conventional hypocrisy, she had to concede that it has its uses.

Praise was unheard of. The best one could hope for was indifference.

It was the time of adapting to unthinking obedience...

For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of conceited self-blame.

No responsibility, no memory of the hours before, no idea of what he was about, where he was going, what his plan was. And no curiosity about these matters. He would then find himself in the grip of illogical certainties.

She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting.

There were parts of herself she had completely forgotten.

The dead were not yet present, the absent were presumed alive.

The scene was dreamlike in its normality.

From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.

She could imagine for how she might abandon her ambitions of writing and dedicate her life for these moments of elated, generalized love.

"Do you love me?" She hesitated. "Yes." No other reply was possible. Besides, for that moment she did. He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.

Warfare, as we remarked, is the enemy of creative ability.

Then she was alone in the church with the unseen organist who went on playing for his own pleasure. It was over too quickly, and nothing for certain was achieved. She remained standing in place, beginning to feel a little foolish, reluctant to go outside. Daylight, and the banality of family small talk, would dispel whatever impact she had made as a ghostly illuminated apparition.

She became aware of the nervy, fidgeting music behind her the moment it ceased, and in the sudden new measure of silence, which seemed to confer freedom, she decided she must eat breakfast.

She left the cafe, and as she walked along the common she felt the distance widen between her and another self, no less real, who was walking back toward the hospital. Perhaps the Briony who was walking in the direction of Balham was the imagined or ghostly persona.

She had been right to be wary. He was gripped by the kind of anger that passes itself off as wonderment.

What she felt was more like homesickness, though there was no source for it, no home.

Who would have dreamed it? This as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered. That may sound sour, but it went through my mind as I glanced across at her.

I love these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the creation of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction.

I've always been good at not thinking about the things that are really troubling me.

It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk of dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguised intellectual.

How could that constitute an ending? What sense of hope of satisfaction would a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism?

The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.

The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.