Atonement Read Online Free PDF

while.
    â€˜Beautiful day,’ she then said through a sigh.
    He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
    â€˜How’s Clarissa ?’ He was looking down at his fingers rolling the tobacco.
    â€˜Boring.’
    â€˜We mustn’t say so.’
    â€˜I wish she’d get on with it.’
    â€˜She does. And it gets better.’
    They slowed, then stopped so that he could put the finishing touches to her roll-up.
    She said, ‘I’d rather read Fielding any day.’
    She felt she had said something stupid. Robbie was looking away across the park and the cows towards the oak wood that lined the river valley, the wood she had run through that morning. He might be thinking she was talking to him in code, suggestively conveying her taste for the full-blooded and sensual. That was a mistake, of course, and she was discomfited and had no idea how to put him right. She liked his eyes, she thought, the unblended mix of orange and green, made even more granular in sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall. It was an interesting combination in a man,intelligence and sheer bulk. Cecilia had taken the cigarette and he was lighting it for her.
    â€˜I know what you mean,’ he said as they walked the remaining few yards to the fountain. ‘There’s more life in Fielding, but he can be psychologically crude compared to Richardson.’
    She set down the vase by the uneven steps that rose to the fountain’s stone basin. The last thing she wanted was an undergraduate debate on eighteenth-century literature. She didn’t think Fielding was crude at all, or that Richardson was a fine psychologist, but she wasn’t going to be drawn in, defending, defining, attacking. She was tired of that, and Robbie was tenacious in argument.
    Instead she said, ‘Leon’s coming today, did you know?’
    â€˜I heard a rumour. That’s marvellous.’
    â€˜He’s bringing a friend, this man Paul Marshall.’
    â€˜The chocolate millionaire. Oh no! And you’re giving him flowers!’
    She smiled. Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer understood him. They had fallen out of touch at Cambridge. It had been too difficult to do anything else. She changed the subject.
    â€˜The Old Man says you’re going to be a doctor.’
    â€˜I’m thinking about it.’
    â€˜You must love the student life.’
    He looked away again, but this time for only a second or less, and when he turned to her she thought she saw a touch of irritation. Had she sounded condescending? She saw his eyes again, green and orange flecks, like a boy’s marble. When he spoke he was perfectly pleasant.
    â€˜I know you never liked that sort of thing, Cee. But how else do you become a doctor?’
    â€˜That’s my point. Another six years. Why do it?’
    He wasn’t offended. She was the one who was over-interpreting, and jittery in his presence, and she was annoyed with herself.
    He was taking her question seriously. ‘No one’s really going to give me work as a landscape gardener. I don’t want to teach, or go in for the civil service. And medicine interests me…’ He broke off as a thought occurred to him. ‘Look, I’ve agreed to pay your father back. That’s the arrangement.’
    â€˜That’s not what I meant at all.’
    She was surprised that he should think she was raising the question of money. That was ungenerous of him. Her father had subsidised Robbie’s education all his life. Had anyone ever objected? She had thought she was imagining it, but in fact she was right – there was something trying in Robbie’s manner lately. He had a way of wrong-footing her whenever he could. Two days before he had rung the front doorbell – in itself odd, for he had