In part to try to atone for what she has done, she refuses to go study at Cambridge. She is riddled with guilt since realizing that it wasn't Robbie who raped Lola.

He finally collapses into sleep, waiting for the evacuation which is to begin the next day. He is sustained only by letters from Cecilia and his hopes for their future together. Robbie is wounded and increasingly delirious. The war has gone horribly though, and so Robbie is trudging cross-country to the sea at Dunkirk, where he, his companions Mace and Nettle, and the rest of the British hope to be ferried across to England and safety. Robbie has been released from prison to join the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fighting in France against the Nazis. The novel now jumps several years to 1940. Robbie is taken to prison, despite the protests of Grace Turner (his mother) and Cecilia, who pledges her love and promises to wait for him.

Though she does not see his face, she is convinced that it was Robbie, and accuses him to the police. Briony finds Lola, who has been sexually assaulted, and sees a figure running away into the darkness. This results in disaster when the twins run away after dinner, and everyone races out to search for them in the dark. Spurred by confusion, and by her penchant for making up stories, she decides that Robbie is a 'maniac' who is after her sister. These embarrassing events are witnessed by Briony, Cecilia's imaginative 13-year-old sister. Then they do some of those things, not nearly privately enough, in the family library. Robbie accidentally gives Cecilia a letter he meant to destroy in which he tells her exactly what he wants to do with her. Cecilia jumps into a fountain in her underwear. Their courtship rituals result-as these things will-in a series of awkward sexual displays. In the middle of all this burble and bustle, Robbie Turner, the son of the housekeeper, realizes that he's fallen hopelessly, passionately in love with his childhood friend Cecilia Tallis. With five (count 'em, five) people arriving, the house is in something of an uproar-especially since father Jack Tallis is off in London at his government job, while mother Emily Tallis is largely incapacitated with a migraine. The Tallis family is also expecting a visit from brother Leon and his friend, the chocolate magnate Paul Marshall. The family is expecting a visit from their maternal cousins-the young twins Jackson and Pierrot, and 15-year-old Lola-all of whom have been temporarily cast adrift by their parents' divorce.

We start out at the Tallis family's very upper-class English home in 1935, a few years before World War II. And then some of it doesn't, which can get the plot even more tangled.

Saturday ian mcewan sparknotes