Atonement (27 page)

They came away from the hotel and turned inland again, back towards the old lady and her pig. The electricity supply from Dunkirk must have been cut, but round the edges of some heavily curtained windows they saw the ochre glow of candlelight and oil lamps. On the other side of the road soldiers were knocking at doors, but no one would open up
now. This was the moment Turner chose to describe to Nettle the kind of place that he had in mind for dinner. He embellished to make his point, adding French windows open onto a wrought-iron balcony through which an ancient wisteria threaded, and a gramophone on a round table covered by a green chenille cloth, and a Persian rug spread across a chaise longue. The more he described, the more certain he was that the room was close by. His words were bringing it into being.

Nettle, his front teeth resting on his lower lip in a look of kindly rodent bafflement, let him finish and said, ‘I knew it. I fucking knew it.'

They were standing outside a bombed house whose cellar was half open to the sky and had the appearance of a gigantic cave. Grabbing him by his jacket, Nettle pulled him down a scree of broken bricks. Cautiously, he guided him across the cellar floor into the blackness. Turner knew this was not the place, but he could not resist Nettle's unusual determination. Ahead, there appeared a point of light, then another, and a third. The cigarettes of men already sheltering there.

A voice said, ‘Geh. Bugger off. We're full.'

Nettle struck a match and held it up. All around the walls there were men, propped in a sitting position, most of them asleep. A few were lying in the centre of the floor, but there was still room, and when the match went out he pressed down on Turner's shoulders to make him sit. As he was pushing debris away from under his buttocks, Turner felt his soaked shirt. It may have been blood, or some other fluid, but for the moment there was no pain. Nettle arranged the greatcoat around Turner's shoulders. Now the weight was off his feet, an ecstasy of relief spread upwards through his knees and he knew he would not move again that night, however disappointed Nettle might be. The rocking motion of daylong walking transferred itself to the floor. Turner felt it tilt and buck beneath him as he sat in total darkness. The problem now was to eat without being set upon. To survive
was to be selfish. But he did nothing for the moment and his mind emptied. After a while Nettle nudged him awake and slipped the bottle of wine into his hands. He got his mouth around the opening, tipped the bottle and drank. Someone heard him swallowing.

‘What's that you got?'

‘Sheep's milk,' Nettle said. ‘Still warm. Have some.'

There was a hawking sound, and something tepid and jelly-like landed on the back of Turner's hand. ‘You're filthy, you are.'

Another voice, more threatening, said, ‘Shut up. I'm trying to sleep.'

Moving soundlessly, Nettle groped in his haversack for the saucisson, cut it into three and passed a piece to Turner with a chunk of bread. He stretched out full length on the concrete floor, pulled his greatcoat over his head to contain the smell of the meat as well as the sound of his chewing, and in the fug of his own breathing, and with pieces of brick and grit pressing into his cheek, began to eat the best meal of his life. There was a smell of scented soap on his face. He bit into the bread that tasted of army canvas, and tore and sucked at the sausage. As the food reached his stomach a bloom of warmth opened across his chest and throat. He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life. When he closed his eyes he saw moving asphalt and his boots swinging in and out of view. Even as he chewed, he felt himself plunging into sleep for seconds on end. He entered another stretch of time, and now, lying snugly on his tongue, was a sugared almond, whose sweetness belonged to another world. He heard men complaining of the cold in the cellar and he was glad of the coat tucked around him, and felt a fatherly pride that he had stopped the corporals throwing theirs away.

A group of soldiers came in looking for shelter and striking matches, just as he and Nettle had. He felt unfriendly towards them and irritated by their West Country accents. Like everyone else in the cellar, he wanted them to go away.
But they found a place somewhere beyond his feet. He caught a whiff of brandy and resented them more. They were noisy organising their sleeping places, and when a voice from along the wall called out, ‘Fucking yokels,' one of the newcomers lurched in that direction and for a moment it seemed there would be a rumble. But the darkness and the weary protests of the residents held the peace.

 

Soon there were only the sounds of steady breathing and snores. Beneath him the floor still seemed to list, then switch to the rhythm of a steady march, and once again Turner found himself too afflicted by impressions, too fevered, too exhausted to sleep. Through the material of his coat he felt for the bundle of her letters.
I'll wait for you. Come back.
The words were not meaningless, but they didn't touch him now. It was clear enough – one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. He felt it pressing down, heavy as a greatcoat. Everyone in the cellar was waiting, everyone on the beach. She was waiting, yes, but then what? He tried to make her voice say the words, but it was his own he heard, just below the tread of his heart. He could not even form her face. He forced his thoughts towards the new situation, the one that was supposed to make him happy. The intricacies were lost to him, the urgency had died. Briony would change her evidence, she would rewrite the past so that the guilty became the innocent. But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren't enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts. The witnesses were guilty too. All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die? Down here in the cellar we'll keep
quiet about it. We'll sleep it off, Briony. His sugared almond tasted of her name which seemed so quaintly improbable that he wondered if he had remembered it correctly. Cecilia's too. Had he always taken for granted the strangeness of these names? Even this question was hard to hold for long. He had so much unfinished business here in France that it seemed to him sensible to delay his departure for England, even though his bags were packed, his strange, heavy bags. No one would see them if he left them here and went back. Invisible baggage. He must go back and get the boy from the tree. He had done it before. He had gone back where no one else was and found the boys under a tree and carried Pierrot on his shoulders and Jackson in his arms, across the park. So heavy! He was in love, with Cecilia, with the twins, with success and the dawn and its curious glowing mist. And what a reception party! Now he was used to such things, a roadside commonplace, but back then, before the coarsening and general numbness, when it was a novelty and when everything was new, he felt it sharply. He cared when she ran out across the gravel and spoke to him by the open police car door.
Oh, when I was in love with you, Then I was clean and brave
. So he would go back the way he had come, walk back through the reverses of all they had achieved, across the drained and dreary marshes, past the fierce sergeant on the bridge, through the bombed-up village, and along the ribbon road that lay across the miles of undulating farmland, watching for the track on the left on the edge of the village, opposite the shoe shop, and two miles on, go over the barbed-wire fence and through the woods and fields to an overnight stop at the brothers' farm, and next day, in yellow morning light, on the swing of a compass needle, hurry through that glorious country of little valleys and streams and swarming bees, and take the rising footpath to the sad cottage by the railway. And the tree. Gather up from the mud the pieces of burned, striped cloth, the shreds of his pyjamas, then bring him down, the poor pale boy, and make a decent burial. A nice-looking kid. Let the guilty bury
the innocent, and let no one change the evidence. And where was Mace to help with the digging? That brave bear, Corporal Mace. Here was more unfinished business and another reason why he could not leave. He must find Mace. But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plough, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths. For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of conceited self-blame. She might say no – the Flemish for no. You tried to help us. You couldn't carry us across the field. You carried the twins, but not us, no. No, you are not guilty. No.

There was a whisper, and he felt the breath of it on his burning face. ‘Too much noise, Guv'nor.'

Behind Corporal Nettle's head was a wide strip of deep blue sky and, etched against it, the ragged black edge of the cellar's ruined ceiling.

‘Noise? What was I doing?'

‘Shouting “no” and waking everyone up. Some of these lads was getting a bit peeved.'

He tried to lift his head and found that he couldn't. The corporal struck a match.

‘Christ. You look fucking terrible. Come on. Drink.'

He raised Turner's head and put the canteen to his lips.

The water tasted metallic. When he was done, a long steady oceanic swell of exhaustion began to push him under. He walked across the land until he fell in the ocean. In order not to alarm Nettle, he tried to sound more reasonable than he really felt.

‘Look, I've decided to stay on. There's some business I need to see to.'

With a dirty hand, Nettle was wiping Turner's forehead. He saw no reason why Nettle should think it necessary to put his face, his worried ratty face, so close to his own.

The corporal said, ‘Guv'nor, can you hear me? Are you listening? About an hour ago I went out for a slash. Guess
what I saw. There was the navy coming down the road, putting out the call for officers. They're getting organised on the beach. The boats are back. We're going home, mate. There's a lieutenant from the Buffs here who's marching us down at seven. So get some sleep and no more of your bloody shouting.'

 

He was falling now and sleep was all he wanted, a thousand hours of sleep. It was easier. The water was vile, but it helped and so did the news and Nettle's soothing whisper. They would be forming up in the road outside and marching to the beach. Squaring off to the right. Order would prevail. No one at Cambridge taught the benefits of good marching order. They revered the free, unruly spirits. The poets. But what did the poets know about survival? About surviving as a body of men. No breaking ranks, no rushing the boats, no first come first served, no devil take the hindmost. No sound of boots as they crossed the sand to the tide line. In the rolling surf, willing hands to steady the gunwale as their mates climbed in. But it was a tranquil sea, and now that he himself was calm, of course he saw how fine it really was that she was waiting. Arithmetic be damned.
I'll wait for you
was elemental. It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you.
Come back
. He remembered the feel of the gravel through his thin-soled shoes, he could feel it now, and the icy touch of the handcuffs on his wrists. He and the inspector stopped by the car and turned at the sound of her steps. How could he forget that green dress, how it clung to the curve of her hips and hampered her running and showed the beauty of her shoulders. Whiter than the mist. It didn't surprise him that the police let them talk. He didn't even think about it. He and Cecilia behaved as though they were alone. She would not let herself cry when she was telling him that she believed him, she trusted him, she loved him. He said to her simply that he would not forget this, by which he meant to tell her
how grateful he was, especially then, especially now. Then she put a finger on the handcuffs and said she wasn't ashamed, there was nothing to be ashamed of. She took a corner of his lapel and gave it a little shake and this was when she said, ‘I'll wait for you. Come back.' She meant it. Time would show she really meant it. After that they pushed him into the car, and she spoke hurriedly, before the crying began that she could no longer hold back, and she said that what had happened between them was theirs, only theirs. She meant the library, of course. It was theirs. No one could take it away. ‘It's our secret,' she called out, in front of them all, just before the slam of the door.

‘I won't say a word,' he said, though Nettle's head had long disappeared from his view. ‘Wake me before seven. I promise, you won't hear another word from me.'

 

Part Three

 

T
he unease was not confined to the hospital. It seemed to rise with the turbulent brown river swollen by the April rains, and in the evenings lay across the blacked-out city like a mental dusk which the whole country could sense, a quiet and malign thickening, inseparable from the cool late spring, well concealed within its spreading beneficence. Something was coming to an end. The senior staff, conferring in self-important groups at the corridor intersections, were nursing a secret. Younger doctors were a little taller, their stride more aggressive, and the consultant was distracted on his round, and on one particular morning crossed to the window to gaze out across the river for minutes on end, while behind him the nurses stood to attention by the beds and waited. The elderly porters seemed depressed as they pushed the patients to and from the wards, and seemed to have forgotten their chirpy catch-phrases from the wireless comedy shows, and it might even have consoled Briony to hear again that line of theirs she so despised – Cheer up love, it might never happen.

But it was about to. The hospital had been emptying slowly, invisibly, for many days. It seemed purely chance at first, an epidemic of good health that the less intelligent of the trainees were tempted to put down to their own improving techniques. Only slowly did one detect a design. Empty beds spread across
the ward, and through other wards, like deaths in the night. Briony imagined that retreating footsteps in the wide polished corridors had a muffled, apologetic sound, where once they had been bright and efficient. The workmen who came to install new drums of fire hose on the landings outside the lifts, and set out new buckets of fire-fighting sand, laboured all day, without a break, and spoke to no one before they left, not even the porters. In the ward, only eight beds out of twenty were occupied, and though the work was even harder than before, a certain disquiet, an almost superstitious dread, prevented the student nurses from complaining when they were alone together at tea. They were all generally calmer, more accepting. They no longer spread their hands to compare chilblains.

In addition, there was the constant and pervasive anxiety the trainees shared about making mistakes. They all lived in fear of Sister Marjorie Drummond, of the menacing meagre smile and softening of manner that preceded her fury. Briony knew she had recently accumulated a string of errors. Four days ago, despite careful instruction, a patient in her care had quaffed her carbolic gargle – according to the porter who saw it, down in one like a pint of Guinness – and was violently sick across her blankets. Briony was also aware that she had been observed by Sister Drummond carrying only three bedpans at a time, when by now they were expected to go the length of the ward reliably with a pile of six, like a busy waiter in La Coupole. There may have been other errors too, which she would have forgotten in her weariness, or never even known about. She was prone to errors of deportment – in moments of abstraction she tended to shift her weight onto one foot in a way that particularly enraged her superior. Lapses and failures could carelessly accrue over several days: a broom improperly stowed, a blanket folded with its label facing up, a starched collar in infinitesimal disarray, the bed castors not lined up and pointing inwards, walking back down the ward empty-handed – all silently noted, until capacity was reached
and then, if you had not read the signs, the wrath would come down as a shock. And just when you thought you were doing well.

But lately, the sister was not casting her mirthless smile in the direction of the probationers, nor speaking to them in the subdued voice that gave them such terrors. She hardly bothered with her charges at all. She was preoccupied, and often stood in the quadrangle by men's surgical, in long conferences with her counterpart, or she disappeared for two days at a time.

In another context, a different profession, she would have seemed motherly in her plumpness, or even sensual, for her unpainted lips were rich in natural colour and sweetly bowed, and her face with its rounded cheeks and doll's patches of healthy pink suggested a kindly nature. This impression was dispelled early on when a probationer in Briony's year, a large, kindly, slow-moving girl with a cow's harmless gaze, met the lacerating force of the ward sister's fury. Nurse Langland had been seconded to the men's surgical ward, and was asked to help prepare a young soldier for an appendectomy. Left alone with him for a minute or two, she chatted and made reassuring remarks about his operation. He must have asked the obvious question, and that was when she broke the hallowed rule. It was set out clearly in the handbook, though no one had guessed how important it was considered to be. Hours later, the soldier came round from his anaesthetic and muttered the student nurse's name while the surgical ward sister was standing close by. Nurse Langland was sent back to her own ward in disgrace. The others were made to gather round and take careful note. If poor Susan Langland had carelessly or cruelly killed two dozen patients, it could not have been worse for her. By the time Sister Drummond finished telling her that she was an abomination to the traditions of Nightingale nursing to which she aspired, and should consider herself lucky to be spending the next month sorting soiled linen, not only Langland, but half the girls present were weeping.
Briony was not among them, but that night in bed, still a little shivery, she went through the handbook again, to see if there were other points of etiquette she might have missed. She reread and committed to memory the commandment: in no circumstances should a nurse communicate to a patient her Christian name.

The wards emptied, but the work intensified. Every morning the beds were pushed into the centre so that the probationers could polish the floor with a heavy bumper that a girl on her own could barely swing from side to side. The floors were to be swept three times a day. Vacated lockers were scrubbed, mattresses fumigated, brass coat-hooks, doorknobs and keyholes were buffed. The woodwork – doors as well as skirting – was washed down with carbolic solution, and so were the beds themselves, the iron frames as well as springs. The students scoured, wiped and dried bedpans and bottles till they shone like dinner plates. Army three-ton lorries drew up at the loading bays, bringing yet more beds, filthy old ones that needed to be scrubbed down many times before they were carried into the ward and squeezed into the lines, and then carbolised. Between tasks, perhaps a dozen times a day, the students scrubbed their cracked and bleeding chilblained hands under freezing water. The war against germs never ceased. The probationers were initiated into the cult of hygiene. They learned that there was nothing so loathsome as a wisp of blanket fluff hiding under a bed, concealing within its form a battalion, a whole division, of bacteria. The everyday practice of boiling, scrubbing, buffing and wiping became the badge of the students' professional pride, to which all personal comfort must be sacrificed.

The porters brought up from the loading bays a great quantity of new supplies which had to be unpacked, inventoried and stowed – dressings, kidney bowls, hypodermics, three new autoclaves and many packages marked ‘Bunyan Bags' whose use had not yet been explained. An extra medicine cupboard was installed and filled, once it had been scrubbed
three times over. It was locked, and the key remained with Sister Drummond, but one morning Briony saw inside rows of bottles labelled morphine. When she was sent on errands, she saw other wards in similar states of preparation. One was already completely empty of patients, and gleamed in spacious silence, waiting. But it was not done to ask questions. The year before, just after war was declared, the wards on the top floor had been closed down completely as a protection against bombing. The operating theatres were now in the basement. The ground-floor windows had been sandbagged, and every skylight cemented over.

An army general made a tour of the hospital with half a dozen consultants at his side. There was no ceremony, or even silence when they came. Usually on such important visits, so it was said, the nose of every patient had to be in line with the centre creasing of the top sheet. But there was no time to prepare. The general and his party strode through the ward, murmuring and nodding, and then they were gone.

The unease grew, but there was little opportunity for speculation, which in any case was officially forbidden. When they were not on their shifts, the probationers were in lessons in their free time, or lectures, or at practical demonstrations or studying alone. Their meals and bedtimes were supervised as if they were new girls at Roedean. When Fiona, who slept in the bed next to Briony, pushed her plate away and announced to no one in particular that she was ‘clinically incapable' of eating vegetables boiled with an Oxo cube, the Nightingale home sister stood over her until she had eaten the last scrap. Fiona was Briony's friend, by definition; in the dormitory, on the first night of preliminary training, she asked Briony to cut the fingernails of her right hand, explaining that her left hand couldn't make the scissors work and that her mother always did it for her. She was ginger-haired and freckled, which made Briony automatically wary. But unlike Lola, Fiona was loud and jolly, with dimples on the backs of her hands and an enormous bosom which caused the other girls to say that she
was bound to be a ward sister one day. Her family lived in Chelsea. She whispered from her bed one night that her father was expecting to be asked to join Churchill's war cabinet. But when the cabinet was announced, the surnames didn't match up and nothing was said, and Briony thought it better not to enquire. In those first months after preliminary training, Fiona and Briony had little chance to find out if they actually liked each other. It was convenient for them to assume they did. They were among the few who had no medical background at all. Most of the other girls had done first-aid courses, and some had been VADs already and were familiar with blood and dead bodies, or at least, they said they were.

But friendships were not easy to cultivate. The probationers worked their shifts in the wards, studied three hours a day in their spare time, and slept. Their luxury was teatime, between four and five, when they took down from the wooden slatted shelves their miniature brown teapots inscribed with their names and sat together in a little day-room off the ward. Conversation was stilted. The home sister was there to supervise and ensure decorum. Besides, as soon as they sat down, tiredness came over them, heavy as three folded blankets. One girl fell asleep with a cup and saucer in her hand and scalded her thigh – a good opportunity, Sister Drummond said when she came in to see what the screaming was about, to practise the treatment of burns.

And she herself was a barrier to friendship. In those early months, Briony often thought that her only relationship was with Sister Drummond. She was always there, one moment at the end of a corridor, approaching with a terrible purpose, the next, at Briony's shoulder, murmuring in her ear that she had failed to pay attention during preliminary training to the correct procedures for blanket-bathing male patients: only after the
second
change of washing water should the freshly soaped back flannel and back towel be passed to the patient so that he could ‘finish off for himself'. Briony's state of mind largely depended on how she stood that hour in the ward
sister's opinion. She felt a coolness in her stomach whenever Sister Drummond's gaze fell on her. It was impossible to know whether you had done well. Briony dreaded her bad opinion. Praise was unheard of. The best one could hope for was indifference.

In the moments she had to herself, usually in the dark, minutes before falling asleep, Briony contemplated a ghostly parallel life in which she was at Girton, reading Milton. She could have been at her sister's college, rather than her sister's hospital. Briony had thought she was joining the war effort. In fact, she had narrowed her life to a relationship with a woman fifteen years older who assumed a power over her greater than that of a mother over an infant.

This narrowing, which was above all a stripping away of identity, began weeks before she had even heard of Sister Drummond. On her first day of the two months' preliminary training, Briony's humiliation in front of the class had been instructive. This was how it was going to be. She had gone up to the sister to point out courteously that a mistake had been made with her name badge. She was B. Tallis, not, as it said on the little rectangular brooch, N. Tallis.

The reply was calm. ‘You are, and will remain, as you have been designated. Your Christian name is of no interest to me. Now kindly sit down, Nurse Tallis.'

The other girls would have laughed if they had dared, for they all had the same initial, but they correctly sensed that permission had not been granted. This was the time of hygiene lectures, and of practising blanket-baths on life-size models – Mrs Mackintosh, Lady Chase, and baby George whose blandly impaired physique allowed him to double as a baby girl. It was the time of adapting to unthinking obedience, of learning to carry bedpans in a stack, and remembering a fundamental rule: never walk up a ward without bringing something back. Physical discomfort helped close down Briony's mental horizons. The high starched collars rubbed her neck raw. Washing her hands a dozen times a day under stinging cold water with
a block of soda brought on her first chilblains. The shoes she had to buy with her own money fiercely pinched her toes. The uniform, like all uniforms, eroded identity, and the daily attention required – ironing pleats, pinning hats, straightening seams, shoe polishing, especially the heels – began a process by which other concerns were slowly excluded. By the time the girls were ready to start their course as probationers, and to work in the wards (they were never to say ‘on') under Sister Drummond, and to submit to the daily routine ‘from bedpan to Bovril', their previous lives were becoming indistinct. Their minds had emptied to some extent, their defences were down, so that they were easily persuaded of the absolute authority of the ward sister. There could be no resistance as she filled their vacated minds.