Atonement (28 page)

It was never said, but the model behind this process was military. Miss Nightingale, who was never to be referred to as Florence, had been in the Crimea long enough to see the value of discipline, strong lines of command and well-trained troops. So when she lay in the dark listening to Fiona begin her nightlong snoring – she slept on her back – Briony already sensed that the parallel life, which she could imagine so easily from her visits to Cambridge as a child to see Leon and Cecilia, would soon begin to diverge from her own. This was her student life now, these four years, this enveloping regime, and she had no will, no freedom to leave. She was abandoning herself to a life of strictures, rules, obedience, housework, and a constant fear of disapproval. She was one of a batch of probationers – there was a new intake every few months – and she had no identity beyond her badge. There were no tutorials here, no one losing sleep over the precise course of her intellectual development. She emptied and sluiced the bedpans, swept and polished floors, made cocoa and Bovril, fetched and carried – and was delivered from introspection. At some point in the future, she knew from listening to the second-year students, she would begin to take pleasure in her competence. She had had a taste of it lately, having
been entrusted with taking a pulse and temperature under supervision and marking the readings on a chart. In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise. But mostly, she was a maid, a skivvy and, in her hours off, a crammer of simple facts. She was happy to have little time to think of anything else. But when she stood on her landing in her dressing gown, last thing at night, and she looked across the river at the unlit city, she remembered the unease that was out there in the streets as well as in the wards, and was like the darkness itself. Nothing in her routine, not even Sister Drummond, could protect her from it.

 

I
n the half hour before lights out, after cocoa, the girls would be in and out of each other's rooms, sitting on their beds writing letters home, or to sweethearts. Some still cried a little from homesickness, and there would be much comforting going on at this time, with arms around shoulders and soothing words. It seemed theatrical to Briony, and ridiculous, grown young women tearful for their mothers, or as one of the students put it through her sobs, for the smell of daddy's pipe. Those doing the consoling seemed to be enjoying themselves rather too much. In this cloying atmosphere Briony sometimes wrote her own concise letters home which conveyed little more than that she was not ill, not unhappy, not in need of her allowance and not about to change her mind in the way that her mother had predicted. Other girls proudly wrote out their exacting routines of work and study to astound their loving parents. Briony confided these matters only to her notebook, and even then, in no great detail. She did not want her mother to know about the lowly
work she did. Part of the purpose of becoming a nurse was to work for her independence. It was important to her that her parents, especially her mother, knew as little about her life as possible.

Apart from a string of repeated questions which remained unanswered, Emily's letters were mostly about the evacuees. Three mothers with seven children, all from the Hackney area of London, had been billeted on the Tallis family. One of the mothers had disgraced herself in the village pub and was now banned. Another woman was a devout Catholic who walked four miles with her three children to the local town for mass on Sunday. But Betty, a Catholic herself, was not sensitive to these differences. She hated all the mothers and all their children. They told her on the first morning that they did not like her food. She claimed to have seen the church-goer spitting on the hallway floor. The oldest of the children, a thirteen-year-old boy who looked no bigger than eight, had got into the fountain, climbed onto the statue and snapped off the Triton's horn and his arm, right down to the elbow. Jack said that it could be fixed without too much trouble. But now the part, which had been carried into the house and left in the scullery, was missing. On information from old Hardman, Betty accused the boy of throwing it in the lake. The boy said he knew nothing. There was talk of draining the lake, but there was concern for the pair of mating swans. The mother was fierce in her son's defence, saying that it was dangerous to have a fountain when children were about, and that she was writing to the MP. Sir Arthur Ridley was Briony's godfather.

Still, Emily thought they should consider themselves lucky to have evacuees because at one point it had looked like the whole house was going to be requisitioned for use by the army. They settled instead on Hugh van Vliet's place because it had a snooker table. Her other news was that her sister Hermione was still in Paris but thinking of relocating to Nice, and the cows had been moved into three fields on the north side so
that the park could be ploughed up for corn. A mile and a half of iron fencing dating from the 1750s had been taken away to be melted down to make Spitfires. Even the workmen who removed it said it was the wrong kind of metal. A cement and brick pillbox had been built down by the river, right on the bend, among the sedges, destroying the nests of the teal and the grey wagtails. Another pillbox was being built where the main road entered the village. They were storing all the fragile pieces in the cellars, including the harpsichord. Wretched Betty dropped Uncle Clem's vase carrying it down and it shattered on the steps. She said the pieces had simply come away in her hand, but that was hardly to be believed. Danny Hardman had joined the navy, but all the other boys in the village had gone into the East Surreys. Jack was working far too hard. He attended a special conference and when he came back he looked tired and thin, and wasn't allowed to tell her where he had been. He was furious about the vase and actually shouted at Betty, which was so unlike him. On top of it all, she had lost a ration book and they had to do without sugar for two weeks. The mother who was banned from the Red Lion had come without her gas mask and no replacement was to be had. The ARP warden, who was PC Vockins's brother, had been round a third time for a blackout inspection. He was turning out to be quite a little dictator. No one liked him.

Reading these letters at the end of an exhausting day, Briony felt a dreamy nostalgia, a vague yearning for a long-lost life. She could hardly feel sorry for herself. She was the one who had cut herself off from home. In the week's holiday after preliminary training, before the probationer year began, she had stayed with her uncle and aunt in Primrose Hill and had resisted her mother on the telephone. Why could Briony not visit, even for a day, when everyone would adore to see her and was desperate for her stories about her new life? And why did she write so infrequently? It was difficult to give a straight answer. For now it was necessary to stay away.

In the drawer of her bedside locker, she kept a foolscap notebook with marbled cardboard covers. Taped to the spine was a length of string on the end of which was a pencil. It was not permitted to use pen and ink in bed. She began her journal at the end of the first day of preliminary training, and managed at least ten minutes most nights before lights out. Her entries consisted of artistic manifestos, trivial complaints, character sketches and simple accounts of her day which increasingly shaded off into fantasy. She rarely read back over what she had written, but she liked to flip the filled pages. Here, behind the name badge and uniform, was her true self, secretly hoarded, quietly accumulating. She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting. It almost didn't matter what she wrote. Since the drawer did not lock, she was careful to disguise her descriptions of Sister Drummond. She changed the names of the patients too. And having changed the names, it became easier to transform the circumstances and invent. She liked to write out what she imagined to be their rambling thoughts. She was under no obligation to the truth, she had promised no one a chronicle. This was the only place she could be free. She built little stories – not very convincing, somewhat overwritten – around the people on the ward. For a while she thought of herself as a kind of medical Chaucer, whose wards thronged with colourful types, coves, topers, old hats, nice dears with a sinister secret to tell. In later years she regretted not being more factual, not providing herself with a store of raw material. It would have been useful to know what happened, what it looked like, who was there, what was said. At the time, the journal preserved her dignity: she might look and behave like and live the life of a trainee nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew – family, home, friends – writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done.

They were rare, the moments in the day when her mind
could wander freely. Sometimes she would be sent on an errand to the dispensary and would have to wait for the pharmacist to return. Then she would drift along the corridor to a stairwell where a window gave a view of the river. Imperceptibly, her weight would shift to her right foot as she stared across at the Houses of Parliament without seeing them, and thought not about her journal, but about the long story she had written and sent away to a magazine. During her stay in Primrose Hill she borrowed her uncle's typewriter, took over the dining room and typed out her final draft with her forefingers. She was at it all week for more than eight hours a day, until her back and neck ached, and ragged curls of unfurling ampersands swam across her vision. But she could hardly remember a greater pleasure than at the end, when she squared off the completed pile of pages – one hundred and three! – and felt at the tips of her raw fingers the weight of her creation. All her own. No one else could have written it. Keeping a carbon copy for herself, she wrapped her story (such an inadequate word) in brown paper, took the bus to Bloomsbury, walked to the address in Lansdowne Terrace, the office of the new magazine,
Horizon
, and delivered the package to a pleasant young woman who came to the door.

What excited her about her achievement was its design, the pure geometry and the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility. The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the
obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow's flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. She had read Virginia Woolf's
The Waves
three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change. To enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do this within a symmetrical design – this would be an artistic triumph. So thought Nurse Tallis as she lingered near the dispensary, waiting for the pharmacist to return, and gazing across the Thames, oblivious to the danger she was in, of being discovered standing on one leg by Sister Drummond.

Three months had passed, and Briony had heard nothing from
Horizon
.

A second piece of writing also brought no response. She had gone to the administration office and asked for Cecilia's address. In early May she had written to her sister. Now she was beginning to think that silence was Cecilia's answer.

 

D
uring the last days of May the deliveries of medical supplies increased. More non-urgent cases were sent home. Many wards would have been completely emptied had it not been for the admission of forty sailors – a rare type of jaundice was sweeping through the Royal Navy. Briony no longer had time to notice. New courses on hospital nursing and preliminary anatomy began. The first-year students hurried from their shifts to their lectures, to their meals and to private study. After three pages of reading, it would be difficult to
stay awake. The chimes of Big Ben marked every change of the day, and there were times when the solemn single note of the quarter hour prompted moans of suppressed panic as the girls realised they were supposed to be elsewhere.

Total bed rest was considered a medical procedure in itself. Most patients, whatever their condition, were forbidden to walk the few steps to the lavatory. The days therefore began with bedpans. Sister did not approve of them being carried down the ward ‘like tennis rackets'. They were to be carried ‘to the glory of God', and emptied, sluiced, cleaned and stowed by half past seven, when it was time to start the morning drinks. All day long, bedpans, blanket-bathing, floor-cleaning. The girls complained of backache from bed-making, and fiery sensations in their feet from standing all day. An extra nursing duty was drawing the blackout over the huge ward windows. Towards the end of the day, more bedpans, the emptying of sputum mugs, the making of cocoa. There was barely time between the end of a shift and the beginning of a class to get back to the dormitory to collect papers and textbooks. Twice in one day, Briony had caught the disapproval of the ward sister for running in the corridor, and on each occasion the reprimand was delivered tonelessly. Only haemorrhages and fires were permissible reasons for a nurse to run.

But the principal domain of the junior probationers was the sluice room. There was talk of automatic bedpan-and bottle-washers being installed, but this was mere rumour of a promised land. For now, they must do as others had done before them. On the day she had been told off twice for running, Briony found herself sent to the sluice room for an extra turn. It may have been an accident of the unwritten roster, but she doubted it. She pulled the sluice room door behind her, and tied the heavy rubber apron around her waist. The trick of emptying, in fact the only way it was possible for her, was to close her eyes, hold her breath and avert her head. Then came the rinsing in a solution of carbolic. If she neglected
to check that hollow bedpan handles were cleaned and dry she would be in deeper trouble with the sister.