Atonement (38 page)

“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 catchphrases 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, labored 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
meager 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 inward, 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 color
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 anesthetic 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
center 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 carbolized. 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 labeled 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
theaters 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 center 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 inquire. 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 dayroom 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 practice 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.