Atonement (40 page)

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 nonurgent 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 realized 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. Toward 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
hemorrhages 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
rumor 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.

From this
task she went straight to tidying the near-empty ward at the end of the
day—straightening lockers, emptying ashtrays, picking up the day’s
newspapers. Automatically, she glanced at a folded page of the
Sunday
Graphic
. She had been following the news in unrelated scraps. There was
never enough time to sit down and read a paper properly. She knew about the
breaching of the Maginot Line, the bombing of Rotterdam, the surrender of the
Dutch army, and some of the girls had been talking the night before about the imminent
collapse of Belgium. The war was going badly, but it was bound to pick up. It
was one anodyne sentence that caught her attention now—not for what it
said, but for what it blandly tried to conceal. The British army in northern
France was “making strategic withdrawals to previously prepared
positions.” Even she, who knew nothing of military strategy or
journalistic convention, understood a euphemism for retreat. Perhaps she was
the last person in the hospital to understand what was happening. The emptying
wards, the flow of supplies, she had thought were simply part of general
preparations for war. She had been too wrapped up in her own tiny concerns. Now
she saw how the separate news items might connect, and understood what everyone
else must know and what the hospital administration was planning for. The
Germans had reached the Channel, the British army was in difficulties. It had
all gone badly wrong in France, though no one knew on what kind of scale. This
foreboding, this muted dread, was what she had sensed around her.

About this
time, on the day the last patients were escorted from the ward, a letter came
from her father. After a cursory greeting and inquiry after the course and her
health, he passed on information picked up from a colleague and confirmed by
the family: Paul Marshall and Lola Quincey were to be married a week Saturday
in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Clapham Common. He gave no reason why he
supposed she would want to know, and made no comment on the matter himself. He
simply signed off in a scrawl down the page—“love as always.”

All morning,
as she went about her duties, she thought about the news. She had not seen Lola
since that summer, so the figure she imagined at the altar was a spindly girl
of fifteen. Briony helped a departing patient, an elderly lady from Lambeth,
pack her suitcase, and tried to concentrate on her complaints. She had broken
her toe and been promised twelve days’ bed rest, and had had only seven.
She was helped into a wheelchair and a porter took her away. On duty in the
sluice room Briony did the sums. Lola was twenty, Marshall would be
twenty-nine. It wasn’t a surprise; the shock was in the confirmation.
Briony was more than implicated in this union. She had made it possible.

Throughout
the day, up and down the ward, along the corridors, Briony felt her familiar
guilt pursue her with a novel vibrancy. She scrubbed down the vacated lockers,
helped wash bed frames in carbolic, swept and polished the floors, ran errands
to the dispensary and the almoner at double speed without actually running, was
sent with another probationer to help dress a boil in men’s general, and
covered for Fiona who had to visit the dentist. On this first really fine day
of May she sweated under her starchy uniform. All she wanted to do was work,
then bathe and sleep until it was time to work again. But it was all useless,
she knew. Whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did, and however well or
hard she did it, whatever illumination in tutorial she had relinquished, or
lifetime moment on a college lawn, she would never undo the damage. She was
unforgivable.

For the first
time in years she thought that she would like to talk to her father. She had
always taken his remoteness for granted and expected nothing. She wondered
whether in sending his letter with its specific information he was trying to
tell her that he knew the truth. After tea, leaving herself too little time,
she went to the phone box outside the hospital entrance near Westminster Bridge
and attempted to call him at his work. The switchboard put her through to a
helpful nasal voice, and then the connection was broken and she had to start
again. The same happened, and on her third attempt the line went dead as soon
as a voice said—Trying to connect you.

By this time
she had run out of change and she was due back on the ward. She paused outside
the phone box to admire the huge cumulus clouds piled against a pale blue sky.
The river with its spring tide racing seaward reflected the color with dashes
of green and gray. Big Ben seemed to be endlessly toppling forward against the
restless sky. Despite the traffic fumes, there was a scent of fresh vegetation
around, newly cut grass perhaps from the hospital gardens, or from young trees
along the riverside. Though the light was brilliant, there was a delicious
coolness in the air. She had seen or felt nothing so pleasing in days, perhaps
weeks. She was indoors too much, breathing disinfectant. As she came away, two
young army officers, medics from the military hospital on Millbank, gave her a
friendly smile as they brushed past her. Automatically, she glanced down, then
immediately regretted that she had not at least met their look. They walked
away from her across the bridge, oblivious to everything but their own
conversation. One of them mimed reaching up high, as though to grope for
something on a shelf, and his companion laughed. Halfway across they stopped to
admire a gunboat gliding under the bridge. She thought how lively and free the
RAMC doctors looked, and wished she had returned their smiles. There were parts
of herself she had completely forgotten. She was late and she had every reason
to run, despite the shoes that pinched her toes. Here, on the stained,
uncarbolized pavement, the writ of Sister Drummond did not apply. No
hemorrhages or fires, but it was a surprising physical pleasure, a brief taste of
freedom, to run as best she could in her starched apron to the hospital
entrance.

N
OW A LANGUOROUS
waiting settled over the
hospital. Only the jaundiced seamen remained. There was much fascination and
amused talk about them among the nurses. These tough ratings sat up in bed
darning their socks, and insisted on hand-washing their own smalls, which they
dried on washing lines improvised from string, suspended along the radiators.
Those who were still bed-bound would suffer agonies rather than call for the
bottle. It was said the able seamen insisted on keeping the ward shipshape
themselves and had taken over the sweeping and the heavy bumper. Such
domesticity among men was unknown to the girls, and Fiona said she would marry
no man who had not served in the Royal Navy.

For no
apparent reason, the probationers were given a half day off, free from study,
though they were to remain in uniform. After lunch Briony walked with Fiona
across the river past the Houses of Parliament and into St. James’s Park.
They strolled around the lake, bought tea at a stall, and rented deck chairs to
listen to elderly men of the Salvation Army playing Elgar adapted for brass
band. In those days of May, before the story from France was fully understood,
before the bombing of the city in September, London had the outward signs, but
not yet the mentality, of war. Uniforms, posters warning against fifth
columnists, two big air-raid shelters dug into the park lawns, and everywhere,
surly officialdom. While the girls were sitting on their deck chairs, a man in
armband and cap came over and demanded to see Fiona’s gas mask—it
was partially obscured by her cape. Otherwise, it was still an innocent time.
The anxieties about the situation in France that had been absorbing the country
had for the moment dissipated in the afternoon’s sunshine. The dead were
not yet present, the absent were presumed alive. The scene was dreamlike in its
normality. Prams drifted along the paths, hoods down in full sunlight, and
white, soft-skulled babies gaped at the outdoor world for the first time.
Children who seemed to have escaped evacuation ran about on the grass shouting
and laughing, the band struggled with music beyond its capabilities, and deck
chairs still cost twopence. It was hard to believe that barely a hundred miles
away was a military disaster.

Briony’s
thoughts remained fixed on her themes. Perhaps London would be overwhelmed by
poisonous gas, or overrun by German parachutists aided on the ground by fifth
columnists before Lola’s wedding could take place. Briony had heard a
know-all porter saying, with what sounded like satisfaction, that nothing now
could stop the German army. They had the new tactics and we didn’t, they
had modernized, and we had not. The generals should have read Liddell
Hart’s book, or have come to the hospital porter’s lodge and
listened carefully during tea break.

At her side,
Fiona talked of her adored little brother and the clever thing he had said at
dinner, while Briony pretended to listen and thought about Robbie. If he had
been fighting in France, he might already be captured. Or worse. How would
Cecilia survive such news? As the music, enlivened by unscored dissonances,
swelled to a raucous climax, she gripped the wooden sides of her chair, closed
her eyes. If something happened to Robbie, if Cecilia and Robbie were never to
be together . . . Her secret torment and the public upheaval of war had always
seemed separate worlds, but now she understood how the war might compound her
crime. The only conceivable solution would be for the past never to have
happened. If he didn’t come back . . . She longed to have someone
else’s past, to be someone else, like hearty Fiona with her unstained
life stretching ahead, and her affectionate, sprawling family, whose dogs and
cats had Latin names, whose home was a famous venue for artistic Chelsea
people. All Fiona had to do was live her life, follow the road ahead and
discover what was to happen. To Briony, it appeared that her life was going to
be lived in one room, without a door.

“Briony,
are you all right?”

“What?
Yes, of course. I’m fine, thanks.”

“I
don’t believe you. Shall I get you some water?”

As the
applause grew—no one seemed to mind how bad the band was—she
watched Fiona go across the grass, past the musicians and the man in a brown
coat renting out the deck chairs, to the little café among the trees.
The Salvation Army was starting in on “Bye Bye Blackbird” at which
they were far more adept. People in their deck chairs were joining in, and some
were clapping in time. Communal sing-alongs had a faintly coercive
quality—that way strangers had of catching each other’s eye as
their voices rose—which she was determined to resist. Still, it lifted
her spirits, and when Fiona returned with a teacup of water, and the band began
a medley of old-time favorites with “It’s a Long Way to
Tipperary,” they began to talk about work. Fiona drew Briony into the
gossip—about which pros they liked, and those that irritated them, about
Sister Drummond whose voice Fiona could do, and the matron who was almost as
grand and remote as a consultant. They remembered the eccentricities of various
patients, and they shared grievances—Fiona was outraged that she
wasn’t allowed to keep things on her windowsill, Briony hated the eleven
o’clock lights-out—but they did so with self-conscious enjoyment
and increasingly with a great deal of giggling, so that heads began to turn in
their direction, and fingers were laid theatrically over lips. But these
gestures were only half serious, and most of those who turned smiled
indulgently from their deck chairs, for there was something about two young
nurses—nurses in wartime—in their purple and white tunics, dark
blue capes and spotless caps, that made them as irreproachable as nuns. The
girls sensed their immunity and their laughter grew louder, into cackles of
hilarity and derision. Fiona turned out to be a good mimic, and for all her
merriness, there was a cruel touch to her humor that Briony liked. Fiona had
her own version of Lambeth Cockney, and with heartless exaggeration caught the
ignorance of some patients, and their pleading, whining voices. It’s me
’art, Nurse. It’s always been on the wrong side. Me mum was just
the same. Is it true your baby comes out of your bottom, Nurse? ’Cos I
don’t know how mine’s going to fit, seeing as ’ow I’m
always blocked. I ’ad six nippers, then I goes and leaves one on a bus,
the eighty-eight up from Brixton. Must’ve left ’im on the seat.
Never saw ’im again, Nurse. Really upset, I was. Cried me eyes out.