Atonement (39 page)

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 practicing 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 defenses 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.

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 churchgoer 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
defense, saying that it was dangerous to have a fountain when children were about,
and that she was writing to the M.P. 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 plowed 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 gray 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 P.C. 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 colorful 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.