Atonement

by Ian Mcewan

  “That was bad luck. Now you know this dressing’s got to come off.”

  She gently lifted an edge and the corporal winced.

  He said, “Count me in, one two three like, and do it quick.”

  The corporal clenched his fists. She took the edge she had freed, gripped it hard between forefinger and thumb, and pulled the dressing back in a sudden stroke. A memory came to her from childhood, of seeing at an afternoon birthday party the famous tablecloth trick. The dressing came away in one, with a gluey rasping sound.

  The corporal said, “I’m going to be sick.”

  There was a kidney bowl to hand. He retched, but produced nothing. In the folds of skin at the back of his neck were beads of perspiration. The wound was eighteen inches long, perhaps more, and curved behind his knee. The stitches were clumsy and irregular. Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red grapes forced up from the fissure.

  She said, “Hold still. I’m going to clean round it, but I won’t touch it.” She would not touch it yet. The leg was black and soft, like an overripe banana. She soaked cotton wool in alcohol. Fearful that the skin would simply come away, she made a gentle pass, around his calf, two inches above the wound. Then she wiped again, with a little more pressure. The skin was firm, so she pressed the cotton wool until he flinched. She took away her hand and saw the swath of white skin she had revealed. The cotton wool was black. Not gangrene. She couldn’t help her gasp of relief. She even felt her throat constrict.

  He said, “What is it, Nurse? You can tell me.” He pushed up and was trying to look over his shoulder. There was fear in his voice.

  She swallowed and said neutrally, “I think it’s healing well.”

  She took more cotton wool. It was oil, or grease, mixed in with beach sand, and it did not come away easily. She cleaned an area six inches back, working her way right round the wound.

  She had been doing this for some minutes when a hand rested on her shoulder and a woman’s voice said in her ear, “That’s good, Nurse Tallis, but you’ve got to work faster.”

  She was on her knees, bent over the stretcher, squeezed against a bed, and it was not easy to turn round. By the time she did, she saw only the familiar form retreating. The corporal was asleep by the time Briony began to clean around the stitches. He flinched and stirred but did not quite wake. Exhaustion was his anesthetic. As she straightened at last, and gathered her bowl and all the soiled cotton wool, a doctor came and she was dismissed.

  She scrubbed her hands and was set another task. Everything was different for her now she had achieved one small thing. She was set to taking water around to the soldiers who had collapsed with battle exhaustion. It was important that they did not dehydrate. Come on now, Private Carter. Drink this and you can go back to sleep. Sit up now … She held a little white enamel teapot and let them suck the water from its spout while she cradled their filthy heads against her apron, like giant babies. She scrubbed down again, and did a bedpan round. She had never minded it less. She was told to attend to a soldier with stomach wounds who had also lost a part of his nose. She could see through the bloody cartilage into his mouth, and onto the back of his lacerated tongue. Her job was to clean up his face. Again, it was oil and sand which had been blasted into the skin. He was awake, she guessed, but he kept his eyes closed. Morphine had calmed him, and he swayed slightly from side to side, as though in time to music in his head. As his features began to appear from behind the mask of black, she thought of those books of glossy blank pages she had in childhood which she rubbed with a blunt pencil to make a picture appear. She thought too how one of these men might be Robbie, how she would dress his wounds without knowing who he was, and with cotton wool tenderly rub his face until his familiar features emerged, and how he would turn to her with gratitude, realize who she was, and take her hand, and in silently squeezing it, forgive her. Then he would let her settle him down into sleep.

  Her responsibilities increased. She was sent with forceps and a kidney bowl to an adjacent ward, to the bedside of an airman with shrapnel in his leg. He watched her warily as she set her equipment down.

  “If I’m having them out, I’d rather have an operation.”

  Her hands were trembling. But she was surprised how easily it came to her, the brisk voice of the no-nonsense nurse. She pulled the screen around his bed.

  “Don’t be silly. We’ll have them out in a jiff. How did it happen?”

  While he explained to her that his job was building runways in the fields of northern France, his eyes kept returning to the steel forceps she had collected from the autoclave. They lay dripping in the blue-edged kidney bowl.

  “We’d get going on the job, then Jerry comes over and dumps his load. We drops back, starts all over in another field, then it’s Jerry again and we’re falling back again. Till we fell into the sea.”

  She smiled and pulled back his bedcovers. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

  The oil and grime had been washed from his legs to reveal an area below his thigh where pieces of shrapnel were embedded in the flesh. He leaned forward, watching her anxiously.

  She said, “Lie back so I can see what’s there.”

  “They’re not bothering me or anything.”

  “Just lie back.”

  Several pieces were spread across a twelve-inch area. There was swelling and slight inflammation around each rupture in the skin.

  “I don’t mind them, Nurse. I’d be happy leaving them where they are.” He laughed without conviction. “Something to show me grandchildren.”

  “They’re getting infected,” she said. “And they could sink.”

  “Sink?”

  “Into your flesh. Into your bloodstream, and get carried to your heart. Or your brain.”

  He seemed to believe her. He lay back and sighed at the distant ceiling. “Bloody ’ell. I mean, excuse me, Nurse. I don’t think I’m up to it today.”

  “Let’s count them up together, shall we?”

  They did so, out loud. Eight. She pushed him gently in the chest.

  “They’ve got to come out. Lie back now. I’ll be as quick as I can. If it helps you, grip the bedhead behind you.”

  His leg was tensed and trembling as she took the forceps.

  “Don’t hold your breath. Try and relax.”

  He made a derisive, snorting sound. “Relax!”

  She steadied her right hand with her left. It would have been easier for her to sit on the edge of the bed, but that was unprofessional and strictly prohibited. When she placed her left hand on an unaffected part of his leg, he flinched. She chose the smallest piece she could find on the edge of the cluster. The protruding part was obliquely triangular. She gripped it, paused a second, then pulled it clear, firmly, but without jerking.

  “Fuck!”

  The escaped word ricocheted around the ward and seemed to repeat itself several times. There was silence, or at least a lowering of sound beyond the screens. Briony still held the bloody metal fragment between her forceps. It was three quarters of an inch long and narrowed to a point. Purposeful steps were approaching. She dropped the shrapnel into the kidney bowl as Sister Drummond whisked the screen aside. She was perfectly calm as she glanced at the foot of the bed to take in the man’s name and, presumably, his condition, then she stood over him and gazed into his face.

  “How dare you,” the sister said quietly. And then again, “How dare you speak that way in front of one of my nurses.”

  “I beg your pardon, Sister. It just came out.”

  Sister Drummond looked with disdain into the bowl. “Compared to what we’ve admitted these past few hours, Airman Young, your injuries are superficial. So you’ll consider yourself lucky. And you’ll show some courage worthy of your uniform. Carry on, Nurse Tallis.”

  Into the silence that followed her departure, Briony said brightly, “We’ll get on, shall we? Only seven to go. When it’s ove
r, I’ll bring you a measure of brandy.”

  He sweated, his whole body shook, and his knuckles turned white round the iron bedhead, but he did not make a sound as she continued to pull the pieces clear.

  “You know, you can shout, if you want.”

  But he didn’t want a second visit from Sister Drummond, and Briony understood. She was saving the largest until last. It did not come clear in one stroke. He bucked on the bed, and hissed through his clenched teeth. By the second attempt, the shrapnel stuck out two inches from his flesh. She tugged it clear on the third try, and held it up for him, a gory four-inch stiletto of irregular steel.

  He stared at it in wonder. “Run him under the tap, Nurse. I’ll take him home.” Then he turned into the pillow and began to sob. It may have been the word home, as well as the pain. She slipped away to get his brandy, and stopped in the sluice to be sick.

  For a long time she undressed, washed and dressed the more superficial of the wounds. Then came the order she was dreading.

  “I want you to go and dress Private Latimer’s face.”

  She had already tried to feed him earlier with a teaspoon into what remained of his mouth, trying to spare him the humiliation of dribbling. He had pushed her hand away. Swallowing was excruciating.

  Half his face had been shot away. What she dreaded, more than the removal of the dressing, was the look of reproach in his large brown eyes. What have you done to me? His form of communication was a soft aah sound from the back of his throat, a little moan of disappointment.

  “We’ll soon have you fixed,” she had kept repeating, and could think of nothing else.

  And now, approaching his bed with her materials, she said cheerily, “Hello, Private Latimer. It’s me again.”

  He looked at her without recognition. She said as she unpinned the bandage that was secured at the top of his head, “It’s going to be all right. You’ll walk out of here in a week or two, you’ll see. And that’s more than we can say to a lot of them in here.”

  That was one comfort. There was always someone worse. Half an hour earlier they had carried out a multiple amputation on a captain from the East Surreys—the regiment the boys in the village had joined. And then there were the dying.

  Using a pair of surgical tongs, she began carefully pulling away the sodden, congealed lengths of ribbon gauze from the cavity in the side of his face. When the last was out, the resemblance to the cutaway model they used in anatomy classes was only faint. This was all ruin, crimson and raw. She could see through his missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long. Further up, where she hardly dared look, were the exposed muscles around his eye socket. So intimate, and never intended to be seen. Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so. Did a girl love him before? Could she continue to?

  “We’ll soon have you fixed,” she lied again.

  She began repacking his face with clean gauze soaked in eusol. As she was securing the pins he made his sad sound.

  “Shall I bring you the bottle?”

  He shook his head and made the sound again.

  “You’re uncomfortable?”

  No.

  “Water?”

  A nod. Only a small corner of his lips remained. She inserted the little teapot spout and poured. With each swallow he winced, which in turn caused him agony around the missing muscles of his face. He could stand no more, but as she withdrew the water pot, he raised a hand toward her wrist. He had to have more. Rather pain than thirst. And so it went on for minutes—he couldn’t bear the pain, he had to have the water.

  She would have stayed with him, but there was always another job, always a sister demanding help or a soldier calling from his bed. She had a break from the wards when a man coming round from an anesthetic was sick onto her lap and she had to find a clean apron. She was surprised to see from a corridor window that it was dark outside. Five hours had passed since they came back from the park. She was by the linen store tying her apron when Sister Drummond came up. It was hard to say what had changed—the manner was still quietly remote, the orders unchallengeable. Perhaps beneath the self-discipline, a touch of rapport in adversity.

  “Nurse, you’ll go and help apply the Bunyan bags to Corporal MacIntyre’s arms and legs. You’ll treat the rest of his body with tannic acid. If there are difficulties, you’ll come straight to me.”

  She turned away to give instructions to another nurse. Briony had seen them bring the corporal in. He was one of a number of men overwhelmed by burning oil on a sinking ferry off Dunkirk. He was picked out of the water by a destroyer. The viscous oil clung to the skin and seared through the tissue. It was the burned-out remains of a human they lifted onto the bed. She thought he could never survive. It was not easy to find a vein to give him morphine. Sometime in the past two hours she had helped two other nurses lift him onto a bedpan and he had screamed at the first touch of their hands.

  The Bunyan bags were big cellophane containers. The damaged limb floated inside, cushioned by saline solution that had to be at exactly the right temperature. A variation of one degree was not tolerated. As Briony came up, a probationer with a Primus stove on a trolley was already preparing the fresh solution. The bags had to be changed frequently. Corporal MacIntyre lay on his back under a bed cradle because he could not bear the touch of a sheet on his skin. He was whimpering pathetically for water. Burn cases were always badly dehydrated. His lips were too ruined, too swollen, and his tongue too blistered for him to be given fluid by mouth. His saline drip had come away. The needle would not hold in place in the damaged vein. A qualified nurse she had never seen before was attaching a new bag to the stand. Briony prepared the tannic acid in a bowl and took the roll of cotton wool. She thought she would start with the corporal’s legs in order to be out of the way of the nurse who was beginning to search his blackened arm, looking for a vein.

  But the nurse said, “Who sent you over here?”

  “Sister Drummond.”

  The nurse spoke tersely, and did not look up from her probing. “He’s suffering too much. I don’t want him treated until I get him hydrated. Go and find something else to do.”

  Briony did as she was told. She did not know how much later it was—perhaps it was in the small hours when she was sent to get fresh towels. She saw the nurse standing near the entrance to the duty room, unobtrusively crying. Corporal MacIntyre was dead. His bed was already taken by another case.

  The probationers and the second-year students worked twelve hours without rest. The other trainees and the qualified nurses worked on, and no one could remember how long they were in the wards. All the training she had received, Briony felt later, had been useful preparation, especially in obedience, but everything she understood about nursing she learned that night. She had never seen men crying before. It shocked her at first, and within the hour she was used to it. On the other hand, the stoicism of some of the soldiers amazed and even appalled her. Men coming round from amputations seemed compelled to make terrible jokes. What am I going to kick the missus with now? Every secret of the body was rendered up—bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended. She came the closest she would ever be to the battlefield, for every case she helped with had some of its essential elements—blood, oil, sand, mud, seawater, bullets, shrapnel, engine grease, or the smell of cordite, or damp sweaty battle dress whose pockets contained rancid food along with the sodden crumbs of Amo bars. Often, when she returned yet again to the sink with the high taps and the soda block, it was beach sand she scrubbed away from between her fingers. She and the other probationers of her set were aware of each other only as nurses, not as friends: she barely registered that one of the girls who had helped to move Corporal MacIntyre onto the bedpan was Fiona. Sometimes,
when a soldier Briony was looking after was in great pain, she was touched by an impersonal tenderness that detached her from the suffering, so that she was able to do her work efficiently and without horror. That was when she saw what nursing might be, and she longed to qualify, to have that badge. She could imagine how she might abandon her ambitions of writing and dedicate her life in return for these moments of elated, generalized love.

  Toward three-thirty in the morning, she was told to go and see Sister Drummond. She was on her own, making up a bed. Earlier, Briony had seen her in the sluice room. She seemed to be everywhere, doing jobs at every level. Automatically, Briony began to help her.

  The sister said, “I seem to remember that you speak a bit of French.”

  “It’s only school French, Sister.”

  She nodded toward the end of the ward. “You see that soldier sitting up, at the end of the row? Acute surgical, but there’s no need to wear a mask. Find a chair, go and sit with him. Hold his hand and talk to him.”

  Briony could not help feeling offended. “But I’m not tired, Sister. Honestly, I’m not.”

  “You’ll do as you’re told.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  He looked like a boy of fifteen, but she saw from his chart that he was her own age, eighteen. He was sitting, propped by several pillows, watching the commotion around him with a kind of abstracted childlike wonder. It was hard to think of him as a soldier. He had a fine, delicate face, with dark eyebrows and dark green eyes, and a soft full mouth. His face was white and had an unusual sheen, and the eyes were unhealthily radiant. His head was heavily bandaged. As she brought up her chair and sat down he smiled as though he had been expecting her, and when she took his hand he did not seem surprised.

  “Te voilà enfin.” The French vowels had a musical twang, but she could just about understand him. His hand was cold and greasy to the touch.

  She said, “The sister told me to come and have a little chat with you.” Not knowing the word, she translated “sister” literally.

  “Your sister is very kind.” Then he cocked his head and added, “But she always was. And is all going well for her? What does she do these days?”