by Ian Mcewan
There was such friendliness and charm in his eyes, such boyish eagerness to engage her, that she could only go along.
“She’s a nurse too.”
“Of course. You told me before. Is she still happy? Did she get married to that man she loved so well? Do you know, I can’t remember his name. I hope you’ll forgive me. Since my injury my memory has been poor. But they tell me it will soon come back. What was his name?”
“Robbie. But …”
“And they’re married now and happy?”
“Er, I hope they will be soon.”
“I’m so happy for her.”
“You haven’t told me your name.”
“Luc. Luc Cornet. And yours?”
She hesitated. “Tallis.”
“Tallis. That’s very pretty.” The way he pronounced it, it was.
He looked away from her face and gazed at the ward, turning his head slowly, quietly amazed. Then he closed his eyes and began to ramble, speaking softly under his breath. Her vocabulary was not good enough to follow him easily. She caught, “You count them slowly, in your hand, on your fingers … my mother’s scarf … you choose the color and you have to live with it.”
He fell silent for some minutes. His hand tightened its grip on hers. When he spoke again, his eyes were still closed.
“Do you want to know something odd? This is my first time in Paris.”
“Luc, you’re in London. Soon we’ll be sending you home.”
“They said that the people would be cold and unfriendly, but the opposite is true. They’re very kind. And you’re very kind, coming to see me again.”
For a while she thought he might have fallen asleep. Sitting for the first time in hours, she felt her own fatigue gathering behind her eyes.
Then he was looking about him with that same slow turn of the head, and then he looked at her and said, “Of course, you’re the girl with the English accent.”
She said, “Tell me what you did before the war. Where did you live? Can you remember?”
“Do you remember that Easter, when you came to Millau?” Feebly, he swung her hand from side to side as he spoke, as though to stir her memory, and his dark green eyes scanned her face in anticipation.
She thought it wasn’t right to lead him on. “I’ve never been to Millau …”
“Do you remember the first time you came in our shop?”
She pulled her chair nearer the bed. His pale, oily face gleamed and bobbed in front of her eyes. “Luc, I want you to listen to me.”
“I think it was my mother who served you. Or perhaps it was one of my sisters. I was working with my father on the ovens at the back. I heard your accent and came to take a look at you …”
“I want to tell you where you are. You’re not in Paris …”
“Then you were back the next day, and this time I was there and you said …”
“Soon you can sleep. I’ll come and see you tomorrow, I promise.”
Luc raised his hand to his head and frowned. He said in a lower voice, “I want to ask you a little favor, Tallis.”
“Of course.”
“These bandages are so tight. Will you loosen them for me a little?”
She stood and peered down at his head. The gauze bows were tied for easy release. As she gently pulled the ends away he said, “My youngest sister, Anne, do you remember her? She’s the prettiest girl in Millau. She passed her grade exam with a tiny piece by Debussy, so full of light and fun. Anyway, that’s what Anne says. It keeps running through my mind. Perhaps you know it.”
He hummed a few random notes. She was uncoiling the layer of gauze.
“No one knows where she got her gift from. The rest of our family is completely hopeless. When she plays her back is so straight. She never smiles till she reaches the end. That’s beginning to feel better. I think it was Anne who served you that first time you came into the shop.”
She was not intending to remove the gauze, but as she loosened it, the heavy sterile towel beneath it slid away, taking a part of the bloodied dressing with it. The side of Luc’s head was missing. The hair was shaved well back from the missing portion of skull. Below the jagged line of bone was a spongy crimson mess of brain, several inches across, reaching from the crown almost to the tip of his ear. She caught the towel before it slipped to the floor, and she held it while she waited for her nausea to pass. Only now did it occur to her what a foolish and unprofessional thing she had done. Luc sat quietly, waiting for her. She glanced down the ward. No one was paying attention. She replaced the sterile towel, fixed the gauze and retied the bows. When she sat down again, she found his hand, and tried to steady herself in its cold moist grip.
Luc was rambling again. “I don’t smoke. I promised my ration to Jeannot … Look, it’s all over the table … under the flowers now … the rabbit can’t hear you, stupid …” Then words came in a torrent, and she lost him. Later she caught a reference to a schoolmaster who was too strict, or perhaps it was an army officer. Finally he was quiet. She wiped his sweating face with a damp towel and waited.
When he opened his eyes, he resumed their conversation as though there had been no interlude.
“What did you think of our baguettes and ficelles?”
“Delicious.”
“That was why you came every day.”
“Yes.”
He paused to consider this. Then he said cautiously, raising a delicate matter, “And our croissants?”
“The best in Millau.”
He smiled. When he spoke, there was a grating sound at the back of his throat which they both ignored.
“It’s my father’s special recipe. It all depends on the quality of butter.”
He was gazing at her in rapture. He brought his free hand to cover hers.
He said, “You know that my mother is very fond of you.”
“Is she?”
“She talks about you all the time. She thinks we should be married in the summer.”
She held his gaze. She knew now why she had been sent. He was having difficulty swallowing, and drops of sweat were forming on his brow, along the edge of the dressing and along his upper lip. She wiped them away, and was about to reach the water for him, but he said,
“Do you love me?”
She hesitated. “Yes.” No other reply was possible. Besides, for that moment, she did. He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.
She gave him some water. While she was wiping his face again he said, “Have you ever been on the Causse de Larzac?”
“No. I’ve never been there.”
But he did not offer to take her. Instead he turned his head away into the pillow, and soon he was murmuring his unintelligible scraps. His grip on her hand remained tight as though he were aware of her presence.
When he became lucid again, he turned his head toward her.
“You won’t leave just yet.”
“Of course not. I’ll stay with you.”
“Tallis …”
Still smiling, he half closed his eyes. Suddenly, he jerked upright as if an electric current had been applied to his limbs. He was gazing at her in surprise, with his lips parted. Then he tipped forward, and seemed to lunge at her. She jumped up from her chair to prevent him toppling to the floor. His hand still held hers, and his free arm was around her neck. His forehead was pressed into her shoulder, his cheek was against hers. She was afraid the sterile towel would slip from his head. She thought she could not support his weight or bear to see his wound again. The grating sound from deep in his throat resounded in her ear. Staggering, she eased him onto the bed and settled him back on the pillows.
“It’s Briony,” she said, so only he would hear.
His eyes had a wide-open look of astonishment and his waxy skin gleamed in the electric light. She moved closer and put her lips to his ear. Behind her was a presence, and then a hand resting on her shoulder.
“It’s not Tallis. You should call me Briony,” she
whispered, as the hand reached over to touch hers, and loosened her fingers from the boy’s.
“Stand up now, Nurse Tallis.”
Sister Drummond took her elbow and helped her to her feet. The sister’s cheek patches were bright, and across the cheekbones the pink skin met the white in a precise straight line.
On the other side of the bed, a nurse drew the sheet over Luc Cornet’s face.
Pursing her lips, the sister straightened Briony’s collar. “There’s a good girl. Now go and wash the blood from your face. We don’t want the other patients upset.”
She did as she was told and went to the lavatories and washed her face in cold water, and minutes later returned to her duties in the ward.
At four-thirty in the morning the probationers were sent to their lodgings to sleep, and told to report back at eleven. Briony walked with Fiona. Neither girl spoke, and when they linked arms it seemed they were resuming, after a lifetime of experience, their walk across Westminster Bridge. They could not have begun to describe their time in the wards, or how it had changed them. It was enough to be able to keep walking down the empty corridors behind the other girls.
When she had said her good nights and entered her tiny room, Briony found a letter on the floor. The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar. One of the girls must have picked it up at the porter’s lodge and pushed it under her door. Rather than open it straight away, she undressed and prepared herself for sleep. She sat on her bed in her nightdress with the letter in her lap and thought about the boy. The corner of sky in her window was already white. She could still hear his voice, the way he said Tallis, turning it into a girl’s name. She imagined the unavailable future—the boulangerie in a narrow shady street swarming with skinny cats, piano music from an upstairs window, her giggling sisters-in-law teasing her about her accent, and Luc Cornet loving her in his eager way. She would have liked to cry for him, and for his family in Millau who would be waiting to hear news from him. But she couldn’t feel a thing. She was empty. She sat for almost half an hour, in a daze, and then at last, exhausted but still not sleepy, she tied her hair back with the ribbon she always used, got into bed and opened the letter.
Dear Miss Tallis,
Thank you for sending us Two Figures by a Fountain, and please accept our apologies for this dilatory response. As you must know, it would be unusual for us to publish a complete novella by an unknown writer, or for that matter a well-established one. However, we did read with an eye to an extract we might take. Unfortunately we are not able to take any of it. I am returning the typescript under separate cover.
That said, we found ourselves (initially against our better judgment, for there is much to do in this office) reading the whole with great interest. Though we cannot offer to publish any part of it, we thought you should know that in this quarter there are others as well as myself who would take an interest in what you might write in the future. We are not complacent about the average age of our contributors and are keen to publish promising young writers. We would like to see whatever you do, especially if you were to write a short story or two.
We found Two Figures by a Fountain arresting enough to read with dedicated attention. I do not say this lightly. We cast aside a great deal of material, some of it by writers of reputation. There are some good images—I liked “the long grass stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer”—and you both capture a flow of thought and represent it with subtle differences in order to make attempts at characterization. Something unique and unexplained is caught. However, we wondered whether it owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf. The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on. Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement. Put the other way round, our attention would have been held even more effectively had there been an underlying pull of simple narrative. Development is required.
So, for example, the child at the window whose account we read first—her fundamental lack of grasp of the situation is nicely caught. So too is the resolve in her that follows, and the sense of initiation into grown-up mysteries. We catch this young girl at the dawn of her selfhood. One is intrigued by her resolve to abandon the fairy stories and homemade folktales and plays she has been writing (how much nicer if we had the flavor of one) but she may have thrown the baby of fictional technique out with the folktale water. For all the fine rhythms and nice observations, nothing much happens after a beginning that has such promise. A young man and woman by a fountain, who clearly have a great deal of unresolved feeling between them, tussle over a Ming vase and break it. (More than one of us here thought Ming rather too priceless to take outdoors? Wouldn’t Sèvres or Nymphenburg suit your purpose?) The woman goes fully dressed into the fountain to retrieve the pieces. Wouldn’t it help you if the watching girl did not actually realize that the vase had broken? It would be all the more of a mystery to her that the woman submerges herself. So much might unfold from what you have—but you dedicate scores of pages to the quality of light and shade, and to random impressions. Then we have matters from the man’s view, then the woman’s—though we don’t really learn much that is fresh. Just more about the look and feel of things, and some irrelevant memories. The man and woman part, leaving a damp patch on the ground which rapidly evaporates—and there we have reached the end. This static quality does not serve your evident talent well.
If this girl has so fully misunderstood or been so wholly baffled by the strange little scene that has unfolded before her, how might it affect the lives of the two adults? Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion? Or bring them closer, either by design or accident? Might she innocently expose them somehow, to the young woman’s parents perhaps? They surely would not approve of a liaison between their eldest daughter and their charlady’s son. Might the young couple come to use her as a messenger?
In other words, rather than dwell for quite so long on the perceptions of each of the three figures, would it not be possible to set them before us with greater economy, still keeping some of the vivid writing about light and stone and water which you do so well—but then move on to create some tension, some light and shade within the narrative itself. Your most sophisticated readers might be well up on the latest Bergsonian theories of consciousness, but I’m sure they retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens. Incidentally, from your description, the Bernini you refer to is the one in the Piazza Barberini, not the Piazza Navona.
Simply put, you need the backbone of a story. It may interest you to know that one of your avid readers was Mrs. Elizabeth Bowen. She picked up the bundle of typescript in an idle moment while passing through this office on her way to luncheon, asked to take it home to read, and finished it that afternoon. Initially, she thought the prose “too full, too cloying” but with “redeeming shades of Dusty Answer” (which I wouldn’t have thought of at all). Then she was “hooked for a while” and finally she gave us some notes, which are, as it were, mulched into the above. You may feel perfectly satisfied with your pages as they stand, or our reservations may fill you with dismissive anger, or such despair you never want to look at the thing again. We sincerely hope not. Our wish is that you will take our remarks—which are given with sincere enthusiasm—as a basis for another draft.
Your covering letter was admirably reticent, but you did hint that you had almost no free time at present. If that should change, and you are passing this way, we would be more than happy to see you over a glass of wine and discuss this further. We hope you will not be discouraged. It may help you to know that our letters of rejection are usually no more than three sentences long.
You apologize, in passing, for not writing about the w
ar. We will be sending you a copy of our most recent issue, with a relevant editorial. As you will see, we do not believe that artists have an obligation to strike up attitudes to the war. Indeed, they are wise and right to ignore it and devote themselves to other subjects. Since artists are politically impotent, they must use this time to develop at deeper emotional levels. Your work, your war work, is to cultivate your talent, and go in the direction it demands. Warfare, as we remarked, is the enemy of creative activity.
Your address suggests you may be either a doctor or suffering from a long illness. If the latter, then all of us wish you a speedy and successful recovery.
Finally, one of us here wonders whether you have an older sister who was at Girton six or seven years ago.
Yours sincerely,
CC
IN THE DAYS that followed, the reversion to a strict shift system dispelled the sense of floating timelessness of those first twenty-four hours. She counted herself lucky to be on days, seven till eight with half hours for meals. When her alarm sounded at five forty-five, she drifted upward from a soft pit of exhaustion, and in the several seconds of no-man’s-land, between sleep and full consciousness, she became aware of some excitement in store, a treat, or a momentous change. Waking as a child on Christmas day was like this—the sleepy thrill, before remembering its source. With her eyes still closed against the summer-morning brightness in the room, she fumbled for the button on her clock and sank back into her pillow, and then it came back to her. The very opposite of Christmas in fact. The opposite of everything. The Germans were about to invade. Everybody said it was so, from the porters who were forming their own hospital Local Defence Volunteers unit, to Churchill himself who conjured an image of the country subjugated and starving with only the Royal Navy still at large. Briony knew it would be dreadful, that there would be hand-to-hand fighting in the streets and public hangings, a descent into slavery and the destruction of everything decent. But as she sat on the edge of her rumpled, still-warm bed, pulling on her stockings, she could not prevent or deny her horrible exhilaration. As everyone kept saying, the country stood alone now, and it was better that way.