by Ian Mcewan
Already, things looked different—the fleur-de-lys pattern on her wash bag, the chipped plaster frame of the mirror, her face in it as she brushed her hair, all looked brighter, in sharper focus. The doorknob in her hand as she turned it felt obtrusively cool and hard. When she stepped into the corridor and heard distant heavy footsteps in the stairwell, she thought of German jackboots, and her stomach lurched. Before breakfast she had a minute or two to herself along the walkway by the river. Even at this hour, under a clear sky, there was a ferocious sparkle in its tidal freshness as it slid past the hospital. Was it really possible that the Germans could own the Thames?
The clarity of everything she saw or touched or heard was certainly not prompted by the fresh beginnings and abundance of early summer; it was an inflamed awareness of an approaching conclusion, of events converging on an end point. These were the last days, she felt, and they would shine in the memory in a particular way. This brightness, this long spell of sunny days, was history’s last fling before another stretch of time began. The early morning duties, the sluice room, the taking round of tea, the changing of dressings, and the renewed contact with all the irreparable damage did not dim this heightened perception. It conditioned everything she did and was a constant background. And it gave an urgency to her plans. She felt she did not have much time. If she delayed, she thought, the Germans might arrive and she might never have another chance.
Fresh cases arrived each day, but no longer in a deluge. The system was taking hold, and there was a bed for everyone. The surgical cases were prepared for the basement operating theaters. Afterward, most patients were sent off to outlying hospitals to convalesce. The turnover among the dead was high, and for the probationers there was no drama now, only routine: the screens drawn round the padre’s bedside murmur, the sheet pulled up, the porters called, the bed stripped and remade. How quickly the dead faded into each other, so that Sergeant Mooney’s face became Private Lowell’s, and both exchanged their fatal wounds with those of other men whose names they could no longer recall.
Now France had fallen it was assumed that the bombing of London, the softening-up, must soon begin. No one was to stay in the city unnecessarily. The sandbagging on the ground-floor windows was reinforced, and civilian contractors were on the roofs checking the firmness of the chimney stacks and the concreted skylights. There were various rehearsals for evacuating the wards, with much stern shouting and blowing of whistles. There were fire drills too, and assembly-point procedures, and fitting gas masks on incapable or unconscious patients. The nurses were reminded to put their own masks on first. They were no longer terrorized by Sister Drummond. Now they had been blooded, she did not speak to them like schoolgirls. Her tone when she gave instructions was cool, professionally neutral, and they were flattered. In this new environment it was relatively easy for Briony to arrange to swap her day off with Fiona who generously gave up her Saturday for a Monday.
Because of an administrative bungle, some soldiers were left to convalesce in the hospital. Once they had slept off their exhaustion, and got used to regular meals again and regained some weight, the mood was sour or surly, even among those without permanent disabilities. They were infantrymen mostly. They lay on their beds smoking, silently staring at the ceiling, brooding over their recent memories. Or they gathered to talk in mutinous little groups. They were disgusted with themselves. A few of them told Briony they had never even fired a shot. But mostly they were angry with the “brass,” and with their own officers for abandoning them in the retreat, and with the French for collapsing without a fight. They were bitter about the newspaper celebrations of the miracle evacuation and the heroism of the little boats.
“A fucking shambles,” she heard them mutter. “Fucking RAF.” Some men were even unfriendly, and uncooperative about their medicines, having managed to blur the distinction between the generals and the nurses. All mindless authority, as far as they were concerned. It took a visit from Sister Drummond to set them straight.
On Saturday morning Briony left the hospital at eight without eating breakfast and walked with the river on her right, upstream. As she passed the gates of Lambeth Palace, three buses went by. All the destination boards were blank now. Confusion to the invader. It did not matter because she had already decided to walk. It was of no help that she had memorized a few street names. All the signs had been taken down or blacked out. Her vague idea was to go along the river a couple of miles and then head off to the left, which should be south. Most plans and maps of the city had been confiscated by order. Finally she had managed to borrow a crumbling bus route map dated 1926. It was torn along its folds, right along the line of the way she wanted to take. Opening it was to risk breaking it in pieces. And she was nervous of the kind of impression she would make. There were stories in the paper of German parachutists disguised as nurses and nuns, spreading out through the cities and infiltrating the population. They were to be identified by the maps they might sometimes consult and, on questioning, by their too-perfect English and their ignorance of common nursery rhymes. Once the idea was in her mind, she could not stop thinking about how suspicious she looked. She had thought her uniform would protect her as she crossed unknown territory. Instead, she looked like a spy.
As she walked against the flow of morning traffic, she ran through the nursery rhymes she remembered. There were very few she could have recited all the way through. Ahead of her, a milkman had got down from his cart to tighten the girth straps of his horse. He was murmuring to the animal as she came up. Briefly there came back to her, as she stood behind him and politely cleared her throat, a memory of old Hardman and his trap. Anyone who was, say, seventy now, would have been her age in 1888. Still the age of the horse, at least on the streets, and the old men hated to let it go.
When she asked him the way the milkman was friendly enough and gave a long indistinct account of the route. He was a large fellow with a tobacco-stained white beard. He suffered from an adenoidal problem that made his words bleed into each other through a humming sound in his nostrils. He waved her toward a road forking to the left, under a railway bridge. She thought it might be too soon to be leaving the river, but as she walked on, she sensed him watching her and thought it would be impolite to disregard his directions. Perhaps the left fork was a shortcut.
She was surprised by how clumsy and self-conscious she was, after all she had learned and seen. She felt inept, unnerved by being out on her own, and no longer part of her group. For months she had lived a closed life whose every hour was marked on a timetable. She knew her humble place in the ward. As she became more proficient in the work, so she became better at taking orders and following procedures and ceasing to think for herself. It was a long time since she had done anything on her own. Not since her week in Primrose Hill, typing out the novella, and what a foolish excitement that seemed now.
She was walking under the bridge as a train passed overhead. The thunderous, rhythmic rumble reached right into her bones. Steel gliding and thumping over steel, the great bolted sheets of it high above her in the gloom, an inexplicable door sunk into the brickwork, mighty cast-iron pipework clamped in rusting brackets and carrying no one knew what—such brutal invention belonged to a race of supermen. She herself mopped floors and tied bandages. Did she really have the strength for this journey?
When she stepped out from under the bridge, crossing a wedge of dusty morning sunlight, the train was making a harmless clicking suburban sound as it receded. What she needed, Briony told herself yet again, was backbone. She passed a tiny municipal park with a tennis court on which two men in flannels were hitting a ball back and forward, warming up for a game with lazy confidence. There were two girls in khaki shorts on a bench nearby reading a letter. She thought of her letter, her sugarcoated rejection slip. She had been carrying it in her pocket during her shift and the second page had acquired a crablike stain of carbolic. She had come to see that, without intending to, it delivered a significant personal indictment. Might s
he come between them in some disastrous fashion? Yes, indeed. And having done so, might she obscure the fact by concocting a slight, barely clever fiction and satisfy her vanity by sending it off to a magazine? The interminable pages about light and stone and water, a narrative split between three different points of view, the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen—none of this could conceal her cowardice. Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream—three streams!—of consciousness? The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella—and was necessary to it. What was she to do now? It was not the backbone of a story that she lacked. It was backbone.
She left the little park behind, and passed a small factory whose thrumming machinery made the pavement vibrate. There was no telling what was being made behind those high filthy windows, or why yellow and black smoke poured from a single slender aluminum stack. Opposite, set in a diagonal across a street corner, the wide-open double doors of a pub suggested a theater stage. Inside, where a boy with an attractive, pensive look was emptying ashtrays into a bucket, last night’s air still had a bluish look. Two men in leather aprons were unloading beer barrels down a ramp from the dray cart. She had never seen so many horses on the streets. The military must have requisitioned all the lorries. Someone was pushing open the cellar trapdoors from inside. They banged against the pavement, sending up the dust, and a man with a tonsure, whose legs were still below street level, paused and turned to watch her go by. He appeared to her like a giant chess piece. The draymen were watching her too, and one of them wolf-whistled.
“All right, darling?”
She didn’t mind, but she never knew how to reply. Yes, thank you? She smiled at them all, glad of the folds of her cape. Everyone, she assumed, was thinking about the invasion, but there was nothing to do but keep on. Even if the Germans came, people would still play tennis, or gossip, or drink beer. Perhaps the wolf-whistling would stop. As the street curved and narrowed, the steady traffic along it sounded louder and the warm fumes blew into her face. A Victorian terrace of bright red brick faced right onto the pavement. A woman in a paisley apron was sweeping with demented vigor in front of her house through whose open door came the smell of fried breakfast. She stood back to let Briony pass, for the way was narrow here, but she looked away sharply at Briony’s good morning. Approaching her were a woman and four jug-eared boys with suitcases and knapsacks. The kids were jostling and shouting and kicking along an old shoe. They ignored their mother’s exhausted cry as Briony was forced to stand aside and let them pass.
“Leave off, will ya! Let the nursey through.”
As she passed, the woman gave a lopsided smile of rueful apology. Two of her front teeth were missing. She was wearing a strong perfume and between her fingers she carried an unlit cigarette.
“They’s so excited about going in the countryside. Never been before, would you believe.”
Briony said, “Good luck. I hope you get a nice family.”
The woman, whose ears also protruded, but were partially obscured by her hair cut in a bob, gave a gay shout of a laugh. “They dunno what they’re in for with this lot!”
She came at last to a confluence of shabby streets which she assumed from the detached quarter of her map was Stockwell. Commanding the route south was a pillbox and standing by it, with only one rifle between them, was a handful of bored Home Guards. An elderly fellow in a trilby, overalls and armband, with drooping jowls like a bulldog’s, detached himself and demanded to see her identity card. Self-importantly, he waved her on. She thought better of asking him directions. As she understood it, her way lay straight along the Clapham Road for almost two miles. There were fewer people here and less traffic, and the street was broader than the one she had come up. The only sound was the rumble of a departing tram. By a line of smart Edwardian flats set well back from the road, she allowed herself to sit for half a minute on a low parapet wall, in the shade of a plane tree, and remove her shoe to examine a blister on her heel. A convoy of three-ton lorries went by, heading south, out of town. Automatically, she glanced at their backs half expecting to see wounded men. But there were only wooden crates.
Forty minutes later she reached Clapham Common tube station. A squat church of rumpled stone turned out to be locked. She took out her father’s letter and read it over again. A woman in a shoe shop pointed her toward the Common. Even when Briony had crossed the road and walked onto the grass she did not see the church at first. It was half concealed among trees in leaf, and was not what she expected. She had been imagining the scene of a crime, a Gothic cathedral, whose flamboyant vaulting would be flooded with brazen light of scarlet and indigo from a stained-glass backdrop of lurid suffering. What appeared among the cool trees as she approached was a brick barn of elegant dimensions, like a Greek temple, with a black-tiled roof, windows of plain glass, and a low portico with white columns beneath a clock tower of harmonious proportions. Parked outside, close to the portico, was a polished black Rolls-Royce. The driver’s door was ajar, but there was no chauffeur in sight. As she passed the car she felt the warmth of its radiator, as intimate as body heat, and heard the click of contracting metal. She went up the steps and pushed on the heavy, studded door.
The sweet waxy smell of wood, the watery smell of stone, were of churches everywhere. Even as she turned her back to close the door discreetly, she was aware that the church was almost empty. The vicar’s words were in counterpoint with their echoes. She stood by the door, partly screened by the font, waiting for her eyes and ears to adjust. Then she advanced to the rear pew and slid along to the end where she still had a view of the altar. She had been to various family weddings, though she was too young to have been at the grand affair in Liverpool Cathedral of Uncle Cecil and Aunt Hermione, whose form and elaborate hat she could now distinguish in the front row. Next to her were Pierrot and Jackson, lankier by five or six inches, wedged between the outlines of their estranged parents. On the other side of the aisle were three members of the Marshall family. This was the entire congregation. A private ceremony. No society journalists. Briony was not meant to be there. She was familiar enough with the form of words to know that she had not missed the moment itself.
“Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication, that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.”
Facing the altar, framed by the elevated white-sheeted shape of the vicar, stood the couple. She was in white, the full traditional wear, and, as far as Briony could tell from the rear, was heavily veiled. Her hair was gathered into a single childish plait that fell from under the froth of tulle and organdy and lay along the length of her spine. Marshall stood erect, the lines of his padded morning-suit shoulders etched sharply against the vicar’s surplice.
“Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other …”
She felt the memories, the needling details, like a rash, like dirt on her skin: Lola coming to her room in tears, her chafed and bruised wrists, and the scratches on Lola’s shoulder and down Marshall’s face; Lola’s silence in the darkness at the lakeside as she let her earnest, ridiculous, oh so prim younger cousin, who couldn’t tell real life from the stories in her head, deliver the attacker into safety. Poor vain and vulnerable Lola with the pearl-studded choker and the rosewater scent, who longed to throw off the last restraints of childhood, who saved herself from humiliation by falling in love, or persuading herself she had, and who could not believe her luck when Briony insisted on doing the talking and blaming. And what luck that was for Lola—barely more than a child, prized open and taken—to marry her rapist.
“… Therefore if any man can show any just cause, why they may not be lawfully joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.”
But the scratches and bruises were long healed, and all her own statements at the time were to the contrary. Nor did the bride appear to be a victim, and she had her parents’ consent. More than that, surely; a chocolate magnate, the creator of Amo. Aunt Hermione would be rubbing her hands. That Paul Marshall, Lola Quincey and she, Briony Tallis, had conspired with silence and falsehoods to send an innocent man to jail? But the words that had convicted him had been her very own, read out loud on her behalf in the Assize Court. The sentence had already been served. The debt was paid. The verdict stood.
She remained in her seat with her accelerating heart and sweating palms, and humbly inclined her head.
“I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts will be disclosed, that if either of you know of any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it.”