Atonement: Part Three

Four days ago, despite careful instruction, a patient in her care had quaffed her carbolic gargle—according to the porter who saw it, down in one like a pint of Guinness—and was violently sick across her blankets.

She was prone to errors of deportment—in moments of abstraction she tended to shift her weight onto one foot in a way that particularly enraged her superior.

But lately, the sister was not casting her mirthless smile in the direction of the probationers, nor speaking to them in the subdued voice that gave them such terrors.

The porters brought up from the loading bays a great quantity of new supplies which had to be unpacked, inventoried and stowed—dressings, kidney bowls, hypodermics, three new autoclaves and many packages marked “Bunyan Bags” whose use had not yet been explained.

Conversation was stilted.

She emptied and sluiced the bedpans, swept and polished floors, made cocoa and Bovril, fetched and carried—and was delivered from introspection.

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.

Even she, who knew nothing of military strategy or journalistic convention, understood a euphemism for retreat.

This foreboding, this muted dread, was what she had sensed around her.

Now a languorous waiting settled over the hospital.

Only the jaundiced seamen remained.

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.

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.

A consultant was taking charge and a rough triage system was in place.

She thought she could see the white protuberance of bone.

He made a derisive, snorting sound.

The protruding part was obliquely triangular.

On the other hand, the stoicism of some of the soldiers amazed and even appalled her.

Every secret of the body was rendered up—bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve.

Dear Miss Tallis,
Thank you for sending us Two Figures by a Fountain, and please accept our apologies for this dilatory response.

We are not complacent about the average age of our contributors and are keen to publish promising young writers.

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.

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.

The doorknob in her hand as she turned it felt obtrusively cool and hard.

Fresh cases arrived each day, but no longer in a deluge.

Afterward, most patients were sent off to outlying hospitals to convalesce.

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.

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.

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.

Marshall stood erect, the lines of his padded morning-suit shoulders etched sharply against the vicar’s surplice.

How flagrantly, sensually, it reverberated before the altar when he said, “With my body I thee worship.”

There were more prayers, a psalm, the Lord’s Prayer and another long one in which the falling tones of valediction gathered into a melancholy finality.

The Edwardian terraces, net-curtained and seedy, ran straight for half a mile.

From the threshold to the beginning of the stairs she counted fifteen roses, sixteen snowflakes. Inauspicious.

It was inane to be standing there listing these details.

What was surprising was the speed with which her relief that Robbie was alive was supplanted by her dread of confronting him.

But how banal that would have sounded.

With this brittle precis of her obligations he left the table and went toward the bedroom.

She knew that she did not have the right to ask her sister about her new address, or Robbie where the train was taking him, or about the cottage in Wiltshire. Was that where the harebells came from? Surely there had been an idyll.