Atonement

PART THREE

THE UNEASE WAS not confined to the hospital. It seemed to rise with the turbulent brown river swollen by the April rains, and in the evenings lay across the blacked-out city like a mental dusk which the whole country could sense, a quiet and malign thickening, inseparable from the cool late spring, well concealed within its spreading beneficence. Something was coming to an end. The senior staff, conferring in self-important groups at the corridor intersections, were nursing a secret. Younger doctors were a little taller, their stride more aggressive, and the consultant was distracted on his round, and on one particular morning crossed to the window to gaze out across the river for minutes on end, while behind him the nurses stood to attention by the beds and waited. The elderly porters seemed depressed as they pushed the patients to and from the wards, and seemed to have forgotten their chirpy catchphrases from the wireless comedy shows, and it might even have consoled Briony to hear again that line of theirs she so despised—Cheer up love, it might never happen. But it was about to. The hospital had been emptying slowly, invisibly, for many days. It seemed purely chance at first, an epidemic of good health that the less intelligent of the trainees were tempted to put down to their own improving techniques. Only slowly did one detect a design. Empty beds spread across the ward, and through other wards, like deaths in the night. Briony imagined that retreating footsteps in the wide polished corridors had a muffled, apologetic sound, where once they had been bright and efficient. The workmen who came to install new drums of fire hose on the landings outside the lifts, and set out new buckets of fire-fighting sand, labored all day, without a break, and spoke to no one before they left, not even the porters. In the ward, only eight beds out of twenty were occupied, and though the work was even harder than before, a certain disquiet, an almost superstitious dread, prevented the student nurses from complaining when they were alone together at tea. They were all generally calmer, more accepting. They no longer spread their hands to compare chilblains. In addition, there was the constant and pervasive anxiety the trainees shared about making mistakes. They all lived in fear of Sister Marjorie Drummond, of the menacing meager smile and softening of manner that preceded her fury. Briony knew she had recently accumulated a string of errors. 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. Briony was also aware that she had been observed by Sister Drummond carrying only three bedpans at a time, when by now they were expected to go the length of the ward reliably with a pile of six, like a busy waiter in La Coupole. There may have been other errors too, which she would have forgotten in her weariness, or never even known about. 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. Lapses and failures could carelessly accrue over several days: a broom improperly stowed, a blanket folded with its label facing up, a starched collar in infinitesimal disarray, the bed castors not lined up and pointing inward, walking back down the ward empty-handed—all silently noted, until capacity was reached and then, if you had not read the signs, the wrath would come down as a shock. And just when you thought you were doing well. 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. She hardly bothered with her charges at all. She was preoccupied, and often stood in the quadrangle by men’s surgical, in long conferences with her counterpart, or she disappeared for two days at a time. In another context, a different profession, she would have seemed motherly in her plumpness, or even sensual, for her unpainted lips were rich in natural color and sweetly bowed, and her face with its rounded cheeks and doll’s patches of healthy pink suggested a kindly nature. This impression was dispelled early on when a probationer in Briony’s year, a large, kindly, slow-moving girl with a cow’s harmless gaze, met the lacerating force of the ward sister’s fury. Nurse Langland had been seconded to the men’s surgical ward, and was asked to help prepare a young soldier for an appendectomy. Left alone with him for a minute or two, she chatted and made reassuring remarks about his operation. He must have asked the obvious question, and that was when she broke the hallowed rule. It was set out clearly in the handbook, though no one had guessed how important it was considered to be. Hours later, the soldier came round from his anesthetic and muttered the student nurse’s name while the surgical ward sister was standing close by. Nurse Langland was sent back to her own ward in disgrace. The others were made to gather round and take careful note. If poor Susan Langland had carelessly or cruelly killed two dozen patients, it could not have been worse for her. By the time Sister Drummond finished telling her that she was an abomination to the traditions of Nightingale nursing to which she aspired, and should consider herself lucky to be spending the next month sorting soiled linen, not only Langland but half the girls present were weeping. Briony was not among them, but that night in bed, still a little shivery, she went through the handbook again, to see if there were other points of etiquette she might have missed. She reread and committed to memory the commandment: in no circumstances should a nurse communicate to a patient her Christian name. The wards emptied, but the work intensified. Every morning the beds were pushed into the center so that the probationers could polish the floor with a heavy bumper that a girl on her own could barely swing from side to side. The floors were to be swept three times a day. Vacated lockers were scrubbed, mattresses fumigated, brass coat hooks, doorknobs and keyholes were buffed. The woodwork—doors as well as skirting—was washed down with carbolic solution, and so were the beds themselves, the iron frames as well as springs. The students scoured, wiped and dried bedpans and bottles till they shone like dinner plates. Army three-ton lorries drew up at the loading bays, bringing yet more beds, filthy old ones that needed to be scrubbed down many times before they were carried into the ward and squeezed into the lines, and then carbolized. Between tasks, perhaps a dozen times a day, the students scrubbed their cracked and bleeding chilblained hands under freezing water. The war against germs never ceased. The probationers were initiated into the cult of hygiene. They learned that there was nothing so loathsome as a wisp of blanket fluff hiding under a bed, concealing within its form a battalion, a whole division, of bacteria. The everyday practice of boiling, scrubbing, buffing and wiping became the badge of the students’ professional pride, to which all personal comfort must be sacrificed. 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. An extra medicine cupboard was installed and filled, once it had been scrubbed three times over. It was locked, and the key remained with Sister Drummond, but one morning Briony saw inside rows of bottles labeled morphine. When she was sent on errands, she saw other wards in similar states of preparation. One was already completely empty of patients, and gleamed in spacious silence, waiting. But it was not done to ask questions. The year before, just after war was declared, the wards on the top floor had been closed down completely as a protection against bombing. The operating theaters were now in the basement. The ground-floor windows had been sandbagged, and every skylight cemented over. An army general made a tour of the hospital with half a dozen consultants at his side. There was no ceremony, or even silence when they came. Usually on such important visits, so it was said, the nose of every patient had to be in line with the center creasing of the top sheet. But there was no time to prepare. The general and his party strode through the ward, murmuring and nodding, and then they were gone. The unease grew, but there was little opportunity for speculation, which in any case was officially forbidden. When they were not on their shifts, the probationers were in lessons in their free time, or lectures, or at practical demonstrations or studying alone. Their meals and bedtimes were supervised as if they were new girls at Roedean. When Fiona, who slept in the bed next to Briony, pushed her plate away and announced to no one in particular that she was “clinically incapable” of eating vegetables boiled with an Oxo cube, the Nightingale home sister stood over her until she had eaten the last scrap. Fiona was Briony’s friend, by definition; in the dormitory, on the first night of preliminary training, she asked Briony to cut the fingernails of her right hand, explaining that her left hand couldn’t make the scissors work and that her mother always did it for her. She was ginger-haired and freckled, which made Briony automatically wary. But unlike Lola, Fiona was loud and jolly, with dimples on the backs of her hands and an enormous bosom which caused the other girls to say that she was bound to be a ward sister one day. Her family lived in Chelsea. She whispered from her bed one night that her father was expecting to be asked to join Churchill’s war cabinet. But when the cabinet was announced, the surnames didn’t match up and nothing was said, and Briony thought it better not to inquire. In those first months after preliminary training, Fiona and Briony had little chance to find out if they actually liked each other. It was convenient for them to assume they did. They were among the few who had no medical background at all. Most of the other girls had done first-aid courses, and some had been VADs already and were familiar with blood and dead bodies, or at least, they said they were. But friendships were not easy to cultivate. The probationers worked their shifts in the wards, studied three hours a day in their spare time, and slept. Their luxury was teatime, between four and five, when they took down from the wooden slatted shelves their miniature brown teapots inscribed with their names and sat together in a little dayroom off the ward. Conversation was stilted. The home sister was there to supervise and ensure decorum. Besides, as soon as they sat down, tiredness came over them, heavy as three folded blankets. One girl fell asleep with a cup and saucer in her hand and scalded her thigh—a good opportunity, Sister Drummond said when she came in to see what the screaming was about, to practice the treatment of burns. And she herself was a barrier to friendship. In those early months, Briony often thought that her only relationship was with Sister Drummond. She was always there, one moment at the end of a corridor, approaching with a terrible purpose, the next, at Briony’s shoulder, murmuring in her ear that she had failed to pay attention during preliminary training to the correct procedures for blanket-bathing male patients: only after the second change of washing water should the freshly soaped back flannel and back towel be passed to the patient so that he could “finish off for himself.” Briony’s state of mind largely depended on how she stood that hour in the ward sister’s opinion. She felt a coolness in her stomach whenever Sister Drummond’s gaze fell on her. It was impossible to know whether you had done well. Briony dreaded her bad opinion. Praise was unheard of. The best one could hope for was indifference. In the moments she had to herself, usually in the dark, minutes before falling asleep, Briony contemplated a ghostly parallel life in which she was at Girton, reading Milton. She could have been at her sister’s college, rather than her sister’s hospital. Briony had thought she was joining the war effort. In fact, she had narrowed her life to a relationship with a woman fifteen years older who assumed a power over her greater than that of a mother over an infant. 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.

IN 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. Three months had passed, and Briony had heard nothing from Horizon. A second piece of writing also brought no response. She had gone to the administration office and asked for Cecilia’s address. In early May she had written to her sister. Now she was beginning to think that silence was Cecilia’s answer.

DURING THE LAST days of May the deliveries of medical supplies increased. More nonurgent cases were sent home. Many wards would have been completely emptied had it not been for the admission of forty sailors—a rare type of jaundice was sweeping through the Royal Navy. Briony no longer had time to notice. New courses on hospital nursing and preliminary anatomy began. The first-year students hurried from their shifts to their lectures, to their meals and to private study. After three pages of reading, it would be difficult to stay awake. The chimes of Big Ben marked every change of the day, and there were times when the solemn single note of the quarter hour prompted moans of suppressed panic as the girls realized they were supposed to be elsewhere. Total bed rest was considered a medical procedure in itself. Most patients, whatever their condition, were forbidden to walk the few steps to the lavatory. The days therefore began with bedpans. Sister did not approve of them being carried down the ward “like tennis rackets.” They were to be carried “to the glory of God,” and emptied, sluiced, cleaned and stowed by half past seven, when it was time to start the morning drinks. All day long, bedpans, blanket-bathing, floor-cleaning. The girls complained of backache from bed-making, and fiery sensations in their feet from standing all day. An extra nursing duty was drawing the blackout over the huge ward windows. Toward the end of the day, more bedpans, the emptying of sputum mugs, the making of cocoa. There was barely time between the end of a shift and the beginning of a class to get back to the dormitory to collect papers and textbooks. Twice in one day, Briony had caught the disapproval of the ward sister for running in the corridor, and on each occasion the reprimand was delivered tonelessly. Only hemorrhages and fires were permissible reasons for a nurse to run. But the principal domain of the junior probationers was the sluice room. There was talk of automatic bedpan- and bottle-washers being installed, but this was mere rumor of a promised land. For now, they must do as others had done before them. On the day she had been told off twice for running, Briony found herself sent to the sluice room for an extra turn. It may have been an accident of the unwritten roster, but she doubted it. She pulled the sluice room door behind her, and tied the heavy rubber apron around her waist. The trick of emptying, in fact the only way it was possible for her, was to close her eyes, hold her breath and avert her head. Then came the rinsing in a solution of carbolic. If she neglected to check that hollow bedpan handles were cleaned and dry she would be in deeper trouble with the sister. From this task she went straight to tidying the near-empty ward at the end of the day—straightening lockers, emptying ashtrays, picking up the day’s newspapers. Automatically, she glanced at a folded page of the Sunday Graphic. She had been following the news in unrelated scraps. There was never enough time to sit down and read a paper properly. She knew about the breaching of the Maginot Line, the bombing of Rotterdam, the surrender of the Dutch army, and some of the girls had been talking the night before about the imminent collapse of Belgium. The war was going badly, but it was bound to pick up. It was one anodyne sentence that caught her attention now—not for what it said, but for what it blandly tried to conceal. The British army in northern France was “making strategic withdrawals to previously prepared positions.” Even she, who knew nothing of military strategy or journalistic convention, understood a euphemism for retreat. Perhaps she was the last person in the hospital to understand what was happening. The emptying wards, the flow of supplies, she had thought were simply part of general preparations for war. She had been too wrapped up in her own tiny concerns. Now she saw how the separate news items might connect, and understood what everyone else must know and what the hospital administration was planning for. The Germans had reached the Channel, the British army was in difficulties. It had all gone badly wrong in France, though no one knew on what kind of scale. This foreboding, this muted dread, was what she had sensed around her. About this time, on the day the last patients were escorted from the ward, a letter came from her father. After a cursory greeting and inquiry after the course and her health, he passed on information picked up from a colleague and confirmed by the family: Paul Marshall and Lola Quincey were to be married a week Saturday in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Clapham Common. He gave no reason why he supposed she would want to know, and made no comment on the matter himself. He simply signed off in a scrawl down the page—“love as always.”

All morning, as she went about her duties, she thought about the news. She had not seen Lola since that summer, so the figure she imagined at the altar was a spindly girl of fifteen. Briony helped a departing patient, an elderly lady from Lambeth, pack her suitcase, and tried to concentrate on her complaints. She had broken her toe and been promised twelve days’ bed rest, and had had only seven. She was helped into a wheelchair and a porter took her away. On duty in the sluice room Briony did the sums. Lola was twenty, Marshall would be twenty-nine. It wasn’t a surprise; the shock was in the confirmation. Briony was more than implicated in this union. She had made it possible. Throughout the day, up and down the ward, along the corridors, Briony felt her familiar guilt pursue her with a novel vibrancy. She scrubbed down the vacated lockers, helped wash bed frames in carbolic, swept and polished the floors, ran errands to the dispensary and the almoner at double speed without actually running, was sent with another probationer to help dress a boil in men’s general, and covered for Fiona who had to visit the dentist. On this first really fine day of May she sweated under her starchy uniform. All she wanted to do was work, then bathe and sleep until it was time to work again. But it was all useless, she knew. Whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did, and however well or hard she did it, whatever illumination in tutorial she had relinquished, or lifetime moment on a college lawn, she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable. For the first time in years she thought that she would like to talk to her father. She had always taken his remoteness for granted and expected nothing. She wondered whether in sending his letter with its specific information he was trying to tell her that he knew the truth. After tea, leaving herself too little time, she went to the phone box outside the hospital entrance near Westminster Bridge and attempted to call him at his work. The switchboard put her through to a helpful nasal voice, and then the connection was broken and she had to start again. The same happened, and on her third attempt the line went dead as soon as a voice said—Trying to connect you. By this time she had run out of change and she was due back on the ward. She paused outside the phone box to admire the huge cumulus clouds piled against a pale blue sky. The river with its spring tide racing seaward reflected the color with dashes of green and gray. Big Ben seemed to be endlessly toppling forward against the restless sky. Despite the traffic fumes, there was a scent of fresh vegetation around, newly cut grass perhaps from the hospital gardens, or from young trees along the riverside. Though the light was brilliant, there was a delicious coolness in the air. She had seen or felt nothing so pleasing in days, perhaps weeks. She was indoors too much, breathing disinfectant. As she came away, two young army officers, medics from the military hospital on Millbank, gave her a friendly smile as they brushed past her. Automatically, she glanced down, then immediately regretted that she had not at least met their look. They walked away from her across the bridge, oblivious to everything but their own conversation. One of them mimed reaching up high, as though to grope for something on a shelf, and his companion laughed. Halfway across they stopped to admire a gunboat gliding under the bridge. She thought how lively and free the RAMC doctors looked, and wished she had returned their smiles. There were parts of herself she had completely forgotten. She was late and she had every reason to run, despite the shoes that pinched her toes. Here, on the stained, uncarbolized pavement, the writ of Sister Drummond did not apply. No hemorrhages or fires, but it was a surprising physical pleasure, a brief taste of freedom, to run as best she could in her starched apron to the hospital entrance.

NOW A LANGUOROUS waiting settled over the hospital. Only the jaundiced seamen remained. There was much fascination and amused talk about them among the nurses. 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. Those who were still bed-bound would suffer agonies rather than call for the bottle. It was said the able seamen insisted on keeping the ward shipshape themselves and had taken over the sweeping and the heavy bumper. Such domesticity among men was unknown to the girls, and Fiona said she would marry no man who had not served in the Royal Navy. For no apparent reason, the probationers were given a half day off, free from study, though they were to remain in uniform. After lunch Briony walked with Fiona across the river past the Houses of Parliament and into St. James’s Park. They strolled around the lake, bought tea at a stall, and rented deck chairs to listen to elderly men of the Salvation Army playing Elgar adapted for brass band. In those days of May, before the story from France was fully understood, before the bombing of the city in September, London had the outward signs, but not yet the mentality, of war. Uniforms, posters warning against fifth columnists, two big air-raid shelters dug into the park lawns, and everywhere, surly officialdom. While the girls were sitting on their deck chairs, a man in armband and cap came over and demanded to see Fiona’s gas mask—it was partially obscured by her cape. Otherwise, it was still an innocent time. The anxieties about the situation in France that had been absorbing the country had for the moment dissipated in the afternoon’s sunshine. The dead were not yet present, the absent were presumed alive. The scene was dreamlike in its normality. Prams drifted along the paths, hoods down in full sunlight, and white, soft-skulled babies gaped at the outdoor world for the first time. Children who seemed to have escaped evacuation ran about on the grass shouting and laughing, the band struggled with music beyond its capabilities, and deck chairs still cost twopence. It was hard to believe that barely a hundred miles away was a military disaster. Briony’s thoughts remained fixed on her themes. Perhaps London would be overwhelmed by poisonous gas, or overrun by German parachutists aided on the ground by fifth columnists before Lola’s wedding could take place. Briony had heard a know-all porter saying, with what sounded like satisfaction, that nothing now could stop the German army. They had the new tactics and we didn’t, they had modernized, and we had not. The generals should have read Liddell Hart’s book, or have come to the hospital porter’s lodge and listened carefully during tea break. At her side, Fiona talked of her adored little brother and the clever thing he had said at dinner, while Briony pretended to listen and thought about Robbie. If he had been fighting in France, he might already be captured. Or worse. How would Cecilia survive such news? As the music, enlivened by unscored dissonances, swelled to a raucous climax, she gripped the wooden sides of her chair, closed her eyes. If something happened to Robbie, if Cecilia and Robbie were never to be together . . . Her secret torment and the public upheaval of war had always seemed separate worlds, but now she understood how the war might compound her crime. The only conceivable solution would be for the past never to have happened. If he didn’t come back . . . She longed to have someone else’s past, to be someone else, like hearty Fiona with her unstained life stretching ahead, and her affectionate, sprawling family, whose dogs and cats had Latin names, whose home was a famous venue for artistic Chelsea people. All Fiona had to do was live her life, follow the road ahead and discover what was to happen. To Briony, it appeared that her life was going to be lived in one room, without a door.

“Briony, are you all right?”

“What? Yes, of course. I’m fine, thanks.”

“I don’t believe you. Shall I get you some water?”

As the applause grew—no one seemed to mind how bad the band was—she watched Fiona go across the grass, past the musicians and the man in a brown coat renting out the deck chairs, to the little café among the trees. The Salvation Army was starting in on “Bye Bye Blackbird” at which they were far more adept. People in their deck chairs were joining in, and some were clapping in time. Communal sing-alongs had a faintly coercive quality—that way strangers had of catching each other’s eye as their voices rose—which she was determined to resist. Still, it lifted her spirits, and when Fiona returned with a teacup of water, and the band began a medley of old-time favorites with “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” they began to talk about work. Fiona drew Briony into the gossip—about which pros they liked, and those that irritated them, about Sister Drummond whose voice Fiona could do, and the matron who was almost as grand and remote as a consultant. They remembered the eccentricities of various patients, and they shared grievances—Fiona was outraged that she wasn’t allowed to keep things on her windowsill, Briony hated the eleven o’clock lights-out—but they did so with self-conscious enjoyment and increasingly with a great deal of giggling, so that heads began to turn in their direction, and fingers were laid theatrically over lips. 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. The girls sensed their immunity and their laughter grew louder, into cackles of hilarity and derision. Fiona turned out to be a good mimic, and for all her merriness, there was a cruel touch to her humor that Briony liked. Fiona had her own version of Lambeth Cockney, and with heartless exaggeration caught the ignorance of some patients, and their pleading, whining voices. It’s me ’art, Nurse. It’s always been on the wrong side. Me mum was just the same. Is it true your baby comes out of your bottom, Nurse? ’Cos I don’t know how mine’s going to fit, seeing as ’ow I’m always blocked. I ’ad six nippers, then I goes and leaves one on a bus, the eighty-eight up from Brixton. Must’ve left ’im on the seat. Never saw ’im again, Nurse. Really upset, I was. Cried me eyes out. As they walked back toward Parliament Square Briony was light-headed and still weak in the knees from laughing so hard. She wondered at herself, at how quickly her mood could be transformed. Her worries did not disappear, but slipped back, their emotional power temporarily exhausted. Arm in arm the girls walked across Westminster Bridge. The tide was out, and in such strong light there was a purple sheen on the mudbanks where thousands of wormcasts threw tiny sharp shadows. As Briony and Fiona turned right onto Lambeth Palace Road they saw a line of army lorries drawn up outside the main entrance. The girls groaned good-humoredly at the prospect of more supplies to be unpacked and stowed. Then they saw the field ambulances among the lorries, and coming closer they saw the stretchers, scores of them, set down haphazardly on the ground, and an expanse of dirty green battle dress and stained bandages. There were also soldiers standing in groups, dazed and immobile, and wrapped like the men on the ground in filthy bandages. A medical orderly was gathering rifles from the back of a lorry. A score of porters, nurses and doctors were moving through the crowd. Five or six trolleys had been brought out to the front of the hospital—clearly not enough. For a moment, Briony and Fiona stopped and looked, and then, at the same moment, they began to run. In less than a minute they were down among the men. The brisk air of spring did not dispel the stench of engine oil and festering wounds. The soldiers’ faces and hands were black, and with their stubble and matted black hair, and their tied-on labels from the casualty-receiving stations, they looked identical, a wild race of men from a terrible world. The ones who were standing appeared to be asleep. More nurses and doctors were pouring out of the entrance. A consultant was taking charge and a rough triage system was in place. Some of the urgent cases were being lifted onto the trolleys. For the first time in her training, Briony found herself addressed by a doctor, a registrar she had never seen before.

“You, get on the end of this stretcher.”

The doctor himself took the other end. She had never carried a stretcher before and the weight of it surprised her. They were through the entrance and ten yards down the corridor and she knew her left wrist could not hold up. She was at the feet end. The soldier had a sergeant’s stripes. He was without his boots and his bluish toes stank. His head was wrapped in a bandage soaked to crimson and black. On his thigh his battle dress was mangled into a wound. She thought she could see the white protuberance of bone. Each step they took gave him pain. His eyes were shut tight, but he opened and closed his mouth in silent agony. If her left hand failed, the stretcher would certainly tip. Her fingers were loosening as they reached the lift, stepped inside and set the stretcher down. While they slowly rose, the doctor felt the man’s pulse, and breathed in sharply through his nose. He was oblivious to Briony’s presence. As the second floor sank into their view, she thought only of the thirty yards of corridor to the ward, and whether she would make it. It was her duty to tell the doctor that she couldn’t. But his back was to her as he slammed the lift gates apart, and told her to take her end. She willed more strength to her left arm, and she willed the doctor to go faster. She would not bear the disgrace if she were to fail. The black-faced man opened and closed his mouth in a kind of chewing action. His tongue was covered in white spots. His black Adam’s apple rose and fell, and she made herself stare at that. They turned into the ward, and she was lucky that an emergency bed was ready by the door. Her fingers were already slipping. A sister and a qualified nurse were waiting. As the stretcher was maneuvered into position alongside the bed, Briony’s fingers went slack, she had no control over them, and she brought up her left knee in time to catch the weight. The wooden handle thumped against her leg. The stretcher wobbled, and it was the sister who leaned in to steady it. The wounded sergeant blew through his lips a sound of incredulity, as though he had never guessed that pain could be so vast.

“For God’s sake, girl,” the doctor muttered. They eased their patient onto the bed. Briony waited to find out if she was needed. But now the three were busy and ignored her. The nurse was removing the head bandage, and the sister was cutting away the soldier’s trousers. The registrar turned away to the light to study the notes scribbled on the label he had pulled away from the man’s shirt. Briony cleared her throat softly and the sister looked round and was annoyed to find her still there.

“Well don’t just stand idle, Nurse Tallis. Get downstairs and help.”

She came away humiliated, and felt a hollow sensation spreading in her stomach. The moment the war touched her life, at the first moment of pressure, she had failed. If she was made to carry another stretcher, she would not make it halfway to the lift. But if she was told to, she would not dare refuse. If she dropped her end she would simply leave, gather her things from her room into her suitcase, and go to Scotland and work as a land girl. It would be better for everyone. As she hurried along the ground-floor corridor she met Fiona coming the other way on the front of a stretcher. She was a stronger girl than Briony. The face of the man she was carrying was completely obliterated by dressings, with a dark oval hole for his mouth. The girls’ eyes met and something passed between them, shock, or shame that they had been laughing in the park when there was this. Briony went outside and saw with relief the last of the stretchers being lifted onto extra trolleys, and porters waiting to push them. A dozen qualified nurses were standing to one side with their suitcases. She recognized some from her own ward. There was no time to ask them where they were being sent. Something even worse was happening elsewhere. The priority now was the walking wounded. There were still more than two hundred of them. A sister told her to lead fifteen men up to Beatrice ward. They followed her in single file back down the corridor, like children in a school crocodile. Some had their arms in slings, others had head or chest wounds. Three men walked on crutches. No one spoke. There was a jam around the lifts with trolleys waiting to get to the operating theaters in the basement, and others still trying to get up to the wards. She found a place in an alcove for the men with crutches to sit, told them not to move, and took the rest up by the stairs. Progress was slow and they paused on each landing.

“Not far now,” she kept saying, but they did not seem to be aware of her. When they reached the ward, etiquette required her to report to the sister. She was not in her office. Briony turned to her crocodile, which had bunched up behind her. They did not look at her. They were staring past her, into the grand Victorian space of the ward, the lofty pillars, the potted palms, the neatly ranged beds and their pure, turned-down sheets.

“You wait here,” she said. “The sister will find you all a bed.”

She walked quickly to the far end where the sister and two nurses were attending a patient. There were shuffling footsteps behind Briony. The soldiers were coming down the ward. Horrified, she flapped her hands at them. “Go back, please go back and wait.”

But they were fanning out now across the ward. Each man had seen the bed that was his. Without being assigned, without removing their boots, without baths and delousing and hospital pajamas, they were climbing onto the beds. Their filthy hair, their blackened faces were on the pillows. The sister was coming at a sharp pace from her end of the ward, her heels resounding in the venerable space. Briony went to a bedside and plucked at the sleeve of a soldier who lay faceup, cradling his arm which had slipped its sling. As he kicked his legs out straight he made a scar of oil stain across his blanket. All her fault.

“You must get up,” she said as the sister was upon her. She added feebly, “There’s a procedure.”

“The men need to sleep. The procedures are for later.” The voice was Irish. The sister put a hand on Briony’s shoulder and turned her so that her name badge could be read. “You’ll go back to your ward now, Nurse Tallis. You’ll be needed there, I should think.”

With the gentlest of shoves, Briony was sent about her business. The ward could do without disciplinarians like her. The men around her were already asleep, and again she had been proved an idiot. Of course they should sleep. She had only wanted to do what she thought was expected. These weren’t her rules, after all. They had been dinned into her these past few months, the thousand details of a new admission. How was she to know they meant nothing in fact? These indignant thoughts afflicted her until she was almost at her own ward when she remembered the men with crutches downstairs, waiting to be brought up in the lift. She hurried down the stairs. The alcove was empty, and there was no sign of the men in corridors. She did not want to expose her ineptitude by asking among the nurses or porters. Someone must have gathered the wounded men up. In the days that followed, she never saw them again. Her own ward had been redesignated as an overflow to acute surgical, but the definitions meant nothing at first. It could have been a clearing station on the front line. Sisters and senior nurses had been drafted in to help, and five or six doctors were working on the most urgent cases. There were two padres, one sitting and talking to a man lying on his side, the other praying by a shape under a blanket. All the nurses wore masks, and they and the doctors had rolled up their sleeves. The sisters moved between the beds swiftly, giving injections—probably morphine—or administering the transfusion needles to connect the injured to the vacolitres of whole blood and the yellow flasks of plasma that hung like exotic fruits from the tall mobile stands. Probationers moved down the ward with piles of hot-water bottles. The soft echo of voices, medical voices, filled the ward, and was pierced regularly by groans and shouts of pain. Every bed was occupied, and new cases were left on the stretchers and laid between the beds to take advantage of the transfusion stands. Two orderlies were getting ready to take away the dead men. At many beds, nurses were removing dirty dressings. Always a decision, to be gentle and slow, or firm and quick and have it over with in one moment of pain. This ward favored the latter, which accounted for some of the shouts. Everywhere, a soup of smells—the sticky sour odor of fresh blood, and also filthy clothes, sweat, oil, disinfectant, medical alcohol, and drifting above it all, the stink of gangrene. Two cases going down to the theater turned out to be amputations. With senior nurses seconded to casualty-receiving hospitals further out in the hospital’s sector, and more cases coming in, the qualified nurses gave orders freely, and the probationers of Briony’s set were given new responsibilities. A nurse sent Briony to remove the dressing and clean the leg wound of a corporal lying on a stretcher near the door. She was not to dress it again until one of the doctors had looked at it. The corporal was facedown, and grimaced when she knelt to speak in his ear.

“Don’t mind me if I scream,” he murmured. “Clean it up, Nurse. I don’t want to lose it.”

The trouser leg had been cut clear. The outer bandaging looked relatively new. She began to unwind it, and when it was impossible to pass her hand under his leg, she used scissors to cut the dressing away.

“They did me up on the quayside at Dover.”

Now there was only gauze, black with congealed blood, along the length of the wound which ran from his knee to his ankle. The leg itself was hairless and black. She feared the worst and breathed through her mouth.

“Now how did you do a thing like that?” She made herself sound chirpy.

“Shell comes over, knocks me back onto this fence of corrugated tin.”

“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 over, 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?”

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 war. 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. 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 she 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.”

Was it really happening? Was she really rising now, with weak legs and empty contracting stomach and stuttering heart, and moving along the pew to take her position in the center of the aisle, and setting out her reasons, her just causes, in a defiant untrembling voice as she advanced in her cape and headdress, like a bride of Christ, toward the altar, toward the openmouthed vicar who had never before in his long career been interrupted, toward the congregation of twisted necks, and the half-turned white-faced couple? She had not planned it, but the question, which she had quite forgotten, from the Book of Common Prayer, was a provocation. And what were the impediments exactly? Now was her chance to proclaim in public all the private anguish and purge herself of all that she had done wrong. Before the altar of this most rational of churches. 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.”

By any estimate, it was a very long time until judgment day, and until then the truth that only Marshall and his bride knew at first hand was steadily being walled up within the mausoleum of their marriage. There it would lie secure in the darkness, long after anyone who cared was dead. Every word in the ceremony was another brick in place.

“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”

Birdlike Uncle Cecil stepped up smartly, no doubt anxious to be done with his duty before hurrying back to the sanctuary of All Souls, Oxford. Straining to hear any wavering doubt in their voices, Briony listened to Marshall, then Lola, repeating the words after the vicar. She was sweet and sure, while Marshall boomed, as though in defiance. How flagrantly, sensually, it reverberated before the altar when he said, “With my body I thee worship.”

“Let us pray.”

Then the seven outlined heads in the front pews drooped and the vicar removed his tortoiseshell glasses, lifted his chin and with eyes closed addressed the heavenly powers in his weary, sorrowful singsong.

“O Eternal God, Creator and Preserver of all mankind, Giver of all spiritual grace, the Author of everlasting life: Send thy blessing upon these thy servants, this man and this woman . . .”

The last brick was set in place as the vicar, having put his glasses back on, made the celebrated pronouncement—man and wife together—and invoked the Trinity after which his church was named. 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.

“. . . Pour upon you the riches of his grace, sanctify and bless you, that ye may please him both in body and soul, and live together in holy love unto your lives’ end.”

Immediately, there cascaded from the fluting organ confetti of skittering triplets as the vicar turned to lead the couple down the aisle and the six family members fell in behind. Briony, who had been on her knees in a pretense of prayer, stood and turned to face the procession as it reached her. The vicar seemed a little pressed for time, and was many feet ahead of the rest. When he glanced to his left and saw the young nurse, his kindly look and tilt of the head expressed both welcome and curiosity. Then he strode on to pull one of the big doors wide open. A slanting tongue of sunlight reached all the way to where she stood and illuminated her face and headdress. She wanted to be seen, but not quite so clearly. There would be no missing her now. Lola, who was on Briony’s side, drew level and their eyes met. Her veil was already parted. The freckles had vanished, but otherwise she was not much changed. Only slightly taller perhaps, and prettier, softer and rounder in the face, and the eyebrows severely plucked. Briony simply stared. All she wanted was for Lola to know she was there and to wonder why. The sunlight made it harder for Briony to see, but for a fraction of a moment, a tiny frown of displeasure may have registered in the bride’s face. Then she pursed her lips and looked to the front, and then she was gone. Paul Marshall had seen her too, but had not recognized her, and nor had Aunt Hermione or Uncle Cecil who had not met her in years. But the twins, bringing up the rear in school uniform trousers at half mast, were delighted to see her, and mimed mock-horror at her costume, and did clownish eye-rolling yawns, with hands flapping on their mouths. Then she was alone in the church with the unseen organist who went on playing for his own pleasure. It was over too quickly, and nothing for certain was achieved. She remained standing in place, beginning to feel a little foolish, reluctant to go outside. Daylight, and the banality of family small talk, would dispel whatever impact she had made as a ghostly illuminated apparition. She also lacked courage for a confrontation. And how would she explain herself, the uninvited guest, to her uncle and aunt? They might be offended, or worse, they might not be, and want to take her off to some excruciating breakfast in a hotel, with Mr. and Mrs. Paul Marshall oily with hatred, and Hermione failing to conceal her contempt for Cecil. Briony lingered another minute or two, as though held there by the music, then, annoyed with her own cowardice, hurried out onto the portico. The vicar was a hundred yards off at least, walking quickly away across the common with arms swinging freely. The newlyweds were in the Rolls, Marshall at the wheel, reversing in order to turn round. She was certain they saw her. There was a metallic screech as he changed gear—a good sign perhaps. The car moved away, and through a side window she saw Lola’s white shape huddled against the driver’s arm. As for the congregation, it had vanished completely among the trees.

SHE KNEW FROM her map that Balham lay at the far end of the Common, in the direction the vicar was walking. It was not very far, and this fact alone made her reluctant to continue. She would arrive too soon. She had eaten nothing, she was thirsty, and her heel was throbbing and had glued itself to the back of her shoe. It was warm now, and she would be crossing a shadeless expanse of grass, broken by straight asphalt paths and public shelters. In the distance was a bandstand where men in dark blue uniforms were milling about. She thought of Fiona whose day off she had taken, and of their afternoon in St. James’s Park. It seemed a far-off, innocent time, but it was no more than ten days ago. Fiona would be doing the second bedpan round by now. Briony remained in the shade of the portico and thought about the little present she would buy her friend—something delicious to eat, a banana, oranges, Swiss chocolate. The porters knew how to get these things. She had heard them say that anything, everything, was available, if you had the right money. She watched the file of traffic moving round the Common, along her route, and she thought about food. Slabs of ham, poached eggs, the leg of a roast chicken, thick Irish stew, lemon meringue. A cup of tea. She became aware of the nervy, fidgeting music behind her the moment it ceased, and in the sudden new measure of silence, which seemed to confer freedom, she decided she must eat breakfast. There were no shops that she could see in the direction she had to walk, only dull mansion blocks of flats in deep orange brick. Some minutes passed, and the organist came out holding his hat in one hand and a heavy set of keys in the other. She would have asked him the way to the nearest café, but he was a jittery-looking man at one with his music, who seemed determined to ignore her as he slammed the church door shut and stooped over to lock it. He rammed his hat on and hurried away. Perhaps this was the first step in the undoing of her plans, but she was already walking back, retracing her steps, in the direction of Clapham High Street. She would have breakfast, and she would reconsider. Near the tube station she passed a stone drinking trough and could happily have sunk her face in it. She found a drab little place with smeared windows, and cigarette butts all over the floor, but the food could be no worse than what she was used to. She ordered tea, and three pieces of toast and margarine, and strawberry jam of palest pink. She heaped sugar into the tea, having diagnosed herself as suffering from hypoglycemia. The sweetness did not quite conceal a taste of disinfectant. She drank a second cup, glad that it was lukewarm so she could gulp it down, then she made use of a reeking seatless lavatory across a cobbled courtyard behind the café. But there was no stench that could impress a trainee nurse. She wedged lavatory paper into the heel of her shoe. It would see her another mile or two. A handbasin with a single tap was bolted to a brick wall. There was a gray-veined lozenge of soap she preferred not to touch. When she ran the water, the waste fell straight out onto her shins. She dried them with her sleeves, and combed her hair, trying to imagine her face in the brickwork. However, she couldn’t reapply her lipstick without a mirror. She dabbed her face with a soaked handkerchief, and patted her cheeks to bring up the color. A decision had been made—without her, it seemed. This was an interview she was preparing for, the post of beloved younger sister. She left the café, and as she walked along the Common she felt the distance widen between her and another self, no less real, who was walking back toward the hospital. Perhaps the Briony who was walking in the direction of Balham was the imagined or ghostly persona. This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyond its center, an agglomeration of dull little towns. She made a resolution never to live in any of them. The street she was looking for was three turnings past the tube station, itself another replica. The Edwardian terraces, net-curtained and seedy, ran straight for half a mile. 43 Dudley Villas was halfway down, with nothing to distinguish it from the others except for an old Ford 8, without wheels, supported on brick piles, which took up the whole of the front garden. If there was no one in, she could go away, telling herself she had tried. The doorbell did not work. She let the knocker fall twice and stood back. She heard a woman’s angry voice, then the slam of a door and the thud of footsteps. Briony took another pace back. It was not too late to retreat up the street. There was a fumbling with the catch and an irritable sigh, and the door was opened by a tall, sharp-faced woman in her thirties who was out of breath from some terrible exertion. She was in a fury. She had been interrupted in a row, and was unable to adjust her expression—the mouth open, the upper lip slightly curled—as she took Briony in.

“What do you want?”

“I’m looking for a Miss Cecilia Tallis.”

Her shoulders sagged, and she turned her head back, as though recoiling from an insult. She looked Briony up and down.

“You look like her.”

Bewildered, Briony simply stared at her. The woman gave another sigh that was almost like a spitting sound, and went along the hallway to the foot of the stairs.

“Tallis!” she yelled. “Door!”

She came halfway back along the corridor to the entrance to her sitting room, flashed Briony a look of contempt, then disappeared, pulling the door violently behind her. The house was silent. Briony’s view past the open front door was of a stretch of floral lino, and the first seven or eight stairs which were covered in deep red carpet. The brass rod on the third step was missing. Halfway along the hall was a semicircular table against the wall, and on it was a polished wooden stand, like a toast rack, for holding letters. It was empty. The lino extended past the stairs to a door with a frosted-glass window which probably opened onto the kitchen out the back. The wallpaper was floral too—a posy of three roses alternating with a snowflake design. From the threshold to the beginning of the stairs she counted fifteen roses, sixteen snowflakes. Inauspicious. At last, she heard a door opening upstairs, possibly the one she had heard slammed when she had knocked. Then the creak of a stair, and feet wearing thick socks came into view, and a flash of bare skin, and a blue silk dressing gown that she recognized. Finally, Cecilia’s face tilting sideways as she leaned down to make out who was at the front door and spare herself the trouble of descending further, improperly dressed. It took her some moments to recognize her sister. She came down slowly another three steps.

“Oh my God.”

She sat down and folded her arms. Briony remained standing with one foot still on the garden path, the other on the front step. A wireless in the landlady’s sitting room came on, and the laughter of an audience swelled as the valves warmed. There followed a comedian’s wheedling monologue, broken at last by applause, and a jolly band striking up. Briony took a step into the hallway. She murmured, “I have to talk to you.”

Cecilia was about to get up, then changed her mind. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“You didn’t answer my letter, so I came.”

She drew her dressing gown around her, and patted its pocket, probably in the hope of a cigarette. She was much darker in complexion, and her hands too were brown. She had not found what she wanted, but for the moment she did not make to rise. Marking time rather than changing the subject, she said, “You’re a probationer.”

“Yes.”

“Whose ward?”

“Sister Drummond’s.”

There was no telling whether Cecilia was familiar with this name, or whether she was displeased that her younger sister was training at the same hospital. There was another obvious difference—Cecilia had always spoken to her in a motherly or condescending way. Little Sis! No room for that now. There was a hardness in her tone that warned Briony off asking about Robbie. She took another step further into the hallway, conscious of the front door open behind her.

“And where are you?”

“Near Morden. It’s an EMS.”

An Emergency Medical Services hospital, a commandeered place, most likely dealing with the brunt, the real brunt of the evacuation. There was too much that couldn’t be said, or asked. The two sisters looked at each other. Even though Cecilia had the rumpled look of someone who had just got out of bed, she was more beautiful than Briony remembered her. That long face always looked odd, and vulnerable, horsey everyone said, even in the best of lights. Now it looked boldly sensual, with an accentuated bow of the full purplish lips. The eyes were dark and enlarged, by fatigue perhaps. Or sorrow. The long fine nose, the dainty flare of the nostrils—there was something masklike and carved about the face, and very still. And hard to read. Her sister’s appearance added to Briony’s unease, and made her feel clumsy. She barely knew this woman whom she hadn’t seen in five years. Briony could take nothing for granted. She was searching for another neutral topic, but there was nothing that did not lead back to the sensitive subjects—the subjects she was going to have to confront in any case—and it was because she could no longer bear the silence and the staring that she said at last,

“Have you heard from the Old Man?”

“No, I haven’t.”

The downward tone implied she didn’t want to, and wouldn’t care or reply if she did. Cecilia said, “Have you?”

“I had a scribbled note a couple of weeks ago.”

“Good.”

So there was no more to be said on that. After another pause, Briony tried again.

“What about from home?”

“No. I’m not in touch. And you?”

“She writes now and then.”

“And what’s her news, Briony?”

The question and the use of her name was sardonic. As she forced her memory back, she felt she was being exposed as a traitor to her sister’s cause.

“They’ve taken in evacuees and Betty hates them. The park’s been plowed up for corn.” She trailed away. It was inane to be standing there listing these details. But Cecilia said coldly, “Go on. What else?”

“Well, most of the lads in the village have joined the East Surreys, except for . . .”

“Except for Danny Hardman. Yes, I know all about that.” She smiled in a bright, artificial way, waiting for Briony to continue.

“They’ve built a pillbox by the post office, and they’ve taken up all the old railings. Um. Aunt Hermione’s living in Nice, and oh yes, Betty broke Uncle Clem’s vase.”

Only now was Cecilia roused from her coolness. She uncrossed her arms and pressed a hand against her cheek.

“Broke?”

“She dropped it on a step.”

“You mean properly broken, in lots of pieces?”

“Yes.”

Cecilia considered this. Finally she said, “That’s terrible.”

“Yes,” Briony said. “Poor Uncle Clem.” At least her sister was no longer derisive. The interrogation continued.

“Did they keep the pieces?”

“I don’t know. Emily said the Old Man shouted at Betty.”

At that moment, the door snapped open and the landlady stood right in front of Briony, so close to her that she could smell peppermint on the woman’s breath. She pointed at the front door.

“This isn’t a railway station. Either you’re in, young lady, or you’re out.”

Cecilia was getting to her feet without any particular hurry, and was retying the silk cord of her dressing gown. She said languidly, “This is my sister, Briony, Mrs. Jarvis. Try and remember your manners when you speak to her.”

“In my own home I’ll speak as I please,” Mrs. Jarvis said. She turned back to Briony. “Stay if you’re staying, otherwise leave now and close the door behind you.”

Briony looked at her sister, guessing that she was unlikely to let her go now. Mrs. Jarvis had turned out to be an unwitting ally. Cecilia spoke as though they were alone. “Don’t mind the landlady. I’m leaving at the end of the week. Close the door and come up.”

Watched by Mrs. Jarvis, Briony began to follow her sister up the stairs.

“And as for you, Lady Muck,” the landlady called up. But Cecilia turned sharply and cut her off. “Enough, Mrs. Jarvis. Now that’s quite enough.”

Briony recognized the tone. Pure Nightingale, for use on difficult patients or tearful students. It took years to perfect. Cecilia had surely been promoted to ward sister. On the first-floor landing, as she was about to open her door, she gave Briony a look, a cool glance to let her know that nothing had changed, nothing had softened. From the bathroom across the way, through its half-open door, drifted a humid scented air and a hollow dripping sound. Cecilia had been about to take a bath. She led Briony into her flat. Some of the tidiest nurses on the ward lived in stews in their own rooms, and she would not have been surprised to see a new version of Cecilia’s old chaos. But the impression here was of a simple and lonely life. A medium-sized room had been divided to make a narrow strip of a kitchen and, presumably, a bedroom next door. The walls were papered with a design of pale vertical strips, like a boy’s pajamas, which heightened the sense of confinement. The lino was irregular offcuts from downstairs, and in places, gray floorboards showed. Under the single sash window was a sink with one tap and a one-ring gas cooker. Against the wall, leaving little room to squeeze by, was a table covered with a yellow gingham cloth. On it was a jam jar of blue flowers, harebells perhaps, and a full ashtray, and a pile of books. At the bottom were Gray’s Anatomy and a collected Shakespeare, and above them, on slenderer spines, names in faded silver and gold—she saw Housman and Crabbe. By the books were two bottles of stout. In the corner furthest from the window was the door to the bedroom on which was tacked a map of northern Europe. Cecilia took a cigarette from a packet by the cooker, and then, remembering that her sister was no longer a child, offered one to her. There were two kitchen chairs by the table, but Cecilia, who leaned with her back to the sink, did not invite Briony to sit down. The two women smoked and waited, so it seemed to Briony, for the air to clear of the landlady’s presence. Cecilia said in a quiet level voice, “When I got your letter I went to see a solicitor. It’s not straightforward, unless there’s hard new evidence. Your change of heart won’t be enough. Lola will go on saying she doesn’t know. Our only hope was old Hardman and now he’s dead.”

“Hardman?” The contending elements—the fact of his death, his relevance to the case—confused Briony and she struggled with her memory. Was Hardman out that night looking for the twins? Did he see something? Was something said in court that she didn’t know about?

“Didn’t you know he was dead?”

“No. But . . .”

“Unbelievable.”

Cecilia’s attempts at a neutral, factual tone were coming apart. Agitated, she came away from the cooking area, squeezed past the table and went to the other end of the room and stood by the bedroom door. Her voice was breathy as she tried to control her anger.

“How odd that Emily didn’t include that in her news along with the corn and the evacuees. He had cancer. Perhaps with the fear of God in him he was saying something in his last days that was rather too inconvenient for everyone at this stage.”

“But Cee . . .”

She snapped, “Don’t call me that!” She repeated in a softer voice, “Please don’t call me that.” Her fingers were on the handle of the bedroom door and it looked like the interview was coming to an end. She was about to disappear. With an implausible display of calm, she summarized for Briony.

“What I paid two guineas to discover is this. There isn’t going to be an appeal just because five years on you’ve decided to tell the truth.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying . . .” Briony wanted to get back to Hardman, but Cecilia needed to tell her what must have gone through her head many times lately.

“It isn’t difficult. If you were lying then, why should a court believe you now? There are no new facts, and you’re an unreliable witness.”

Briony carried her half-smoked cigarette to the sink. She was feeling sick. She took a saucer for an ashtray from the plate rack. Her sister’s confirmation of her crime was terrible to hear. But the perspective was unfamiliar. Weak, stupid, confused, cowardly, evasive—she had hated herself for everything she had been, but she had never thought of herself as a liar. How strange, and how clear it must seem to Cecilia. It was obvious, and irrefutable. And yet, for a moment she even thought of defending herself. She hadn’t intended to mislead, she hadn’t acted out of malice. But who would believe that? She stood where Cecilia had stood, with her back to the sink and, unable to meet her sister’s eye, said, “What I did was terrible. I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said soothingly, and in the second or two during which she drew deeply on her cigarette, Briony flinched as her hopes lifted unreally. “Don’t worry,” her sister resumed. “I won’t ever forgive you.”

“And if I can’t go to court, that won’t stop me telling everyone what I did.”

As her sister gave a wild little laugh, Briony realized how frightened she was of Cecilia. Her derision was even harder to confront than her anger. This narrow room with its stripes like bars contained a history of feeling that no one could imagine. Briony pressed on. She was, after all, in a part of the conversation she had rehearsed.

“I’ll go to Surrey and speak to Emily and the Old Man. I’ll tell them everything.”

“Yes, you said that in your letter. What’s stopping you? You’ve had five years. Why haven’t you been?”

“I wanted to see you first.”

Cecilia came away from the bedroom door and stood by the table. She dropped her stub into the neck of a stout bottle. There was a brief hiss and a thin line of smoke rose from the black glass. Her sister’s action made Briony feel nauseous again. She had thought the bottles were full. She wondered if she had ingested something unclean with her breakfast. Cecilia said, “I know why you haven’t been. Because your guess is the same as mine. They don’t want to hear anything more about it. That unpleasantness is all in the past, thank you very much. What’s done is done. Why stir things up now? And you know very well they believed Hardman’s story.”

Briony came away from the sink and stood right across the table from her sister. It was not easy to look into that beautiful mask. She said very deliberately, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. What’s he got to do with this? I’m sorry he’s dead, I’m sorry I didn’t know . . .”

At a sound, she started. The bedroom door was opening and Robbie stood before them. He wore army trousers and shirt and polished boots, and his braces hung free at his waist. He was unshaven and tousled, and his gaze was on Cecilia only. She had turned to face him, but she did not go toward him. In the seconds during which they looked at each other in silence, Briony, partly obscured by her sister, shrank into her uniform. He spoke to Cecilia quietly, as though they were alone. “I heard voices and I guessed it was something to do with the hospital.”

“That’s all right.”

He looked at his watch. “Better get moving.”

As he crossed the room, just before he went out onto the landing, he made a brief nod in Briony’s direction. “Excuse me.”

They heard the bathroom door close. Into the silence Cecilia said, as if there were nothing between her and her sister, “He sleeps so deeply. I didn’t want to wake him.” Then she added, “I thought it would be better if you didn’t meet.”

Briony’s knees were actually beginning to tremble. Supporting herself with one hand on the table, she moved away from the kitchen area so that Cecilia could fill the kettle. Briony longed to sit down. She would not do so until invited, and she would never ask. So she stood by the wall, pretending not to lean against it, and watched her sister. What was surprising was the speed with which her relief that Robbie was alive was supplanted by her dread of confronting him. Now she had seen him walk across the room, the other possibility, that he could have been killed, seemed outlandish, against all the odds. It would have made no sense. She was staring at her sister’s back as she moved about the tiny kitchen. Briony wanted to tell her how wonderful it was that Robbie had come back safely. What deliverance. But how banal that would have sounded. And she had no business saying it. She feared her sister, and her scorn. Still feeling nauseous, and now hot, Briony pressed her cheek against the wall. It was no cooler than her face. She longed for a glass of water, but she did not want to ask her sister for anything. Briskly, Cecilia moved about her tasks, mixing milk and water to egg powder, and setting out a pot of jam and three plates and cups on the table. Briony registered this, but it gave her no comfort. It only increased her foreboding of the meeting that lay ahead. Did Cecilia really think that in this situation they could sit together and still have an appetite for scrambled eggs? Or was she soothing herself by being busy? Briony was listening out for footsteps on the landing, and it was to distract herself that she attempted a conversational tone. She had seen the cape hanging on the back of the door.

“Cecilia, are you a ward sister now?”

“Yes, I am.”

She said it with a downward finality, closing off the subject. Their shared profession was not going to be a bond. Nothing was, and there was nothing to talk about until Robbie came back. At last she heard the click of the lock on the bathroom door. He was whistling as he crossed the landing. Briony moved away from the door, further down toward the darker end of the room. But she was in his sight line as he came in. He had half raised his right hand in order to shake hers, and his left trailed, about to close the door behind him. If it was a double take, it was undramatic. As soon as their eyes met, his hands dropped to his sides and he gave a little winded sigh as he continued to look at her hard. However intimidated, she felt she could not look away. She smelled the faint perfume of his shaving soap. The shock was how much older he looked, especially round the eyes. Did everything have to be her fault? she wondered stupidly. Couldn’t it also be the war’s?

“So it was you,” he said finally. He pushed the door closed behind him with his foot. Cecilia had come to stand by his side and he looked at her. She gave an exact summary, but even if she had wanted, she would not have been able to withhold her sarcasm.

“Briony’s going to tell everybody the truth. She wanted to see me first.”

He turned back to Briony. “Did you think I might be here?”

Her immediate concern was not to cry. At that moment, nothing would have been more humiliating. Relief, shame, self-pity, she didn’t know which it was, but it was coming. The smooth wave rose, tightening her throat, making it impossible to speak, and then, as she held on, tensing her lips, it fell away and she was safe. No tears, but her voice was a miserable whisper.

“I didn’t know if you were alive.”

Cecilia said, “If we’re going to talk we should sit down.”

“I don’t know that I can.” He moved away impatiently to the adjacent wall, a distance of seven feet or so, and leaned against it, arms crossed, looking from Briony to Cecilia. Almost immediately he moved again, down the room to the bedroom door where he turned to come back, changed his mind and stood there, hands in pockets. He was a large man, and the room seemed to have shrunk. In the confined space he was desperate in his movements, as though suffocating. He took his hands from his pockets and smoothed the hair at the back of his neck. Then he rested his hands on his hips. Then he let them drop. It took all this time, all this movement, for Briony to realize that he was angry, very angry, and just as she did, he said,

“What are you doing here? Don’t talk to me about Surrey. No one’s stopping you going. Why are you here?”

She said, “I had to talk to Cecilia.”

“Oh yes. And what about?”

“The terrible thing that I did.”

Cecilia was going toward him. “Robbie,” she whispered. “Darling.” She put her hand on his arm, but he pulled it clear.

“I don’t know why you let her in.” Then to Briony, “I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m torn between breaking your stupid neck here and taking you outside and throwing you down the stairs.”

If it had not been for her recent experience, she would have been terrified. Sometimes she heard soldiers on the ward raging against their helplessness. At the height of their passion, it was foolish to reason with them or try to reassure them. It had to come out, and it was best to stand and listen. She knew that even offering to leave now could be provocative. So she faced Robbie and waited for the rest, her due. But she was not frightened of him, not physically. He did not raise his voice, though it was straining with contempt. “Have you any idea at all what it’s like inside?”

She imagined small high windows in a cliff face of brick, and thought perhaps she did, the way people imagined the different torments of hell. She shook her head faintly. To steady herself she was trying to concentrate on the details of his transformation. The impression of added height was due to his parade-ground posture. No Cambridge student ever stood so straight. Even in his distraction his shoulders were well back, and his chin was raised like an old-fashioned boxer’s.

“No, of course you don’t. And when I was inside, did that give you pleasure?”

“No.”

“But you did nothing.”

She had thought about this conversation many times, like a child anticipating a beating. Now it was happening at last, and it was as if she wasn’t quite here. She was watching from far away and she was numb. But she knew his words would hurt her later. Cecilia had stood back. Now she put her hand again on Robbie’s arm. He had lost weight, though he looked stronger, with a lean and stringy muscular ferocity. He half turned to her.

“Remember,” Cecilia was starting to say, but he spoke over her.

“Do you think I assaulted your cousin?”

“No.”

“Did you think it then?”

She fumbled her words. “Yes, yes and no. I wasn’t certain.”

“And what’s made you so certain now?”

She hesitated, conscious that in answering she would be offering a form of defense, a rationale, and that it might enrage him further.

“Growing up.”

He stared at her, lips slightly parted. He really had changed in five years. The hardness in his gaze was new, and the eyes were smaller and narrower, and in the corners were the firm prints of crow’s feet. His face was thinner than she remembered, the cheeks were sunken, like an Indian brave’s. He had grown a little toothbrush mustache in the military style. He was startlingly handsome, and there came back to her from years ago, when she was ten or eleven, the memory of a passion she’d had for him, a real crush that had lasted days. Then she confessed it to him one morning in the garden and immediately forgot about it. She had been right to be wary. He was gripped by the kind of anger that passes itself off as wonderment.

“Growing up,” he echoed. When he raised his voice she jumped. “Goddamnit! You’re eighteen. How much growing up do you need to do? There are soldiers dying in the field at eighteen. Old enough to be left to die on the roads. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

It was a pathetic source of comfort, that he could not know what she had seen. Strange, that for all her guilt, she should feel the need to withstand him. It was that, or be annihilated. She barely nodded. She did not dare speak. At the mention of dying, a surge of feeling had engulfed him, pushing him beyond anger into an extremity of bewilderment and disgust. His breathing was irregular and heavy, he clenched and unclenched his right fist. And still he stared at her, into her, with a rigidity, a savagery in his look. His eyes were bright, and he swallowed hard several times. The muscles in his throat tensed and knotted. He too was fighting off an emotion he did not want witnessed. She had learned the little she knew, the tiny, next-to-nothing scraps that came the way of a trainee nurse, in the safety of the ward and the bedside. She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving this turmoil. He took a step toward her and she shrank back, no longer certain of his harmlessness—if he couldn’t talk, he might have to act. Another step, and he could have reached her with his sinewy arm. But Cecilia slid between them. With her back to Briony, she faced Robbie and placed her hands on his shoulders. He turned his face away from her.

“Look at me,” she murmured. “Robbie. Look at me.”

The reply he made was lost to Briony. She heard his dissent or denial. Perhaps it was an obscenity. As Cecilia gripped him tighter, he twisted his whole body away from her, and they seemed like wrestlers as she reached up and tried to turn his head toward her. But his face was tilted back, his lips retracted and teeth bared in a ghoulish parody of a smile. Now with two hands she was gripping his cheeks tightly, and with an effort she turned his face and drew it toward her own. At last he was looking into her eyes, but still she kept her grip on his cheeks. She pulled him closer, drawing him into her gaze, until their faces met and she kissed him lightly, lingeringly on the lips. With a tenderness that Briony remembered from years ago, waking in the night, Cecilia said, “Come back . . . Robbie, come back.”

He nodded faintly, and took a deep breath which he released slowly as she relaxed her grip and withdrew her hands from his face. In the silence, the room appeared to shrink even smaller. He put his arms around her, lowered his head and kissed her, a deep, sustained and private kiss. Briony moved away quietly to the other end of the room, toward the window. While she drank a glass of water from the kitchen tap, the kiss continued, binding the couple into their solitude. She felt obliterated, expunged from the room, and was relieved. She turned her back and looked out at the quiet terraced houses in full sunlight, at the way she had come from the High Street. She was surprised to discover that she had no wish to leave yet, even though she was embarrassed by the long kiss, and dreaded what more there was to come. She watched an old woman dressed in a heavy overcoat, despite the heat. She was on the far pavement walking an ailing swag-bellied dachshund on a lead. Cecilia and Robbie were talking in low voices now, and Briony decided that to respect their privacy she would not turn from the window until she was spoken to. It was soothing to watch the woman unfasten her front gate, close it carefully behind her with fussy exactitude, and then, halfway to her front door, bend with difficulty to pull up a weed from the narrow bed that ran the length of her front path. As she did so, the dog waddled forward and licked her wrist. The lady and her dog went indoors, and the street was empty again. A blackbird dropped down onto a privet hedge and, finding no satisfactory foothold, flew away. The shadow of a cloud came and swiftly dimmed the light, and passed on. It could be any Saturday afternoon. There was little evidence of a war in this suburban street. A glimpse of blackout blinds in a window across the way, the Ford 8 on its blocks, perhaps. Briony heard her sister say her name and turned round.

“There isn’t much time. Robbie has to report for duty at six tonight and he’s got a train to catch. So sit down. There are some things you’re going to do for us.”

It was the ward sister’s voice. Not even bossy. She simply described the inevitable. Briony took the chair nearest her, Robbie brought over a stool, and Cecilia sat between them. The breakfast she had prepared was forgotten. The three empty cups stood in the center of the table. He lifted the pile of books to the floor. As Cecilia moved the jam jar of harebells to one side where it could not be knocked over, she exchanged a look with Robbie. He was staring at the flowers as he cleared his throat. When he began to speak, his voice was purged of emotion. He could have been reading from a set of standing orders. He was looking at her now. His eyes were steady, and he had everything under control. But there were drops of sweat on his forehead, above his eyebrows.

“The most important thing you’ve already agreed to. You’re to go to your parents as soon as you can and tell them everything they need to know to be convinced that your evidence was false. When’s your day off?”

“Sunday week.”

“That’s when you’ll go. You’ll take our addresses and you’ll tell Jack and Emily that Cecilia is waiting to hear from them. The second thing you’ll do tomorrow. Cecilia says you’ll have an hour at some point. You’ll go to a solicitor, a commissioner for oaths, and make a statement which will be signed and witnessed. In it you’ll say what you did wrong, and how you’re retracting your evidence. You’ll send copies to both of us. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll write to me in much greater detail. In this letter you’ll put in absolutely everything you think is relevant. Everything that led up to you saying you saw me by the lake. And why, even though you were uncertain, you stuck to your story in the months leading up to my trial. If there were pressures on you, from the police or your parents, I want to know. Have you got that? It needs to be a long letter.”

“Yes.”

He met Cecilia’s look and nodded. “And if you can remember anything at all about Danny Hardman, where he was, what he was doing, at what time, who else saw him—anything that might put his alibi in question, then we want to hear it.”

Cecilia was writing out the addresses. Briony was shaking her head and starting to speak, but Robbie ignored her and spoke over her. He had got to his feet and was looking at his watch.

“There’s very little time. We’re going to walk you to the tube. Cecilia and I want the last hour together alone before I have to leave. And you’ll need to spend the rest of today writing your statement, and letting your parents know you’re coming. And you could start thinking about this letter you’re sending me.”

With this brittle précis of her obligations he left the table and went toward the bedroom. Briony stood too and said, “Old Hardman was probably telling the truth. Danny was with him all that night.”

Cecilia was about to pass the folded sheet of paper she had been writing on. Robbie had stopped in the bedroom doorway. Cecilia said, “What do you mean by that? What are you saying?”

“It was Paul Marshall.”

During the silence that followed, Briony tried to imagine the adjustments that each would be making. Years of seeing it a certain way. And yet, however startling, it was only a detail. Nothing essential was changed by it. Nothing in her own role. Robbie came back to the table. “Marshall?”

“Yes.”

“You saw him?”

“I saw a man his height.”

“My height.”

“Yes.”

Cecilia now stood and looked around her—a hunt for the cigarettes was about to start. Robbie found them and tossed the packet across the room. Cecilia lit up and said as she exhaled, “I find it difficult to believe. He’s a fool, I know . . .”

“He’s a greedy fool,” Robbie said. “But I can’t imagine him with Lola Quincey, even for the five minutes it took . . .”

Given all that had happened, and all its terrible consequences, it was frivolous, she knew, but Briony took calm pleasure in delivering her clinching news.

“I’ve just come from their wedding.”

Again, the amazed adjustments, the incredulous repetition. Wedding? This morning? Clapham? Then reflective silence, broken by single remarks.

“I want to find him.”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

“I want to kill him.”

And then, “It’s time to go.”

There was so much more that could have been said. But they seemed exhausted, by her presence, or by the subject. Or they simply longed to be alone. Either way, it was clear they felt their meeting was at an end. All curiosity was spent. Everything could wait until she wrote her letter. Robbie fetched his jacket and cap from the bedroom. Briony noted the corporal’s single stripe. Cecilia was saying to him, “He’s immune. She’ll always cover for him.”

Minutes were lost while she searched for her ration book. Finally, she gave up and said to Robbie, “I’m sure it’s in Wiltshire, in the cottage.”

As they were about to leave, and he was holding the door open for the sisters, Robbie said, “I suppose we owe an apology to Able Seaman Hardman.”

Downstairs, Mrs. Jarvis did not appear from her sitting room as they went by. They heard clarinets playing on her wireless. Once through the front door, it seemed to Briony that she was stepping into another day. There was a strong, gritty breeze blowing, and the street was in harsh relief, with even more sunlight, fewer shadows than before. There was not enough room on the pavement to go three abreast. Robbie and Cecilia walked behind her, hand in hand. Briony felt her blistered heel rubbing against her shoe, but she was determined they should not see her limp. She had the impression of being seen off the premises. At one point she turned and told them she would be happy to walk to the tube on her own. But they insisted. They had purchases to make for Robbie’s journey. They walked on in silence. Small talk was not an option. 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. Nor could she ask when the two of them would see each other again. Together, she and her sister and Robbie had only one subject, and it was fixed in the unchangeable past. They stood outside Balham tube station, which in three months’ time would achieve its terrible form of fame in the Blitz. A thin stream of Saturday shoppers moved around them, causing them, against their will, to stand closer. They made a cool farewell. Robbie reminded her to have money with her when she saw the commissioner for oaths. Cecilia told her she was not to forget to take the addresses with her to Surrey. Then it was over. They stared at her, waiting for her to leave. But there was one thing she had not said. She spoke slowly. “I’m very very sorry. I’ve caused you such terrible distress.” They continued to stare at her, and she repeated herself. “I’m very sorry.”

It sounded so foolish and inadequate, as though she had knocked over a favorite houseplant, or forgotten a birthday. Robbie said softly, “Just do all the things we’ve asked.”

It was almost conciliatory, that “just,” but not quite, not yet. She said, “Of course,” and then turned and walked away, conscious of them watching her as she entered the ticket hall and crossed it. She paid her fare to Waterloo. When she reached the barrier, she looked back and they had gone. She showed her ticket and went through into the dirty yellow light, to the head of the clanking, creaking escalator, and it began to take her down, into the man-made breeze rising from the blackness, the breath of a million Londoners cooling her face and tugging at her cape. She stood still and let herself be carried down, grateful to be moving without scouring her heel. She was surprised at how serene she felt, and just a little sad. Was it disappointment? She had hardly expected to be forgiven. What she felt was more like homesickness, though there was no source for it, no home. But she was sad to leave her sister. It was her sister she missed—or more precisely, it was her sister with Robbie. Their love. Neither Briony nor the war had destroyed it. This was what soothed her as she sank deeper under the city. How Cecilia had drawn him to her with her eyes. That tenderness in her voice when she called him back from his memories, from Dunkirk, or from the roads that led to it. She used to speak like that to her sometimes, when Cecilia was sixteen and she was a child of six and things went impossibly wrong. Or in the night, when Cecilia came to rescue her from a nightmare and take her into her own bed. Those were the words she used. Come back. It was only a bad dream. Briony, come back. How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten. She was gliding down now, through the soupy brown light, almost to the bottom. There were no other passengers in sight, and the air was suddenly still. She was calm as she considered what she had to do. Together, the note to her parents and the formal statement would take no time at all. Then she would be free for the rest of the day. She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin. BT

LONDON, 1999

WHAT A STRANGE time this has been. Today, on the morning of my seventy-seventh birthday, I decided to make one last visit to the Imperial War Museum library in Lambeth. It suited my peculiar state of mind. The reading room, housed right up in the dome of the building, was formerly the chapel of the Royal Bethlehem Hospital—the old Bedlam. Where the unhinged once came to offer their prayers, scholars now gather to research the collective insanity of war. The car the family was sending was not due until after lunch, so I thought I would distract myself, checking final details, and saying my farewells to the Keeper of Documents, and to the cheerful porters who have been escorting me up and down in the lift during these wintry weeks. I also intended to donate to the archives my dozen long letters from old Mr. Nettle. It was a birthday present to myself, I suppose, to pass an hour or two in a half-pretense of seeming busy, fussing about with those little tasks of housekeeping that come at the end, and are part of the reluctant process of letting go. In the same mood, I was busy in my study yesterday afternoon; now the drafts are in order and dated, the photocopied sources labeled, the borrowed books ready for return, and everything is in the right box file. I’ve always liked to make a tidy finish. It was too cold and wet, and I was feeling too troubled to go by public transport. I took a taxi from Regent’s Park, and in the long crawl through central London I thought of those sad inmates of Bedlam who were once a source of general entertainment, and I reflected in a self-pitying way on how I was soon to join their ranks. The results of my scan have come through and I went to see my doctor about them yesterday morning. It was not good news. This was the way he put it as soon as I sat down. My headaches, the sensation of tightness around the temples, have a particular and sinister cause. He pointed out some granular smears across a section of the scan. I noticed how the pencil tip quivered in his hand, and I wondered if he too was suffering some neural disorder. In the spirit of shoot the messenger, I rather hoped he was. I was experiencing, he said, a series of tiny, nearly imperceptible strokes. The process will be slow, but my brain, my mind, is closing down. The little failures of memory that dog us all beyond a certain point will become more noticeable, more debilitating, until the time will come when I won’t notice them because I will have lost the ability to comprehend anything at all. The days of the week, the events of the morning, or even ten minutes ago, will be beyond my reach. My phone number, my address, my name and what I did with my life will be gone. In two, three or four years’ time, I will not recognize my remaining oldest friends, and when I wake in the morning, I will not recognize that I am in my own room. And soon I won’t be, because I will need continuous care. I have vascular dementia, the doctor told me, and there was some comfort to be had. There’s the slowness of the undoing, which he must have mentioned a dozen times. Also, it’s not as bad as Alzheimer’s, with its mood swings and aggression. If I’m lucky, it might turn out to be somewhat benign. I might not be unhappy—just a dim old biddy in a chair, knowing nothing, expecting nothing. I had asked him to be frank, so I could not complain. Now he was hurrying me out. There were twelve people in his waiting room wanting their turn. In summary, as he helped me into my coat, he gave me the route map: loss of memory, short- and long-term, the disappearance of single words—simple nouns might be the first to go—then language itself, along with balance, and soon after, all motor control, and finally the autonomous nervous system. Bon voyage! I wasn’t distressed, not at first. On the contrary, I was elated and urgently wanted to tell my closest friends. I spent an hour on the phone breaking my news. Perhaps I was already losing my grip. It seemed so momentous. All afternoon I pottered about in my study with my housekeeping chores, and by the time I finished, there were six new box files on the shelves. Stella and John came over in the evening and we ordered in some Chinese food. Between them they drank two bottles of Morgon. I drank green tea. My charming friends were devastated by my description of my future. They’re both in their sixties, old enough to start fooling themselves that seventy-seven is still young. Today, in the taxi, as I crossed London at walking pace in the freezing rain, I thought of little else. I’m going mad, I told myself. Let me not be mad. But I couldn’t really believe it. Perhaps I was nothing more than a victim of modern diagnostics; in another century it would have been said of me that I was old and therefore losing my mind. What else would I expect? I’m only dying then, I’m fading into unknowing. My taxi was cutting through the back streets of Bloomsbury, past the house where my father lived after his second marriage, and past the basement flat where I lived and worked all through the fifties. Beyond a certain age, a journey across the city becomes uncomfortably reflective. The addresses of the dead pile up. We crossed the square where Leon heroically nursed his wife, and then raised his boisterous children with a devotion that amazed us all. One day I too will prompt a moment’s reflection in the passenger of a passing cab. It’s a popular shortcut, the Inner Circle of Regent’s Park. We crossed the river at Waterloo Bridge. I sat forward on the edge of my seat to take in my favorite view of the city, and as I turned my neck, downstream to St. Paul’s, upstream to Big Ben, the full panoply of tourist London in between, I felt myself to be physically well and mentally intact, give or take the headaches and a little tiredness. However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve always been. Hard to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we’re not a separate tribe. In the next year or two, however, I will be losing my claim to this familiar protestation. The seriously ill, the deranged, are another race, an inferior race. I won’t let anyone persuade me otherwise. My cabbie was cursing. Over the river, roadworks were forcing us on a detour toward the old County Hall. As we swung off the roundabout there, toward Lambeth, I had a glimpse of St. Thomas’s Hospital. It took a clobbering in the Blitz—I wasn’t there, thank God—and the replacement buildings and the tower block are a national disgrace. I worked in three hospitals in the duration—Alder Hey and the Royal East Sussex as well as St. Thomas’s—and I merged them in my description to concentrate all my experiences into one place. A convenient distortion, and the least of my offenses against veracity. It was raining less heavily as the driver made a neat U-turn in the middle of the road to bring us outside the main gates of the museum. With the business of gathering up my bag, finding a twenty-pound note and unfolding my umbrella, I did not notice the car parked immediately in front until my cab pulled away. It was a black Rolls. For a moment I thought it was unattended. In fact, the chauffeur was a diminutive fellow almost lost behind the front wheel. I’m not sure that what I am about to describe really rates as a startling coincidence. I occasionally think of the Marshalls whenever I see a parked Rolls without a driver. It’s become a habit over the years. They often pass through my mind, usually without generating any particular feeling. I’ve grown used to the idea of them. They still appear in the newspapers occasionally, in connection with their Foundation and all its good work for medical research, or the collection they’ve donated to the Tate, or their generous funding of agricultural projects in sub-Saharan Africa. And her parties, and their vigorous libel actions against national newspapers. It was not remarkable that Lord and Lady Marshall passed through my thoughts as I approached those massive twin guns in front of the museum, but it was a shock to see them coming down the steps toward me. A posse of officials—I recognized the museum’s director—and a single photographer made up a farewell party. Two young men held umbrellas over the Marshalls’ heads as they descended the steps by the columns. I held back, slowing my pace rather than stopping and drawing attention to myself. There was a round of handshakes, and a chorus of genial laughter at something Lord Marshall said. He leaned on a walking stick, the lacquered cane that I think has become something of a trademark. He and his wife and the director posed for the camera, then the Marshalls came away, accompanied by the suited young men with the umbrellas. The museum officials remained on the steps. My concern was to see which way the Marshalls would go so that I could avoid a head-on encounter. They chose to pass the guns on their left, so I did the same. Concealed partly by the raised barrels and their concrete emplacements, partly by my tilted umbrella, I kept hidden, but still managed a good look. They went by in silence. He was familiar from his photographs. Despite the liver spots and the purplish swags under his eyes, he at last appeared the cruelly handsome plutocrat, though somewhat reduced. Age had shrunk his face and delivered the look he had always fallen short of by a fraction. It was his jaw that had scaled itself down—bone loss had been kind. He was a little doddery and flat-footed, but he walked reasonably well for a man of eighty-eight. One becomes a judge of these things. But his hand was firmly on her arm and the stick was not just for show. It has often been remarked upon, how much good he did in the world. Perhaps he’s spent a lifetime making amends. Or perhaps he just swept onward without a thought, to live the life that was always his. As for Lola—my high-living, chain-smoking cousin—here she was, still as lean and fit as a racing dog, and still faithful. Who would have dreamed it? This, as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered. That may sound sour, but it went through my mind as I glanced across at her. She wore a sable coat and a scarlet wide-brimmed fedora. Bold rather than vulgar. Near on eighty years old, and still wearing high heels. They clicked on the pavement with the sound of a younger woman’s stride. There was no sign of a cigarette. In fact, there was an air of the health farm about her, and an indoor tan. She was taller than her husband now, and there was no doubting her vigor. But there was also something comic about her—or was I clutching at straws? She was heavy on the makeup, quite garish around the mouth and liberal with the smoothing cream and powder. I’ve always been a puritan in this, so I count myself an unreliable witness. I thought there was a touch of the stage villain here—the gaunt figure, the black coat, the lurid lips. A cigarette holder, a lapdog tucked under one arm and she could have been Cruella De Vil. We passed by each other in a matter of seconds. I went on up the steps, then stopped under the pediment, out of the rain, to watch the group make its way to the car. He was helped in first, and I saw then how frail he was. He couldn’t bend at the waist, nor could he take his own weight on one foot. They had to lift him into his seat. The far door was held open for Lady Lola who folded herself in with a terrible agility. I watched the Rolls pull away into the traffic, then I went in. Seeing them laid something heavy on my heart, and I was trying not to think about it, or feel it now. I already had enough to deal with today. But Lola’s health was on my mind as I gave my bag in at the cloakroom, and exchanged cheery good mornings with the porters. The rule here is that one must be escorted up to the reading room in a lift, whose cramped space makes small talk compulsory as far as I’m concerned. As I made it—shocking weather, but improvements were due by the weekend—I couldn’t resist thinking about my encounter outside in the fundamental terms of health: I might outlive Paul Marshall, but Lola would certainly outlive me. The consequences of this are clear. The issue has been with us for years. As my editor put it once, publication equals litigation. But I could hardly face that now. There was already enough that I didn’t want to be thinking about. I had come here to be busy. I spent a while chatting with the Keeper of Documents. I handed over the bundle of letters Mr. Nettle wrote me about Dunkirk—most gratefully received. They’ll be stored with all the others I’ve given. The Keeper had found me an obliging old colonel of the Buffs, something of an amateur historian himself, who had read the relevant pages of my typescript and faxed through his suggestions. His notes were handed to me now—irascible, helpful. I was completely absorbed by them, thank God.

“Absolutely no [underlined twice] soldier serving with the British army would say ‘On the double.’ Only an American would give such an order. The correct term is ‘At the double.’”

I love these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction.

“No one would ever think of saying ‘twenty-five-pound guns.’ The term was either ‘twenty-five pounders’ or ‘twenty-five-pounder guns.’ Your usage would sound distinctly bizarre, even to a man who was not with the Royal Artillery.”

Like policemen in a search team, we go on hands and knees and crawl our way toward the truth.

“You have your RAF chappie wearing a beret. I really don’t think so. Outside the Tank Corps, even the army didn’t have them in 1940. I think you’d better give the man a forage cap.”

Finally, the colonel, who began his letter by addressing me as “Miss Tallis,” allowed some impatience with my sex to show through. What was our kind doing anyway, meddling in these affairs?

“Madame [underlined three times]—a Stuka does not carry ‘a single thousand-ton bomb.’ Are you aware that a navy frigate hardly weighs that much? I suggest you look into the matter further.”

Merely a typo. I meant to type “pound.” I made a note of these corrections, and wrote a letter of thanks to the colonel. I paid for some photocopies of documents which I arranged into orderly piles for my own archives. I returned the books I had been using to the front desk, and threw away various scraps of paper. The work space was cleared of all traces of me. As I said my goodbyes to the Keeper, I learned that the Marshall Foundation was about to make a grant to the museum. After a round of handshaking with the other librarians, and my promise to acknowledge the department’s help, a porter was called to see me down. Very kindly, the girl in the cloakroom called a taxi, and one of the younger members of the door staff carried my bag all the way out to the pavement. During the ride back north, I thought about the colonel’s letter, or rather, about my own pleasure in these trivial alterations. If I really cared so much about facts, I should have written a different kind of book. But my work was done. There would be no further drafts. These were the thoughts I had as we entered the old tram tunnel under the Aldwych, just before I fell asleep. When I was woken by the driver, the cab was outside my flat in Regent’s Park. I filed away the papers I had brought from the library, made a sandwich, then packed an overnight case. I was conscious as I moved about my flat, from one familiar room to another, that the years of my independence could soon be over. On my desk was a framed photograph of my husband, Thierry, taken in Marseille two years before he died. One day I would be asking who he was. I soothed myself by spending time choosing a dress to wear for my birthday dinner. The process was actually rejuvenating. I’m thinner than I was a year ago. As I trailed my fingers along the racks I forgot about the diagnosis for minutes on end. I decided on a shirtwaisted cashmere dress in dove gray. Everything followed easily then: a white satin scarf held by Emily’s cameo brooch, patent court shoes—low-heeled, of course—a black dévoré shawl. I closed the case and was surprised by how light it seemed as I carried it into the hallway. My secretary would be coming in tomorrow, before I returned. I left her a note, setting out the work I wanted her to do, then I took a book and a cup of tea and sat in an armchair at a window with a view over the park. I’ve always been good at not thinking about the things that are really troubling me. But I was not able to read. I felt excited. A journey into the country, a dinner in my honor, a renewal of family bonds. And yet I’d had one of those classic conversations with a doctor. I should have been depressed. Was it possible that I was, in the modern term, in denial? Thinking this changed nothing. The car was not due for another half hour and I was restless. I got out of the chair, and went up and down the room a few times. My knees hurt if I sit too long. I was haunted by the thought of Lola, the severity of that gaunt old painted face, her boldness of stride in the perilous high heels, her vitality, ducking into the Rolls. Was I competing with her as I trod the carpet between the fireplace and the Chesterfield? I always thought the high life, the cigarettes, would see her off. Even in our fifties I thought that. But at eighty she has a voracious, knowing look. She was always the superior older girl, one step ahead of me. But in that final important matter, I will be ahead of her, while she’ll live on to be a hundred. I will not be able to publish in my lifetime. The Rolls must have turned my head, because the car when it came—fifteen minutes late—was a disappointment. Such things do not usually trouble me. It was a dusty minicab, whose rear seat was covered in nylon fur with a zebra pattern. But the driver, Michael, was a cheerful West Indian lad who took my case and made a fuss of sliding the front passenger seat forward for me. Once it was established that I would not tolerate the thumping music at any volume from the speakers on the ledge behind my head, and he had recovered from a little sulkiness, we got along well and talked about families. He had never known his father, and his mother was a doctor at the Middlesex Hospital. He himself graduated in law from Leicester University, and now he was going to the LSE to write a doctoral thesis on law and poverty in the third world. As we headed out of London by the dismal Westway, he gave me his condensed version: no property law, therefore no capital, therefore no wealth.

“There’s a lawyer talking,” I said. “Drumming up business for yourself.”

He laughed politely, though he must have thought me profoundly stupid. It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual. After twenty minutes we had spoken enough, and as the car reached a motorway and the engine settled into an unvarying drone, I fell asleep again and when I woke we were on a country road, and a painful tightness was around my forehead. I took from my handbag three aspirins which I chewed and swallowed with distaste. Which portion of my mind, of my memory, had I lost to a minuscule stroke while I was asleep? I would never know. It was then, in the back of that tinny little car, that I experienced for the first time something like desperation. Panic would be too strong a word. Claustrophobia was part of it, helpless confinement within a process of decay, and a sensation of shrinking. I tapped Michael’s shoulder and asked him to turn on his music. He assumed I was indulging him because we were close to our destination, and he refused. But I insisted, and so the thumping twangy bass noise resumed, and over it, a light baritone chanting in Caribbean patois to the rhythms of a nursery rhyme, or a playground skipping-rope jingle. It helped me. It amused me. It sounded so childish, though I had a suspicion that some terrible sentiments were being expressed. I didn’t ask for a translation. The music was still playing as we turned into the drive of Tilney’s Hotel. More than twenty-five years had passed since I came this way, for Emily’s funeral. I noticed first the absence of parkland trees, the giant elms lost to disease I supposed, and the remaining oaks cleared to make way for a golf course. We were slowing now to let some golfers and their caddies cross. I couldn’t help thinking of them as trespassers. The woods that surrounded Grace Turner’s old bungalow were still there, and as the drive cleared a last stand of beeches, the main house came into view. There was no need to be nostalgic—it was always an ugly place. But from a distance it had a stark and unprotected look. The ivy which used to soften the effect of that bright red façade had been stripped away, perhaps to preserve the brickwork. Soon we were approaching the first bridge, and already I could see that the lake was no longer there. On the bridge we were suspended above an area of perfect lawn, such as you sometimes see in an old moat. It was not unpleasant in itself, if you did not know what had once been there—the sedge, the ducks, and the giant carp that two tramps had roasted and feasted on by the island temple. Which had also gone. Where it stood was a wooden bench, and a litter basket. The island, which of course was no longer that, was a long mound of smooth grass, like an immense ancient barrow, where rhododendrons and other shrubbery were growing. There was a gravel path looping round, with more benches here and there, and spherical garden lights. I did not have time to try and estimate the spot where I once sat and comforted the young Lady Lola Marshall, for we were already crossing the second bridge and then slowing to turn into the asphalted car park that ran the length of the house. Michael carried my case into the reception area in the old hall. How odd that they should have taken the trouble to lay needlecord carpet over those black and white tiles. I supposed that the acoustic was always troublesome, though I never minded it. A Vivaldi Season was burbling through concealed speakers. There was a decent rosewood desk with a computer screen and a vase of flowers, and standing guard on each side were two suits of armor; mounted on the paneling, crossed halberds and a coat of arms; above them, the portrait that used to be in the dining room which my grandfather imported to give the family some lineage. I tipped Michael and earnestly wished him luck with property rights and poverty. I was trying to unsay my foolish remark about lawyers. He wished me happy birthday and shook my hand—how feathery and unassertive his grip was—and left. From behind the desk a grave-faced girl in a business suit gave me my key and told me that the old library had been booked for the exclusive use of our party. The few who had already arrived had gone out for a stroll. The plan was to gather for drinks at six. A porter would bring my case up. There was a lift for my convenience. No one to greet me then, but I was relieved. I preferred to take it in alone, the interest of so much change, before I was obliged to become the guest of honor. I took the lift to the second floor, went through a set of glass fire doors, and walked along the corridor whose polished boards creaked in a familiar way. It was bizarre, to see the bedrooms numbered and locked. Of course, my room number—seven—told me nothing, but I think I’d already guessed where I would be sleeping. At least, when I stopped outside the door, I wasn’t surprised. Not my old room, but Auntie Venus’s, always considered to have the best view in the house, over the lake, the driveway, the woods and the hills beyond. Charles, Pierrot’s grandson and the organizing spirit, would have reserved it for me. It was a pleasant surprise, stepping in. Rooms on either side had been incorporated to make a grand suite. On a low glass table stood a giant spray of hothouse flowers. The huge high bed Auntie Venus had occupied for so long without complaint had gone, and so had the carved trousseau chest and the green silk sofa. They were now the property of the eldest son by Leon’s second marriage and installed in a castle somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. But the new furnishings were fine, and I liked my room. My case arrived, I ordered a pot of tea and hung my dress. I explored my sitting room which had a writing desk and a good lamp, and was impressed by the vastness of the bathroom with its potpourri and stacks of towels on a heated rack. It was a relief not to see everything in terms of tasteless decline—it easily becomes a habit of age. I stood at the window to admire the sunlight slanting over the golf course, and burnishing the bare trees on the distant hills. I could not quite accept the absence of the lake, but it could be restored one day perhaps, and the building itself surely embraced more human happiness now, as a hotel, than it did when I lived here. Charles phoned an hour later, just as I was beginning to think about getting dressed. He suggested that he come to get me at six-fifteen, after everyone else was gathered, and bring me down so that I could make an entrance. And so it was that I entered that enormous L-shaped room, on his arm, in my cashmere finery, to the applause, and then the raised glasses of fifty relatives. My immediate impression as I came in was of recognizing no one. Not a familiar face! I wondered if this was a foretaste of the incomprehension I had been promised. Then slowly people came into focus. One must make allowances for the years, and the speed with which babes-in-arms become boisterous ten-year-olds. There was no mistaking my brother, curled and slumped to one side in his wheelchair, a napkin at his throat to catch the spills of champagne that someone held to his lips. As I leaned over to kiss Leon, he managed a smile in the half of his face still under his control. And nor did I mistake for long Pierrot, much shriveled and with a shining pate I wanted to put my hand on, but still twinkly as ever and very much the paterfamilias. It’s accepted that we never mention his sister. I made a progress round the room, with Charles at my side, prompting me with the names. How delightful to be at the heart of such a good-willed reunion. I reacquainted myself with the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Jackson who died fifteen years ago. In fact, between them the twins had fairly peopled the room. And Leon had not done so badly either, with his four marriages and dedicated fathering. We ranged in age from three months to his eighty-nine years. And what a din of voices, from gruff to shrill, as the waiters came round with more champagne and lemonade. The aging children of distant cousins greeted me like long-lost friends. Every second person wanted to tell me something kind about my books. A group of enchanting teenagers told me how they were studying my books at school. I promised to read the typescript novel of someone’s absent son. Notes and cards were pressed into my hands. Piled on a table in the corner of the room were presents which I would have to open, several children told me, before, not after, their bedtime. I made my promises, I shook hands, kissed cheeks and lips, admired and tickled babies, and just as I was beginning to think how much I wanted to sit down somewhere, I noticed that chairs were being set out, facing one way. Then Charles clapped his hands and, shouting over the noise that barely subsided, announced that before dinner there was to be an entertainment in my honor. Would we all take our seats. I was led to an armchair in the front row. Next to me was old Pierrot, who was in conversation with a cousin on his left. A fidgety near-silence descended on the room. From a corner came the agitated whispers of children, which I thought it tactful to ignore. While we waited, while I had, as it were, some seconds to myself, I looked about me, and only now properly absorbed the fact that all the books were gone from the library, and all the shelves too. That was why the room had seemed so much bigger than I remembered. The only reading matter was the country magazines in racks by the fireplace. At the sound of shushing, and the scrape of a chair, there stood before us a boy with a black cloak over his shoulders. He was pale, freckled and ginger-haired—no mistaking a Quincey child. I guessed him to be about nine or ten years old. His body was frail, which made his head seem large and gave him an ethereal look. But he looked confident as he gazed around the room, waiting for his audience to settle. Then at last he raised his elfin chin, filled his lungs, and spoke out in a clear pure treble. I’d been expecting a magic trick, but what I heard had the ring of the supernatural.

This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow. It grieved her parents to see their firstborn Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne Without permission, to get ill and find indigence Until she was down to her last sixpence.

Suddenly, she was right there before me, that busy, priggish, conceited little girl, and she was not dead either, for when people tittered appreciatively at “evanesce” my feeble heart—ridiculous vanity!—made a little leap. The boy recited with a thrilling clarity, and a jarring touch of what my generation would call Cockney, though I have no idea these days what the significance is of a glottal t. I knew the words were mine, but I barely remembered them, and it was hard to concentrate, with so many questions, so much feeling, crowding in. Where had they found the copy, and was this unearthly confidence a symptom of a different age? I glanced at my neighbor, Pierrot. He had his handkerchief out and was dabbing at his eyes, and I don’t think it was only great-grandfatherly pride. I also suspected that this was all his idea. The prologue rose to its reasonable climax:

For that fortuitous girl the sweet day dawned To wed her gorgeous prince. But be warned, Because Arabella almost learned too late, That before we love, we must cogitate!

We made a rowdy applause. There was even some vulgar whistling. That dictionary, that Oxford Concise. Where was it now? Northwest Scotland? I wanted it back. The boy made a bow and retreated a couple of yards and was joined by four other children who had come up, unnoticed by me, and were waiting in what would have been the wings. And so The Trials of Arabella began, with a leave-taking from the anxious, saddened parents. I recognized the heroine immediately as Leon’s great-granddaughter, Chloe. What a lovely solemn girl she is, with her rich low voice and her mother’s Spanish blood. I remember being at her first birthday party, and it seemed only months ago. I watched her fall convincingly into poverty and despair, once abandoned by the wicked count—who was the prologue speaker in his black cloak. In less than ten minutes it was over. In memory, distorted by a child’s sense of time, it had always seemed the length of a Shakespeare play. I had completely forgotten that after the wedding ceremony Arabella and the medical prince link arms and, speaking in unison, step forward to address to the audience a final couplet.

Here’s the beginning of love at the end of our travail. So farewell, kind friends, as into the sunset we sail!

Not my best, I thought. But the whole room, except for Leon, Pierrot and myself, rose for the applause. How practiced these children were, right down to the curtain call. Hand in hand, they stood in line abreast, taking their cue from Chloe, stepped back two paces, came forward, bowed again. In the uproar, no one noticed that poor Pierrot was completely overcome and put his face in his hands. Was he reliving that lonely, terrifying time here after his parents’ divorce? They’d so much wanted to be in the play, the twins, for that evening in the library, and here it was at last, sixty-four years late, and his brother long dead. I was helped out of my comfortable chair and made a little speech of thanks. Competing with a wailing baby at the back of the room, I tried to evoke that hot summer of 1935, when the cousins came down from the north. I turned to the cast and told them that our production would have been no match for theirs. Pierrot was nodding emphatically. I explained that it was entirely my fault the rehearsals fell apart, because halfway through I had decided to become a novelist. There was indulgent laughter, more applause, then Charles announced that it was dinner. And so the pleasant evening unraveled—the noisy meal at which I even drank a little wine, the presents, bedtime for the younger children, while their bigger brothers and sisters went off to watch television. Then speeches over coffee and much good-natured laughter, and by ten o’clock I was beginning to think of my splendid room upstairs, not because I was tired, but because I was tired of being in company and the object of so much attention, however kindly. Another half hour passed in good nights and farewells before Charles and his wife Annie escorted me to my room. Now it is five in the morning and I am still at the writing desk, thinking over my strange two days. It’s true about the old not needing sleep—at least, not in the night. I still have so much to consider, and soon, within the year perhaps, I’ll have far less of a mind to do it with. I’ve been thinking about my last novel, the one that should have been my first. The earliest version, January 1940, the latest, March 1999, and in between, half a dozen different drafts. The second draft, June 1947, the third . . . who cares to know? My fifty-nine-year assignment is over. There was our crime—Lola’s, Marshall’s, mine—and from the second version onward, I set out to describe it. I’ve regarded it as my duty to disguise nothing—the names, the places, the exact circumstances—I put it all there as a matter of historical record. But as a matter of legal reality, so various editors have told me over the years, my forensic memoir could never be published while my fellow criminals were alive. You may only libel yourself and the dead. The Marshalls have been active about the courts since the late forties, defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity. They could ruin a publishing house with ease from their current accounts. One might almost think they had something to hide. Think, yes, but not write. The obvious suggestions have been made—displace, transmute, dissemble. Bring down the fogs of the imagination! What are novelists for? Go just so far as is necessary, set up camp inches beyond the reach, the fingertips of the law. But no one knows these precise distances until a judgment is handed down. To be safe, one would have to be bland and obscure. I know I cannot publish until they are dead. And as of this morning, I accept that will not be until I am. No good, just one of them going. Even with Lord Marshall’s bone-shrunk mug on the obituary pages at last, my cousin from the north would not tolerate an accusation of criminal conspiracy.

There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love. The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. I’ve been standing at the window, feeling waves of tiredness beat the remaining strength from my body. The floor seems to be undulating beneath my feet. I’ve been watching the first gray light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness. I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible. But now I must sleep.