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.