“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