“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.