by Ian Mcewan
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 stretch
er 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, disin
fectant, 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.”
