Atonement (44 page)

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

I
N 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.