Atonement (42 page)

He said,
“What is it, Nurse? You can tell me.” He pushed up and was trying
to look over his shoulder. There was fear in his voice.

She swallowed
and said neutrally, “I think it’s healing well.”

She took more
cotton wool. It was oil, or grease, mixed in with beach sand, and it did not
come away easily. She cleaned an area six inches back, working her way right
round the wound.

She had been
doing this for some minutes when a hand rested on her shoulder and a
woman’s voice said in her ear, “That’s good, Nurse Tallis,
but you’ve got to work faster.”

She was on
her knees, bent over the stretcher, squeezed against a bed, and it was not easy
to turn round. By the time she did, she saw only the familiar form retreating.
The corporal was asleep by the time Briony began to clean around the stitches.
He flinched and stirred but did not quite wake. Exhaustion was his anesthetic.
As she straightened at last, and gathered her bowl and all the soiled cotton
wool, a doctor came and she was dismissed.

She scrubbed
her hands and was set another task. Everything was different for her now she
had achieved one small thing. She was set to taking water around to the
soldiers who had collapsed with battle exhaustion. It was important that they
did not dehydrate. Come on now, Private Carter. Drink this and you can go back
to sleep. Sit up now . . . She held a little white enamel teapot and let them
suck the water from its spout while she cradled their filthy heads against her
apron, like giant babies. She scrubbed down again, and did a bedpan round. She
had never minded it less. She was told to attend to a soldier with stomach
wounds who had also lost a part of his nose. She could see through the bloody
cartilage into his mouth, and onto the back of his lacerated tongue. Her job
was to clean up his face. Again, it was oil and sand which had been blasted
into the skin. He was awake, she guessed, but he kept his eyes closed. Morphine
had calmed him, and he swayed slightly from side to side, as though in time to
music in his head. As his features began to appear from behind the mask of
black, she thought of those books of glossy blank pages she had in childhood
which she rubbed with a blunt pencil to make a picture appear. She thought too
how one of these men might be Robbie, how she would dress his wounds without
knowing who he was, and with cotton wool tenderly rub his face until his
familiar features emerged, and how he would turn to her with gratitude, realize
who she was, and take her hand, and in silently squeezing it, forgive her. Then
he would let her settle him down into sleep.

Her
responsibilities increased. She was sent with forceps and a kidney bowl to an
adjacent ward, to the bedside of an airman with shrapnel in his leg. He watched
her warily as she set her equipment down.

“If
I’m having them out, I’d rather have an operation.”

Her hands were
trembling. But she was surprised how easily it came to her, the brisk voice of
the no-nonsense nurse. She pulled the screen around his bed.

“Don’t
be silly. We’ll have them out in a jiff. How did it happen?”

While he
explained to her that his job was building runways in the fields of northern
France, his eyes kept returning to the steel forceps she had collected from the
autoclave. They lay dripping in the blue-edged kidney bowl.

“We’d
get going on the job, then Jerry comes over and dumps his load. We drops back,
starts all over in another field, then it’s Jerry again and we’re
falling back again. Till we fell into the sea.”

She smiled
and pulled back his bedcovers. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

The oil and
grime had been washed from his legs to reveal an area below his thigh where
pieces of shrapnel were embedded in the flesh. He leaned forward, watching her
anxiously.

She said,
“Lie back so I can see what’s there.”

“They’re
not bothering me or anything.”

“Just
lie back.”

Several
pieces were spread across a twelve-inch area. There was swelling and slight
inflammation around each rupture in the skin.

“I
don’t mind them, Nurse. I’d be happy leaving them where they
are.” He laughed without conviction. “Something to show me
grandchildren.”

“They’re
getting infected,” she said. “And they could sink.”

“Sink?”

“Into
your flesh. Into your bloodstream, and get carried to your heart. Or your
brain.”

He seemed to
believe her. He lay back and sighed at the distant ceiling. “Bloody
’ell. I mean, excuse me, Nurse. I don’t think I’m up to it
today.”

“Let’s
count them up together, shall we?”

They did so,
out loud. Eight. She pushed him gently in the chest.

“They’ve
got to come out. Lie back now. I’ll be as quick as I can. If it helps
you, grip the bedhead behind you.”

His leg was
tensed and trembling as she took the forceps.

“Don’t
hold your breath. Try and relax.”

He made a
derisive, snorting sound. “Relax!”

She steadied
her right hand with her left. It would have been easier for her to sit on the
edge of the bed, but that was unprofessional and strictly prohibited. When she
placed her left hand on an unaffected part of his leg, he flinched. She chose
the smallest piece she could find on the edge of the cluster. The protruding
part was obliquely triangular. She gripped it, paused a second, then pulled it
clear, firmly, but without jerking.

“Fuck!”

The escaped
word ricocheted around the ward and seemed to repeat itself several times.
There was silence, or at least a lowering of sound beyond the screens. Briony
still held the bloody metal fragment between her forceps. It was three quarters
of an inch long and narrowed to a point. Purposeful steps were approaching. She
dropped the shrapnel into the kidney bowl as Sister Drummond whisked the screen
aside. She was perfectly calm as she glanced at the foot of the bed to take in
the man’s name and, presumably, his condition, then she stood over him
and gazed into his face.

“How
dare you,” the sister said quietly. And then again, “How dare you
speak that way in front of one of my nurses.”

“I beg
your pardon, Sister. It just came out.”

Sister
Drummond looked with disdain into the bowl. “Compared to what we’ve
admitted these past few hours, Airman Young, your injuries are superficial. So
you’ll consider yourself lucky. And you’ll show some courage worthy
of your uniform. Carry on, Nurse Tallis.”

Into the
silence that followed her departure, Briony said brightly, “We’ll
get on, shall we? Only seven to go. When it’s over, I’ll bring you
a measure of brandy.”

He sweated,
his whole body shook, and his knuckles turned white round the iron bedhead, but
he did not make a sound as she continued to pull the pieces clear.

“You
know, you can shout, if you want.”

But he
didn’t want a second visit from Sister Drummond, and Briony understood.
She was saving the largest until last. It did not come clear in one stroke. He
bucked on the bed, and hissed through his clenched teeth. By the second
attempt, the shrapnel stuck out two inches from his flesh. She tugged it clear
on the third try, and held it up for him, a gory four-inch stiletto of
irregular steel.

He stared at
it in wonder. “Run him under the tap, Nurse. I’ll take him
home.” Then he turned into the pillow and began to sob. It may have been the
word home, as well as the pain. She slipped away to get his brandy, and stopped
in the sluice to be sick.

For a long
time she undressed, washed and dressed the more superficial of the wounds. Then
came the order she was dreading.

“I want
you to go and dress Private Latimer’s face.”

She had
already tried to feed him earlier with a teaspoon into what remained of his
mouth, trying to spare him the humiliation of dribbling. He had pushed her hand
away. Swallowing was excruciating. Half his face had been shot away. What she
dreaded, more than the removal of the dressing, was the look of reproach in his
large brown eyes. What have you done to me? His form of communication was a
soft aah sound from the back of his throat, a little moan of disappointment.

“We’ll
soon have you fixed,” she had kept repeating, and could think of nothing
else.

And now,
approaching his bed with her materials, she said cheerily, “Hello,
Private Latimer. It’s me again.”

He looked at
her without recognition. She said as she unpinned the bandage that was secured
at the top of his head, “It’s going to be all right. You’ll
walk out of here in a week or two, you’ll see. And that’s more than
we can say to a lot of them in here.”

That was one
comfort. There was always someone worse. Half an hour earlier they had carried
out a multiple amputation on a captain from the East Surreys—the regiment
the boys in the village had joined. And then there were the dying.

Using a pair
of surgical tongs, she began carefully pulling away the sodden, congealed
lengths of ribbon gauze from the cavity in the side of his face. When the last
was out, the resemblance to the cutaway model they used in anatomy classes was
only faint. This was all ruin, crimson and raw. She could see through his
missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and
hideously long. Further up, where she hardly dared look, were the exposed
muscles around his eye socket. So intimate, and never intended to be seen.
Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so. Did
a girl love him before? Could she continue to?

“We’ll
soon have you fixed,” she lied again.

She began
repacking his face with clean gauze soaked in eusol. As she was securing the
pins he made his sad sound.

“Shall
I bring you the bottle?”

He shook his
head and made the sound again.

“You’re
uncomfortable?”

No.

“Water?”

A nod. Only a
small corner of his lips remained. She inserted the little teapot spout and
poured. With each swallow he winced, which in turn caused him agony around the
missing muscles of his face. He could stand no more, but as she withdrew the
water pot, he raised a hand toward her wrist. He had to have more. Rather pain
than thirst. And so it went on for minutes—he couldn’t bear the
pain, he had to have the water.

She would
have stayed with him, but there was always another job, always a sister
demanding help or a soldier calling from his bed. She had a break from the
wards when a man coming round from an anesthetic was sick onto her lap and she
had to find a clean apron. She was surprised to see from a corridor window that
it was dark outside. Five hours had passed since they came back from the park.
She was by the linen store tying her apron when Sister Drummond came up. It was
hard to say what had changed—the manner was still quietly remote, the orders
unchallengeable. Perhaps beneath the self-discipline, a touch of rapport in
adversity.

“Nurse,
you’ll go and help apply the Bunyan bags to Corporal MacIntyre’s
arms and legs. You’ll treat the rest of his body with tannic acid. If
there are difficulties, you’ll come straight to me.”

She turned
away to give instructions to another nurse. Briony had seen them bring the
corporal in. He was one of a number of men overwhelmed by burning oil on a
sinking ferry off Dunkirk. He was picked out of the water by a destroyer. The
viscous oil clung to the skin and seared through the tissue. It was the
burned-out remains of a human they lifted onto the bed. She thought he could
never survive. It was not easy to find a vein to give him morphine. Sometime in
the past two hours she had helped two other nurses lift him onto a bedpan and
he had screamed at the first touch of their hands.

The Bunyan
bags were big cellophane containers. The damaged limb floated inside, cushioned
by saline solution that had to be at exactly the right temperature. A variation
of one degree was not tolerated. As Briony came up, a probationer with a Primus
stove on a trolley was already preparing the fresh solution. The bags had to be
changed frequently. Corporal MacIntyre lay on his back under a bed cradle
because he could not bear the touch of a sheet on his skin. He was whimpering
pathetically for water. Burn cases were always badly dehydrated. His lips were
too ruined, too swollen, and his tongue too blistered for him to be given fluid
by mouth. His saline drip had come away. The needle would not hold in place in
the damaged vein. A qualified nurse she had never seen before was attaching a
new bag to the stand. Briony prepared the tannic acid in a bowl and took the
roll of cotton wool. She thought she would start with the corporal’s legs
in order to be out of the way of the nurse who was beginning to search his
blackened arm, looking for a vein.

But the nurse
said, “Who sent you over here?”

“Sister
Drummond.”

The nurse
spoke tersely, and did not look up from her probing. “He’s
suffering too much. I don’t want him treated until I get him hydrated. Go
and find something else to do.”

Briony did as
she was told. She did not know how much later it was—perhaps it was in
the small hours when she was sent to get fresh towels. She saw the nurse
standing near the entrance to the duty room, unobtrusively crying. Corporal
MacIntyre was dead. His bed was already taken by another case.