IN THE HALF HOUR before lights-out, after cocoa, the girls would be in and out of each other’s rooms, sitting on their beds writing letters home, or to sweethearts. Some still cried a little from homesickness, and there would be much comforting going on at this time, with arms around shoulders and soothing1 words. It seemed theatrical2 to Briony, and ridiculous, grown young women tearful for their mothers, or as one of the students put it through her sobs3, for the smell of Daddy’s pipe. Those doing the consoling seemed to be enjoying themselves rather too much. In this cloying4 atmosphere Briony sometimes wrote her own concise5 letters home which conveyed little more than that she was not ill, not unhappy, not in need of her allowance and not about to change her mind in the way that her mother had predicted. Other girls proudly wrote out their exacting6 routines of work and study to astound7 their loving parents. Briony confided8 these matters only to her notebook, and even then, in no great detail. She did not want her mother to know about the lowly work she did. Part of the purpose of becoming a nurse was to work for her independence. It was important to her that her parents, especially her mother, knew as little about her life as possible.
Apart from a string of repeated questions which remained unanswered, Emily’s letters were mostly about the evacuees9. Three mothers with seven children, all from the Hackney area of London, had been billeted on the Tallis family. One of the mothers had disgraced herself in the village pub and was now banned. Another woman was a devout10 Catholic who walked four miles with her three children to the local town for mass on Sunday. But Betty, a Catholic herself, was not sensitive to these differences. She hated all the mothers and all their children. They told her on the first morning that they did not like her food. She claimed to have seen the churchgoer spitting on the hallway floor. The oldest of the children, a thirteen-year-old boy who looked no bigger than eight, had got into the fountain, climbed onto the statue and snapped off the Triton’s horn and his arm, right down to the elbow. Jack11 said that it could be fixed12 without too much trouble. But now the part, which had been carried into the house and left in the scullery, was missing. On information from old Hardman, Betty accused the boy of throwing it in the lake. The boy said he knew nothing. There was talk of draining the lake, but there was concern for the pair of mating swans. The mother was fierce in her son’s defense13, saying that it was dangerous to have a fountain when children were about, and that she was writing to the M.P. Sir Arthur Ridley was Briony’s godfather.
Still, Emily thought they should consider themselves lucky to have evacuees because at one point it had looked like the whole house was going to be requisitioned for use by the army. They settled instead on Hugh van Vliet’s place because it had a snooker table. Her other news was that her sister Hermione was still in Paris but thinking of relocating to Nice, and the cows had been moved into three fields on the north side so that the park could be plowed14 up for corn. A mile and a half of iron fencing dating from the 1750s had been taken away to be melted down to make Spitfires. Even the workmen who removed it said it was the wrong kind of metal. A cement and brick pillbox had been built down by the river, right on the bend, among the sedges, destroying the nests of the teal and the gray wagtails. Another pillbox was being built where the main road entered the village. They were storing all the fragile pieces in the cellars, including the harpsichord15. Wretched Betty dropped Uncle Clem’s vase carrying it down and it shattered on the steps. She said the pieces had simply come away in her hand, but that was hardly to be believed. Danny Hardman had joined the navy, but all the other boys in the village had gone into the East Surreys. Jack was working far too hard. He attended a special conference and when he came back he looked tired and thin, and wasn’t allowed to tell her where he had been. He was furious about the vase and actually shouted at Betty, which was so unlike him. On top of it all, she had lost a ration16 book and they had to do without sugar for two weeks. The mother who was banned from the Red Lion had come without her gas mask and no replacement17 was to be had. The ARP warden18, who was P.C. Vockins’s brother, had been round a third time for a blackout inspection20. He was turning out to be quite a little dictator. No one liked him.
Reading these letters at the end of an exhausting day, Briony felt a dreamy nostalgia21, a vague yearning22 for a long-lost life. She could hardly feel sorry for herself. She was the one who had cut herself off from home. In the week’s holiday after preliminary training, before the probationer year began, she had stayed with her uncle and aunt in Primrose23 Hill and had resisted her mother on the telephone. Why could Briony not visit, even for a day, when everyone would adore to see her and was desperate for her stories about her new life? And why did she write so infrequently? It was difficult to give a straight answer. For now it was necessary to stay away.
In the drawer of her bedside locker24, she kept a foolscap notebook with marbled cardboard covers. Taped to the spine25 was a length of string on the end of which was a pencil. It was not permitted to use pen and ink in bed. She began her journal at the end of the first day of preliminary training, and managed at least ten minutes most nights before lights-out. Her entries consisted of artistic26 manifestos, trivial complaints, character sketches27 and simple accounts of her day which increasingly shaded off into fantasy. She rarely read back over what she had written, but she liked to flip28 the filled pages. Here, behind the name badge and uniform, was her true self, secretly hoarded29, quietly accumulating. She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting. It almost didn’t matter what she wrote. Since the drawer did not lock, she was careful to disguise her descriptions of Sister Drummond. She changed the names of the patients too. And having changed the names, it became easier to transform the circumstances and invent. She liked to write out what she imagined to be their rambling30 thoughts. She was under no obligation to the truth, she had promised no one a chronicle. This was the only place she could be free. She built little stories—not very convincing, somewhat overwritten—around the people on the ward19. For a while she thought of herself as a kind of medical Chaucer, whose wards31 thronged32 with colorful types, coves33, topers, old hats, nice dears with a sinister34 secret to tell. In later years she regretted not being more factual, not providing herself with a store of raw material. It would have been useful to know what happened, what it looked like, who was there, what was said. At the time, the journal preserved her dignity: she might look and behave like and live the life of a trainee35 nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew—family, home, friends—writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done.
They were rare, the moments in the day when her mind could wander freely. Sometimes she would be sent on an errand to the dispensary and would have to wait for the pharmacist to return. Then she would drift along the corridor to a stairwell where a window gave a view of the river. Imperceptibly, her weight would shift to her right foot as she stared across at the Houses of Parliament without seeing them, and thought not about her journal, but about the long story she had written and sent away to a magazine. During her stay in Primrose Hill she borrowed her uncle’s typewriter, took over the dining room and typed out her final draft with her forefingers36. She was at it all week for more than eight hours a day, until her back and neck ached, and ragged37 curls of unfurling ampersands swam across her vision. But she could hardly remember a greater pleasure than at the end, when she squared off the completed pile of pages—one hundred and three!—and felt at the tips of her raw fingers the weight of her creation. All her own. No one else could have written it. Keeping a carbon copy for herself, she wrapped her story (such an inadequate38 word) in brown paper, took the bus to Bloomsbury, walked to the address in Lansdowne Terrace, the office of the new magazine, Horizon, and delivered the package to a pleasant young woman who came to the door.
What excited her about her achievement was its design, the pure geometry and the defining uncertainty39 which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility. The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint40 devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology41 had exposed. Plots too were like rusted42 machinery43 whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward44 roll, as well as all the tributaries45 that would swell46 it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer’s morning, the sensations of a child standing47 at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow’s flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. She had read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation48 was being worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change. To enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do this within a symmetrical design—this would be an artistic triumph. So thought Nurse Tallis as she lingered near the dispensary, waiting for the pharmacist to return, and gazing across the Thames, oblivious49 to the danger she was in, of being discovered standing on one leg by Sister Drummond.
Three months had passed, and Briony had heard nothing from Horizon.
A second piece of writing also brought no response. She had gone to the administration office and asked for Cecilia’s address. In early May she had written to her sister. Now she was beginning to think that silence was Cecilia’s answer.
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soothing
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| adj.慰藉的；使人宽心的；镇静的 | |
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theatrical
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| adj.剧场的，演戏的；做戏似的，做作的 | |
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sobs
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| 啜泣（声），呜咽（声）( sob的名词复数 ) | |
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cloying
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| adj.甜得发腻的 | |
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concise
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| adj.简洁的，简明的 | |
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exacting
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| adj.苛求的，要求严格的 | |
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astound
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| v.使震惊，使大吃一惊 | |
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confided
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| v.吐露（秘密，心事等）( confide的过去式和过去分词 )；（向某人）吐露（隐私、秘密等） | |
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evacuees
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| n.被疏散者( evacuee的名词复数 ) | |
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devout
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| adj.虔诚的，虔敬的，衷心的 (n.devoutness) | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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defense
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| n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩 | |
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plowed
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| v.耕( plow的过去式和过去分词 )；犁耕；费力穿过 | |
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harpsichord
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| n.键琴（钢琴前身） | |
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ration
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| n.定量(pl.)给养，口粮；vt.定量供应 | |
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replacement
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| n.取代，替换，交换；替代品，代用品 | |
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warden
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| n.监察员，监狱长，看守人，监护人 | |
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ward
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| n.守卫，监护，病房，行政区，由监护人或法院保护的人（尤指儿童）；vt.守护，躲开 | |
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inspection
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| n.检查，审查，检阅 | |
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nostalgia
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| n.怀乡病，留恋过去，怀旧 | |
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yearning
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| a.渴望的；向往的；怀念的 | |
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primrose
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| n.樱草，最佳部分， | |
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locker
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| n.更衣箱，储物柜，冷藏室，上锁的人 | |
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spine
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| n.脊柱，脊椎；(动植物的)刺；书脊 | |
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artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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sketches
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| n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概 | |
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flip
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| vt.快速翻动；轻抛；轻拍；n.轻抛；adj.轻浮的 | |
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hoarded
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| v.积蓄并储藏（某物）( hoard的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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rambling
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| adj.[建]凌乱的，杂乱的 | |
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wards
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| 区( ward的名词复数 )； 病房； 受监护的未成年者； 被人照顾或控制的状态 | |
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thronged
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| v.成群，挤满( throng的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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coves
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| n.小海湾( cove的名词复数 )；家伙 | |
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sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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trainee
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| n.受训练者 | |
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forefingers
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| n.食指( forefinger的名词复数 ) | |
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ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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inadequate
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| adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的 | |
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uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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41
psychology
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| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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42
rusted
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| v.（使）生锈( rust的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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43
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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45
tributaries
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| n. 支流 | |
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46
swell
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| vi.膨胀，肿胀；增长，增强 | |
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47
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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48
transformation
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| n.变化；改造；转变 | |
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49
oblivious
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| adj.易忘的，遗忘的，忘却的，健忘的 | |
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