Fiona
Fiona is a fellow probationer nurse at St. Thomas's Hospital during Briony Tallis's training, serving as Briony's closest friend in the dormitory and ward. A loud, jolly, and physically robust young woman from Chelsea, she provides comic relief and emotional support amid the grueling regime of wartime nursing, but her presence also underscores Briony's isolation and the moral weight of her past.
Identity and Introduction
Fiona is introduced as the girl who sleeps in the bed next to Briony's in the Nightingale home dormitory. On the first night of preliminary training, she asked Briony to cut the fingernails of her right hand, explaining that her left hand could not make the scissors work and that her mother always did it for her. She is ginger-haired and freckled, with dimples on the backs of her hands and an enormous bosom that causes the other girls to say she is bound to become a ward sister one day. Her family lives in Chelsea, and she whispered from her bed one night that her father was expected to be asked to join Churchill's war cabinet, though when the cabinet was announced the surnames did not match up and nothing was said. In those first months after preliminary training, Fiona and Briony had little chance to find out if they actually liked each other; it was convenient for them to assume they did. They were among the few probationers who had no medical background at all, most of the other girls having done first-aid courses or already served as VADs.
Life in the Ward and Friendship
Fiona and Briony share the relentless routine of the probationer year: working shifts in the wards, studying three hours a day in their spare time, and sleeping. Their luxury is teatime between four and five, when they take down their miniature brown teapots inscribed with their names and sit together in a little dayroom off the ward, though conversation is stilted under the home sister's supervision. Fiona is a good mimic with a cruel touch to her humor that Briony likes; she has her own version of Lambeth Cockney and catches the ignorance of some patients with heartless exaggeration, such as the woman who left a child on a bus. On a half day off, Fiona and Briony walk across the river past the Houses of Parliament into St. James's Park, where they stroll around the lake, buy tea at a stall, and rent deck chairs to listen to elderly men of the Salvation Army playing Elgar adapted for brass band. Fiona talks of her adored little brother and the clever thing he said at dinner while Briony pretends to listen and thinks about Robbie. When Briony seems distressed, Fiona notices and offers to get her water. Their laughter grows into cackles of hilarity and derision, and heads turn in their direction, but the two young nurses in their purple and white tunics, dark blue capes and spotless caps are as irreproachable as nuns.
The Arrival of the Wounded
When the first casualties from Dunkirk arrive at the hospital, Fiona and Briony are returning from their walk and see the line of army lorries and field ambulances outside the main entrance. At the same moment, they begin to run toward the stretchers. Briony meets Fiona coming the other way on the front of a stretcher; the face of the man she is carrying is completely obliterated by dressings, with a dark oval hole for his mouth. Their eyes meet and something passes between them—shock, or shame that they had been laughing in the park when there was this. Later, during the long night of work, Briony barely registers that one of the girls who helped move Corporal MacIntyre onto the bedpan is Fiona. The probationers of their set are aware of each other only as nurses, not as friends. At four-thirty in the morning they are sent to their lodgings to sleep, and Briony walks with Fiona; neither girl speaks, and when they link arms it seems they are resuming, after a lifetime of experience, their walk across Westminster Bridge. They cannot begin to describe how the time in the wards has changed them; it is enough to be able to keep walking down the empty corridors behind the other girls.
Narrative Role and Significance
Fiona functions as a foil to Briony's intense, guilt-ridden interiority. She represents the ordinary, unstained life that Briony might have had—a hearty, affectionate girl from a sprawling Chelsea family whose dogs and cats have Latin names, whose home is a famous venue for artistic people, and who has only to follow the road ahead and discover what is to happen. To Briony, it appears that her own life is going to be lived in one room, without a door. Fiona's presence also highlights the dehumanizing pressures of nursing training: the probationers are stripped of identity, their friendships not easily cultivated, and their only relationship is with Sister Drummond. Yet Fiona's mimicry and laughter provide a rare release, and her simple act of noticing Briony's distress and offering water shows a kindness that contrasts with the cold discipline of the ward. When Briony swaps her day off with Fiona to attend Lola's wedding, it is a small administrative transaction that enables Briony's crucial confrontation with her past, making Fiona an unwitting facilitator of the novel's moral reckoning.
