Imperial War Museum
The Imperial War Museum, housed in the former chapel of the Royal Bethlehem Hospital—the old Bedlam—occupies the dome of a building where the insane once prayed and scholars now study the collective insanity of war. On the morning of her seventy-seventh birthday, Briony Tallis makes what she intends as her last visit to the reading room, a place she has frequented during wintry weeks of research. She comes not to gather new material but to perform final acts of housekeeping: checking details, saying farewells to the Keeper of Documents and the cheerful porters who have escorted her up and down in the lift, and donating to the archives her dozen long letters from old Mr. Nettle. The visit is a birthday present to herself, a way of passing an hour or two in a half-pretense of being busy, fussing with the little tasks that come at the end and are part of the reluctant process of letting go.
The Encounter with the Marshalls
As Briony's taxi pulls away outside the main gates, she notices a black Rolls-Royce parked immediately in front. She occasionally thinks of the Marshalls whenever she sees a parked Rolls without a driver—it has become a habit over the years—but it is a shock to see them coming down the steps toward her. Lord Marshall, at eighty-eight, leans on a lacquered walking stick that has become something of a trademark; he is a little doddery and flat-footed, his face shrunk by age, his jaw scaled down by bone loss. Lady Lola Marshall, near eighty, wears a sable coat and a scarlet wide-brimmed fedora, her stride bold in high heels, her face heavy with makeup, garish around the mouth. Briony, concealed partly by the raised barrels of the museum's guns and her tilted umbrella, watches them pass. She notes that Lord Marshall cannot bend at the waist or take his own weight on one foot; they have to lift him into his seat. Lola folds herself in with terrible agility. The Rolls pulls away into the traffic, and Briony goes inside, something heavy laid on her heart.
The Work of Research and the Colonel's Corrections
Inside the museum, Briony exchanges cheery good mornings with the porters and is escorted up to the reading room in the cramped lift, where small talk is compulsory. The Keeper of Documents has found her an obliging old colonel of the Buffs, an amateur historian who has read the relevant pages of her typescript and faxed through his suggestions. His notes are irascible and helpful: no British soldier would say "On the double"—the correct term is "At the double"; "twenty-five-pound guns" should be "twenty-five pounders" or "twenty-five-pounder guns"; an RAF man would not wear a beret in 1940—he should have a forage cap; a Stuka does not carry a "single thousand-ton bomb"—she meant "pound." Briony makes notes of these corrections, writes a letter of thanks, pays for photocopies, returns borrowed books, and clears her work space of all traces of herself. She loves these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction. As she says her goodbyes, she learns that the Marshall Foundation is about to make a grant to the museum.
The Legal Impossibility of Publication
During the taxi ride back north, Briony reflects on the colonel's letter and her own pleasure in these trivial alterations. If she really cared so much about facts, she should have written a different kind of book. But her work is done; there will be no further drafts. The Marshalls have been active about the courts since the late forties, defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity. They could ruin a publishing house with ease from their current accounts. One might almost think they had something to hide—think, yes, but not write. The obvious suggestions have been made: displace, transmute, dissemble, bring down the fogs of the imagination. But to be safe, one would have to be bland and obscure. Briony knows she cannot publish until they are dead, and as of this morning she accepts that will not be until she is. Even with Lord Marshall's obituary, her cousin from the north would not tolerate an accusation of criminal conspiracy. The museum, with its archives and its connection to the Marshall Foundation, becomes the physical space where this legal reality crystallizes: the truth she has spent fifty-nine years writing cannot be released into the world while her fellow criminals live.
