Atonement (29 page)

The brothers
nodded and, with final smiles of farewell, left the dim circle of the
candle’s glow and crossed the darkness toward the open barn door, the
glasses chinking against the bottles as they went.

F
OR A LONG TIME
he lay on his back smoking,
staring into the blackness of the cavernous roof. The corporals’ snores
rose and fell in counterpoint. He was exhausted, but not sleepy. The wound
throbbed uncomfortably, each beat precise and tight. Whatever was in there was
sharp and close to the surface, and he wanted to touch it with a fingertip.
Exhaustion made him vulnerable to the thoughts he wanted least. He was thinking
about the French boy asleep in his bed, and about the indifference with which
men could lob shells into a landscape. Or empty their bomb bays over a sleeping
cottage by a railway, without knowing or caring who was there. It was an
industrial process. He had seen their own RA units at work, tightly knit
groups, working all hours, proud of the speed with which they could set up a
line, and proud of their discipline, drills, training, teamwork. They need
never see the end result—a vanished boy. Vanished. As he formed the word
in his thoughts, sleep snatched him under, but only for seconds. Then he was
awake, on his bed, on his back, staring at the darkness in his cell. He could
feel he was back there. He could smell the concrete floor, and the piss in the
bucket, and the gloss paint on the walls, and hear the snores of the men along
the row. Three and a half years of nights like these, unable to sleep, thinking
of another vanished boy, another vanished life that was once his own, and
waiting for dawn, and slop-out and another wasted day. He did not know how he
survived the daily stupidity of it. The stupidity and claustrophobia. The hand
squeezing on his throat. Being here, sheltering in a barn, with an army in
rout, where a child’s limb in a tree was something that ordinary men
could ignore, where a whole country, a whole civilization was about to fall,
was better than being there, on a narrow bed under a dim electric light,
waiting for nothing. Here there were wooded valleys, streams, sunlight on the
poplars which they could not take away unless they killed him. And there was
hope.
I’ll wait for you. Come back
. There was a chance, just a
chance, of getting back. He had her last letter in his pocket and her new
address. This was why he had to survive, and use his cunning to stay off the
main roads where the circling dive-bombers waited like raptors.

Later, he got
up from under his greatcoat, pulled on his boots and groped his way through the
barn to relieve himself outside. He was dizzy with fatigue, but he was still
not ready for sleep. Ignoring the snarling farm dogs, he found his way along a
track to a grassy rise to watch the flashes in the southern sky. This was the
approaching storm of German armor. He touched his top pocket where the poem she
sent was enfolded in her letter.
In the nightmare of the dark, / All the
dogs of Europe bark
. The rest of her letters were buttoned into the inside
pocket of his greatcoat. By standing on the wheel of an abandoned trailer he
was able to see other parts of the sky. The gun flashes were everywhere but the
north. The defeated army was running up a corridor that was bound to narrow,
and soon must be cut off. There would be no chance of escape for the
stragglers. At best, it would be prison again. Prison camp. This time, he
wouldn’t last. When France fell there would be no end of the war in
sight. No letters from her, and no way back. No bargaining an early release in
return for joining the infantry. The hand on his throat again. The prospect
would be of a thousand, or thousands of incarcerated nights, sleeplessly
turning over the past, waiting for his life to resume, wondering if it ever
would. Perhaps it would make sense to leave now before it was too late, and
keep going, all night, all day until he reached the Channel. Slip away, leave
the corporals to their fate. He turned and began to make his way back down the slope
and thought better of it. He could barely see the ground in front of him. He
would make no progress in the dark and could easily break a leg. And perhaps
the corporals weren’t such complete dolts—Mace with his straw
mattresses, Nettle with his gift for the brothers.

Guided by
their snores, he shuffled back to his bed. But still sleep would not come, or
came only in quick plunges from which he emerged, giddy with thoughts he could
not choose or direct. They pursued him, the old themes. Here it was again, his
only meeting with her. Six days out of prison, one day before he reported for
duty near Aldershot. When they arranged to meet at Joe Lyons teahouse in the
Strand in 1939, they had not seen each other for three and a half years. He was
at the café early and took a corner seat with a view of the door.
Freedom was still a novelty. The pace and clatter, the colors of coats, jackets
and skirts, the bright, loud conversations of West End shoppers, the
friendliness of the girl who served him, the spacious lack of threat—he
sat back and enjoyed the embrace of the everyday. It had a beauty he alone
could appreciate.

During his
time inside, the only female visitor he was permitted was his mother. In case
he was inflamed, they said. Cecilia wrote every week. In love with her, willing
himself to stay sane for her, he was naturally in love with her words. When he
wrote back, he pretended to be his old self, he lied his way into sanity. For
fear of his psychiatrist who was also their censor, they could never be
sensual, or even emotional. His was considered a modern, enlightened prison,
despite its Victorian chill. He had been diagnosed, with clinical precision, as
morbidly oversexed, and in need of help as well as correction. He was not to be
stimulated. Some letters—both his and hers—were confiscated for
some timid expression of affection. So they wrote about literature, and used
characters as codes. At Cambridge, they had passed each other by in the street.
All those books, those happy or tragic couples they had never met to discuss!
Tristan and Isolde, the Duke Orsino and Olivia (and Malvolio too), Troilus and
Criseyde, Mr. Knightley and Emma, Venus and Adonis. Turner and Tallis. Once, in
despair, he referred to Prometheus, chained to a rock, his liver devoured daily
by a vulture. Sometimes she was patient Griselde. Mention of “a quiet
corner in a library” was a code for sexual ecstasy. They charted the
daily round too, in boring, loving detail. He described the prison routine in
every aspect, but he never told her of its stupidity. That was plain enough. He
never told her that he feared he might go under. That too was clear. She never
wrote that she loved him, though she would have if she thought it would get
through. But he knew it.

She told him
she had cut herself off from her family. She would never speak to her parents,
brother or sister again. He followed closely all her steps along the way toward
her nurse’s qualification. When she wrote, “I went to the library
today to get the anatomy book I told you about. I found a quiet corner and
pretended to read,” he knew she was feeding on the same memories that
consumed him every night, beneath thin prison blankets.

When she
entered the café, wearing her nurse’s cape, startling him from a
pleasant daze, he stood too quickly and knocked his tea. He was conscious of
the oversized suit his mother had saved for. The jacket did not seem to touch
his shoulders at any point. They sat down, looked at each other, smiled and
looked away. Robbie and Cecilia had been making love for years—by post.
In their coded exchanges they had drawn close, but how artificial that
closeness seemed now as they embarked on their small talk, their helpless
catechism of polite query and response. As the distance opened up between them,
they understood how far they had run ahead of themselves in their letters. This
moment had been imagined and desired for too long, and could not measure up. He
had been out of the world, and lacked the confidence to step back and reach for
the larger thought.
I love you, and you saved my life
. He asked about
her lodgings. She told him.

“And do
you get along all right with your landlady?”

He could
think of nothing better, and feared the silence that might come down, and the
awkwardness that would be a prelude to her telling him that it had been nice to
meet up again. Now she must be getting back to work. Everything they had,
rested on a few minutes in a library years ago. Was it too frail? She could
easily slip back into being a kind of sister. Was she disappointed? He had lost
weight. He had shrunk in every sense. Prison made him despise himself, while
she looked as adorable as he remembered her, especially in a nurse’s
uniform. But she was miserably nervous too, incapable of stepping around the
inanities. Instead, she was trying to be lighthearted about her
landlady’s temper. After a few more such exchanges, she really was
looking at the little watch that hung above her left breast, and telling him
that her lunch break would soon be over. They had had half an hour.

He walked
with her to Whitehall, toward the bus stop. In the precious final minutes he
wrote out his address for her, a bleak sequence of acronyms and numbers. He
explained that he would have no leave until his basic training was over. After
that, he was granted two weeks. She was looking at him, shaking her head in
some exasperation, and then, at last, he took her hand and squeezed. The
gesture had to carry all that had not been said, and she answered it with
pressure from her own hand. Her bus came, and she did not let go. They were
standing face to face. He kissed her, lightly at first, but they drew closer,
and when their tongues touched, a disembodied part of himself was abjectly
grateful, for he knew he now had a memory in the bank and would be drawing on
it for months to come. He was drawing on it now, in a French barn, in the small
hours. They tightened their embrace and went on kissing while people edged past
them in the queue. Some card squawked in his ear. She was crying onto his
cheek, and her sorrow stretched her lips against his. Another bus arrived. She
pulled away, squeezed his wrist, and got on without a word and didn’t
look back. He watched her find her seat, and as the bus began to move realized
he should have gone with her, all the way to the hospital. He had thrown away
minutes in her company. He must learn again how to think and act for himself.
He began to run along Whitehall, hoping to catch up with her at the next stop.
But her bus was far ahead, and soon disappearing toward Parliament Square.

Throughout
his training, they continued to write. Liberated from censorship and the need
to be inventive, they proceeded cautiously. Impatient with living on the page,
mindful of the difficulties, they were wary of getting ahead of the touch of
hands and a single bus-stop kiss. They said they loved each other, used “darling”
and “dearest,” and knew their future was together, but they held
back from wilder intimacies. Their business now was to remain connected until
those two weeks. Through a Girton friend she found a cottage in Wiltshire they
could borrow, and though they thought of little else in their moments of free
time, they tried not to dream it away in their letters. Instead, they spoke of
their routines. She was now on the maternity ward, and every day brought
commonplace miracles, as well as moments of drama or hilarity. There were
tragedies too, against which their own troubles faded to nothing: stillborn
babies, mothers who died, young men weeping in the corridors, dazed mothers in
their teens discarded by their families, infant deformities that evoked shame
and love in confusing measure. When she described a happy outcome, that moment
when the battle was over and an exhausted mother took the child in her arms for
the first time, and gazed in rapture into a new face, it was the unspoken call
to Cecilia’s own future, the one she would share with him, which gave the
writing its simple power, though in truth, his thoughts dwelled less on birth
than conception.

He in turn
described the parade ground, the rifle range, the drills, the
“bull,” the barracks. He was not eligible for officer training,
which was as well, for sooner or later he would have met someone in an
officers’ mess who knew about his past. In the ranks he was anonymous,
and it turned out that to have been inside conferred a certain status. He
discovered he was already well adapted to an army regime, to the terrors of kit
inspection and the folding of blankets into precise squares, with the labels
lined up. Unlike his fellows, he thought the food not bad at all. The days,
though tiring, seemed rich in variety. The cross-country marches gave him a
pleasure that he dared not express to the other recruits. He was gaining in
weight and strength. His education and age marked him down, but his past made
up for that and no one gave him trouble. Instead, he was regarded as a wise old
bird who knew the ways of “them,” and who was handy when it came to
filling out a form. Like her, he confined his letters to the daily round,
interrupted by the funny or alarming anecdote: the recruit who came on parade
with a boot missing; the sheep that ran amok in the barracks and could not be
chased out, the sergeant instructor almost hit by a bullet on the range.

But there was
one external development, one shadow that he had to refer to. After Munich last
year, he was certain, like everyone else, that there would be a war. Their
training was being streamlined and accelerated, a new camp was being enlarged
to take more recruits. His anxiety was not for the fighting he might have to
do, but the threat to their Wiltshire dream. She mirrored his fears with
descriptions of contingency arrangements at the hospital—more beds,
special courses, emergency drills. But for both of them there was also
something fantastical about it all, remote even though likely. Surely not
again, was what many people were saying. And so they continued to cling to
their hopes.