Atonement (32 page)

But nothing
came. Only the sounds of insects determined on their late spring business, and
birdsong resuming after a decent pause. And then, as if taking their cue from
the birds, the wounded began to groan and call out, and terrified children
began to cry. Someone, as usual, was cursing the RAF. Turner stood up and was
dusting himself down when Nettle and Mace emerged and together they walked back
toward the major who was sitting on the ground. All the color had gone from his
face, and he was nursing his right hand.

“Bullet
went clean through it,” he said as they came up. “Jolly lucky
really.”

They helped
him to his feet and offered to take him over to an ambulance where an RAMC
captain and two orderlies were already seeing to the wounded. But he shook his
head and stood there unaided. In shock he was talkative and his voice was
softer.

“ME
109. Must have been his machine gun. The cannon would have blown my ruddy hand
off. Twenty millimeter, you know. He must have strayed from his group. Spotted
us on his way home and couldn’t resist. Can’t blame him, really.
But it means there’ll be more of them pretty soon.”

The half
dozen men he had gathered up before had picked themselves and their rifles out
of the ditch and were wandering off. The sight of them recalled the major to
himself.

“All
right, chaps. Form up.”

They seemed
quite unable to resist him and formed a line. Trembling a little now, he
addressed Turner.

“And
you three. At the double.”

“Actually,
old boy, to tell the truth, I think we’d rather not.”

“Oh, I
see.” He squinted at Turner’s shoulder, seeming to see there the
insignia of senior rank. He gave a good-natured salute with his left hand.
“In that case, sir, if you don’t mind, we’ll be off. Wish us
luck.”

“Good
luck, Major.”

They watched
him march his reluctant detachment away toward the woods where the machine guns
waited.

For half an
hour the column did not move. Turner put himself at the disposal of the RAMC
captain and helped on the stretcher parties bringing in the wounded. Afterward
he found places for them on the lorries. There was no sign of the corporals. He
fetched and carried supplies from the back of an ambulance. Watching the
captain at work, stitching a head wound, Turner felt the stirrings of his old
ambitions. The quantity of blood obscured the textbook details he remembered.
Along their stretch of road there were five injured and, surprisingly, no one
dead, though the sergeant with the rifle was hit in the face and was not
expected to live. Three vehicles had their front ends shot up and were pushed
off the road. The petrol was siphoned off and, for good measure, bullets were
fired through the tires.

When all this
was done in their section, there was still no movement up at the front of the
column. Turner retrieved his greatcoat and walked on. He was too thirsty to
wait about. An elderly Belgian lady shot in the knee had drunk the last of his
water. His tongue was large in his mouth and all he could think of now was
finding a drink. That, and keeping a watch on the sky. He passed sections like
his own where vehicles were being disabled and the wounded were being lifted
into lorries. He had been going for ten minutes when he saw Mace’s head
on the grass by a pile of dirt. It was about twenty-five yards away, in the
deep green shadow of a stand of poplars. He went toward it, even though he
suspected that it would be better for his state of mind to walk on. He found Mace
and Nettle shoulder deep in a hole. They were in the final stages of digging a
grave. Lying facedown beyond the pile of earth was a boy of fifteen or so. A
crimson stain on the back of his white shirt spread from neck to waist.

Mace leaned
on his shovel and did a passable imitation. “‘I think we’d
rather not.’ Very good, guv’nor. I’ll remember that next
time.”

“Divagation
was nice. Where d’you get that one?”

“He
swallowed a fucking dictionary,” Corporal Nettle said proudly.

“I used
to like the crossword.”

“And
’orribly and onerously overrun?”

“That
was a concert party they had in the sergeants’ mess last
Christmas.”

Still in the
grave, he and Nettle sang tunelessly for Turner’s benefit.

’Twas
ostensibly ominous in the overview

To be
’orribly and onerously overrun.

Behind them
the column was beginning to move.

“Better
stick him in,” Corporal Mace said.

The three men
lifted the boy down and set him on his back. Clipped to his shirt pocket was a
row of fountain pens. The corporals didn’t pause for ceremony. They began
to shovel in the dirt and soon the boy had vanished.

Nettle said,
“Nice-looking kid.”

The corporals
had bound two tent poles with twine to make a cross. Nettle banged it in with
the back of his shovel. As soon as it was done they walked back to the road.

Mace said,
“He was with his grandparents. They didn’t want him left in the
ditch. I thought they’d come over and see him off like, but they’re
in a terrible state. We better tell them where he is.”

But the
boy’s grandparents were not to be seen. As they walked on, Turner took
out the map and said, “Keep watching the sky.” The major was
right—after the Messerschmitt’s casual pass, they would be back.
They should have been back by now. The Bergues-Furnes canal was marked in thick
bright blue on his map. Turner’s impatience to reach it had become
inseparable from his thirst. He would put his face in that blue and drink
deeply. This thought put him in mind of childhood fevers, their wild and
frightening logic, the search for the cool corner of the pillow, and his
mother’s hand upon his brow. Dear Grace. When he touched his own forehead
the skin was papery and dry. The inflammation round his wound, he sensed, was
growing, and the skin was becoming tighter, harder, with something, not blood,
leaking out of it onto his shirt. He wanted to examine himself in private, but
that was hardly possible here. The convoy was moving at its old inexorable
pace. Their road ran straight to the coast—there would be no shortcuts
now. As they drew closer, the black cloud, which surely came from a burning
refinery in Dunkirk, was beginning to rule the northern sky. There was nothing
to do but walk toward it. So he settled once more into silent head-down
trudging.

T
HE ROAD NO LONGER
had the protection of the
plane trees. Vulnerable to attack and without shade, it uncoiled across the
undulating land in long shallow S shapes. He had wasted precious reserves in
unnecessary talk and encounters. Tiredness had made him superficially elated
and forthcoming. Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his
boots—he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that
impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove
him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness,
the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the
Channel; in the other,
I’ll wait for you
, and the memory of when
she had said it, which he had come to treat like a sacred site. Also, the fear
of capture. His most sensual memories—their few minutes in the library,
the kiss in Whitehall—were bleached colorless through overuse. He knew by
heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the
vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when
the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too
often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on
the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as
B.C.
and
A.D.
Before prison, before the war, before the
sight of a corpse became a banality.

But these
heresies died when he read her last letter. He touched his breast pocket. It
was a kind of genuflection. Still there. Here was something new on the scales.
That he could be cleared had all the simplicity of love. Merely tasting the
possibility reminded him how much had narrowed and died. His taste for life, no
less, all the old ambitions and pleasures. The prospect was of a rebirth, a
triumphant return. He could become again the man who had once crossed a Surrey
park at dusk in his best suit, swaggering on the promise of life, who had
entered the house and with the clarity of passion made love to
Cecilia—no, let him rescue the word from the corporals, they had fucked
while others sipped their cocktails on the terrace. The story could resume, the
one that he had been planning on that evening walk. He and Cecilia would no
longer be isolated. Their love would have space and a society to grow in. He
would not go about cap in hand to collect apologies from the friends who had
shunned him. Nor would he sit back, proud and fierce, shunning them in return.
He knew exactly how he would behave. He would simply resume. With his criminal
record struck off, he could apply to medical college when the war was over, or
even go for a commission now in the Medical Corps. If Cecilia made her peace
with her family, he would keep his distance without seeming sour. He could
never be on close terms with Emily or Jack. She had pursued his prosecution
with a strange ferocity, while Jack turned away, vanished into his Ministry the
moment he was needed.

None of that
mattered. From here it looked simple. They were passing more bodies in the
road, in the gutters and on the pavement, dozens of them, soldiers and
civilians. The stench was cruel, insinuating itself into the folds of his
clothes. The convoy had entered a bombed village, or perhaps the suburb of a
small town—the place was rubble and it was impossible to tell. Who would
care? Who could ever describe this confusion, and come up with the village
names and the dates for the history books? And take the reasonable view and
begin to assign the blame? No one would ever know what it was like to be here.
Without the details there could be no larger picture. The abandoned stores,
equipment and vehicles made an avenue of scrap that spilled across their path.
With this, and the bodies, they were forced to walk in the center of the road.
That did not matter because the convoy was no longer moving. Soldiers were
climbing out of troop carriers and continuing on foot, stumbling over brick and
roof tiles. The wounded were left in the lorries to wait. There was a greater
press of bodies in a narrower space, greater irritation. Turner kept his head
down and followed the man in front, protectively folded in his thoughts.

He would be
cleared. From the way it looked here, where you could hardly be bothered to
lift your feet to step over a dead woman’s arm, he did not think he would
be needing apologies or tributes. To be cleared would be a pure state. He
dreamed of it like a lover, with a simple longing. He dreamed of it in the way
other soldiers dreamed of their hearths or allotments or old civilian jobs. If
innocence seemed elemental here, there was no reason why it should not be so
back in England. Let his name be cleared, then let everyone else adjust their
thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was
simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her, and live without shame.

But there was
one part in all this that he could not think through, one indistinct shape that
the shambles twelve miles outside Dunkirk could not reduce to a simple outline.
Briony. Here he came against the outer edge of what Cecilia called his generous
spirit. And his rationality. If Cecilia were to be reunited with her family, if
the sisters were close again, there would be no avoiding her. But could he
accept her? Could he be in the same room? Here she was, offering a possibility
of absolution. But it was not for him. He had done nothing wrong. It was for
herself, for her own crime which her conscience could no longer bear. Was he
supposed to feel grateful? And yes, of course, she was a child in 1935. He had
told himself, he and Cecilia had told each other, over and again. Yes, she was
just a child. But not every child sends a man to prison with a lie. Not every
child is so purposeful and malign, so consistent over time, never wavering,
never doubted. A child, but that had not stopped him daydreaming in his cell of
her humiliation, of a dozen ways he might find revenge. In France once, in the
bitterest week of winter, raging drunk on cognac, he had even conjured her onto
the end of his bayonet. Briony and Danny Hardman. It was not reasonable or just
to hate Briony, but it helped.

How to begin
to understand this child’s mind? Only one theory held up. There was a day
in June 1932, all the more beautiful for coming suddenly, after a long spell of
rain and wind. It was one of those rare mornings which declares itself, with a
boastful extravagance of warmth and light and new leaves, as the true
beginning, the grand portal to summer, and he was walking through it with
Briony, past the Triton pond, down beyond the ha-ha and rhododendrons, through
the iron kissing gate and onto the winding narrow woodland path. She was
excited and talkative. She would have been about ten years old, just starting
to write her little stories. Along with everyone else, he had received his own
bound and illustrated tale of love, adversities overcome, reunion and a
wedding. They were on their way down to the river for the swimming lesson he
had promised her. As they left the house behind she may have been telling him
about a story she had just finished or a book she was reading. She may have been
holding his hand. She was a quiet, intense little girl, rather prim in her way,
and this outpouring was unusual. He was happy to listen. These were exciting
times for him too. He was nineteen, exams were almost over and he thought
he’d done well. Soon he would cease to be a schoolboy. He had interviewed
well at Cambridge and in two weeks he was leaving for France where he was to
teach English at a religious school. There was a grandeur about the day, about
the colossal, barely stirring beeches and oaks, and the light that dropped like
jewels through the fresh foliage to make pools among last year’s dead
leaves. This magnificence, he sensed in his youthful self-importance, reflected
the glorious momentum of his life.