Atonement (22 page)

‘What with, sir?'

‘With cunning and a bit of teamwork.'

How was the fool to be resisted? Turner was too tired to think, though he knew he wasn't going.

‘Now, I've got the remains of two platoons halfway up the eastern…'

Remains was the word that told the story, and prompted Mace, with all his barrack-room skill, to interrupt.

‘Beg pardon, sir. Permission to speak.'

‘Not granted, corporal.'

‘Thank you, sir. Orders is from GHQ. Proceed at haste and speed and celerity, without delay, diversion or divagation to Dunkirk for the purposes of immediate evacuation on account of being 'orribly and onerously overrun from all directions. Sir.'

The major turned and poked his forefinger into Mace's chest.

‘Now look here you. This is our one last chance to show…'

Corporal Nettle said dreamily, ‘It was Lord Gort what wrote out that order, sir, and sent it down personally.'

It seemed extraordinary to Turner that an officer should be addressed this way. And risky too. The major had not grasped that he was being mocked. He seemed to think that it was Turner who had spoken, for the little speech that followed was addressed to him.

‘The retreat is a bloody shambles. For heaven's sake, man. This is your one last good chance to show what we can do when we're decisive and determined. What's more…'

He went on to say a good deal more, but it seemed to Turner that a muffling silence had descended on the bright late-morning scene. This time he wasn't asleep. He was looking past the major's shoulder towards the head of the column. Hanging there, a long way off, about thirty feet above the road, warped by the rising heat, was what looked like a plank of wood, suspended horizontally, with a bulge in its centre. The major's words were not reaching him, and nor were his own clear thoughts. The horizontal apparition hovered in the sky without growing larger, and though he was beginning to understand its meaning, it was, as in a dream, impossible to begin to respond or move his limbs. His only action had been to open his mouth, but he could make no sound, and would not have known what to say, even if he could.

Then, precisely at the moment when sound flooded back in, he was able to shout, ‘Go!' He began to run directly towards the nearest cover. It was the vaguest, least soldierly form of advice, but he sensed the corporals not far behind. Dreamlike too was the way he could not move his legs fast enough. It was not pain he felt below his ribs, but something scraping against the bone. He let his greatcoat fall. Fifty yards ahead was a three-ton lorry on its side. That black greasy chassis, that bulbous differential was his only home. He didn't have long to get there. A fighter was strafing the length of the column. The broad spray of fire was advancing up the road at two hundred miles an hour, a rattling hail-storm din of cannon rounds hitting metal and glass. No one inside the near-stationary vehicles had started to react. Drivers were only just registering the spectacle through their windscreens. They were where he had been seconds before. Men in the backs of the lorries knew nothing. A sergeant stood in the centre of the road and raised his rifle. A woman screamed, and then fire was upon them just as Turner threw himself into the shadow of the upended lorry. The steel frame trembled as rounds hit it with the wild rapidity of a drum roll. Then the cannon fire swept on, hurtling down the column, chased by the fighter's roar and the flicker of its shadow. He pressed himself into the darkness of the chassis by the front wheel. Never had sump oil smelled sweeter. Waiting for another plane, he crouched foetally, his arms cradling his head and eyes tight shut, and thought only of survival.

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 towards the major who was sitting on the ground. All the colour 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 millimetre, 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 towards 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. Afterwards 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 tyres.

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 towards 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 face-down 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 inflamation 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 towards 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 colourless 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 BC and AD. 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 centre 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.