THERE WERE HORRORS enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him and afterward would not let him go. When they reached the level crossing, after a three-mile walk along a narrow road, he saw the path he was looking for meandering off to the right, then dipping and rising toward a copse that covered a low hill to the northwest. They stopped so that he could consult the map. But it wasn’t where he thought it should be. It wasn’t in his pocket, or tucked into his belt. Had he dropped it, or put it down at the last stop? He let his greatcoat fall on the ground and was reaching inside his jacket when he realized. The map was in his left hand and must have been there for over an hour. He glanced across at the other two but they were facing away from him, standing apart, smoking silently. It was still in his hand. He had prized it from the fingers of a captain in the West Kents lying in a ditch outside—outside where? These rear-area maps were rare. He also took the dead captain’s revolver. He wasn’t trying to impersonate an officer. He had lost his rifle and simply intended to survive.
The path he was interested in started down the side of a bombed house, fairly new, perhaps a railwayman’s cottage rebuilt after the last time. There were animal tracks in the mud surrounding a puddle in a tire rut. Probably goats. Scattered around were shreds of striped cloth with blackened edges, remains of curtains or clothing, and a smashed-in window frame draped across a bush, and everywhere, the smell of damp soot. This was their path, their shortcut. He folded the map away, and as he straightened from picking up the coat and was slinging it around his shoulders, he saw it. The others, sensing his movement, turned round, and followed his gaze. It was a leg in a tree. A mature plane tree, only just in leaf. The leg was twenty feet up, wedged in the first forking of the trunk, bare, severed cleanly above the knee. From where they stood there was no sign of blood or torn flesh. It was a perfect leg, pale, smooth, small enough to be a child’s. The way it was angled in the fork, it seemed to be on display, for their benefit or enlightenment: this is a leg.
The two corporals made a dismissive sound of disgust and picked up their stuff. They refused to be drawn in. In the past few days they had seen enough.
Nettle, the lorry driver, took out another cigarette and said, “So, which way, guv’nor?”
They called him that to settle the difficult matter of rank. He set off down the path in a hurry, almost at a half run. He wanted to get ahead, out of sight, so that he could throw up, or crap, he didn’t know which. Behind a barn, by a pile of broken slates, his body chose the first option for him. He was so thirsty, he couldn’t afford to lose the fluid. He drank from his canteen, and walked around the barn. He made use of this moment alone to look at his wound. It was on his right side, just below his rib cage, about the size of a half crown. It wasn’t looking so bad after he washed away the dried blood yesterday. Though the skin around it was red, there wasn’t much swelling. But there was something in there. He could feel it move when he walked. A piece of shrapnel perhaps.
By the time the corporals caught up, he had tucked his shirt back in and was pretending to study the map. In their company the map was his only privacy.
“What’s the hurry?”
“He’s seen some crumpet.”
“It’s the map. He’s having his fucking doubts again.”
“No doubts, gentlemen. This is our path.”
He took out a cigarette and Corporal Mace lit it for him. Then, to conceal the trembling in his hands, Robbie Turner walked on, and they followed him, as they had followed him for two days now. Or was it three? He was lower in rank, but they followed and did everything he suggested, and to preserve their dignity, they teased him. When they tramped the roads or cut across the fields and he was silent for too long, Mace would say, “Guv’nor, are you thinking about crumpet again?” And Nettle would chant, “He fucking is, he fucking is.” They were townies who disliked the countryside and were lost in it. The compass points meant nothing to them. That part of basic training had passed them by. They had decided that to reach the coast, they needed him. It was difficult for them. He acted like an officer, but he didn’t even have a single stripe. On the first night, when they were sheltering in the bike shed of a burned-out school, Corporal Nettle said, “What’s a private soldier like you doing talking like a toff?”
He didn’t owe them explanations. He intended to survive, he had one good reason to survive, and he didn’t care whether they tagged along or not. Both men had hung on to their rifles. That was something at least, and Mace was a big man, strong across the shoulders, and with hands that could have spanned one and a half octaves of the pub piano he said he played. Nor did Turner mind about the taunts. All he wanted now as they followed the path away from the road was to forget about the leg. Their path joined a track which ran between two stone walls and dropped down into a valley that had not been visible from the road. At the bottom was a brown stream which they crossed on stepping-stones set deep in a carpet of what looked like miniature water parsley.
Their route swung to the west as they rose out of the valley, still between the ancient walls. Ahead of them the sky was beginning to clear a little and glowed like a promise. Everywhere else was gray. As they approached the top through a copse of chestnut trees, the lowering sun dropped below the cloud cover and caught the scene, dazzling the three soldiers as they rose into it. How fine it might have been, to end a day’s ramble in the French countryside, walking into the setting sun. Always a hopeful act.
As they came out of the copse they heard bombers, so they went back in and smoked while they waited under the trees. From where they were they could not see the planes, but the view was fine. These were hardly hills that spread so expansively before them. They were ripples in the landscape, faint echoes of vast upheavals elsewhere. Each successive ridge was paler than the one before. He saw a receding wash of gray and blue fading in a haze toward the setting sun, like something oriental on a dinner plate.
Half an hour later they were making a long traverse across a deeper slope that edged further to the north and delivered them at last to another valley, another little stream. This one had a more confident flow and they crossed it by a stone bridge thick with cow dung. The corporals, who were not as tired as he was, had a lark, pretending to be revolted. One of them threw a dried lump of dung at his back. Turner did not look round. The scraps of cloth, he was beginning to think, may have been a child’s pajamas. A boy’s. The dive-bombers sometimes came over not long after dawn. He was trying to push it away, but it would not let him go. A French boy asleep in his bed. Turner wanted to put more distance between himself and that bombed cottage. It was not only the German army and air force pursuing him now. If there had been a moon he would have been happy walking all night. The corporals wouldn’t like it. Perhaps it was time to shake them off.
Downstream of the bridge was a line of poplars whose tops fluttered brilliantly in the last of the light. The soldiers turned in the other direction and soon the track was a path again and was leaving the stream. They wound and squeezed their way through bushes with fat shiny leaves. There were also stunted oaks, barely in leaf. The vegetation underfoot smelled sweet and damp, and he thought there must be something wrong with the place to make it so different from anything they had seen.
Ahead of them was the hum of machinery. It grew louder, angrier, and suggested the high-velocity spin of flywheels or electric turbines turning at impossible speed. They were entering a great hall of sound and power.
“Bees!” he called out. He had to turn and say it again before they heard him. The air was already darker. He knew the lore well enough. If one stuck in your hair and stung you, it sent out a chemical message as it died and all who received it were compelled to come and sting and die at the same place. General conscription! After all the danger, this was a kind of insult. They lifted their greatcoats over their heads and ran on through the swarm. Still among the bees, they reached a stinking ditch of slurry which they crossed by a wobbling plank. They came up behind a barn where it was suddenly peaceful. Beyond it was a farmyard. As soon as they were in it, dogs were barking and an old woman was running toward them flapping her hands at them, as though they were hens she could shoo away. The corporals depended on Turner’s French. He went forward and waited for her to reach him. There were stories of civilians selling bottles of water for ten francs, but he had never seen it. The French he had met were generous, or otherwise lost to their own miseries. The woman was frail and energetic. She had a gnarled, man-in-the-moon face and a wild look. Her voice was sharp.
“C’est impossible, M’sieur. Vous ne pouvez pas rester ici.”
“We’ll be staying in the barn. We need water, wine, bread, cheese and anything else you can spare.”
“Impossible!”
He said to her softly, “We’ve been fighting for France.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“We’ll be gone at dawn. The Germans are still…”
“It’s not the Germans, M’sieur. It’s my sons. They are animals. And they’ll be back soon.”
Turner pushed past the woman and went to the pump which was in the corner of the yard, near the kitchen. Nettle and Mace followed him. While he drank, a girl of about ten and an infant brother holding her hand watched him from the doorway. When he finished and had filled his canteen he smiled at them and they fled. The corporals were under the pump together, drinking simultaneously. The woman was suddenly behind him, clutching at his elbow. Before she could start again he said, “Please bring us what I asked for or we’ll come in and get it for ourselves.”
“My sons are brutes. They’ll kill me.”
He would have preferred to say, So be it, but instead he walked away and called over his shoulder, “I’ll talk to them.”
“And then, M’sieur, they will kill you. They will tear you to shreds.”
Corporal Mace was a cook in the same RASC unit as Corporal Nettle. Before he joined he was a warehouseman at Heal’s in the Tottenham Court Road. He said he knew a thing or two about comfort, and in the barn he set about arranging their quarters. Turner would have thrown himself down on the straw. Mace found a heap of sacks and with Nettle’s help stuffed them to make up three mattresses. He made headboards out of hay bales which he lifted down with a single hand. He set up a door on brick piles for a table. He took out half a candle from his pocket.
“Might as well be comfy,” he kept saying under his breath. It was the first time they had moved much beyond sexual innuendo. The three men lay on their beds, smoking and waiting. Now they were no longer thirsty their thoughts were on the food they were about to get and they heard each other’s stomachs rumbling and squirting in the gloom, and it made them laugh. Turner told them about his conversation with the old woman and what she had said about her sons.
“Fifth columnists, they would be,” Nettle said. He only looked small alongside his friend, but he had a small man’s sharp features and a friendly, rodent look, heightened by his way of resting the teeth of his upper jaw on his lower lip.
“Or French Nazis. German sympathizers. Like we got Mosley,” Mace said.
They were silent for a while, then Mace added, “Or like they all are in the country, bonkers from marrying too close.”
“Whatever it is,” Turner said, “I think you should check your weapons now and have them handy.”
They did as they were told. Mace lit the candle, and they went through the routines. Turner checked his pistol and put it within reach. When the corporals were finished, they propped the Lee-Enfields against a wooden crate and lay down on their beds again. Presently the girl came with a basket. She set it down by the barn door and ran away. Nettle fetched the basket and they spread out what they had on their table. A round loaf of brown bread, a small piece of soft cheese, an onion and a bottle of wine. The bread was hard to cut and tasted of mold. The cheese was good, but it was gone in seconds. They passed the bottle around and soon that was gone too. So they chewed on the musty bread and ate the onion.
Nettle said, “I wouldn’t give this to my fucking dog.”
“I’ll go across,” Turner said, “and get something better.”
“We’ll come too.”
But for a while they lay back on their beds in silence. No one felt like confronting the old lady just yet.
Then, at the sound of footsteps, they turned and saw two men standing in the entrance. They each held something in their hands, a club perhaps, or a shotgun. In the fading light it was not possible to tell. Nor could they see the faces of the French brothers.
The voice was soft. “Bonsoir, Messieurs.”
“Bonsoir.”
As Turner got up from his straw bed he took the revolver. The corporals reached for their rifles. “Go easy,” he whispered.
“Anglais? Belges?”
“Anglais.”
“We have something for you.”
“What sort of thing?”
“What’s he saying?” one of the corporals said.
“He says they’ve got something for us.”
“Fucking hell.”
The men came a couple of steps closer and raised what was in their hands. Shotguns, surely. Turner released his safety catch. He heard Mace and Nettle do the same. “Easy,” he murmured.
“Put away your guns, Messieurs.”
“Put away yours.”
“Wait a little moment.”
The figure who spoke was reaching into his pocket. He brought out a torch and shone it not at the soldiers, but at his brother, at what was in his hand. A French loaf. And at what was in the other hand, a canvas bag. Then he showed them the two baguettes he himself was holding.
“And we have olives, cheese, pâté, tomatoes and ham. And naturally, wine. Vive l’Angleterre.”
“Er, Vive la France.”
They sat at Mace’s table, which the Frenchmen, Henri and Jean-Marie Bonnet, politely admired, along with the mattresses. They were short, stocky men in their fifties. Henri wore glasses, which Nettle said looked odd on a farmer. Turner did not translate. As well as wine, they brought glass tumblers. The five men raised them in toasts to the French and British armies, and to the crushing of Germany. The brothers watched the soldiers eat. Through Turner, Mace said that he had never tasted, never even heard of, goose liver pâté, and from now on, he would eat nothing else. The Frenchmen smiled, but their manner was constrained and they seemed in no mood to get drunk. They said they had driven all the way to a hamlet near Arras in their flatbed farm truck to look for a young cousin and her children. A great battle had been fought for the town but they had no idea who was taking it, who was defending it or who had the upper hand. They drove on the back roads to avoid the chaos of refugees. They saw farmhouses burning, and then they came across a dozen or so dead English soldiers in the road. They had to get out and drag the men aside to avoid running over them. But a couple of the bodies were almost cut in half. It must have been a big machine-gun attack, perhaps from the air, perhaps an ambush. Back in the lorry, Henri was sick in the cab, and Jean-Marie, who was at the wheel, got into a panic and drove into a ditch. They walked to a village, borrowed two horses from a farmer and pulled the Renault free. That took two hours. On the road again, they saw burned-out tanks and armored cars, German as well as British and French. But they saw no soldiers. The battle had moved on.
By the time they reached the hamlet, it was late afternoon. The place had been completely destroyed and was deserted. Their cousin’s house was smashed up, with bullet holes all over the walls, but it still had its roof. They went in every room and were relieved to find no one there. She must have taken the children and joined the thousands of people on the roads. Afraid of driving back at night, they parked in a wood and tried to sleep in the cab. All night long they heard the artillery pounding Arras. It seemed impossible that anyone, or anything, could survive there. They drove back by another route, a much greater distance, to avoid passing the dead soldiers. Now, Henri explained, he and his brother were very tired. When they shut their eyes, they saw those mutilated bodies.
Jean-Marie refilled the glasses. The account, with Turner’s running translation, had taken almost an hour. All the food was eaten. He thought about telling them of his own single, haunting detail. But he didn’t want to add to the horror, and nor did he want to give life to the image while it remained at a distance, held there by wine and companionship. Instead, he told them how he was separated from his unit at the beginning of the retreat, during a Stuka attack. He didn’t mention his injury because he didn’t want the corporals to know about it. Instead he explained how they were walking cross-country to Dunkirk to avoid the air raids along the main roads.
Jean-Marie said, “So it’s true what they’re saying. You’re leaving.”
“We’ll be back.” He said this, but he didn’t believe it.
The wine was taking hold of Corporal Nettle. He began a rambling eulogy of what he called ‘Frog crumpet’—how plentiful, how available, how delicious. It was all fantasy. The brothers looked at Turner.
“He says French women are the most beautiful in the world.”
They nodded solemnly and raised their glasses.
They were all silent for a while. Their evening was almost at an end. They listened to the night sounds they had grown used to—the rumble of artillery, stray shots in the distance, a booming far-off explosion—probably sappers blowing a bridge in the retreat.
“Ask them about their mum,” Corporal Mace suggested. “Let’s get that one cleared up.”
“We were three brothers,” Henri explained. “The eldest, Paul, her firstborn, died near Verdun in 1915. A direct hit from a shell. There was nothing to bury apart from his helmet. Us two, we were lucky. We came through without a scratch. Since then, she’s always hated soldiers. But now she’s eighty-three and losing her mind, it’s an obsession with her. French, English, Belgian, German. She makes no distinction. You’re all the same to her. We worry that when the Germans come, she’ll go at them with a pitchfork and they’ll shoot her.”
Wearily, the brothers got to their feet. The soldiers did the same.
Jean-Marie said, “We would offer you hospitality at our kitchen table. But to do that, we would have to lock her in her room.”
“But this has been a magnificent feast,” Turner said.
Nettle was whispering in Mace’s ear and he was nodding. Nettle took from his bag two cartons of cigarettes. Of course, it was the right thing to do. The Frenchmen made a polite show of refusing, but Nettle came round the table and shoved the gifts into their arms. He wanted Turner to translate.
“You should have seen it, when the order came through to destroy the stores. Twenty thousand cigarettes. We took whatever we wanted.”
A whole army was fleeing to the coast, armed with cigarettes to keep the hunger away.
The Frenchmen gave courteous thanks, complimented Turner on his French, then bent over the table to pack the empty bottles and glasses into the canvas bag. There was no pretending that they would meet again.
“We’ll be gone at first light,” Turner said. “So we’ll say goodbye.”
They shook hands.
Henri Bonnet said, “All that fighting we did twenty-five years ago. All those dead. Now the Germans back in France. In two days they’ll be here, taking everything we have. Who would have believed it?”
Turner felt, for the first time, the full ignominy of the retreat. He was ashamed. He said, with even less conviction than before, “We’ll be back to throw them out, I promise you.”
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.
§
FOR 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.
There was another, closer matter that troubled him. Cecilia had not spoken to her parents, brother or sister since November 1935 when Robbie was sentenced. She would not write to them, nor would she let them know her address. Letters reached her through his mother who had sold the bungalow and moved to another village. It was through Grace that she let her family know she was well and did not wish to be contacted. Leon had come to the hospital once, but she would not speak to him. He waited outside the gates all afternoon. When she saw him, she retreated inside until he went away. The following morning he was outside the nurses’ hostel. She pushed past him and would not even look in his direction. He took her elbow, but she wrenched her arm free and walked on, outwardly unmoved by his pleading.
Robbie knew better than anyone how she loved her brother, how close she was to her family, and how much the house and the park meant to her. He could never return, but it troubled him to think that she was destroying a part of herself for his sake. A month into his training he told her what was on his mind. It wasn’t the first time they had been through this, but the issue had become clearer.
She wrote in reply, “They turned on you, all of them, even my father. When they wrecked your life they wrecked mine. They chose to believe the evidence of a silly, hysterical little girl. In fact, they encouraged her by giving her no room to turn back. She was a young thirteen, I know, but I never want to speak to her again. As for the rest of them, I can never forgive what they did. Now that I’ve broken away, I’m beginning to understand the snobbery that lay behind their stupidity. My mother never forgave you your first. My father preferred to lose himself in his work. Leon turned out to be a grinning, spineless idiot who went along with everyone else. When Hardman decided to cover for Danny, no one in my family wanted the police to ask him the obvious questions. The police had you to prosecute. They didn’t want their case messed up. I know I sound bitter, but my darling, I don’t want to be. I’m honestly happy with my new life and my new friends. I feel I can breathe now. Most of all, I have you to live for. Realistically, there had to be a choice—you or them. How could it be both? I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one, my reason for life. Cee.”
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive. He lay on his side, staring at where he thought the barn’s entrance was, waiting for the first signs of light. He was too restless for sleep now. He wanted only to be walking to the coast.
There was no cottage in Wiltshire for them. Three weeks before his training ended, war was declared. The military response was automatic, like the reflexes of a clam. All leave was canceled. Sometime later, it was redefined as postponed. A date was given, changed, canceled. Then, with twenty-four hours’ notice, railway passes were issued. They had four days before reporting back for duty with their new regiment. The rumor was they would be on the move. She had tried to rearrange her holiday dates, and partly succeeded. When she tried again she could not be accommodated. By the time his card arrived, telling her of his arrival, she was on her way to Liverpool for a course in severe trauma nursing at the Alder Hey Hospital. The day after he reached London he set out to follow her north, but the trains were impossibly slow. Priority was for military traffic moving southward. At Birmingham New Street station he missed a connection and the next train was canceled. He would have to wait until the following morning. He paced the platforms for half an hour in a turmoil of indecision. Finally, he chose to turn back. Reporting late for duty was a serious matter.
By the time she returned from Liverpool, he was disembarking at Cherbourg and the dullest winter of his life lay before him. The distress of course was shared between them, but she felt it her duty to be positive and soothing. “I’m not going to go away,” she wrote in her first letter after Liverpool. “I’ll wait for you. Come back.” She was quoting herself. She knew he would remember. From that time on, this was how she ended every one of her letters to Robbie in France, right through to the last, which arrived just before the order came to fall back on Dunkirk.
It was a long bitter winter for the British Expeditionary Force in northern France. Nothing much happened. They dug trenches, secured supply lines and were sent out on night exercises that were farcical for the infantrymen because the purpose was never explained and there was a shortage of weapons. Off-duty, every man was a general. Even the lowliest private soldier had decided that the war would not be fought in the trenches again. But the antitank weapons that were expected never arrived. In fact, they had little heavy weaponry at all. It was a time of boredom and football matches against other units, and daylong marches along country roads with full pack, and nothing to do for hours on end but to keep in step and daydream to the beat of boots on asphalt. He would lose himself in thoughts of her, and plan his next letter, refining the phrases, trying to find comedy in the dullness.
It may have been the first touches of green along the French lanes and the haze of bluebells glimpsed through the woods that made him feel the need for reconciliation and fresh beginnings. He decided he should try again to persuade her to make contact with her parents. She needn’t forgive them, or go back over the old arguments. She should just write a short and simple letter, letting them know where and how she was. Who could tell what changes might follow over the years to come? He knew that if she did not make her peace with her parents before one of them died, her remorse would be endless. He would never forgive himself if he did not encourage her.
So he wrote in April, and her reply did not reach him until mid-May, when they were already falling back through their own lines, not long before the order came to retreat all the way to the Channel. There had been no contact with enemy fire. The letter was in his top pocket now. It was her last to reach him before the post delivery system broke down.
…I wasn’t going to tell you about this now. I still don’t know what to think and I wanted to wait until we’re together. Now I have your letter, it doesn’t make sense not to tell you. The first surprise is that Briony isn’t at Cambridge. She didn’t go up last autumn, she didn’t take her place. I was amazed because I’d heard from Dr. Hall that she was expected. The other surprise is that she’s doing nurse’s training at my old hospital. Can you imagine Briony with a bedpan? I suppose they all said the same thing about me. But she’s such a fantasist, as we know to our cost. I pity the patient who receives an injection from her. Her letter is confused and confusing. She wants to meet. She’s beginning to get the full grasp of what she did and what it has meant. Clearly, not going up has something to do with it. She’s saying that she wants to be useful in a practical way. But I get the impression she’s taken on nursing as a sort of penance. She wants to come and see me and talk. I might have this wrong, and that’s why I was going to wait and go through this with you face to face, but I think she wants to recant. I think she wants to change her evidence and do it officially or legally. This might not even be possible, given that your appeal was dismissed. We need to know more about the law. Perhaps I should see a solicitor. I don’t want us to get our hopes up for nothing. She might not mean what I think she does, or she might not be prepared to see it through. Remember what a dreamer she is.
I’ll do nothing until I’ve heard from you. I wouldn’t have told you any of this, but when you wrote to tell me again that I should be in touch with my parents (I admire your generous spirit), I had to let you know because the situation could change. If it’s not legally possible for Briony to go before a judge and tell him she’s had second thoughts, then she can at least go and tell our parents. Then they can decide what they want to do. If they can bring themselves to write a proper apology to you, then perhaps we may have the beginning of a new start.
I keep thinking of her. To go into nursing, to cut herself off from her background, is a bigger step for her than it was for me. I had my three years at Cambridge at least, and I had an obvious reason to reject my family. She must have her reasons too. I can’t deny that I’m curious to find out. But I’m waiting for you, my darling, to tell me your thoughts. Yes, and by the way, she also said she’s had a piece of writing turned down by Cyril Connolly at Horizon. So at least someone can see through her wretched fantasies.
Do you remember those premature twins I told you about? The smaller one died. It happened in the night, when I was on. The mother took it very badly indeed. We’d heard that the father was a bricklayer’s mate, and I suppose we were expecting some cheeky little chap with a fag stuck on his lower lip. He’d been in East Anglia with contractors seconded to the army, building coastal defenses, which was why he was so late coming to the hospital. He turned out to be a very handsome fellow, nineteen years old, more than six feet tall, with blond hair that flopped over his forehead. He has a clubfoot like Byron, which was why he hadn’t joined up. Jenny said he looked like a Greek god. He was so sweet and gentle and patient comforting his young wife. We were all touched by it. The saddest part was that he was just getting somewhere, calming her down, when visiting time ended and Sister came through and made him leave along with everyone else. That left us to pick up the pieces. Poor girl. But four o’clock, and rules are rules.
I’m going to rush down with this to the Balham sorting office in the hope that it will be across the Channel before the weekend. But I don’t want to end on a sad note. I’m actually very excited by this news about my sister and what it could mean for us. I enjoyed your story about the sergeants’ latrines. I read that bit to the girls and they laughed like lunatics. I’m so glad the liaison officer has discovered your French and given you a job that makes use of it. Why did they take so long to find out about you? Did you hang back? You’re right about French bread—ten minutes later and you’re hungry again. All air and no substance. Balham isn’t as bad as I said it was, but more about that next time. I’m enclosing a poem by Auden on the death of Yeats cut out from an old London Mercury from last year. I’m going down to see Grace at the weekend and I’ll look in the boxes for your Housman. Must dash. You’re in my thoughts every minute. I love you. I’ll wait for you.
Come back. Cee.
HE WAS WOKEN by a boot nudging the small of his back. “C’mon, guv’nor. Rise and shine.”
He sat up and looked at his watch. The barn entrance was a rectangle of bluish-black. He had been asleep, he reckoned, for less than forty-five minutes. Mace diligently emptied the straw from the sacks and dismantled his table. They sat in silence on the hay bales smoking the first cigarette of the day. When they stepped outside they found a clay pot with a heavy wooden lid. Inside, wrapped in muslin cloth, was a loaf and a wedge of cheese. Turner divided the provisions right there with a bowie knife.
“In case we’re separated,” he murmured.
A light was on already in the farmhouse and the dogs were in a frenzy as they walked away. They climbed a gate and began to cross a field in a northerly direction. After an hour they stopped in a coppiced wood to drink from their canteens and smoke. Turner studied the map. Already, the first bombers were high overhead, a formation of about fifty Heinkels, heading the same way to the coast. The sun was coming up and there was little cloud. A perfect day for the Luftwaffe. They walked in silence for another hour. There was no path, so he made a route by the compass, through fields of cows and sheep, turnips and young wheat. They were not as safe as he thought, away from the road. One field of cattle had a dozen shell craters, and fragments of flesh, bone and brindled skin had been blasted across a hundred-yard stretch. But each man was folded into his thoughts and no one spoke. Turner was troubled by the map. He guessed they were twenty-five miles from Dunkirk. The closer they came, the harder it would be to stay off the roads. Everything converged. There were rivers and canals to cross. When they headed for the bridges they would only lose time if they cut away across country again.
Just after ten they stopped for another rest. They had climbed a fence to reach a track, but he could not find it on the map. It ran in the right direction anyway, over flat, almost treeless land. They had gone another half hour when they heard antiaircraft fire a couple of miles ahead where they could see the spire of a church. He stopped to consult the map again.
Corporal Nettle said, “It don’t show crumpet, that map.”
“Ssh. He’s having his doubts.”
Turner leaned his weight against a fence post. His side hurt whenever he put his right foot down. The sharp thing seemed to be protruding and snagging on his shirt. Impossible to resist probing with a forefinger. But he felt only tender, ruptured flesh. After last night, it wasn’t right he should have to listen to the corporals’ taunts again. Tiredness and pain were making him irritable, but he said nothing and tried to concentrate. He found the village on the map, but not the track, though it surely led there. It was just as he had thought. They would join the road, and they would need to stay on it all the way to the defense line at the Bergues-Furnes canal. There was no other route. The corporals’ banter was continuing. He folded the map and walked on.
“What’s the plan, guv’nor?”
He did not reply.
“Oh, oh. Now you’ve offended her.”
Beyond the ack-ack, they heard artillery fire, their own, some way further to the west. As they approached the village they heard the sound of slow-moving lorries. Then they saw them, stretching in a line to the north, traveling at walking pace. It was going to be tempting to hitch a ride, but he knew from experience what an easy target they would be from the air. On foot you could see and hear what was coming.
Their track joined the road where it turned a right-angled corner to leave the village. They rested their feet for ten minutes, sitting on the rim of a stone water trough. Three-and ten-ton lorries, half-tracks and ambulances were grinding round the narrow turn at less than one mile an hour, and moving away from the village down a long straight road whose left side was flanked by plane trees. The road led directly north, toward a black cloud of burning oil that stood above the horizon, marking out Dunkirk. No need for a compass now. Dotted along the way were disabled military vehicles. Nothing was to be left for enemy use. From the backs of receding lorries the conscious wounded stared out blankly. There were also armored cars, staff cars, Bren-gun carriers and motorbikes. Mixed in with them and stuffed or piled high with household gear and suitcases were civilian cars, buses, farm trucks and carts pushed by men and women or pulled by horses. The air was gray with diesel fumes, and straggling wearily through the stench, and for the moment moving faster than the traffic, were hundreds of soldiers, most of them carrying their rifles and their awkward greatcoats—a burden in the morning’s growing warmth.
Walking with the soldiers were families hauling suitcases, bundles, babies, or holding the hands of children. The only human sound Turner heard, piercing the din of engines, was the crying of babies. There were old people walking singly. One old man in a fresh lawn suit, bow tie and carpet slippers shuffled by with the help of two sticks, advancing so slowly that even the traffic was passing him. He was panting hard. Wherever he was going he surely would not make it. On the far side of the road, right on the corner, was a shoe shop open for business. Turner saw a woman with a little girl at her side talking to a shop assistant who displayed a different shoe in the palm of each hand. The three paid no attention to the procession behind them. Moving against the flow, and now trying to edge round this same corner, was a column of armored cars, the paintwork untouched by battle, heading south into the German advance. All they could hope to achieve against a Panzer division was an extra hour or two for the retreating soldiers.
Turner stood up, drank from his canteen and stepped into the procession, slipping in behind a couple of Highland Light Infantry men. The corporals followed him. He no longer felt responsible for them now they had joined the main body of the retreat. His lack of sleep exaggerated his hostility. Today their teasing needled him and seemed to betray the comradeship of the night before. In fact, he felt hostile to everyone around him. His thoughts had shrunk to the small hard point of his own survival.
Wanting to shake the corporals off, he quickened his pace, overtook the Scotsmen and pushed his way past a group of nuns shepherding a couple of dozen children in blue tunics. They looked like the rump of a boarding school, like the one he had taught at near Lille in the summer before he went up to Cambridge. It seemed another man’s life to him now. A dead civilization. First his own life ruined, then everybody else’s. He strode on angrily, knowing it was a pace he could not maintain for long. He had been in a column like this before, on the first day, and he knew what he was looking for. To his immediate right was a ditch, but it was shallow and exposed. The line of trees was on the other side. He slipped across, in front of a Renault saloon. As he did so the driver leaned on his horn. The shrill Klaxon startled Turner into a sudden fury. Enough! He leaped back to the driver’s door and wrenched it open. Inside was a trim little fellow in a gray suit and fedora, with leather suitcases piled at his side and his family jammed in the backseat. Turner grabbed the man by his tie and was ready to smack his stupid face with an open right hand, but another hand, one of some great strength, closed about his wrist.
“That ain’t the enemy, guv’nor.”
Without releasing his grip, Corporal Mace pulled him away. Nettle, who was just behind, kicked the Renault door shut with such ferocity that the wing mirror fell off. The children in blue tunics cheered and clapped.
The three crossed to the other side and walked on under the line of trees. The sun was well up now and it was warm, but the shade was not yet over the road. Some of the vehicles lying across the ditches had been shot up in air attacks. Around the abandoned lorries they passed, supplies had been scattered by troops looking for food or drink or petrol. Turner and the corporals tramped through typewriter ribbon spools spilling from their boxes, double-entry ledgers, consignments of tin desks and swivel chairs, cooking utensils and engine parts, saddles, stirrups and harnesses, sewing machines, football trophy cups, stackable chairs, and a film projector and petrol generator, both of which someone had wrecked with the crowbar that was lying nearby. They passed an ambulance, half in the ditch with one wheel removed. A brass plaque on the door said, “This ambulance is a gift of the British residents of Brazil.”
It was possible, Turner found, to fall asleep while walking. The roar of lorry engines would be suddenly cut, then his neck muscles relaxed, his head drooped, and he would wake with a start and a swerve to his step. Nettle and Mace were for getting a lift. But he had already told them the day before what he had seen in that first column—twenty men in the back of a three-ton lorry killed with a single bomb. Meanwhile he had cowered in a ditch with his head in a culvert and caught the shrapnel in his side.
“You go ahead,” he said. “I’m sticking here.”
So the matter was dropped. They wouldn’t go without him—he was their lucky ticket.
They came up behind some more HLI men. One of them was playing the bagpipes, prompting the corporals to begin their own nasal whining parodies. Turner made as if to cross the road.
“If you start a fight, I’m not with you.”
Already a couple of Scots had turned and were muttering to each other.
“It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht,” Nettle called out in Cockney. Something awkward might have developed then if they had not heard a pistol shot from up ahead. As they drew level the bagpipes fell silent. In a wide-open field the French cavalry had assembled in force and dismounted to form a long line. At the head stood an officer dispatching each horse with a shot to the head, and then moving on to the next. Each man stood to attention by his mount, holding his cap ceremonially against his chest. The horses patiently waited their turn.
This enactment of defeat depressed everyone’s spirits further. The corporals had no heart for a tangle with the Scotsmen, who could no longer be bothered with them. Minutes later they passed five bodies in a ditch, three women, two children. Their suitcases lay around them. One of the women wore carpet slippers, like the man in the lawn suit. Turner looked away, determined not to be drawn in. If he was going to survive, he had to keep a watch on the sky. He was so tired, he kept forgetting. And it was hot now. Some men were letting their greatcoats drop to the ground. A glorious day. In another time this was what would have been called a glorious day. Their road was on a long slow rise, enough to be a drag on the legs and increase the pain in his side. Each step was a conscious decision. A blister was swelling on his left heel which forced him to walk on the edge of his boot. Without stopping, he took the bread and cheese from his bag, but he was too thirsty to chew. He lit another cigarette to curb his hunger and tried to reduce his task to the basics: you walked across the land until you came to the sea. What could be simpler, once the social element was removed? He was the only man on earth and his purpose was clear. He was walking across the land until he came to the sea. The reality was all too social, he knew; other men were pursuing him, but he had comfort in a pretense, and a rhythm at least for his feet. He walked ⁄ across ⁄ the land ⁄ until ⁄ he came ⁄ to the sea. A hexameter. Five iambs and an anapest was the beat he tramped to now.
Another twenty minutes and the road began to level out. Glancing over his shoulder he saw the convoy stretching back down the hill for a mile. Ahead, he could not see the end of it. They crossed a railway line. By his map they were sixteen miles from the canal. They were entering a stretch where the wrecked equipment along the road was more or less continuous. Half a dozen twenty-five-pounder guns were piled beyond the ditch, as if swept up there by a heavy bulldozer. Up ahead where the land began to drop there was a junction with a back road and some kind of commotion was taking place. There was laughter from the soldiers on foot and raised voices at the roadside. As he came up, he saw a major from the Buffs, a pink-faced fellow of the old school, in his forties, shouting and pointing toward a wood that lay about a mile away across two fields. He was pulling men out of the column, or trying to. Most ignored him and kept going, some laughed at him, but a few were intimidated by his rank and had stopped, though he lacked any personal authority. They were gathered around him with their rifles, looking uncertain.
“You. Yes you. You’ll do.”
The major’s hand was on Turner’s shoulder. He stopped and saluted before he knew what he was doing. The corporals were behind him.
The major had a little toothbrush mustache overhanging small, tight lips that clipped his words briskly. “We’ve got Jerry trapped in the woods over there. He must be an advance party. But he’s well dug in with a couple of machine guns. We’re going to get in there and flush him out.”
Turner felt the horror chill and weaken his legs. He showed the major his empty palms.
“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 toward 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 center. 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 toward 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 hailstorm 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 center 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 drumroll. 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 fetally, 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 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.
§
THE 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.
She prattled on, and contentedly he half listened. The path emerged from the woods onto the broad grassy banks of the river. They walked upstream for half a mile and entered woods again. Here, on a bend in the river, below overhanging trees, was the pool, dug out in Briony’s grandfather’s time. A stone weir slowed the current and was a favorite diving and jumping-off place. Otherwise, it was not ideal for beginners. You went from the weir, or you jumped off the bank into nine feet of water. He dived in and trod water, waiting for her. They had started the lessons the year before, in late summer when the river was lower and the current sluggish. Now, even in the pool there was a steady rotating drift. She paused only for a moment, then jumped from the bank into his arms with a scream. She practiced treading water until the current carried her against the weir, then he towed her across the pool so that she could start again. When she tried out her breaststroke after a winter of neglect, he had to support her, not easy when he was treading water himself. If he removed his hand from under her, she could only manage three or four strokes before sinking. She was amused by the fact that, going against the current, she swam to remain still. But she did not stay still. Instead, she was carried back each time to the weir, where she clung to a rusty iron ring, waiting for him, her white face vivid against the lurid mossy walls and greenish cement. Swimming uphill, she called it. She wanted to repeat the experience, but the water was cold and after fifteen minutes he’d had enough. He pulled her over to the bank and, ignoring her protests, helped her out.
He took his clothes from the basket and went a little way off into the woods to change. When he returned she was standing exactly where he had left her, on the bank, looking into the water, with her towel around her shoulders.
She said, “If I fell in the river, would you save me?”
“Of course.”
He was bending over the basket as he said this and he heard, but did not see, her jump in. Her towel lay on the bank. Apart from the concentric ripples moving out across the pool, there was no sign of her. Then she bobbed up, snatched a breath and sank again. Desperate, he thought of running to the weir to fish her out from there, but the water was an opaque muddy green. He would only find her below the surface by touch. There was no choice—he stepped into the water, shoes, jacket and all. Almost immediately he found her arm, got his hand under her shoulder and heaved her up. To his surprise she was holding her breath. And then she was laughing joyously and clinging to his neck. He pushed her onto the bank and, with great difficulty in his sodden clothes, struggled out himself.
“Thank you,” she kept saying. “Thank you, thank you.”
“That was a bloody stupid thing to do.”
“I wanted you to save me.”
“Don’t you know how easily you could have drowned?”
“You saved me.”
Distress and relief were charging his anger. He was close to shouting. “You stupid girl. You could have killed us both.”
She fell silent. He sat on the grass, emptying the water from his shoes. “You went under the surface, I couldn’t see you. My clothes were weighing me down. We could have drowned, both of us. Is it your idea of a joke? Well, is it?”
There was nothing more to say. She got dressed and they went back along the path, Briony first, and he squelching behind her. He wanted to get into the open sunlight of the park. Then he faced a long trudge back to the bungalow for a change of clothes. He had not yet spent his anger. She was not too young, he thought, to get her mind around an apology. She walked in silence, head lowered, possibly sulking, he could not see. When they came out of the woods and had gone through the kissing gate, she stopped and turned. Her tone was forthright, even defiant. Rather than sulk, she was squaring up to him.
“Do you know why I wanted you to save me?”
“No.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Because I love you.”
She said it bravely, with chin upraised, and she blinked rapidly as she spoke, dazzled by the momentous truth she had revealed.
He restrained an impulse to laugh. He was the object of a schoolgirl crush. “What on earth do you mean by that?”
“I mean what everybody else means when they say it. I love you.”
This time the words were on a pathetic rising note. He realized that he should resist the temptation to mock. But it was difficult. He said, “You love me, so you threw yourself in the river.”
“I wanted to know if you’d save me.”
“And now you know. I’d risk my life for yours. But that doesn’t mean I love you.”
She drew herself up a little. “I want to thank you for saving my life. I’ll be eternally grateful to you.”
Lines, surely, from one of her books, one she had read lately, or one she had written.
He said, “That’s all right. But don’t do it again, for me or anyone else. Promise?”
She nodded, and said in parting, “I love you. Now you know.”
She walked away toward the house. Shivering in the sunlight, he watched her until she was out of sight, and then he set off for home. He did not see her on her own before he left for France, and by the time he came back in September, she was away at boarding school. Not long after, he went up to Cambridge, and in December spent Christmas with friends. He didn’t see Briony until the following April, and by then the matter was forgotten.
Or was it?
He’d had plenty of time alone, too much time, to consider. He could remember no other unusual conversation with her, no strange behavior, no meaningful looks or sulks to suggest that her schoolgirlish passion had lasted beyond that day in June. He had been back to Surrey almost every vacation and she had many opportunities to seek him out at the bungalow, or pass him a note. He was busy with his new life then, lost to the novelties of undergraduate life, and also intent at that time on putting a little distance between himself and the Tallis family. But there must have been signs which he had not noticed. For three years she must have nurtured a feeling for him, kept it hidden, nourished it with fantasy or embellished it in her stories. She was the sort of girl who lived in her thoughts. The drama by the river might have been enough to sustain her all that time.
This theory, or conviction, rested on the memory of a single encounter—the meeting at dusk on the bridge. For years he had dwelled on that walk across the park. She would have known he was invited to dinner. There she was, barefoot, in a dirty white frock. That was strange enough. She would have been waiting for him, perhaps preparing her little speech, even rehearsing it out loud as she sat on the stone parapet. When he finally arrived, she was tongue-tied. That was proof of a sort. Even at the time, he thought it odd that she did not speak to him. He gave her the letter and she ran off. Minutes later, she was opening it. She was shocked, and not only by a word. In her mind he had betrayed her love by favoring her sister. Then, in the library, confirmation of the worst, at which point, the whole fantasy crashed. First, disappointment and despair, then a rising bitterness. Finally, an extraordinary opportunity in the dark, during the search for the twins, to avenge herself. She named him—and no one but her sister and his mother doubted her. The impulse, the flash of malice, the infantile destructiveness he could understand. The wonder was the depth of the girl’s rancor, her persistence with a story that saw him all the way to Wandsworth Prison. Now he might be cleared, and that gave him joy. He acknowledged the courage it would require for her to go back to the law and deny the evidence she had given under oath. But he did not think his resentment of her could ever be erased. Yes, she was a child at the time, and he did not forgive her. He would never forgive her. That was the lasting damage.
§
THERE WAS MORE confusion ahead, more shouting. Incredibly, an armored column was forcing its way against the forward press of traffic, soldiers and refugees. The crowd parted reluctantly. People squeezed into the gaps between abandoned vehicles or against shattered walls and doorways. It was a French column, hardly more than a detachment—three armored cars, two half-tracks and two troop carriers. There was no show of common cause. Among the British troops the view was that the French had let them down. No will to fight for their own country. Irritated at being pushed aside, the Tommies swore, and taunted their allies with shouts of ‘Maginot!’ For their part, the poilus must have heard rumors of an evacuation. And here they were, being sent to cover the rear. “Cowards! To the boats! Go shit in your pants!” Then they were gone, and the crowd closed in again under a cloud of diesel smoke and walked on.
They were approaching the last houses in the village. In a field ahead, he saw a man and his collie dog walking behind a horse-drawn plow. Like the ladies in the shoe shop, the farmer did not seem aware of the convoy. These lives were lived in parallel—war was a hobby for the enthusiasts and no less serious for that. Like the deadly pursuit of a hunt to hounds, while over the next hedge a woman in the backseat of a passing motorcar was absorbed in her knitting, and in the bare garden of a new house a man was teaching his son to kick a ball. Yes, the plowing would still go on and there’d be a crop, someone to reap it and mill it, others to eat it, and not everyone would be dead…
Turner was thinking this when Nettle gripped his arm and pointed. The commotion of the passing French column had covered the sound, but they were easy enough to see. There were at least fifteen of them, at ten thousand feet, little dots in the blue, circling above the road. Turner and the corporals stopped to watch, and everyone nearby saw them too.
An exhausted voice murmured close to his ear, “Fuck. Where’s the RAF?”
Another said knowingly, “They’ll go for the Frogs.”
As if goaded into disproof, one of the specks peeled away and began its near-vertical dive, directly above their heads. For seconds the sound did not reach them. The silence was building like pressure in their ears. Even the wild shouts that went up and down the road did not relieve it. Take cover! Disperse! Disperse! At the double!
It was difficult to move. He could walk on at a steady trudge, and he could stop, but it was an effort, an effort of memory, to reach for the unfamiliar commands, to turn away from the road and run. They had stopped by the last house in the village. Beyond the house was a barn and flanking both was the field where the farmer had been plowing. Now he was standing under a tree with his dog, as though sheltering from a shower of rain. His horse, still in harness, grazed along the unplowed strip. Soldiers and civilians were streaming away from the road in all directions. A woman brushed past him carrying a crying child, then she changed her mind and came back and stood, turning indecisively at the side of the road. Which way? The farmyard or the field? Her immobility delivered him from his own. As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had become a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally. Turner guided the woman through the gate. He wanted her to run with him into the center of the field. He had touched her, and made her decision for her, so now he felt he could not abandon her. But the boy was at least six years old and heavy, and together they were making no progress at all.
He dragged the child from her arms. “Come on,” he shouted.
A Stuka carried a single thousand-pound bomb. The idea on the ground was to get away from buildings, vehicles and other people. The pilot was not going to waste his precious load on a lone figure in a field. When he turned back to strafe it would be another matter. Turner had seen them hunt down a sprinting man for the sport of it. With a free hand he was pulling on the woman’s arm. The boy was wetting his pants and screaming in Turner’s ear. The mother seemed incapable of running. She was stretching out her hand and shouting. She wanted her son back. The child was wriggling toward her, across his shoulder. Now came the screech of the falling bomb. They said that if you heard the noise stop before the explosion, your time was up. As he dropped to the grass he pulled the woman with him and shoved her head down. He was half lying across the child as the ground shook to the unbelievable roar. The shock wave prized them from the earth. They covered their faces against the stinging spray of dirt. They heard the Stuka climb from its dive even as they heard the banshee wail of the next attack. The bomb had hit the road less than eighty yards away. He had the boy under his arm and he was trying to pull the woman to her feet.
“We’ve got to run again. We’re too close to the road.”
The woman answered but he did not understand her. Again they were stumbling across the field. He felt the pain in his side like a flash of color. The boy was in his arms, and again the woman seemed to be dragging back, and trying to get her son from him. There were hundreds in the field now, all making for the woods on the far side. At the shrill whine of the bomb everyone cowered on the ground. But the woman had no instinct for danger and he had to pull her down again. This time they were pressing their faces into freshly turned earth. As the screech grew louder the woman shouted what sounded like a prayer. He realized then that she wasn’t speaking French. The explosion was on the far side of the road, more than a hundred and fifty yards away. But now the first Stuka was turning over the village and dropping for the strafe. The boy had gone silent with shock. His mother wouldn’t stand. Turner pointed to the Stuka coming in over the rooftops. They were right in its path and there was no time for argument. She wouldn’t move. He threw himself down into the furrow. The rippling thuds of machine-gun fire in the plowed earth and the engine roar flashed past them. A wounded soldier was screaming. Turner was on his feet. But the woman would not take his hand. She sat on the ground and hugged the boy tightly to her. She was speaking Flemish to him, soothing him, surely telling him that everything was going to be all right. Mama would see to that. Turner didn’t know a single word of the language. It would have made no difference. She paid him no attention. The boy was staring at him blankly over his mother’s shoulder.
Turner took a step back. Then he ran. As he floundered across the furrows the attack was coming in. The rich soil was clinging to his boots. Only in nightmares were feet so heavy. A bomb fell on the road, way over in the center of the village, where the lorries were. But one screech hid another, and it hit the field before he could go down. The blast lifted him forward several feet and drove him face-first into the soil. When he came to, his mouth and nose and ears were filled with dirt. He was trying to clear his mouth, but he had no saliva. He used a finger, but that was worse. He was gagging on the dirt, then he was gagging on his filthy finger. He blew the dirt from his nose. His snot was mud and it covered his mouth. But the woods were near, there would be streams and waterfalls and lakes in there. He imagined a paradise. When the rising howl of a diving Stuka sounded again, he struggled to place the sound. Was it the all-clear? His thoughts too were clogged. He could not spit or swallow, he could not easily breathe, and he could not think. Then, at the sight of the farmer with his dog still waiting patiently under the tree, it came back to him, he remembered everything and he turned to look back. Where the woman and her son had been was a crater. Even as he saw it, he thought he had always known. That was why he had to leave them. His business was to survive, though he had forgotten why. He kept on toward the woods.
He walked a few steps into the tree cover, and sat in the new undergrowth with his back to a birch sapling. His only thought was of water. There were more than two hundred people sheltering in the woods, including some wounded who had dragged themselves in. There was a man, a civilian, not far off, crying and shouting in pain. Turner got up and moved further away. All the new greenery spoke to him only of water. The attack continued on the road and over the village. He cleared away old leaves and used his helmet to dig. The soil was damp but no water oozed into the hole he had made, even when it was eighteen inches deep. So he sat and thought about water and tried to clean his tongue against his sleeve. When a Stuka dived, it was impossible not to tense and shrink, though each time he thought he didn’t have the strength. Toward the end they came over to strafe the woods, but to no effect. Leaves and twigs tumbled from the canopy. Then the planes were gone, and in the huge silence that loomed over the fields and trees and the village, there was not even birdsong. After a while, from the direction of the road came blasts of a whistle for the all-clear. But no one moved. He remembered this from last time. They were too dazed, they were in shock from repeated episodes of terror. Each dive brought every man, cornered and cowering, to face his execution. When it did not come, the trial had to be lived through all over again and the fear did not diminish. For the living, the end of a Stuka attack was the paralysis of shock, of repeated shocks. The sergeants and junior officers might come around shouting and kicking the men into standing. But they were drained and, for a good while, useless as troops.
So he sat there in a daze like everyone else, just as he had the first time, outside the village whose name he could not remember. These French villages with Belgian names. When he was separated from his unit and, what was worse for an infantryman, from his rifle. How many days ago? There could be no way of knowing. He examined his revolver which was clogged with dirt. He removed the ammunition and tossed the gun into the bushes. After a time there was a sound behind him and a hand was on his shoulder.
“Here you go. Courtesy of the Green Howards.”
Corporal Mace was passing him some dead man’s water bottle. Since it was almost full he used the first swig to rinse out his mouth, but that was a waste. He drank the dirt with the rest.
“Mace, you’re an angel.”
The corporal extended a hand to pull him up. “Got to shift. There’s a rumor the fucking Belgians have collapsed. We might get cut off from the east. Still miles to go.”
As they were walking back across the field, Nettle joined them. He had a bottle of wine and an Amo bar which they passed around.
“Nice bouquet,” Turner said when he had drunk deeply.
“Dead Frog.”
The peasant and his collie were back behind the plow. The three soldiers approached the crater where the smell of cordite was strong. The hole was a perfectly symmetrical inverted cone whose sides were smooth, as though finely sieved and raked. There were no human signs, not a shred of clothing or shoe leather. Mother and child had been vaporized. He paused to absorb this fact, but the corporals were in a hurry and pushed him on and soon they joined the stragglers on the road. It was easier now. There would be no traffic until the sappers took their bulldozers into the village. Ahead, the cloud of burning oil stood over the landscape like an angry father. High-flying bombers droned above, a steady two-way stream moving into and returning from their target. It occurred to Turner that he might be walking into a slaughter. But everyone was going that way, and he could think of no alternative. Their route was taking them well to the right of the cloud, to the east of Dunkirk, toward the Belgian border.
“Bray Dunes,” he said, remembering the name from the map.
Nettle said, “I like the sound of those.”
They passed men who could barely walk for their blisters. Some were barefoot. A soldier with a bloody chest wound reclined in an ancient pram pushed by his mates. A sergeant was leading a cart horse over the back of which was draped an officer, unconscious or dead, his feet and wrists secured by ropes. Some troops were on bicycles, most walked in twos or threes. A dispatch rider from the Highland Light Infantry came by on a Harley-Davidson. His bloodied legs dangled uselessly, and his pillion passenger, who had heavily bandaged arms, was working the foot pedals. All along the way were discarded greatcoats, left there by men too hot to carry them. Turner had already talked the corporals out of leaving theirs.
They had been going for an hour when they heard behind them a rhythmic thudding, like the ticking of a gigantic clock. They turned to look back. At first sight it seemed that an enormous horizontal door was flying up the road toward them. It was a platoon of Welsh Guards in good order, rifles at the slope, led by a second lieutenant. They came by at a forced march, their gaze fixed forward, their arms swinging high. The stragglers stood aside to let them through. These were cynical times, but no one risked a catcall. The show of discipline and cohesion was shaming. It was a relief when the Guards had pounded out of sight and the rest could resume their introspective trudging.
The sights were familiar, the inventory was the same, but now there was more of everything; vehicles, bomb craters, detritus. There were more bodies. He walked across the land until he caught the taste of the sea, carried across the flat, marshy fields on a freshening breeze. The one-way flow of people with a single purpose, the constant self-important traffic in the air, the extravagant cloud advertising their destination, suggested to his tired but overactive mind some long-forgotten childhood treat, a carnival or sports event on which they were all converging. There was a memory that he could not place, of being carried on his father’s shoulders, up a hill toward a great attraction, toward the source of a huge excitement. He would like those shoulders now. His missing father had left few memories. A knotted neck scarf, a certain smell, the vaguest outline of a brooding, irritable presence. Did he avoid serving in the Great War, or did he die somewhere near here under another name? Perhaps he survived. Grace was certain he was too cowardly, too shifty, to join up, but she had her own reason to be bitter. Nearly every man here had a father who remembered northern France, or was buried in it. He wanted such a father, dead or alive. Long ago, before the war, before Wandsworth, he used to revel in his freedom to make his own life, devise his own story with only the distant help of Jack Tallis. Now he understood how conceited a delusion this was. Rootless, therefore futile. He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father. It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection. All around him men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot…They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh. He would find Cecilia. Her address was on the letter in his pocket, next to the poem. In the deserts of the heart ⁄ Let the healing fountain start. He would find his father too. They were supposed to be good at tracking down missing persons, the Salvation Army. A perfect name. He would track down his father, or his dead father’s story—either way, he would become his father’s son.
They walked all afternoon until at last, a mile ahead, where gray and yellow smoke billowed up from surrounding fields, they saw the bridge across the Bergues-Furnes canal. All the way in now, not a farmhouse or barn was left standing. As well as smoke, a miasma of rotting meat drifted toward them—more slaughtered cavalry horses, hundreds of them, in a heap in a field. Not far from them was a smoldering mountain of uniforms and blankets. A beefy lance corporal with a sledgehammer was smashing typewriters and mimeograph machines. Two ambulances were parked at the side of the road, their back doors open. From inside came the groans and shouts of wounded men. One of them was crying out, over and over, more in rage than pain, “Water, I want water!” Like everyone else, Turner kept going.
The crowds were bunching up again. In front of the canal bridge was a junction, and from the Dunkirk direction, on the road that ran along the canal, came a convoy of three-ton lorries which the military police were trying to direct into a field beyond where the horses were. But troops swarming across the road forced the convoy to a halt. The drivers leaned on their horns and shouted insults. The crowd pressed on. Men tired of waiting scrambled off the backs of the lorries. There was a shout of “Take cover!” And before anyone could even glance round, the mountain of uniforms was detonated. It began to snow tiny pieces of dark green serge. Nearer, a detachment of artillerymen were using hammers to smash up the dial sights and breechblocks of their guns. One of them, Turner noticed, was crying as he destroyed his howitzer. At the entrance to the same field, a chaplain and his clerk were dousing cases of prayer books and Bibles with petrol. Men were crossing the field toward a NAAFI dump, looking for cigarettes and booze. When a shout went up, dozens more left the road to join them. One group sat by a farm gate, trying on new shoes. A soldier with crammed cheeks pushed past Turner with a box of pink and white marshmallows. A hundred yards away a dump of Wellington boots, gas masks and capes was fired, and acrid smoke enveloped the line of men pushing forward to the bridge. At last the lorries were on the move and turned into the biggest field, immediately south of the canal. Military police were organizing the parking, lining up the rows, like stewards at a county show. The lorries were joining half-tracks, motorbikes, Bren-gun carriers and mobile kitchens. The disabling methods were, as always, simple—a bullet in the radiator, and the engine left running until it seized up.
The bridge was held by the Coldstream Guards. Two neatly sandbagged machine-gun posts covered the approach. The men were clean-shaven, stone-eyed, silently contemptuous of the filthy disorganized rabble trailing by. On the other side of the canal, evenly spaced, white-painted stones marked out a path to a hut being used as an orderly room. On the far bank, to the east and west, the Guards were well dug in along their section. Waterfront houses had been commandeered, roof tiles punched out, and windows sandbagged for machine-gun slits. A fierce sergeant was keeping order on the bridge. He was sending back a lieutenant on a motorbike. Absolutely no equipment or vehicles allowed. A man with a parrot in a cage was turned away. The sergeant was also pulling out men for perimeter defense duties, and doing it with far more authority than the poor major. A growing detachment stood unhappily at ease by the orderly room. Turner saw what was happening at the same time as the corporals, when they were still a good way back.
“They’ll fucking have you, mate,” Mace said to Turner. “Poor bloody infantry. If you want to go home to the crumpet, get between us and limp.”
Feeling dishonorable, but determined all the same, he put his arms round the corporals’ shoulders and they staggered forward.
“It’s your left, remember, guv’nor,” Nettle said. “Would you like me to pop my bayonet through your foot?”
“Thanks awfully. I think I can manage.”
Turner let his head droop as they were crossing the bridge so he saw nothing of the duty sergeant’s ferocious gaze, though he felt its heat. He heard the barked command, “‘Ere, you!” Some unfortunate just behind him was pulled out to help hold off the onslaught which must surely come within two or three days, while the last of the BEF was piling into the boats. What he did see while his head was lowered was a long black barge slipping under the bridge in the direction of Furnes in Belgium. The boatman sat at his tiller smoking a pipe, looking stolidly ahead. Behind him, ten miles away, Dunkirk burned. Ahead, in the prow, two boys were bending over an upturned bike, mending a puncture perhaps. A line of washing which included women’s smalls was hanging out to dry. The smell of cooking, of onions and garlic, rose from the boat. Turner and the corporals crossed the bridge and passed the whitewashed rocks, a reminder of training camp and all the bull. In the orderly hut a phone was ringing.
Mace murmured, “You bloody well limp till we’re out of sight.”
But the land was flat for miles and there was no telling which way the sergeant might be looking, and they didn’t like to turn around to check. After half an hour they sat down on a rusty seed drill and watched the defeated army walk by. The idea was to get in among a completely fresh crowd, so that Turner’s sudden recovery did not attract the attention of an officer. A lot of men who passed were irritated at not finding the beach just beyond the canal. They seemed to think it was a failure of planning. Turner knew from the map there were another seven miles, and once they were on the move again, they were the hardest, the dreariest they had walked that day. The wide featureless land denied all sense of progress. Though the late afternoon sun was slipping through the trailing edges of the oil cloud, it was warmer than ever. They saw planes high over the port dropping their bombs. Worse, there were Stuka attacks right over the beach they were heading toward. They passed the walking wounded who could go no further. They sat like beggars at the side of the road, calling out for help, or for a mouthful of water. Others just lay by the ditch, unconscious, or lost in hopelessness. Surely there would be ambulances coming up from the defense perimeter, making regular runs to the beach. If there was time to whitewash rocks, there must be time to organize that. There was no water. They had finished the wine and now their thirst was all the greater. They carried no medicines. What were they expected to do? Carry a dozen men on their backs when they could barely walk themselves?
In sudden petulance, Corporal Nettle sat down in the road, took off his boots and flung them into a field. He said he hated them, he fucking hated them more than all the fucking Germans put together. And his blisters were so bad he was better off with fuck all.
“It’s a long way to England in your socks,” Turner said. He felt weirdly lightheaded as he went into the field to search. The first boot was easy to find, but the second took him a while. At last he saw it lying in the grass near a black furry shape that seemed, as he approached, to be moving or pulsing. Suddenly a swarm of bluebottles rose into the air with an angry whining buzz, revealing the rotting corpse beneath. He held his breath, snatched the boot, and as he hurried away the flies settled back down and there was silence again.
After some coaxing, Nettle was persuaded to take back his boots, tie them together and carry them round his neck. But he did this, he said, only as a favor to Turner.
§
IT WAS IN HIS clear moments he was troubled. It wasn’t the wound, though it hurt at every step, and it wasn’t the dive-bombers circling over the beach some miles to the north. It was his mind. Periodically, something slipped. Some everyday principle of continuity, the humdrum element that told him where he was in his own story, faded from his use, abandoning him to a waking dream in which there were thoughts, but no sense of who was having them. No responsibility, no memory of the hours before, no idea of what he was about, where he was going, what his plan was. And no curiosity about these matters. He would then find himself in the grip of illogical certainties.
He was in this state as they came round the eastern edge of the resort after three hours’ walking. They went down a street of shattered glass and broken tiles where children were playing and watching the soldiers go by. Nettle had put his boots back on, but he had left them loose, with the laces trailing. Suddenly, like a jack-in-a-box, a lieutenant from the Dorsets popped up from the cellar of a municipal building that had been requisitioned for a headquarters. He came toward them at a self-important clip with an attaché case under his arm. When he stopped in front of them they saluted. Scandalized, he ordered the corporal to tie his laces immediately or face a charge.
While the corporal knelt to obey, the lieutenant—round-shouldered, bony, with a deskbound look and a wisp of ginger mustache—said, “You’re a bloody disgrace, man.”
In the lucid freedom of his dream state, Turner intended to shoot the officer through the chest. It would be better for everybody. It was hardly worth discussing the matter in advance. He reached for it, but his gun had gone—he couldn’t remember where—and the lieutenant was already walking away.
After minutes of noisy crunching over glass, there was sudden silence under their boots where the road ended in fine sand. As they rose through a gap in the dunes, they heard the sea and tasted a salty mouthful before they saw it. The taste of holidays. They left the path and climbed through the dune grass to a vantage point where they stood in silence for many minutes. The fresh damp breeze off the Channel restored him to clarity. Perhaps it was nothing more than his temperature rising and falling in fits.
He thought he had no expectations—until he saw the beach. He’d assumed that the cussed army spirit which whitewashed rocks in the face of annihilation would prevail. He tried to impose order now on the random movement before him, and almost succeeded: marshaling centers, warrant officers behind makeshift desks, rubber stamps and dockets, roped-off lines toward the waiting boats; hectoring sergeants, tedious queues around mobile canteens. In general, an end to all private initiative. Without knowing it, that was the beach he had been walking to for days. But the actual beach, the one he and the corporals gazed on now, was no more than a variation on all that had gone before: there was a rout, and this was its terminus. It was obvious enough now they saw it—this was what happened when a chaotic retreat could go no further. It only took a moment to adjust. He saw thousands of men, ten, twenty thousand, perhaps more, spread across the vastness of the beach. In the distance they were like grains of black sand. But there were no boats, apart from one upturned whaler rolling in the distant surf. It was low tide and almost a mile to the water’s edge. There were no boats by the long jetty. He blinked and looked again. That jetty was made of men, a long file of them, six or eight deep, standing up to their knees, their waists, their shoulders, stretching out for five hundred yards through the shallow waters. They waited, but there was nothing in sight, unless you counted in those smudges on the horizon—boats burning after an air attack. There was nothing that could reach the beach in hours. But the troops stood there, facing the horizon in their tin hats, rifles lifted above the waves. From this distance they looked as placid as cattle.
And these men were a small proportion of the total. The majority were on the beach, moving about aimlessly. Little clusters had formed around the wounded left by the last Stuka attack. As aimless as the men, half a dozen artillery horses galloped in a pack along the water’s edge. A few troops were attempting to right the upturned whaler. Some had taken off their clothes to swim. Off to the east was a football game, and from the same direction came the feeble sound of a hymn being sung in unison, then fading. Beyond the football game was the only sign of official activity. On the shore, lorries were being lined up and lashed together to form a makeshift jetty. More lorries were driving down. Nearer, up the beach, individuals were scooping sand with their helmets to make foxholes. In the dunes, close to where Turner and the corporals stood, men had already dug themselves holes from which they peeped out, proprietorial and smug. Like marmots, he thought. But the majority of the army wandered about the sands without purpose, like citizens of an Italian town in the hour of the passeggio. They saw no immediate reason to join the enormous queue, but they were unwilling to come away from the beach in case a boat should suddenly appear.
To the left was the resort of Bray, a cheerful front of cafés and little shops that in a normal season would be renting out beach chairs and pedal bikes. In a circular park with a neatly mowed lawn was a bandstand, and a merry-go-round painted red, white and blue. In this setting, another, more insouciant company had hunkered down. Soldiers had opened up the cafés for themselves and were getting drunk at the tables outside, bawling and laughing. Men were larking about on the bikes along a pavement stained with vomit. A colony of drunks was spread out on the grass by the bandstand, sleeping it off. A solitary sunbather in his underpants, facedown on a towel, had patches of uneven sunburn on his shoulders and legs—pink and white like a strawberry and vanilla ice cream.
It was not difficult to choose between these circles of suffering—the sea, the beach, the front. The corporals were already walking away. Thirst alone decided it. They found a path on the landward side of the dunes, then they were crossing a sandy lawn strewn with broken bottles. As they were making a way round the raucous tables Turner saw a naval party coming along the front and stopped to watch. There were five of them, two officers, three ratings, a gleaming group of fresh white, blue and gold. No concessions to camouflage. Straight-backed and severe, revolvers strapped to their belts, they moved with tranquil authority through the mass of somber battle dress and grimy faces, looking from side to side as if conducting a count. One of the officers made notes on a clipboard. They headed away toward the beach. With a childish feeling of abandonment, Turner watched them until they were out of sight.
He followed Mace and Nettle into the din and fumy stench of the first bar along the front. Two suitcases propped open on the bar were full of cigarettes—but there was nothing to drink. The shelves along the sandblasted mirror behind the bar were empty. When Nettle ducked behind the counter to rummage around, there were jeers. Everyone coming in had tried the same. The drink had long gone with the serious drinkers outside. Turner pushed through the crowd to a small kitchen at the back. The place was wrecked, the taps were dry. Outside was a pissoir and stacked crates of empties. A dog was trying to get its tongue inside an empty sardine can, pushing it across a patch of concrete. He turned and went back to the main room and its roar of voices. There was no electricity, only natural light which was stained brown, as though by the absent beer. Nothing to drink, but the bar remained full. Men came in, were disappointed and yet they stayed, held there by free cigarettes and the evidence of recent booze. The dispensers dangled empty on the wall where the inverted bottles had been wrenched away. The sweet smell of liquor rose from the sticky cement floor. The noise and press of bodies and damp tobacco air satisfied a homesick yearning for a Saturday night pub. This was the Mile End Road, and Sauchiehall Street, and everywhere in between.
He stood in the din, uncertain what to do. It would be such an effort, to fight his way out of the crowd. There were boats yesterday, he gathered from a snatch of conversation, and perhaps again tomorrow. Standing on tiptoe by the kitchen doorway, he gave a no-luck shrug across the crowd toward the corporals. Nettle cocked his head in the direction of the door and they began to converge on it. A drink would have been fine, but what interested them now was water. Progress through the press of bodies was slow, and then, just as they converged, their way to the door was blocked by a tight wall of backs forming around one man.
He must have been short—less than five foot six—and Turner could see nothing of him apart from a portion of the back of his head.
Someone said, “You answer the fucking question, you little git.”
“Yeah, go on then.”
“Oi, Brylcreem job. Where was ya?”
“Where were you when they killed my mate?”
A globule of spittle hit the back of the man’s head and fell behind his ear. Turner moved round to get a view. He saw first the gray-blue of a jacket, and then the mute apprehension in the man’s face. He was a wiry little fellow with thick, unclean lenses in his glasses which magnified his frightened stare. He looked like a filing clerk, or a telephone operator, perhaps from a headquarters long ago dispersed. But he was in the RAF and the Tommies held him accountable. He turned slowly, gazing at the circle of his interrogators. He had no answers to their questions, and he made no attempt to deny his responsibility for the absence of Spitfires and Hurricanes over the beach. His right hand clutched his cap so hard his knuckles trembled. An artilleryman standing by the door gave him a hard push in the back so that he stumbled across the ring into the chest of a soldier who sent him back with a casual punch to the head. There was a hum of approval. Everyone had suffered, and now someone was going to pay.
“So where’s the RAF?”
A hand whipped out and slapped the man’s face, knocking his glasses to the floor. The sound of the blow was precise as a whip crack. It was a signal for a new stage, a new level of engagement. His naked eyes shrank to fluttering little dots as he went down to grope around his feet. That was a mistake. A kick from a steel-capped army boot caught him on the backside, lifting him an inch or two. There were chuckles all round. A sense of something tasty about to happen was spreading across the bar and drawing more soldiers in. As the crowd swelled around the circle, any remaining sense of individual responsibility fell away. A swaggering recklessness was taking hold. A cheer went up as someone stubbed his cigarette on the fellow’s head. They laughed at his comic yelp. They hated him and he deserved everything that was coming his way. He was answerable for the Luftwaffe’s freedom of the skies, for every Stuka attack, every dead friend. His slight frame contained every cause of an army’s defeat. Turner assumed there was nothing he could do to help the man without risking a lynching himself. But it was impossible to do nothing. Joining in would be better than nothing. Unpleasantly excited, he strained forward. Now, a tripping Welsh accent proposed the question.
“Where’s the RAF?”
It was eerie that the man had not shouted for help, or pleaded, or protested his innocence. His silence seemed like collusion in his fate. Was he so dim that it had not occurred to him that he might be about to die? Sensibly, he had folded his glasses into his pocket. Without them his face was empty. Like a mole in bright light, he peered around at his tormentors, his lips parted, more in disbelief than in an attempt to form a word. Because he could not see it coming, he took a blow to the face full-on. It was a fist this time. As his head flipped back, another boot cracked into his shin and a little sporting cheer went up, with some uneven applause, as though for a decent catch in the slips on the village green. It was madness to go to the man’s defense, it was loathsome not to. At the same time, Turner understood the exhilaration among the tormentors and the insidious way it could claim him. He himself could do something outrageous with his bowie knife and earn the love of a hundred men. To distance the thought he made himself count the two or three soldiers in the circle he reckoned bigger or stronger than himself. But the real danger came from the mob itself, its righteous state of mind. It would not be denied its pleasures.
A situation had now been reached in which whoever threw the next hit had to earn general approval by being ingenious or funny. There was an eagerness in the air to please by being creative. No one wanted to strike a false note. For a few seconds these conditions imposed restraint. And at some point soon, Turner knew from his Wandsworth days, the single blow would become a cascade. Then there would be no turning back, and for the RAF man, only one end. A pink blotch had formed on the cheekbone under his right eye. He had drawn his fists up under his chin—he was still gripping his cap—and his shoulders were hunched. It may have been a protective stance, but it was also a gesture of weakness and submission which was bound to provoke greater violence. If he had said something, anything at all, the troops surrounding him might have remembered that he was a man, not a rabbit to be skinned. The Welshman who had spoken was a short, thickset fellow from the sappers. He now produced a belt of canvas webbing and held it up.
“What do you think, lads?”
His precise, insinuating delivery suggested horrors that Turner could not immediately grasp. Now was his last chance to act. As he looked around for the corporals, there was a roar from close by, like the bellowing of a speared bull. The crowd swayed and stumbled as Mace barged through them into the circle. With a wild hollering yodeling sound, like Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, he picked up the clerk from behind in a bear hug, lifting him eighteen inches clear of the ground, and shook the terrified creature from side to side. There were cheers and whistles, foot-stamping and Wild West whoops.
“I know what I want to do with him,” Mace boomed. “I want to drown him in the bloody sea!”
In response, there rose another storm of hooting and stamping. Nettle was suddenly at Turner’s side and they exchanged a look. They guessed what Mace was about and they began to move toward the door, knowing they would have to be quick. Not everyone was in favor of the drowning idea. Even in the frenzy of the moment, some could still recall that the tide line was a mile away across the sands. The Welshman in particular felt cheated. He was holding up his webbing and shouting. There were catcalls and boos as well as cheers. Still holding his victim in his arms, Mace rushed for the door. Turner and Nettle were ahead of him, making a path through the crowd. When they reached the entrance—usefully, a single, not a double, door—they let Mace through, then they blocked the way, shoulder to shoulder, though they appeared not to, for they were shouting and shaking their fists like the rest. They felt against their backs a colossal and excited human weight which they could only resist for a matter of seconds. This was long enough for Mace to run, not toward the sea, but sharp left, and left again, up a narrow street that curved behind the shops and bars, away from the front.
The exultant crowd exploded from the bar like champagne, hurling Turner and Nettle aside. Someone thought he saw Mace down on the sands, and for half a minute the crowd went that way. By the time the mistake was realized and the crowd began to turn back, there was no sign of Mace and his man. Turner and Nettle had melted away too.
The vast beach, the thousands waiting on it, and the sea empty of boats returned the Tommies to their predicament. They emerged from a dream. Away to the east where the night was rising, the perimeter line was under heavy artillery fire. The enemy was closing in and England was a long way off. In the failing light not much time remained to find somewhere to bed down. A cold wind was coming in off the Channel, and the greatcoats lay on the roadsides far inland. The crowd began to break up. The RAF man was forgotten.
It seemed to Turner that he and Nettle had set out to look for Mace, and then forgot about him. They must have wandered the streets for a while, wanting to congratulate him on the rescue and share the joke of it. Turner did not know how he and Nettle came to be here, in this particular narrow street. He remembered no intervening time, no sore feet—but here he was, addressing in the politest terms an old lady who stood in the doorway of a flat-fronted terraced house. When he mentioned water, she looked at him suspiciously, as though she knew he wanted more than water. She was rather handsome, with dark skin, a proud look and a long straight nose, and a floral scarf was tied across her silver hair. He understood immediately she was a gypsy who was not fooled by his speaking French. She looked right into him and saw his faults, and knew he’d been in prison. Then she glanced with distaste at Nettle, and at last pointed along the street to where a pig was nosing around in the gutter.
“Bring her back,” she said, “and I’ll see what I have for you.”
“Fuck that,” Nettle said once Turner had translated. “We’re only asking for a cup of bloody water. We’ll go in and take it.”
But Turner, feeling a familiar unreality taking hold, could not discount the possibility that the woman was possessed of certain powers. In the poor light the space above her head was pulsing to the rhythm of his own heart. He steadied himself against Nettle’s shoulder. She was setting him a test he was too experienced, too wary, to refuse. He was an old hand. So close to home, he was not falling for any traps. Best to be cautious.
“We’ll get the pig,” he said to Nettle. “It’ll only take a minute.”
Nettle was long used to following Turner’s suggestions, for they were generally sound, but as they went up the street the corporal was muttering, “There’s something not right with you, guv’nor.”
Their blisters made them slow. The sow was young and quick and fond of her freedom. And Nettle was frightened of her. When they had it cornered in a shop doorway, she ran at him and he leaped aside with a scream that was not all self-mockery. Turner went back to the lady for a length of rope, but no one came to the door and he wasn’t certain that he had the right house. However, he was certain now that if they did not capture the pig, they would never get home. He was running a temperature again, he knew, but that did not make him wrong. The pig equaled success. As a child, Turner had once tried to persuade himself that preventing his mother’s sudden death by avoiding the pavement cracks outside his school playground was a nonsense. But he had never trodden on them and she had not died.
As they advanced up the street, the pig remained just beyond their reach.
“Fuck it,” Nettle said. “We can’t be doing with this.”
But there was no choice. By a fallen telegraph pole Turner cut off a length of cable and made a noose. They were pursuing the sow along a road on the edge of the resort where bungalows were fronted by small patches of gardens surrounded by fences. They went along opening every front gate on both sides of the street. Then they took a detour down a side road in order to get round the pig and chase it back the way it had come. Sure enough, it soon stepped into a garden and began rooting it up. Turner closed the gate and, leaning over the fence, dropped the noose over the pig’s head.
It took all their remaining strength to drag the squealing sow back home. Fortunately, Nettle knew where it lived. When it was finally secure in the tiny sty in her back garden, the old woman brought out two stone flagons of water. Watched by her they stood in bliss in her little yard by the kitchen door and drank. Even when their bellies seemed about to burst, their mouths craved more and they drank on. Then the woman brought them soap, flannels and two enamel bowls to wash in. Turner’s hot face changed the water to rusty brown. Scabs of dried blood molded to his upper lip came away satisfyingly whole. When he was done he felt a pleasing lightness in the air around him which slipped silkily over his skin and through his nostrils. They tipped the dirty water away onto the base of a clump of snapdragons which, Nettle said, made him homesick for his parents’ back garden. The gypsy filled their canteens and brought them each a liter of red wine with the corks half pulled and a saucisson which they stowed in their haversacks. When they were about to take their leave she had another thought and went back inside. She returned with two small paper bags, each containing half a dozen sugared almonds.
Solemnly, they shook hands.
“For the rest of our lives we will remember your kindness,” Turner said.
She nodded, and he thought she said, “My pig will always remind me of you.” The severity of her expression did not alter, and there was no telling whether there was insult or humor or a hidden message in her remark. Did she think they were not worthy of her kindness? He backed away awkwardly, and then they were walking down the street and he was translating her words for Nettle. The corporal had no doubts.
“She lives alone and she loves her pig. Stands to reason. She’s very grateful to us.” Then he added suspiciously, “Are you feeling all right, guv’nor?”
“Extremely well, thank you.”
Troubled by their blisters, they limped back in the direction of the beach with the idea of finding Mace and sharing the food and drink. But having caught the pig, Nettle thought it was fair dos to crack open a bottle now. His faith in Turner’s judgment had been restored. They passed the wine between them as they went along. Even in the late dusk, it was still possible to make out the dark cloud over Dunkirk. In the other direction, they could now see gun flashes. There was no letup along the defense perimeter.
“Those poor bastards,” Nettle said.
Turner knew he was talking about the men outside the makeshift orderly room. He said, “The line can’t hold much longer.”
“We’ll be overrun.”
“So we’d better be on a boat tomorrow.”
Now they were no longer thirsty, dinner was on their minds. Turner was thinking of a quiet room and a square table covered with a green gingham cloth, with one of those French ceramic oil lamps suspended from the ceiling on a pulley. And the bread, wine, cheese and saucisson spread out on a wooden board.
He said, “I’m wondering if the beach would really be the best place for dinner.”
“We could get robbed blind,” Nettle agreed.
“I think I know the kind of place we need.”
They were back in the street behind the bar. When they glanced along the alley they had run down, they saw figures moving in the half-light outlined against the last gleam of the sea, and far beyond them and to one side, a darker mass that may have been troops on the beach or dune grass or even the dunes themselves. It would be hard enough to find Mace by daylight, and impossible now. So they wandered on, looking for somewhere. In this part of the resort now there were hundreds of soldiers, many of them in loud gangs drifting through the streets, singing and shouting. Nettle slid the bottle back into his haversack. They felt more vulnerable without Mace.
They passed a hotel that had taken a hit. Turner wondered if it was a hotel room he had been thinking of. Nettle was seized by the idea of dragging out some bedding. They went in through a hole in the wall, and picked their way through the gloom, across rubble and fallen timbers, and found a staircase. But scores of men had the same idea.
There was actually a queue forming up at the bottom of the stairs, and soldiers struggling down with heavy horsehair mattresses. On the landing above—Turner and Nettle could just see boots and lower legs moving stiffly from side to side—a fight was developing, with wrestling grunts and a smack of knuckles on flesh. Following a sudden shout, several men fell backward down the stairs onto those waiting below. There was laughter as well as cursing, and people were getting to their feet and feeling their limbs. One man did not get up, but lay awkwardly across the stairs, his legs higher than his head, and screaming hoarsely, almost inaudibly, as though in a panicky dream. Someone held a lighter to his face and they saw his bared teeth and flecks of white in the corners of his mouth. He had broken his back, someone said, but there was nothing anyone could do, and now men were stepping over him with their blankets and bolsters, and others were jostling to go up.
They came away from the hotel and turned inland again, back toward the old lady and her pig. The electricity supply from Dunkirk must have been cut, but round the edges of some heavily curtained windows they saw the ocher glow of candlelight and oil lamps. On the other side of the road soldiers were knocking at doors, but no one would open up now. This was the moment Turner chose to describe to Nettle the kind of place that he had in mind for dinner. He embellished to make his point, adding French windows open onto a wrought-iron balcony through which an ancient wisteria threaded, and a gramophone on a round table covered by a green chenille cloth, and a Persian rug spread across a chaise longue. The more he described, the more certain he was that the room was close by. His words were bringing it into being.
Nettle, his front teeth resting on his lower lip in a look of kindly rodent bafflement, let him finish and said, “I knew it. I fucking knew it.”
They were standing outside a bombed house whose cellar was half open to the sky and had the appearance of a gigantic cave. Grabbing him by his jacket, Nettle pulled him down a scree of broken bricks. Cautiously, he guided him across the cellar floor into the blackness. Turner knew this was not the place, but he could not resist Nettle’s unusual determination. Ahead, there appeared a point of light, then another, and a third. The cigarettes of men already sheltering there.
A voice said, “Geh. Bugger off. We’re full.”
Nettle struck a match and held it up. All around the walls there were men, propped in a sitting position, most of them asleep. A few were lying in the center of the floor, but there was still room, and when the match went out he pressed down on Turner’s shoulders to make him sit. As he was pushing debris away from under his buttocks, Turner felt his soaked shirt. It may have been blood, or some other fluid, but for the moment there was no pain. Nettle arranged the greatcoat around Turner’s shoulders. Now the weight was off his feet, an ecstasy of relief spread upward through his knees and he knew he would not move again that night, however disappointed Nettle might be. The rocking motion of daylong walking transferred itself to the floor. Turner felt it tilt and buck beneath him as he sat in total darkness. The problem now was to eat without being set upon. To survive was to be selfish. But he did nothing for the moment and his mind emptied. After a while Nettle nudged him awake and slipped the bottle of wine into his hands. He got his mouth around the opening, tipped the bottle and drank. Someone heard him swallowing.
“What’s that you got?”
“Sheep’s milk,” Nettle said. “Still warm. Have some.”
There was a hawking sound, and something tepid and jellylike landed on the back of Turner’s hand. “You’re filthy, you are.”
Another voice, more threatening, said, “Shut up. I’m trying to sleep.”
Moving soundlessly, Nettle groped in his haversack for the saucisson, cut it into three and passed a piece to Turner with a chunk of bread. He stretched out full length on the concrete floor, pulled his greatcoat over his head to contain the smell of the meat as well as the sound of his chewing, and in the fug of his own breathing, and with pieces of brick and grit pressing into his cheek, began to eat the best meal of his life. There was a smell of scented soap on his face. He bit into the bread that tasted of army canvas, and tore and sucked at the sausage. As the food reached his stomach a bloom of warmth opened across his chest and throat. He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life. When he closed his eyes he saw moving asphalt and his boots swinging in and out of view. Even as he chewed, he felt himself plunging into sleep for seconds on end. He entered another stretch of time, and now, lying snugly on his tongue, was a sugared almond, whose sweetness belonged to another world. He heard men complaining of the cold in the cellar and he was glad of the coat tucked around him, and felt a fatherly pride that he had stopped the corporals throwing theirs away.
A group of soldiers came in looking for shelter and striking matches, just as he and Nettle had. He felt unfriendly toward them and irritated by their West Country accents. Like everyone else in the cellar, he wanted them to go away. But they found a place somewhere beyond his feet. He caught a whiff of brandy and resented them more. They were noisy organizing their sleeping places, and when a voice from along the wall called out, “Fucking yokels,” one of the newcomers lurched in that direction and for a moment it seemed there would be a rumble. But the darkness and the weary protests of the residents held the peace.
Soon there were only the sounds of steady breathing and snores. Beneath him the floor still seemed to list, then switch to the rhythm of a steady march, and once again Turner found himself too afflicted by impressions, too fevered, too exhausted to sleep. Through the material of his coat he felt for the bundle of her letters. I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough—one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. He felt it pressing down, heavy as a greatcoat. Everyone in the cellar was waiting, everyone on the beach. She was waiting, yes, but then what? He tried to make her voice say the words, but it was his own he heard, just below the tread of his heart. He could not even form her face. He forced his thoughts toward the new situation, the one that was supposed to make him happy. The intricacies were lost to him, the urgency had died. Briony would change her evidence, she would rewrite the past so that the guilty became the innocent. But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts. The witnesses were guilty too. All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die? Down here in the cellar we’ll keep quiet about it. We’ll sleep it off, Briony. His sugared almond tasted of her name which seemed so quaintly improbable that he wondered if he had remembered it correctly. Cecilia’s too. Had he always taken for granted the strangeness of these names? Even this question was hard to hold for long. He had so much unfinished business here in France that it seemed to him sensible to delay his departure for England, even though his bags were packed, his strange, heavy bags. No one would see them if he left them here and went back. Invisible baggage. He must go back and get the boy from the tree. He had done it before. He had gone back where no one else was and found the boys under a tree and carried Pierrot on his shoulders and Jackson in his arms, across the park. So heavy! He was in love, with Cecilia, with the twins, with success and the dawn and its curious glowing mist. And what a reception party! Now he was used to such things, a roadside commonplace, but back then, before the coarsening and general numbness, when it was a novelty and when everything was new, he felt it sharply. He cared when she ran out across the gravel and spoke to him by the open police car door. Oh, when I was in love with you, ⁄ Then I was clean and brave. So he would go back the way he had come, walk back through the reverses of all they had achieved, across the drained and dreary marshes, past the fierce sergeant on the bridge, through the bombed-up village, and along the ribbon road that lay across the miles of undulating farmland, watching for the track on the left on the edge of the village, opposite the shoe shop, and two miles on, go over the barbed-wire fence and through the woods and fields to an overnight stop at the brothers’ farm, and next day, in yellow morning light, on the swing of a compass needle, hurry through that glorious country of little valleys and streams and swarming bees, and take the rising footpath to the sad cottage by the railway. And the tree. Gather up from the mud the pieces of burned, striped cloth, the shreds of his pajamas, then bring him down, the poor pale boy, and make a decent burial. A nice-looking kid. Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence. And where was Mace to help with the digging? That brave bear, Corporal Mace. Here was more unfinished business and another reason why he could not leave. He must find Mace. But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plow, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths. For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of conceited self-blame. She might say no—the Flemish for no. You tried to help us. You couldn’t carry us across the field. You carried the twins, but not us, no. No, you are not guilty. No.
There was a whisper, and he felt the breath of it on his burning face. “Too much noise, guv’nor.”
Behind Corporal Nettle’s head was a wide strip of deep blue sky and, etched against it, the ragged black edge of the cellar’s ruined ceiling.
“Noise? What was I doing?”
“Shouting ‘no’ and waking everyone up. Some of these lads was getting a bit peeved.”
He tried to lift his head and found that he couldn’t. The corporal struck a match.
“Christ. You look fucking terrible. Come on. Drink.”
He raised Turner’s head and put the canteen to his lips.
The water tasted metallic. When he was done, a long steady oceanic swell of exhaustion began to push him under. He walked across the land until he fell in the ocean. In order not to alarm Nettle, he tried to sound more reasonable than he really felt.
“Look, I’ve decided to stay on. There’s some business I need to see to.”
With a dirty hand, Nettle was wiping Turner’s forehead. He saw no reason why Nettle should think it necessary to put his face, his worried ratty face, so close to his own.
The corporal said, “Guv’nor, can you hear me? Are you listening? About an hour ago I went out for a slash. Guess what I saw. There was the navy coming down the road, putting out the call for officers. They’re getting organized on the beach. The boats are back. We’re going home, mate. There’s a lieutenant from the Buffs here who’s marching us down at seven. So get some sleep and no more of your bloody shouting.”
He was falling now and sleep was all he wanted, a thousand hours of sleep. It was easier. The water was vile, but it helped and so did the news and Nettle’s soothing whisper. They would be forming up in the road outside and marching to the beach. Squaring off to the right. Order would prevail. No one at Cambridge taught the benefits of good marching order. They revered the free, unruly spirits. The poets. But what did the poets know about survival? About surviving as a body of men. No breaking ranks, no rushing the boats, no first come first served, no devil take the hindmost. No sound of boots as they crossed the sand to the tide line. In the rolling surf, willing hands to steady the gunwale as their mates climbed in. But it was a tranquil sea, and now that he himself was calm, of course he saw how fine it really was that she was waiting. Arithmetic be damned. I’ll wait for you was elemental. It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back. He remembered the feel of the gravel through his thin-soled shoes, he could feel it now, and the icy touch of the handcuffs on his wrists. He and the inspector stopped by the car and turned at the sound of her steps. How could he forget that green dress, how it clung to the curve of her hips and hampered her running and showed the beauty of her shoulders. Whiter than the mist. It didn’t surprise him that the police let them talk. He didn’t even think about it. He and Cecilia behaved as though they were alone. She would not let herself cry when she was telling him that she believed him, she trusted him, she loved him. He said to her simply that he would not forget this, by which he meant to tell her how grateful he was, especially then, especially now. Then she put a finger on the handcuffs and said she wasn’t ashamed, there was nothing to be ashamed of. She took a corner of his lapel and gave it a little shake and this was when she said, “I’ll wait for you. Come back.” She meant it. Time would show she really meant it. After that they pushed him into the car, and she spoke hurriedly, before the crying began that she could no longer hold back, and she said that what had happened between them was theirs, only theirs. She meant the library, of course. It was theirs. No one could take it away. “It’s our secret,” she called out, in front of them all, just before the slam of the door.
“I won’t say a word,” he said, though Nettle’s head had long disappeared from his view. “Wake me before seven. I promise, you won’t hear another word from me.”