Atonement (35 page)

“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.

I
T 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.