Ian_Mcewan_-_Atonement

Ian McEwan’s Atonement

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 ambu-

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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

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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 BerguesFurnes 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.

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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

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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

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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.

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