Atonement (27 page)

She had been
lying in the semidarkness nursing this palatable sadness for half an hour when
she heard the sound of the police car parked below her window starting up. It
rolled across the gravel, then stopped. There were voices and the crunch of several
footsteps. She got up and parted the curtains. The mist was still there, but it
was brighter, as though illuminated from within, and she half closed her eyes
while they adjusted to the glare. All four doors of the police Humber were wide
open, and three constables were waiting by it. The voices came from a group
directly below her, by the front door, just out of sight. Then came the sound
of footsteps again, and they emerged, the two inspectors, with Robbie between
them. And handcuffed! She saw how his arms were forced in front of him, and
from her vantage point she saw the silver glint of steel below his shirt cuff.
The disgrace of it horrified her. It was further confirmation of his guilt, and
the beginning of his punishment. It had the look of eternal damnation.

They reached
the car and stopped. Robbie half turned, but she could not read his expression.
He stood erect, several inches higher than the inspector, with his head lifted
up. Perhaps he was proud of what he had done. One of the constables got in the
driver’s seat. The junior inspector was walking round to the rear door on
the far side and his chief was about to guide Robbie into the backseat. There
was the sound of a commotion directly below Briony’s window, and of Emily
Tallis’s voice calling sharply, and suddenly a figure was running toward
the car as fast as was possible in a tight dress. Cecilia slowed as she
approached. Robbie turned and took half a pace toward her and, surprisingly,
the inspector stepped back. The handcuffs were in full view, but Robbie did not
appear ashamed or even aware of them as he faced Cecilia and listened gravely
to what she was saying. The impassive policemen looked on. If she was
delivering the bitter indictment Robbie deserved to hear, it did not show on
his face. Though Cecilia was facing away from her, Briony thought she was
speaking with very little animation. Her accusations would be all the more
powerful for being muttered. They had moved closer, and now Robbie spoke
briefly, and half raised his locked hands and let them fall. She touched them
with her own, and fingered his lapel, and then gripped it and shook it gently.
It seemed a kindly gesture and Briony was touched by her sister’s
capacity for forgiveness, if this was what it was. Forgiveness. The word had
never meant a thing before, though Briony had heard it exulted at a thousand
school and church occasions. And all the time, her sister had understood. There
was, of course, much that she did not know about Cecilia. But there would be
time, for this tragedy was bound to bring them closer.

The kindly
inspector with the granite face must have thought he had been indulgent enough,
for he stepped forward to brush away Cecilia’s hand and interpose
himself. Robbie said something to her quickly over the officer’s
shoulder, and turned toward the car. Considerately, the inspector raised his
own hand to Robbie’s head and pressed down hard on it, so that he did not
bang it as he stooped to climb into the backseat. The two inspectors wedged
themselves on each side of their prisoner. The doors slammed, and the one
constable left behind touched his helmet in salute as the car moved forward.
Cecilia remained where she was, facing down the drive, tranquilly watching the
car as it receded, but the tremors along the line of her shoulders confided she
was crying, and Briony knew she had never loved her sister more than now.

It should
have ended there, this seamless day that had wrapped itself around a
summer’s night, it should have concluded then with the Humber
disappearing down the drive. But there remained a final confrontation. The car
had gone no more than twenty yards when it began to slow. A figure Briony had
not noticed was coming down the center of the drive and showed no intention of
standing to one side. It was a woman, rather short, with a rolling walk,
wearing a floral print dress and gripping what looked at first like a stick but
was in fact a man’s umbrella with a goose’s head. The car stopped
and the horn sounded as the woman came up and stood right against the radiator
grille. It was Robbie’s mother, Grace Turner. She raised the umbrella and
shouted. The policeman in the front passenger seat had got out and was speaking
to her, and then took her by the elbow. The other constable, the one who had
saluted, was hurrying over. Mrs. Turner shook her arm free, raised the umbrella
again, this time with two hands, and brought it down, goose head first, with a
crack like a pistol shot, onto the Humber’s shiny bonnet. As the
constables half pushed, half carried her to the edge of the drive, she began to
shout a single word so loudly that Briony could hear it from her bedroom.

“Liars!
Liars! Liars!” Mrs. Turner roared.

With its
front door wide open, the car moved past her slowly and stopped to let the
policeman get back in. On his own, his colleague was having difficulty
restraining her. She managed another swipe with her umbrella but the blow
glanced off the car’s roof. He wrestled the umbrella from her and tossed
it over his shoulder onto the grass.

“Liars!
Liars!” Grace Turner shouted again, and took a few hopeless steps after
the retreating car, and then stopped, hands on hips, to watch as it went over
the first bridge, crossed the island and then the second bridge, and finally
vanished into the whiteness.

PART TWO

T
HERE 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.