Atonement (25 page)

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 disorganised 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 defence 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 dishonourable, but determined all the same, he put his arms round the corporals' shoulders and they staggered forwards.

‘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 towards. 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 defence perimeter, making regular runs to the beach. If there was time to whitewash rocks, there must be time to organise 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 light-headed 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 favour 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 towards them at a self-important clip with an attaché case under his arm. When he stopped in front of them they saluted. Scandalised, 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 desk-bound look and a wisp of ginger moustache – 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: marshalling centres, warrant officers behind makeshift desks, rubber stamps and dockets, roped-off lines towards 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, face-down 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 sombre battledress 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 towards 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 towards 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 grey-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 artillery man 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.