Atonement by Ian Mcewan

  Briony’s immediate feeling was one of relief that the boys were safe. But as she looked at Robbie waiting calmly, she experienced a flash of outrage. Did he believe he could conceal his crime behind an apparent kindness, behind this show of being the good shepherd? This was surely a cynical attempt to win forgiveness for what could never be forgiven. She was confirmed again in her view that evil was complicated and misleading. Suddenly, her mother’s hands were pressing firmly on her shoulders and turning her toward the house, delivering her into Betty’s care. Emily wanted her daughter well away from Robbie Turner. It was bedtime at last. Betty took a firm grip of her hand and was leading her in as her mother and brother went forward to collect the twins. Briony’s last glimpse back over her shoulder as she was pulled away showed her Robbie raising two hands, as though in surrender. He lifted the boy clear of his head and placed him gently on the ground.

  An hour later she was lying on her canopy bed in the clean white cotton nightdress which Betty had found for her. The curtains were drawn, but the daylight gleam around their edges was strong, and for all her spinning sensations of tiredness, she could not sleep. Voices and images were ranged around her bedside, agitated, nagging presences, jostling and merging, resisting her attempts to set them in order. Were they all really bounded by a single day, by one period of unbroken wakefulness, from the innocent rehearsals of her play to the emergence of the giant from the mist? All that lay between was too clamorous, too fluid to understand, though she sensed she had succeeded, even triumphed. She kicked the sheet clear of her legs and turned the pillow to find a cooler patch for her cheeks. In her dizzy state she was not able to say exactly what her success had been; if it was to have gained a new maturity, she could hardly feel it now when she was so helpless, so childish even, through lack of sleep, to the point where she thought she could easily make herself cry. If it was brave to have identified a thoroughly bad person, then it was wrong of him to turn up with the twins like that, and she felt cheated. Who would believe her now, with Robbie posing as the kindly rescuer of lost children? All her work, all her courage and clearheadedness, all she had done to bring Lola home—for nothing. They would turn their backs on her, her mother, the policemen, her brother, and go off with Robbie Turner to indulge some adult cabal. She wanted her mother, she wanted to put her arms round her mother’s neck and pull her lovely face close to hers, but her mother wouldn’t come now, no one would come to Briony, no one would talk to her now. She turned her face into the pillow and let her tears drain into it, and felt that yet more was lost, when there was no witness to her sorrow.

  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

  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.”