Atonement 1987, p.25
Atonement (1987), page 25
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.
“So where’s the RAF?”
A hand whipped out and slapped the man’s face, knocking his glasses to the floor. The sound of the blow was precise as a whip crack. It was a signal for a new stage, a new level of engagement. His naked eyes shrank to fluttering little dots as he went down to grope around his feet. That was a mistake. A kick from a steel-capped army boot caught him on the backside, lifting him an inch or two. There were chuckles all round. A sense of something tasty about to happen was spreading across the bar and drawing more soldiers in. As the crowd swelled around the circle, any remaining sense of individual responsibility fell away. A swaggering recklessness was taking hold. A cheer went up as someone stubbed his cigarette on the fellow’s head. They laughed at his comic yelp. They hated him and he deserved everything that was coming his way. He was answerable for the Luftwaffe’s freedom of the skies, for every Stuka attack, every dead friend. His slight frame contained every cause of an army’s defeat. Turner assumed there was nothing he could do to help the man without risking a lynching himself. But it was impossible to do nothing. Joining in would be better than nothing. Unpleasantly excited, he strained forward. Now, a tripping Welsh accent proposed the question.
“Where’s the RAF?”
It was eerie that the man had not shouted for help, or pleaded, or protested his innocence. His silence seemed like collusion in his fate. Was he so dim that it had not occurred to him that he might be about to die? Sensibly, he had folded his glasses into his pocket. Without them his face was empty. Like a mole in bright light, he peered around at his tormentors, his lips parted, more in disbelief than in an attempt to form a word. Because he could not see it coming, he took a blow to the face full-on. It was a fist this time. As his head flipped back, another boot cracked into his shin and a little sporting cheer went up, with some uneven applause, as though for a decent catch in the slips on the village green. It was madness to go to the man’s defense, it was loathsome not to. At the same time, Turner understood the exhilaration among the tormentors and the insidious way it could claim him. He himself could do something outrageous with his bowie knife and earn the love of a hundred men. To distance the thought he made himself count the two or three soldiers in the circle he reckoned bigger or stronger than himself. But the real danger came from the mob itself, its righteous state of mind. It would not be denied its pleasures.
A situation had now been reached in which whoever threw the next hit had to earn general approval by being ingenious or funny. There was an eagerness in the air to please by being creative. No one wanted to strike a false note. For a few seconds these conditions imposed restraint. And at some point soon, Turner knew from his Wandsworth days, the single blow would become a cascade. Then there would be no turning back, and for the RAF man, only one end. A pink blotch had formed on the cheekbone under his right eye. He had drawn his fists up under his chin—he was still gripping his cap—and his shoulders were hunched. It may have been a protective stance, but it was also a gesture of weakness and submission which was bound to provoke greater violence. If he had said something, anything at all, the troops surrounding him might have remembered that he was a man, not a rabbit to be skinned. The Welshman who had spoken was a short, thickset fellow from the sappers. He now produced a belt of canvas webbing and held it up.
“What do you think, lads?”
His precise, insinuating delivery suggested horrors that Turner could not immediately grasp. Now was his last chance to act. As he looked around for the corporals, there was a roar from close by, like the bellowing of a speared bull. The crowd swayed and stumbled as Mace barged through them into the circle. With a wild hollering yodeling sound, like Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, he picked up the clerk from behind in a bear hug, lifting him eighteen inches clear of the ground, and shook the terrified creature from side to side. There were cheers and whistles, foot-stamping and Wild West whoops.
“I know what I want to do with him,” Mace boomed. “I want to drown him in the bloody sea!”
In response, there rose another storm of hooting and stamping. Nettle was suddenly at Turner’s side and they exchanged a look. They guessed what Mace was about and they began to move toward the door, knowing they would have to be quick. Not everyone was in favor of the drowning idea. Even in the frenzy of the moment, some could still recall that the tide line was a mile away across the sands. The Welshman in particular felt cheated. He was holding up his webbing and shouting. There were catcalls and boos as well as cheers. Still holding his victim in his arms, Mace rushed for the door. Turner and Nettle were ahead of him, making a path through the crowd. When they reached the entrance—usefully, a single, not a double, door—they let Mace through, then they blocked the way, shoulder to shoulder, though they appeared not to, for they were shouting and shaking their fists like the rest. They felt against their backs a colossal and excited human weight which they could only resist for a matter of seconds. This was long enough for Mace to run, not toward the sea, but sharp left, and left again, up a narrow street that curved behind the shops and bars, away from the front.
The exultant crowd exploded from the bar like champagne, hurling Turner and Nettle aside. Someone thought he saw Mace down on the sands, and for half a minute the crowd went that way. By the time the mistake was realized and the crowd began to turn back, there was no sign of Mace and his man. Turner and Nettle had melted away too.
The vast beach, the thousands waiting on it, and the sea empty of boats returned the Tommies to their predicament. They emerged from a dream. Away to the east where the night was rising, the perimeter line was under heavy artillery fire. The enemy was closing in and England was a long way off. In the failing light not much time remained to find somewhere to bed down. A cold wind was coming in off the Channel, and the greatcoats lay on the roadsides far inland. The crowd began to break up. The RAF man was forgotten.
It seemed to Turner that he and Nettle had set out to look for Mace, and then forgot about him. They must have wandered the streets for a while, wanting to congratulate him on the rescue and share the joke of it. Turner did not know how he and Nettle came to be here, in this particular narrow street. He remembered no intervening time, no sore feet—but here he was, addressing in the politest terms an old lady who stood in the doorway of a flat-fronted terraced house. When he mentioned water, she looked at him suspiciously, as though she knew he wanted more than water. She was rather handsome, with dark skin, a proud look and a long straight nose, and a floral scarf was tied across her silver hair. He understood immediately she was a gypsy who was not fooled by his speaking French. She looked right into him and saw his faults, and knew he’d been in prison. Then she glanced with distaste at Nettle, and at last pointed along the street to where a pig was nosing around in the gutter.
“Bring her back,” she said, “and I’ll see what I have for you.”
“Fuck that,” Nettle said once Turner had translated. “We’re only asking for a cup of bloody water. We’ll go in and take it.”
But Turner, feeling a familiar unreality taking hold, could not discount the possibility that the woman was possessed of certain powers. In the poor light the space above her head was pulsing to the rhythm of his own heart. He steadied himself against Nettle’s shoulder. She was setting him a test he was too experienced, too wary, to refuse. He was an old hand. So close to home, he was not falling for any traps. Best to be cautious.
“We’ll get the pig,” he said to Nettle. “It’ll only take a minute.”
Nettle was long used to following Turner’s suggestions, for they were generally sound, but as they went up the street the corporal was muttering, “There’s something not right with you, guv’nor.”
Their blisters made them slow. The sow was young and quick and fond of her freedom. And Nettle was frightened of her. When they had it cornered in a shop doorway, she ran at him and he leaped aside with a scream that was not all self-mockery. Turner went back to the lady for a length of rope, but no one came to the door and he wasn’t certain that he had the right house. However, he was certain now that if they did not capture the pig, they would never get home. He was running a temperature again, he knew, but that did not make him wrong. The pig equaled success. As a child, Turner had once tried to persuade himself that preventing his mother’s sudden death by avoiding the pavement cracks outside his school playground was a nonsense. But he had never trodden on them and she had not died.
As they advanced up the street, the pig remained just beyond their reach.
“Fuck it,” Nettle said. “We can’t be doing with this.”
But there was no choice. By a fallen telegraph pole Turner cut off a length of cable and made a noose. They were pursuing the sow along a road on the edge of the resort where bungalows were fronted by small patches of gardens surrounded by fences. They went along opening every front gate on both sides of the street. Then they took a detour down a side road in order to get round the pig and chase it back the way it had come. Sure enough, it soon stepped into a garden and began rooting it up. Turner closed the gate and, leaning over the fence, dropped the noose over the pig’s head.
It took all their remaining strength to drag the squealing sow back home. Fortunately, Nettle knew where it lived. When it was finally secure in the tiny sty in her back garden, the old woman brought out two stone flagons of water. Watched by her they stood in bliss in her little yard by the kitchen door and drank. Even when their bellies seemed about to burst, their mouths craved more and they drank on. Then the woman brought them soap, flannels and two enamel bowls to wash in. Turner’s hot face changed the water to rusty brown. Scabs of dried blood molded to his upper lip came away satisfyingly whole. When he was done he felt a pleasing lightness in the air around him which slipped silkily over his skin and through his nostrils. They tipped the dirty water away onto the base of a clump of snapdragons which, Nettle said, made him homesick for his parents’ back garden. The gypsy filled their canteens and brought them each a liter of red wine with the corks half pulled and a saucisson which they stowed in their haversacks. When they were about to take their leave she had another thought and went back inside. She returned with two small paper bags, each containing half a dozen sugared almonds.
Solemnly, they shook hands.
“For the rest of our lives we will remember your kindness,” Turner said.
She nodded, and he thought she said, “My pig will always remind me of you.” The severity of her expression did not alter, and there was no telling whether there was insult or humor or a hidden message in her remark. Did she think they were not worthy of her kindness? He backed away awkwardly, and then they were walking down the street and he was translating her words for Nettle. The corporal had no doubts.
“She lives alone and she loves her pig. Stands to reason. She’s very grateful to us.” Then he added suspiciously, “Are you feeling all right, guv’nor?”
“Extremely well, thank you.”
Troubled by their blisters, they limped back in the direction of the beach with the idea of finding Mace and sharing the food and drink. But having caught the pig, Nettle thought it was fair dos to crack open a bottle now. His faith in Turner’s judgment had been restored. They passed the wine between them as they went along. Even in the late dusk, it was still possible to make out the dark cloud over Dunkirk. In the other direction, they could now see gun flashes. There was no letup along the defense perimeter.
“Those poor bastards,” Nettle said.
Turner knew he was talking about the men outside the makeshift orderly room. He said, “The line can’t hold much longer.”
“We’ll be overrun.”
“So we’d better be on a boat tomorrow.”
