“Do you know why I wanted you to save me?”
“No.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Because I love you.”
She said it bravely, with chin upraised, and she blinked rapidly as she spoke, dazzled by the momentous truth she had revealed. He restrained an impulse to laugh. He was the object of a schoolgirl crush. “What on earth do you mean by that?”
“I mean what everybody else means when they say it. I love you.”
This time the words were on a pathetic rising note. He realized that he should resist the temptation to mock. But it was difficult. He said, “You love me, so you threw yourself in the river.”
“I wanted to know if you’d save me.”
“And now you know. I’d risk my life for yours. But that doesn’t mean I love you.”
She drew herself up a little. “I want to thank you for saving my life. I’ll be eternally grateful to you.”
Lines, surely, from one of her books, one she had read lately, or one she had written. He said, “That’s all right. But don’t do it again, for me or anyone else. Promise?”
She nodded, and said in parting, “I love you. Now you know.”
She walked away toward the house. Shivering in the sunlight, he watched her until she was out of sight, and then he set off for home. He did not see her on her own before he left for France, and by the time he came back in September, she was away at boarding school. Not long after, he went up to Cambridge, and in December spent Christmas with friends. He didn’t see Briony until the following April, and by then the matter was forgotten. Or was it? He’d had plenty of time alone, too much time, to consider. He could remember no other unusual conversation with her, no strange behavior, no meaningful looks or sulks to suggest that her schoolgirlish passion had lasted beyond that day in June. He had been back to Surrey almost every vacation and she had many opportunities to seek him out at the bungalow, or pass him a note. He was busy with his new life then, lost to the novelties of undergraduate life, and also intent at that time on putting a little distance between himself and the Tallis family. But there must have been signs which he had not noticed. For three years she must have nurtured a feeling for him, kept it hidden, nourished it with fantasy or embellished it in her stories. She was the sort of girl who lived in her thoughts. The drama by the river might have been enough to sustain her all that time.
This theory, or conviction, rested on the memory of a single encounter—the meeting at dusk on the bridge. For years he had dwelled on that walk across the park. She would have known he was invited to dinner. There she was, barefoot, in a dirty white frock. That was strange enough. She would have been waiting for him, perhaps preparing her little speech, even rehearsing it out loud as she sat on the stone parapet. When he finally arrived, she was tongue-tied. That was proof of a sort. Even at the time, he thought it odd that she did not speak to him. He gave her the letter and she ran off. Minutes later, she was opening it. She was shocked, and not only by a word. In her mind he had betrayed her love by favoring her sister. Then, in the library, confirmation of the worst, at which point, the whole fantasy crashed. First, disappointment and despair, then a rising bitterness. Finally, an extraordinary opportunity in the dark, during the search for the twins, to avenge herself. She named him—and no one but her sister and his mother doubted her. The impulse, the flash of malice, the infantile destructiveness he could understand. The wonder was the depth of the girl’s rancor, her persistence with a story that saw him all the way to Wandsworth Prison. Now he might be cleared, and that gave him joy. He acknowledged the courage it would require for her to go back to the law and deny the evidence she had given under oath. But he did not think his resentment of her could ever be erased. Yes, she was a child at the time, and he did not forgive her. He would never forgive her. That was the lasting damage.
THERE WAS MORE confusion ahead, more shouting. Incredibly, an armored column was forcing its way against the forward press of traffic, soldiers and refugees. The crowd parted reluctantly. People squeezed into the gaps between abandoned vehicles or against shattered walls and doorways. It was a French column, hardly more than a detachment—three armored cars, two half-tracks and two troop carriers. There was no show of common cause. Among the British troops the view was that the French had let them down. No will to fight for their own country. Irritated at being pushed aside, the Tommies swore, and taunted their allies with shouts of “Maginot!” For their part, the poilus must have heard rumors of an evacuation. And here they were, being sent to cover the rear. “Cowards! To the boats! Go shit in your pants!” Then they were gone, and the crowd closed in again under a cloud of diesel smoke and walked on. They were approaching the last houses in the village. In a field ahead, he saw a man and his collie dog walking behind a horse-drawn plow. Like the ladies in the shoe shop, the farmer did not seem aware of the convoy. These lives were lived in parallel—war was a hobby for the enthusiasts and no less serious for that. Like the deadly pursuit of a hunt to hounds, while over the next hedge a woman in the backseat of a passing motorcar was absorbed in her knitting, and in the bare garden of a new house a man was teaching his son to kick a ball. Yes, the plowing would still go on and there’d be a crop, someone to reap it and mill it, others to eat it, and not everyone would be dead . . . Turner was thinking this when Nettle gripped his arm and pointed. The commotion of the passing French column had covered the sound, but they were easy enough to see. There were at least fifteen of them, at ten thousand feet, little dots in the blue, circling above the road. Turner and the corporals stopped to watch, and everyone nearby saw them too. An exhausted voice murmured close to his ear, “Fuck. Where’s the RAF?”
Another said knowingly, “They’ll go for the Frogs.”
As if goaded into disproof, one of the specks peeled away and began its near-vertical dive, directly above their heads. For seconds the sound did not reach them. The silence was building like pressure in their ears. Even the wild shouts that went up and down the road did not relieve it. Take cover! Disperse! Disperse! At the double! It was difficult to move. He could walk on at a steady trudge, and he could stop, but it was an effort, an effort of memory, to reach for the unfamiliar commands, to turn away from the road and run. They had stopped by the last house in the village. Beyond the house was a barn and flanking both was the field where the farmer had been plowing. Now he was standing under a tree with his dog, as though sheltering from a shower of rain. His horse, still in harness, grazed along the unplowed strip. Soldiers and civilians were streaming away from the road in all directions. A woman brushed past him carrying a crying child, then she changed her mind and came back and stood, turning indecisively at the side of the road. Which way? The farmyard or the field? Her immobility delivered him from his own. As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had become a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally. Turner guided the woman through the gate. He wanted her to run with him into the center of the field. He had touched her, and made her decision for her, so now he felt he could not abandon her. But the boy was at least six years old and heavy, and together they were making no progress at all. He dragged the child from her arms. “Come on,” he shouted. A Stuka carried a single thousand-pound bomb. The idea on the ground was to get away from buildings, vehicles and other people. The pilot was not going to waste his precious load on a lone figure in a field. When he turned back to strafe it would be another matter. Turner had seen them hunt down a sprinting man for the sport of it. With a free hand he was pulling on the woman’s arm. The boy was wetting his pants and screaming in Turner’s ear. The mother seemed incapable of running. She was stretching out her hand and shouting. She wanted her son back. The child was wriggling toward her, across his shoulder. Now came the screech of the falling bomb. They said that if you heard the noise stop before the explosion, your time was up. As he dropped to the grass he pulled the woman with him and shoved her head down. He was half lying across the child as the ground shook to the unbelievable roar. The shock wave prized them from the earth. They covered their faces against the stinging spray of dirt. They heard the Stuka climb from its dive even as they heard the banshee wail of the next attack. The bomb had hit the road less than eighty yards away. He had the boy under his arm and he was trying to pull the woman to her feet.