THE ROAD NO LONGER had the protection of the plane trees. Vulnerable to attack and without shade, it uncoiled across the undulating land in long shallow S shapes. He had wasted precious reserves in unnecessary talk and encounters. Tiredness had made him superficially elated and forthcoming. Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots—he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I’ll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it, which he had come to treat like a sacred site. Also, the fear of capture. His most sensual memories—their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall—were bleached colorless through overuse. He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.

But these heresies died when he read her last letter. He touched his breast pocket. It was a kind of genuflection. Still there. Here was something new on the scales. That he could be cleared had all the simplicity of love. Merely tasting the possibility reminded him how much had narrowed and died. His taste for life, no less, all the old ambitions and pleasures. The prospect was of a rebirth, a triumphant return. He could become again the man who had once crossed a Surrey park at dusk in his best suit, swaggering on the promise of life, who had entered the house and with the clarity of passion made love to Cecilia—no, let him rescue the word from the corporals, they had fucked while others sipped their cocktails on the terrace. The story could resume, the one that he had been planning on that evening walk. He and Cecilia would no longer be isolated. Their love would have space and a society to grow in. He would not go about cap in hand to collect apologies from the friends who had shunned him. Nor would he sit back, proud and fierce, shunning them in return. He knew exactly how he would behave. He would simply resume. With his criminal record struck off, he could apply to medical college when the war was over, or even go for a commission now in the Medical Corps. If Cecilia made her peace with her family, he would keep his distance without seeming sour. He could never be on close terms with Emily or Jack. She had pursued his prosecution with a strange ferocity, while Jack turned away, vanished into his Ministry the moment he was needed.

None of that mattered. From here it looked simple. They were passing more bodies in the road, in the gutters and on the pavement, dozens of them, soldiers and civilians. The stench was cruel, insinuating itself into the folds of his clothes. The convoy had entered a bombed village, or perhaps the suburb of a small town—the place was rubble and it was impossible to tell. Who would care? Who could ever describe this confusion, and come up with the village names and the dates for the history books? And take the reasonable view and begin to assign the blame? No one would ever know what it was like to be here. Without the details there could be no larger picture. The abandoned stores, equipment and vehicles made an avenue of scrap that spilled across their path. With this, and the bodies, they were forced to walk in the center of the road. That did not matter because the convoy was no longer moving. Soldiers were climbing out of troop carriers and continuing on foot, stumbling over brick and roof tiles. The wounded were left in the lorries to wait. There was a greater press of bodies in a narrower space, greater irritation. Turner kept his head down and followed the man in front, protectively folded in his thoughts.

He would be cleared. From the way it looked here, where you could hardly be bothered to lift your feet to step over a dead woman’s arm, he did not think he would be needing apologies or tributes. To be cleared would be a pure state. He dreamed of it like a lover, with a simple longing. He dreamed of it in the way other soldiers dreamed of their hearths or allotments or old civilian jobs. If innocence seemed elemental here, there was no reason why it should not be so back in England. Let his name be cleared, then let everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her, and live without shame.

But there was one part in all this that he could not think through, one indistinct shape that the shambles twelve miles outside Dunkirk could not reduce to a simple outline. Briony. Here he came against the outer edge of what Cecilia called his generous spirit. And his rationality. If Cecilia were to be reunited with her family, if the sisters were close again, there would be no avoiding her. But could he accept her? Could he be in the same room? Here she was, offering a possibility of absolution. But it was not for him. He had done nothing wrong. It was for herself, for her own crime which her conscience could no longer bear. Was he supposed to feel grateful? And yes, of course, she was a child in 1935. He had told himself, he and Cecilia had told each other, over and again. Yes, she was just a child. But not every child sends a man to prison with a lie. Not every child is so purposeful and malign, so consistent over time, never wavering, never doubted. A child, but that had not stopped him daydreaming in his cell of her humiliation, of a dozen ways he might find revenge. In France once, in the bitterest week of winter, raging drunk on cognac, he had even conjured her onto the end of his bayonet. Briony and Danny Hardman. It was not reasonable or just to hate Briony, but it helped.

How to begin to understand this child’s mind? Only one theory held up. There was a day in June 1932, all the more beautiful for coming suddenly, after a long spell of rain and wind. It was one of those rare mornings which declares itself, with a boastful extravagance of warmth and light and new leaves, as the true beginning, the grand portal to summer, and he was walking through it with Briony, past the Triton pond, down beyond the ha-ha and rhododendrons, through the iron kissing gate and onto the winding narrow woodland path. She was excited and talkative. She would have been about ten years old, just starting to write her little stories. Along with everyone else, he had received his own bound and illustrated tale of love, adversities overcome, reunion and a wedding. They were on their way down to the river for the swimming lesson he had promised her. As they left the house behind she may have been telling him about a story she had just finished or a book she was reading. She may have been holding his hand. She was a quiet, intense little girl, rather prim in her way, and this outpouring was unusual. He was happy to listen. These were exciting times for him too. He was nineteen, exams were almost over and he thought he’d done well. Soon he would cease to be a schoolboy. He had interviewed well at Cambridge and in two weeks he was leaving for France where he was to teach English at a religious school. There was a grandeur about the day, about the colossal, barely stirring beeches and oaks, and the light that dropped like jewels through the fresh foliage to make pools among last year’s dead leaves. This magnificence, he sensed in his youthful self-importance, reflected the glorious momentum of his life.

She prattled on, and contentedly he half listened. The path emerged from the woods onto the broad grassy banks of the river. They walked upstream for half a mile and entered woods again. Here, on a bend in the river, below overhanging trees, was the pool, dug out i............