The sudden kindness in his voice almost finished her, but she held on tightly to the telephone cord and stated the facts as calmly as she could.
‘My brother’s missing in action, Moonie. We’ve just heard the news, but I don’t need to tell you how frustrating the bare facts can be. There’s no real information. Nothing to say if his plane crashed or if he was wounded, or – or worse—’
‘Take it easy, my dear,’ he said, as her voice began to shake. ‘Just tell me what you want me to do.’
She looked at the phone stupidly. What could he do? What crazy idea was in her head when she first thought of him? He wasn’t God, able to do what nobody else could do – find her brother among a million other casualties of war…
Wenna took the phone out of her hand and spoke rapidly.
‘Captain Moon, this is Celia’s sister. Would you mind holding on for a moment while she recovers herself, please?’
‘Of course. Tell her to take all the time she needs.’
Celia caught the sound of his booming voice, and bit her lip. “Take all the time she needs”… as if he wasn’t one of the busiest men on earth, with a very important job, and no time to spend on a stupid female falling apart with grief…
She took back the phone from Wenna. Like an automaton she gave him Olly’s name and service number, and without a qualm she went on with her request.
‘I’m asking you to pull rank, Moonie. I know it’s not your field, and Olly’s only one young man among so many, but if anyone can get inside information, it’s you. I know it’s a heck of a lot to ask, and I shouldn’t be doing it all—’
‘I’ll do whatever I can, Celia, and of course you had to ask me. I wouldn’t have expected anything else. In fact, life has never been the same here since you left. I miss your quick wit and your quirky ways—’
‘They’re not so quirky now,’ she mumbled, her eyes smarting at the unexpected compliment that was clearly meant to cheer her up.
‘But they will be again, I promise you. I’ll be in touch, my dear.’
She recognised the change in his voice, and guessed that his priorities had changed. She could almost sense the sudden rush of adrenalin and activity as some new decoding message came in – and she missed that feeling. She was no longer in the thick of it, and despite Moonie’s many contacts, she knew it was a very long shot to see if he could find any news of Olly. All she could do was wait and try not to give way to the sudden depression that hit her.
It didn’t even occur to her until much later that she hadn’t even asked if there was any more news of Stefan. But of course there wouldn’t have been, or he would have told her.
Chapter Fifteen
The news that Oliver Pengelly was missing spread around the district with the speed of a forest fire. At Skye’s request, David Kingsley reported it only briefly in the Informer, confirming that the family was still waiting for definite news, and had every hope that their son was still alive.
No one really believed it, of course. The clayworkers were as awkward and inarticulate as Butch with their sympathy, but nonetheless sincere; the townspeople sent cards or stilted letters; and Daphne Hollis arrived at New World with a bunch of wild moorland flowers to make Mrs Pen feel better.
‘It’s a sweet gesture, but it makes me feel as if everyone has got him dead and buried already,’ Skye said, weeping in Nick’s arms.
She wavered between being completely out of control and deathly calm, and could do nothing to stop the moods. She refused to take the doctor’s mind-dulling pills, preferring to keep her senses alert to whatever fate had in store for them.
She knew that the pills might have helped alleviate the nightmares, when she saw Oliver in the grip of some terrible death, burning or drowning, his body ripped apart or blown to pieces. She couldn’t stop the nightmares, and nor would she try to blot them out artificially.
She wanted to feel the pain, and even welcomed it in a macabre way, because in doing so, she believed she was sharing whatever Olly was experiencing. It was wrong, and she knew it. It was virtually trying to take on God’s role.
No human being could share another’s pain, but the agony she had experienced when he was born had been hers alone, and if in some grisly manner she was now sharing the agony of his dying, she jealously guarded that too as hers alone. But the guilt of knowing exactly what she was trying to do made her constantly scratchy with Nick.
‘I’m really worried about you, Skye,’ he told her now, as she shook in his arms. ‘You’re not sleeping properly. You must let the doctor give you something—’
‘No! Not until I know Olly’s safe,’ she snapped.
‘But what good is it doing to suffer like this?’
‘Would you not have me suffer for my son? Are you so damn self-sufficient that you can detach yourself from it all?’
‘That’s not fair,’ he said, not even raising his voice. ‘I love him too, Skye, and if you don’t know that by now, then I wonder what we’ve been doing together all these years.’
Hearing the tightness in his voice, she was stricken with remorse at his quiet dignity, and she leaned into him again, feeling his strength, but unable to take comfort from it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled.
‘You don’t need to say it. And any day now we may get word that Olly’s safe, and our worst fears will be over.’
She moved slightly away from him and looked up into his handsome face, seeing how his dark eyes were clouded and the lines around his mouth were accentuated with the tension he held so rigidly inside. Seeing how old and drawn her once young and virile lover looked now, she knew how selfish she was in not crediting him with suffering too.
‘But you don’t really believe he’ll come home safely, do you?’ she said, her mouth trembling. ‘The truth now, Nick.’
After a moment he slowly bowed his head.
‘If it’s the truth you want, then I believe we’ve already said goodbye to our son, Skye,’ he said.
As if the trauma of saying it out loud was suddenly too much to bear, seconds later his face twisted. He clung to her and wept silently in her arms, and she was at once the comforter and the comforted, and thought all the more of him for breaking down and releasing his feelings.
* * *
Celia and Wenna returned from what had become their ritual daily walk to get out of the house to find their parents still locked in a close embrace. With one accord they moved silently outside again.
‘I can’t stand much more of this,’ Celia declared. ‘I simply don’t know what to do for the best. We’re not helping, Wenna. They don’t want us. We’re constant reminders that something’s wrong. Until some definite news comes through, they have to get on with their lives, and so do we.’
‘I know you’re right, but what do you suggest? Are you going back to Penzance after all?’
‘I suppose so,’ Celia said. ‘I daresay they’ll have me, much as I hated it, and at least I can get home quickly from there if ever – whenever—’ She swallowed hard, and went on more harshly. ‘I’d dearly love to ask if Moonie could take me back, but I doubt if the proper channels would welcome back a crazy woman.’
‘You’re not crazy. You’re the sanest woman I know. But I begin to wonder how much compassionate leave is reasonable for someone whose brother is missing in action. If everyone did the same thing, there’d be no service personnel left.’
They looked at one another. They had been home for two weeks now, but there had been no more real information. Moonie hadn’t been able to come up with anything more definite than the latest official word of ‘missing in action’.
Beyond that, he had stretched the bounds of security and told Celia there had been a spate of missing aircraft that was being hushed up for morale purposes. Among them, several Bomber Command aircraft had been shot down during diversion tactics over Norway. It was suspected at source that Olly’s had been one of them, but there was no mention of survivors in the reports, and until there was positiv
e news of the air crews, nothing would be released.
‘He could have parachuted out of the plane, Celia, and been picked up anywhere and taken to safety,’ was the best Moonie could say. ‘If I hear any more, I’ll contact you.’
‘Thank you,’ she said woodenly. ‘There’s no news of Stefan, I take it?’
‘I’m sorry, no.’
But why would there be? Moonie didn’t even know him, and he was just a civilian, too old for the early conscription into the army, but not too old to be condemned for refusing to support his compatriots. Though, in Celia’s opinion, anyone who defied the Gestapo regime was a hero.
She hadn’t repeated everything to her parents, only the positive thought that Olly might have parachuted into the countryside somewhere. Even if he had been taken prisoner, he would still be alive – but with the recent revelations about the horror camps, no one dared to make any more comments about such a possibility.
‘I really think I should go back to my unit tomorrow,’ Wenna told her sister now. ‘I know Mom will understand.’
‘Can you still manage to entertain the troops, with all this hanging over us?’
‘I have to. It’s not their fault, Celia. They need encouragement to carry on, and maybe in doing it for them, I’m doing it for Olly too.’
‘You’re a good kid,’ Celia said huskily. ‘Not such a kid any more, either. No wonder Harry Mack fell for you.’
‘We’ve all grown up, haven’t we? And a lot quicker than we would have done if we hadn’t gone to war.’
‘So I guess I’ll do my duty and continue eating humble pie in the turnip fields. How’s that for growing up?’
But their cautious laughter held more than a hint of desperation, before they linked arms and went back into the house to tell their parents what they had decided.
* * *
Long before a mellow Cornish November had slid into December, the newspapers announced that the Home Guard was officially to stand down, and the country gave a cautious rejoicing that surely such things couldn’t be sanctioned unless Jerry was truly on the run.
For several months now, towns and cities away from the coast had been allowed to turn on moderate street lighting again, and children who had only ever seen their towns in darkness once night fell were enchanted by the sight.
‘Good for them,’ Skye said to Nick. ‘But we’re still denied the best news of all. And if you tell me once more that no news is good news, I shall scream. Until I hear for sure that Olly is safe, I’ll be unable to rejoice over anything—’
‘Why don’t you think positively, the way you always used to, and turn your words around?’ he retorted. ‘Until you hear for sure that Olly’s not coming home, there’s always hope.’
After a small pause, she spoke sadly. ‘We’ve changed, haven’t we? I used to be the optimist, and you the pessimist.’
‘Well, despite what I once said, one of us has to believe that he’ll return,’ he almost snapped. ‘If you must know, I’m beginning to resent the sight of your gloomy face, Skye. It’s not the most welcome thing to come home to.’
‘Is that why you’ve been staying out more often lately?’
‘Perhaps,’ he replied, turning away, and she felt a huge surge of fear in her heart.
There could be another reason, of course. He was still a very handsome man, and he came into contact with all kinds of women in his work. Vulnerable women, needing advice and support. Who was to say that he wouldn’t be as susceptible as the next man, when the alternative was coming home to a woman who seemed to have lost interest in life?
She caught sight of her reflection in the overmantel mirror, and was shocked at what she saw. Her beautiful black hair, the family trademark, was more than speckled with grey now, and she hadn’t bothered about it properly in weeks. Her once lustrous blue eyes were dulled with anxiety and her private, silent weeping.
She was the one now, she thought furiously, who had her son already dead and buried before they even knew his fate. She owed him the force of her optimism.
‘If only we could hear something,’ she muttered. ‘I begin to think there’s a conspiracy of silence at the War Office about these missing planes. Either that, or there were so many of them that they daren’t let the public know the extent of our losses. They’ve begun reporting some of them, I know, but how can Olly’s plane be missing for so long with no word at all? No wreckage, or sightings, or bodies…’
She said the words deliberately, confronting them out loud, and as she did so, she felt a weird kind of strength seep back into her. Perhaps it was a conspiracy. Perhaps he’d been on some secret mission that couldn’t be revealed as yet.
However crazy it sounded, she knew from Celia’s guarded conversations about her previous decoding work that such things happened.
Nick held her close. ‘Darling, I know he’ll be safe. I have a feeling in my bones about it. Despite what I may have thought before, I think we’d have heard about it by now.’
He wasn’t sure, any more than any of them were, but he wasn’t going to dampen her sudden look of determination to think positively. He wasn’t going to admit that he too had frequent nightmares about the chance of his son becoming fish-bait in the North Sea, or blown to pieces in a horrific air crash. He wouldn’t let himself think of any of it, because he knew that to blot it out was the only way to keep sane.
But the news announcement in mid-December that Glenn Miller’s plane had disappeared over a routine trip to France, and that all passengers and crew were feared dead, was almost enough to crush Skye’s sprits again. They could find news of a celebrity plane all right, she thought bitterly, but they couldn’t trace an ordinary airman’s.
Then, when she had all but given up hope again, came a trickle of information.
A letter arrived from the Air Ministry. She was too afraid to open it until Nick came home that evening, even though Butch had offered to read it for her. But it wasn’t his place, and she sent him out of the room before she gave the letter to Nick. Whatever Olly’s parents had to face, they must do it together.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Nick said. ‘I would have come home earlier.’
‘I knew you were in court today,’ she said, her voice jerky with anxiety. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
God, how feeble that sounded. How dreadful, too, when she knew instinctively that there had to be news of her son’s life – or death – contained in that slim envelope.
‘I’m so afraid, Nick,’ she went on tremulously.
Her hands were clenched together, the palms damp with sweat. She didn’t miss the fact that Nick’s face was as white as her own, even as he ripped open the envelope and scanned the page.
‘It’s all right,’ he said rapidly, but his voice was strained. ‘At least, it’s all right as far as the worst of our fears is concerned. Nothing is confirmed yet – but the news is at least hopeful.’
Skye almost snatched the letter out of his hands. ‘What kind of information is that?’ she said angrily. ‘Are they tormenting us with half-truths?’
She read the formal words quickly. Plane wreckage had been picked up in one of the icy Norwegian fjords, and it was confirmed as one of Oliver Pengelly’s squadron. A man had been found wandering in the woods, somehow keeping alive in a half-wild state in the harsh Norwegian winter. Between the lines the Pengellys deduced the terrible state of the man, but he had finally been able to babble out some service information and was now in hospital and identified as a British airman.
The letter went on in similar stilted manner to tell them that although it had been established that the man was not their son, it was hoped that once the airman had fully recovered his senses, more information would be forthcoming, and then the Pengellys would be contacted again.
‘And that’s all they can tell us?’ Skye said, choked.
‘At least we know one of them got out safely—’
‘You mean alive, don’t you?’ she went on bitterly. ‘But presumably his
mind had gone and all identification was missing. So if he’s the only one they’ve found so far, how much hope you do really hold out for Olly? You told me recently you thought we’d already said goodbye to him, remember? I can’t forget that.’
‘I wish to God I’d never said anything at all.’
‘So do I.’
She couldn’t rid herself of the imagery of the plane wreckage in one of those impenetrably deep Norwegian fjords. The fact that one man had got out alive did nothing to ease her torment. In her imagination she could see the pilot still strapped in his seat, even now, deep in his underwater tomb. And Olly… her sweet baby… his young body ripped apart with the impact of the plane hitting the icy water.
The very thought of drowning – of the sensation of mouth and eyes and lungs filling up with water until they almost burst; of choking and gasping desperately for air, and knowing that there was no escape whatsoever – was filling her with a growing sense of claustrophobia. As if she was the one knowing the terror of sinking into an eternal darkness…
‘Skye, put your head between your knees,’ she heard Nick order her as if from a distance.
Next minute, a glass was thrust between her cold lips. She opened them and swallowed the bitter-tasting brandy automatically, choking as she did so.
‘I’m all right,’ she gasped. ‘Just for a moment I couldn’t breathe, but I’m all right now. I need some air.’
‘Let’s go outside—’
She touched his arm. ‘I need to be alone, Nick. I need space to think by myself. Please understand, honey.’
And although he let her go, she knew he wouldn’t really understand. Why would he? He was a lawyer, who solved everything by logical means and by poring over legal tomes, not by the airy-fairy urge to be up on the moors in the place where her ancestors had lived and breathed and died.
The thought was in her head without conscious effort. In a strange and inexplicable way, the moors had always been her family’s sanctuary, maybe even more so for the women than the men. It was where they always went in time of trouble or fear. It was where Morwen Tremayne and Celia Penry had circled the old Larnie Stone to discover the images of their future sweethearts, nearly a hundred years ago.
A Brighter Tomorrow Page 27
