Lover

by Wilson, Laura

  ‘Holden-Browne. Guy Holden-Browne.’

  A hand in front of her face. Her head jerked back involuntarily, banging against the wall. She blinked. The hand was still there. She took it, and it…shook. Up and down. He’s shaking my hand, she thought, astonished. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Megan.’ Then, automatically, ‘My mother’s Welsh.’ Then, in a blurt, ‘AndIthinkI’mgoingtobesick.’

  He stepped away while she turned her head and vomited, and when she turned back, he was holding out a handkerchief, neatly folded. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  When she’d wiped her face, he said, ‘Do you think…I mean…couldn’t you stand up?’

  ‘I… Yes. I think so.’

  Upright again, she held out the handkerchief, but he didn’t take it. ‘You needn’t worry about that,’ he said.

  Mortified—of course he wouldn’t want it back, not with that on it—she balled it up and stuffed it in her pocket. ‘Sorry. I…I’ll wash it for you.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Keep it. Or throw it away, if you like.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

  It was awful. She wished he’d go away. She wished never to see him, or any of them, ever again. She wished she were home. She wished she were dead, or anywhere except where she was. His kindness made it worse, far worse.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You can’t go home on your own, not when you’re…you’re…not well. I’ll take you.’

  ‘No, honestly, I—’

  ‘It’s all right, really. I won’t…you know.’ He sounded embarrassed. ‘You’ll be quite safe. Please let me help you.’

  ‘Well, all right, then.’

  She didn’t take out her torch. One was enough, and besides, she didn’t want any more light. The night was quiet, and they walked together, without touching or speaking, except for her brief directions. The vomiting and the cool air had sobered her; now all that remained was the bad taste in her mouth, the pain in her neck and chest, the memory and the horrible, mounting embarrassment of what he’d seen, what he must be thinking. By the time they reached the end of her road, her shame was overwhelming.

  ‘I’m fine now,’ she said, grateful that he kept his torch low, and she couldn’t see his face. ‘It’s only just down there.’

  ‘Are you sure? Just…you did seem very frightened, back there.’

  ‘Really,’ she said, impatiently. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure. You’d better take my torch.’

  ‘No, I’ve got one.’ She brought it out of her pocket and switched it on.

  ‘Well, goodnight, then.’

  ‘Yes. Goodnight.’

  The kitchen door was ajar. She paused in the passageway long enough to call out, ‘I’m going straight up, Mum.’

  ‘You stopping in your room?’

  ‘Yes. I’m really tired. I’ll come down if there’s planes.’

  She sat in front of the scarred wooden desk that served as her dressing table and examined herself in the mirror: the remains of make-up on the blotchy face, hair half down, the marks, red and livid, on her neck. She clutched a hand to her chest. The brooch, Mum’s green brooch that she’d filched from her bedroom: it was gone. Must have fallen off when… She fingered the place where she’d pinned it. No—there was a small rip in the material. As if it had been torn off. As if he’d pulled it off her dress when… But that was stupid. Why would he?

  It wasn’t an expensive one, only Woolworth’s, but Mum was bound to notice. She’d have to say it had fallen off at the pictures. She stood up and took off the dress. The skirt was filthy, and there was a long rip down the back. She could say she’d had an accident with the bicycle. Fallen off. Damn. They’d left the bikes in the lane. She’d have to go back and get hers in the morning. She could say that was when she lost the brooch, too. Say she’d gone back to the place and looked, but it wasn’t there. The handkerchief, though: she’d have to get rid of it. She pulled it out of the pocket, and something else—paper—came along with it and fluttered onto the rug. A pound note.

  How…? Then she remembered: the man, he’d put something in her hand. She sat down again, in front of the mirror, and stared at herself.

  He’d tried to kill her. Then he’d given her a pound. For the brooch? She could buy another one now, a replacement, so she wouldn’t have to lie about that, at least. But the bicycle, first thing—she mustn’t forget.

  He’d given her a pound.

  That other pilot, who’d walked her home…she hadn’t said thank you. Rude, when he’d helped her like that. Too late now, she’d never see him again. Hoped she wouldn’t, anyway.

  He’d tried to have his way with her, then he’d tried to kill her. He’d tried to kill her.

  She knew she’d never be able to tell anyone. Her reflection, with its dull eyes and smudged, forbidden lipstick, confirmed what her mother would think: it was her fault. She inspected her hands—grazed and dirty—and picked a bit of grit out of her knee. She’d asked for it, hadn’t she?

  He’d tried to kill her, and it was her fault.

  Monday 16th September

  RAF Hornchurch, Essex

  Flying Officer Jim Rushton

  Look up. Blue, blue sky. Light breeze. It’s a perfect day for flying, and here we are all sprawled on armchairs, baking in full kit.

  Look down. Scuffed grass beside the trench. You can see the earth. Feet in flying boots, parachute harnesses dangling. Metal catches the sun. Funny how you always notice details, before…

  Look out, over the airfield. Airmen filling in craters by the runway. The grass is still dotted with red flags marking unexploded bombs from the last few raids. Huts—what’s left of them—hangars. I remember filling the sandbags when we first came here, making pens to protect the Spitfires. After we came back from France. It seems like years ago. Teddy Norton was still here then, and Stuffy—I was at RAF College with him—Felix Marshall…Bimbo Tanner… All gone, now.

  Let’s see. What’s in the paper? The Queen’s private apartments were badly damaged when Buckingham Palace was bombed again yesterday. Won’t be too many more nice days like this one. It’ll be cold, soon. We’ll have to wait inside…whoever’s left, that is. The RAF had one of its greatest days in smashing the mass attacks on London. Thirty of our machines were lost, but ten pilots are safe.

  I see Corky and Mathy are still arguing about tactics. Funny to see those two together—Corky’s almost taller sitting down than standing up, and Mathy’s over six feet, far too tall for a fighter pilot. God knows how he ended up inside a Spitfire. Davy with his rugger nose and ruddy cheeks, reading a book. He looks calm enough, but he hasn’t turned a page for at least twenty minutes. Czeslaw staring up at the sky. Lined face—he’s older than the rest of us, like most of the Poles: twenty-seven. Flint’s asleep—must be dreaming about flying because his eyebrows are wiggling up and down. Balchin’s next to him. He’s dozing, too, cap tipped over his eyes, arm dangling down by his side, hand very white. That’s how it’ll look when he’s dead—unless he’s burnt, of course. There’s Ginger Mannin off to the latrine, again. Miss Air Force is a blonde and only 18 years old…the Boys in Sky Blue like ‘em young!

  The newspaper is plunged into shade now and I can’t see the picture. A bulky shape—Flight Lieutenant Webster, the adjutant—is blocking out the sun.

  ‘Adj…‘

  ‘Sorry.’ He moves round to stand behind me and jabs at the paper with his pipe. ‘She’s a bit of all right, isn’t she?’

  I shrug. ‘I suppose so.’

  Balchin pushes back his cap and blinks at him. ‘How’s… you know?’

  ‘Tinker?’ offers Mathy.

  ‘That’s not his name… Taylor, wasn’t it?’

  Davy looks up from his paper and says, helpfully, ‘Soldier?’

  ‘Shut up, Davy,’ says Corky.

  ‘Sailor, then.’

  ‘Shut up,’ says Corky. ‘He means Tucker, Adj.’

  ‘Do I mean Tuc
ker?’ asks Davy, in mock surprise.

  ‘Yes, you do. Take no notice of him, Adj.’

  ‘Not fair,’ says Davy. ‘I can’t help it if they all look alike.’

  I can’t remember what Tucker looked like, either. Must have been his first scrap—he only arrived two days ago. Webster hasn’t said anything, but he must have shaken his head because Balchin squints at him for a moment, then grunts and pulls his cap back over his face. Pictured on the right is a Dornier crashing in flames… Bimbo Tanner in the hospital, with his melted face, eyelids gone…Webster’s saying something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, you’re on five-minute stand-by.’

  Ginger returns, doing up his fly, sees Webster, and says, ‘How’s Whatsisname, Adj?’

  ‘Bought it. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Putting rouge on his nipples,’ says Davy. ‘All for your delight, Adj.’

  Webster frowns, but doesn’t reply.

  ‘What’s wrong with that, anyway?’ Ginger nods at the field telephone.

  ‘Buggered.’

  ‘This whole airfield’s buggered,’ says Davy, irritably. ‘Craters everywhere, no bloody huts left, place crawling with dead WAAFs.’

  I picture a dying Miss Air Force crawling on all fours at the bottom of a trench, dishevelled head hanging down, hair full of dust, skirt hiked up round her hips.

  Davy looks at me. ‘I don’t know what you’ve got to grin about, Goldilocks,’ he says.

  ‘It can’t be,’ I say.

  ‘What can’t be what?’

  ‘The airfield. It can’t be crawling with them. Not if they’re dead.’

  ‘Jesus, Goldilocks… Stiff with dead WAAFs, then.’ Davy returns to his paper and Webster fiddles with his pipe.

  After a moment, Mathy says, ‘Are they sending a replacement, Adj?’

  ‘If you can call him that.’ Webster shakes his head. ‘Six hours on Spits.’

  Davy sighs. ‘Another bloody public school boy, no doubt. Must be a factory somewhere, turning out replacements. Hope he’s better than Tucker.’

  ‘This one’s called Sinclair,’ says Webster. ‘Gervase.’

  ‘Gervase, eh?’ says Davy. ‘He can keep Holden-Hyphen-Browne company. We don’t want him.’

  Flint opens his eyes. ‘Well, you’ve got him. And you’re going to take him up this afternoon, show him the ropes.’

  Oh, well…what else is in here? Messages of the Stars… Leave the petty things for others to worry about. Get out of the rut and do not hesitate to try something new.

  Try something new. I’d forgotten about Saturday until I found the brooch in my pocket. Must have belonged to that kid in the pub: no other reason it could be there. I don’t know how it got in my pocket; don’t remember taking it. Might as well keep it, though. I can always find some girl who’ll want it. Give it a story, make it special. They like that sort of thing. Like that yarn I told about my sister—ought to use that line again. Makes me laugh, how they lap it up. Anyone that stupid deserves to be lied to. But that was a queer thing—one minute I wanted to throttle the life out of the silly little bitch, the next minute, I’d lost interest.

  When I saw that girl in the car putting on lipstick I wanted to take it from her and do it myself, scrub it all over her mouth. She was pretty full of herself, that one. I should have chosen her—that would have wiped the smile off her face pretty quick. Wouldn’t have been so pleased with herself after that, would she? But I thought the younger one would be better. It all started when I saw the girl using the cosmetics; I knew I wouldn’t be able to settle until I’d… But then, out there with the other one, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Didn’t like her struggling like that.

  Waste of time. Not cheap, either—had to hand over a quid to keep her quiet. I thought that flying had put me off all that other business. I hadn’t so much as noticed a girl in months, then suddenly that happened. That stupid bint in the car, I’d have settled her all right. Do not hesitate to try something new, that’s what the paper said. Can’t be local, though, and WAAFs are definitely off limits. Too risky.

  Bloody fool thing to do. Running low on funds, as well. I shut my eyes. A torso rears up in front of me: loose, pale breasts, pooling out to the sides. You could pull them away and they’d stretch like lumps of dough.

  Hear a rustle of paper under my nose and the first thing I see are the sagging, dun-coloured dugs of Corky’s Mae West as he bends down to snatch the Daily Mirror off my lap. ‘I’m so thankful that at last I’ve found a powder that’s non-detectable, says Lady Cecilia Smiley,’ he reads in a falsetto voice. ‘I just hate detectable powder, don’t you?’

  ‘Can’t abide it,’ says Mathy, ‘frightful stuff.’

  ‘Pond’s face powder matches my skin colouring so perfectly that it might have—’

  The scramble klaxon sounds, and it all falls away as if it had never existed, which, in a way, it hasn’t, because compared to this, nothing is real. It’s like being lost in a maze, and suddenly finding that all the hedges are flattened and the view is clear. Nothing between you and what you’re about to do.

  I have spent my life waiting for this. Right from the first time—I was ten years old, and the plane was an old Avro from one of those flying circuses that used to go up and down the country. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I knew, straight away, that more than I’d ever wanted anything, I wanted to fly. The Avro was a rickety old crate, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it: the canvas and wires, the propeller, the struts, all seemed to glow with a special light. I loved everything about it, even the way it smelled. I stood there so long that eventually the pilot said he’d take me up for a ten-minute flip, even though I had no money to pay for it. I’ll never forget how it felt, the moment of leaving the ground and soaring through the air, up and away from all the people, watching them get smaller and smaller and knowing that I was free, no longer bound to the earth, to my family, to insignificant things. For the first time in my life, the world was marching to my drum.

  When I got out of the plane, a boy I knew a little, from school, came up to me. He stood staring, and then he put his hand out and touched me, lightly, on the chest. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he wanted to see if I was changed in some way, transformed, from having been up in the sky. It was the first—I think the only—time in my life I’d really wanted to talk to anyone. I could see the excitement in his face—a reflection, I suppose, of my own—and I wanted to tell him how wonderful it was, but I couldn’t put it into words. You can’t, really, not the joy of it, the extraordinary fact of being in the air. Oh, there was the glamour and all the rest of it, and I’d read Biggles and thought it was jolly exciting, but that was at secondhand. This was real, a pure, sharp, true sensation, and it was the first time in my life I’d experienced anything like it. Anything else one did was dull by comparison, blunted—a meaningless, domestic fog of home and school.

  I remember running away from the boy and into the next field and throwing myself down in the long grass so that I was hidden by the hedge. I knew then that I didn’t need to talk to anyone about it, all I needed to do was to close my eyes and re-live, over and over again, the sheer wonder of it. That was the best day of my life, and from that time on, I read everything about aeroplanes that I could find. I used to dream about them, too—or, at least, dream about flying. For some reason, there was never an actual aeroplane in the dream, just me, alone in the air, sitting in an invisible machine, but knowing it was there, and I could fly it, and being proud of that, and happy. Powerful, knowing that nothing could touch me. And every time I dreamed it, I’d wake up with a sense of rightness, a certainty I’d never known before. I’d always felt that I was different from other people, but now I knew the feeling was special—something to be proud of, not ashamed. They didn’t know what I knew. Only pilots knew, and I swore to myself that some day, I’d be one of them. I felt as if I was being kept in mothballs until then—nothing had a meaning, or a point
.

  I’ll never forget my first solo flight in a Spitfire. The first time up there on my own. She was frustrating at first, flying herself, leaving me behind—laughing at me, almost—daring me to control her, and for a moment I thought I couldn’t, I’d flunked it, but then there was a second, lengthened into a minute, then five, ten, when I was her master. More than that: I was part of the plane. Don’t know how I could have thought she was too small— she’s perfect. No vices: she’s all you could wish for. Exactly right.

  It was a relief when the war started—finally, the chance to do what I’d been training for, although it was pretty dull at first. Because there can be no better feeling in the world: mind and body attuned to the job, entirely self-reliant. No yesterday, no tomorrow, nobody else, just the perfect clarity of each moment.

  In the sky, everything is possible: I know that even if I die tomorrow—today—I shall have lived more than the people on the ground.

  We start to run across the airfield, towards the planes.

  Monday 16th September

  Clapham, London

  Lucy

  They started at ten past eight tonight. We filled the buckets and turned off the gas and came down here to get settled—if you can call it that—and I’m in my usual place under the kitchen table. Not the most comfortable way to spend the night, but it’s better than being under the stairs with Mums. She’s in a deck-chair and my sister Minnie is beside her on the cushions from the settee. She’s got her head in the cupboard and her feet stuck out in the passage, where Dad is sure to trip over them when he comes in from the garden. I wish he wouldn’t go out there because Mums gets so nervous and she keeps getting up and calling out to him to come in, but he pretends he can’t hear her. Or maybe he really can’t hear—they’re making enough racket tonight. We’re luckier than a lot of people, living here, but it’s definitely getting worse. Dad says it’s because of Clapham Junction—the Germans want to demolish our railways, if they can, and it’s a big station.