Nicholas took a hesitant step toward her but Skye didn’t move away from the safety of the plane. If anything, she pressed her body closer to it, not trusting herself to speak lest she say or do something else that might cause trouble.
He studied her face, which she imagined must look as bewildered as his but also more guarded than he’d ever seen it. “What’s wrong?” he asked, skipping over all the ordinary pleasantries people might exchange after a long separation and cutting straight to the heart of the matter.
“Everything,” she said quietly, eyes fixed to the ground. When she looked up, she realized that his face was shadowed by sadness too. “Don’t you think?”
Nicholas ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “I just heard that one hundred and three RAF pilots died last night,” he said, his voice disbelieving, wild, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.
“One hundred and three,” Skye repeated. “In one night?”
“And now they’re rushing in men to replace the ones who’ve died. Most of them haven’t even finished their training courses; they have less than twenty hours in the air. Twenty hours. We’ll be lucky if there aren’t two hundred and three dead tonight.”
The sun slipped behind a thick bank of clouds and the light vanished. Darkness descended upon the hangar, transforming it into a space like the cave of their childhood, where they had lain on their backs sharing secrets. And she felt now as she had back then: that Nicholas was the one person in the world who wanted her to speak the truth. So she did.
“That’s why I’ve never spoken of the fuss that was made about the women flying despite our hundreds of hours’ flying experience,” she said urgently. “It’s why I fly wherever and in whatever weather I’m told to and never complain. It’s why I’d never say that if I so much as looked sideways at the Severn Bridge, let alone flew through it, I’d be fired. It’s why I’d never point out that the men of the ATA have had accidents and the women have had none and yet we’re still only allowed to fly non-operational jets. Because none of it matters when set beside one hundred and three men dying.”
Nicholas didn’t interject. That had never been his way. Nor did he leap to the defense of the RAF and thus dismiss everything she’d said.
You haven’t changed, she wanted to say, based on the evidence of nothing other than the way he was listening to her.
His attentiveness made her offer her most secret thought. “If they let the women fly more than just trainers, if they let us fly Spitfires and other operational jets, then the men in the ATA would be freed up to fly for the RAF. You’d have all of those experienced pilots. Why doesn’t anyone think of that?”
Nicholas’s reply was brief, and serious. “So what are you going to do about it?”
Skye stared at him, a punch of disappointment robbing her of breath. He hadn’t been listening to her at all. How had she missed the moment when the conversation turned from the confiding of unsayable things to the asking of preposterous questions? Because the answer to his question was, obviously: nothing. She could do nothing about any of it.
The sun shouldered ahead of the clouds, spilling blinding light into the hangar. Ollie’s voice, as confounding as the sun, made them both whip around.
“You found it. Brilliant. You’d better shift yourself,” he added to Nicholas. “Your squadron leader’s waiting to debrief and he’s hopping mad you’ve disappeared.”
Nicholas swore.
Skye remembered the watch and passed it to him.
“I’ll write to you,” Nicholas said. “Where are you?”
“Skye’s at Hatfield,” Ollie said, as if the question had been asked of him, and then Nicholas was gone again, just like eight years before.
As he left, she saw the eagle on his uniform, which meant he was with the newly formed American Eagle Squadron serving with the RAF. It also meant he’d defied America’s Neutrality Act, and jail if he’d been caught, to get himself to England and into combat. Of course he had. It was Nicholas.
Skye felt her disappointment of moments ago turn into something else: an understanding that he had listened to her. When he’d asked her what she was going to do about it, he’d been telling her that he still believed in her, in a Skye Penrose who, if facing a battle, would do something.
And so she would.
She pushed herself away from the plane.
But then Ollie said, “Your ATA compatriot Mona Friedlander burst a tire on a Lysander. They’ve grounded all the women until further notice.”
* * *
So, rather than doing something, Skye, and every woman in the ATA, was evaluated over the following month. They were subjected to leg-strength tests. An assessment of their ability to concentrate. Measurements of their reaction times in wind-shear. All because one plane in twelve months had been damaged by a woman. Several men in the ATA had wrecked planes but the strength of their legs had never been examined.
Skye, more serious than ever, was called into the medical examiner’s office at White Waltham for her test.
“You can place your uniform on the chair,” the doctor said.
“Pardon?” Skye said.
“Your clothes,” he said impatiently. “Put them on the chair.”
“Why?” she asked, unable to imagine why assessments of her cognitive powers had to be conducted while she was nude.
But even as she asked the question, she felt her hand stray to her jacket as if she was really going to remove it. As if she was going to do just what she was told to, even though all she wanted to remove right now was the doctor’s head with her bare hands.
“It’s for the inquest, as you know,” he said, and waited, not even drawing a curtain.
What are you going to do about it? Nicholas’s voice sounded in her head.
“Do you really not know how to report that my legs are strong enough to fly a plane without seeing me naked?” she heard herself ask coolly.
“It’s protocol.”
“Are the men told to strip too?” Her voice was louder now.
“The men don’t require such testing.”
This was what it came down to, thought Skye. A small room with a small man who reported to other small-minded men. And the question of whether she was willing to take off her clothes in order to keep her job. No wonder Joan had returned from her examination yesterday unsmiling, unspeaking. And Rose the same, the day before.
So Skye, at last, did something. She turned on her heel and walked out.
Outside, under a dirty sky, as if the world were reflecting back at her the filth of what it had become, she walked, unseeing, to the nearest aircraft. She held on to the wing with one hand and wrapped her other arm across her stomach, as if trying to hold herself together.
It was over. By walking out of the medical examination she’d ensured that she would, at last, be fired. Were her principles really so important?
A scream of fighter jets flew over, coming back from defending her country against a man who took whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, grinding to blood and bone beneath his heel anyone who stood in his way.
So yes, principles mattered. They mattered more than anything right now.
Skye would pay whatever it cost to keep hers intact.
* * *
Pauline Gower was the first to come looking for Skye. She pulled up in her car and said, grimly, “Hop in. We’re going to lunch.”
“Lunch?” Skye repeated, sure she’d misheard.
“Yes. I’m supposed to be speaking at a luncheon in London about what the ATA women are doing. I rather think you should speak instead. Reapply your lipstick and get your hair under control. If there was time, I’d order you to cut it to regulation length, rather than turning a blind eye to the fact that you tuck it up and pretend it’s shoulder length.”
Skye’s hands obeyed even as her brain struggled to comprehend. “You know what happened at my medical examination?” she asked.
“I know what happened.” The stern set of Pauline’s f
ace didn’t alter. “But you’re the girl from the newspapers. The face of the women’s section of the ATA. The one everyone wants to see.”
Skye was sure that the unflappable Pauline Gower had become delusional. The constant smoothing of paths until they were so sleek they could be skated upon had finally got to her.
As they drove toward the Mayfair hotel, Skye’s despair worsened. London was shadowed by barrage balloons: gray planets that crowded out the light. On the ground, sandbags held up the city, and maimed buildings, gutted by the Luftwaffe, spilled their insides into the streets. War had scrubbed all color away so the landscape was an achromatic murk of navy, khaki and brown clothing. The sudden appearance of a red double-decker bus was a laceration across the gloom, as preposterous as a belch at a suddenly silent dinner party.
When they arrived at the hotel, waiters served ration meals on fine china as if that might transform the food into haute cuisine. Rows of helmets and gas masks sat stoically by the door, ready for the guests if the air-raid sirens sounded.
Somebody spoke and Skye heard herself introduced to the gathering. Eyes glanced in her direction.
“There are MPs here today,” Pauline whispered to her. “People who want to let us fly Spitfires and Hurricanes. People who understand it’s a waste to use fighting men to ferry those planes across the country when we could be doing it. It’s do or die, Skye. Right here, right now.”
Do or die. Skye’s feet carried her toward the microphone. She kept her fingers curled tightly into her palms to stop herself from shattering the glasses and china plates against the walls, all of them, so that the room would ring with the sounds her unscreaming voice wished it could make.
At the microphone, she stared at the mass of people who wanted chucklesome stories to distract them from the bombs that might fall on them tonight.
Then she saw a face she recognized: the air marshal who’d scrutinized the women’s test flights; who had been to the Penroses’ Cornish cottage and danced laughingly and too often with her mother. Her mother. Whom the people of Porthleven had whispered about because she was a woman who preferred flying airplanes to hosting tea parties. Skye’s fists clenched tighter, nails cutting her palms.
What are you going to do about it? The words were so loud in her head it was almost as if Nicholas were in the room.
Her anger flared. Her head lifted.
I’m sorry, she mouthed to Pauline.
“It can be hard to be alone, to be silent,” she said, a little too softly. She shifted closer to the microphone as the murmuring quieted. “But every day, for a good part of my day, I am alone and silent in the cockpit of an airplane. In the sky above you. In the clouds. Well,” she amended, “I’m supposed to be below the clouds, but cloud isn’t always predictable, nor does it behave as the meteorologists think it should.”
There was a gentle titter from the crowd. The air marshal stared at Skye, forehead creased, as if trying to fathom her.
“My mother taught me to fly when I was only ten years old,” she continued. “I’m sure I’m not supposed to tell you that either.” Another laugh, louder this time. “Her name was Vanessa Penrose, and what she loved about flying was the aloneness. The silence.”
The air marshal flinched as if the words Vanessa Penrose had hit him square in the jaw. Now he was staring at Skye with a mix of anger and dismay.
“There’s more to flying an airplane than the ability to master the controls and to understand weather and navigation,” she said. “It takes more than strength in your legs; it takes strength of mind. Character. Things that can’t be measured and assessed by doctors and air marshals. Things you don’t know you possess until you’re tested.”
She knew what she would say next: something she’d been told by Pauline; something she’d been told not to speak of. But she had to speak of it. “The Prime Minister recently visited Fighter Command and, as the German planes threw everything they could at us, he asked why we were sending no more planes into the sky to fight them off. Our Prime Minister was told that every available pilot was in the sky. That the RAF’s strength had been cut by one quarter since the start of the Blitz. That they were running out of pilots. But that isn’t true.”
Whispers flitted around the room, everyone clearly wondering whether the censors were about to sweep in and carry Skye away. Even Pauline was looking at her with concern.
“There are many other men who could fly Spitfires to fight off the Luftwaffe,” Skye said. “But they’re busy ferrying airplanes from maintenance units to RAF bases, doing the work I do every day. Except I’m not allowed to ferry operational planes like Spitfires because I’m a woman.
“I know many people think it’s shameful and disgusting that women like me wish to fly airplanes. But all I want is for our country to win the war. And to help make that happen, I want to fly a Spitfire from a factory to an RAF base so a male pilot can get into that same Spitfire and chase away the Luftwaffe when they come to drop bombs on us tonight. How is that shameful and disgusting?”
She spoke directly to the air marshal now, shutting out everyone else in the room. He at least had the guts not to look away from the tears that formed in her eyes when she said that final word: disgusting.
“Today I was asked to do something that I think is disgusting: to present myself naked to an older male doctor in order to prove my ability to do something I’ve already shown, day in and day out, over many long months, that I can do. That is disgusting,” she repeated. “Putting me in the cockpit of a Spitfire so that a man might be freed to fight for us is simply common sense.”
Skye stepped down from the podium, meaning to make her way outside, to sit down, to rest her shaking legs before they collapsed underneath her. But a sound so deafening that it made her duck, thinking it was a bomb dropping from the sky, crashed over her. Then she realized it was applause.
She caught Pauline’s eye. Pauline was smiling in a way she’d never smiled before, and her eyes were filled with tears too.
Thank you, Nicholas, Skye thought. She wouldn’t wait for his letter; instead she’d write to him first and tell him what she’d just done.
* * *
The next morning inside the hut at Hatfield there was a buzz of conversation to rival a Merlin engine.
“You’re in the papers again,” Mona told Skye, holding up a copy of the Evening Post.
“And I heard the MPs were talking about you in Parliament yesterday,” Rose added. “What did you say at the lunch? And why were you there?”
“Can I see that?” Skye asked, and took the newspaper from Mona.
They had reproduced the photograph of her stepping out of the plane with her hand in her hair, the sunlight falling on her face in a way that made her look young—which she supposed she was—as if she knew nothing of cynicism, as if she were barely old enough to have finished school, let alone be asked to remove her clothing. And that, thankfully, was the point. The newspapers had taken her side.
The MPs at the lunch had been outraged by what Skye had said and they’d taken her case to Parliament to argue that there was a very simple solution to the problem of not having enough RAF pilots: let the women of the ATA ferry more types of aircraft in order to free up the men to fight. The debate had raged for hours, with many still convinced that it was unnatural for a woman to sit in the cockpit of an airplane, and others unable to see how it was any different to allowing a woman to sit behind the wheel of a car. But nothing had been resolved, except to bring the nation’s spotlight back onto Skye and her fellow ATA women.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve done it again.”
“You have to be joking,” Rose said crisply. “You said what everybody in this room has been wanting to say since the day we started.”
At that, Skye sank into the nearest chair, rested her elbows on the table, covered her eyes with her hands and started to cry.
The women gathered around her. Joan offered a clean hanky, Rose held Skye as if she were her mother. Mona, who
had started the whole thing off by landing awkwardly in the Lysander, made Skye a cup of hot, strong tea just the way she liked it, using at least two days’ worth of the precious rationed leaves.
Then Pauline Gower and the air marshal from yesterday’s lunch entered the hut.
“Skye, I’d like to see you in five minutes, please,” Pauline said, before ushering the air marshal past, even though no amount of hurrying could make him oblivious to the fact that Skye was bawling and nobody was doing any work.
Rose broke the silence. “Right, wipe your face, Skye. I’ll do your hair. Joanie’s best at powder and lipstick.”
Before Skye could blink, all hands in the hut had turned their full attention to her face, her uniform and her coiffure.
“He’s come to fire me,” Skye said, clutching the ends of her cerulean scarf.
“Then he’ll have to fire us all,” Joan said firmly.
“No,” Skye protested. “You can’t.”
“Nonsense,” Rose said. “Otherwise it’s like saying we agree with them. And I am never again taking off my clothes for a medical examination.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” Joan added pensively, “you think if you’re being asked to do something by someone so senior, it must be all right. Even though you know it isn’t. But you convince yourself that you’re the one who’s wrong.”
Heads nodded in agreement and Skye saw cheeks flush pink as the women remembered what they’d been asked to do, and that they’d done it, unwillingly, hating it, but believing they had no choice. Rose whisked away a tear, then resumed work on Skye’s hair.
Within five minutes, Skye was declared ready. She tapped on Pauline’s door.
“This is Air Marshal Wylde,” Pauline said, introducing Skye to the man she knew from childhood. “And this is Second Officer Penrose.”
Wylde nodded.
“Air Marshal Wylde believes there has been a communication error,” Pauline continued. “As a result, a new doctor is conducting the medical assessments. Yours has been rescheduled for this afternoon. You are to wear your uniform at all times. Once your medical examination is complete, the inquest will be concluded. Then I will be selecting four pilots to attend training at White Waltham to fly Spitfires and other Class II jets for the ATA.”
The Paris Secret Page 7
