Not long after, she heard footsteps approaching. Two sets. She opened her eyes to see Liberty and O’Farrell turning in at the cottage.
Liberty waved gaily and stepped onto the porch. “I could murder a cup of tea,” she said before she let herself into the house.
Skye was about to say, sarcastically, Hello. And, please, help yourself when she saw Liberty turn and give O’Farrell a firm nod, as if prompting him to do something. In response, O’Farrell gave Liberty a sheepish smile. Then he dropped himself down to sit on the step beside Skye.
“I know that none of this makes me look good,” he said.
Skye waited, curious to know what was going on.
“Back in New York I had a girl, you see,” O’Farrell went on, voice low. “She and I would always invite my best friend along when we went out. They were close, but I thought it was good that they got along. It turned out they did more than get along. Seeing you and Crawford together that night . . .” He looked at Skye, humble for the first time since she’d known him. “I know there was nothing happening between the two of you. But it brought it all back. Which doesn’t make it right. And then Liberty . . .” He stopped, and stared in bemusement at the door Liberty had disappeared through.
Skye almost felt sorry for him. He’d been swept up in Hurricane Liberty, a force it took great effort to extract oneself from. “You can say no to her,” she told him gently.
“I’ve tried that. But she doesn’t hear me. So it’s easier just to . . .”
He didn’t finish his sentence, and Skye felt a sharp twist in her stomach at the realization that so many of them were doing whatever was easiest because everything else was so damn hard.
“Besides,” he continued, smiling a little now, “she’s fun. And there’s definitely a shortage of that around.”
“There is.” She touched his arm. “Come inside.”
“I was going to wait for her at the pub. I thought you might be mad at me.”
“I’m not mad.”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “You’re one in a million, Skye.” She led him into the house and the three of them sat in the kitchen while Liberty told stories about people. Skye pretended to listen while at the same time marveling that her chameleon sister had come to visit on the anniversary of their mother’s death and they were now gathered around a table and drinking tea, as if they rubbed along just fine together.
“Thank goodness the Ice Queen won’t be around for a while,” Liberty concluded.
“The Ice Queen?” Skye inquired.
“Margaux,” Liberty said impatiently, and Skye thought she saw O’Farrell shake his head.
“She’s been blessedly absent,” Liberty went on, “so I haven’t had to put up with any of her reproofs. I’m either too loud, or I’m in the way. Once she even tried to tell me I’d smoked the room up too much, when everyone knows she’s the one who smokes more than every chimney in London.”
“I didn’t realize you had that much to do with her—” Skye began.
“Liberty doesn’t have that much to do with her.” O’Farrell broke in. “And especially not lately as Margaux’s been assigned somewhere else for a while. Are we going to eat?” He stood up, stretching, and Skye watched Liberty devour his body with her eyes. “How about the Bugle? Come with us,” he added to Skye.
“You go without me,” Skye said. “And have a nice dinner together.”
O’Farrell excused himself to the bathroom, and Skye took the chance to say one thing to her sister. “You’re being careful, aren’t you? A war isn’t a good time to have a baby.”
“We were both conceived during a war and we turned out all right,” Liberty said glibly. “Well, you did. No one’s quite sure if I have. Not even you.”
Then, before Skye could get exasperated with that uninformative and provoking reply, Liberty said quietly, “Maybe I’d give all this up for a baby, Skye.”
Never had her sister surprised her more, and that was saying something. Skye couldn’t think what to say, knew only that her mouth had dropped open, and she was staring.
But as if it had all been a joke, Liberty added, “Maybe not. I was never the selfless one.”
O’Farrell reappeared and the moment was lost. Skye knew only that Liberty hadn’t answered her question, and it probably meant she couldn’t answer it in a way that would please Skye.
Soon the cottage was quiet; too quiet, and Skye’s thoughts were too loud. Had Liberty been serious? She couldn’t have been. Why had she come if she’d meant only to have dinner with O’Farrell? And why had she chosen today to visit and then not spoken about their mother?
But nor had Skye said anything about Vanessa. Perhaps they’d both been waiting for the other to broach it. And Skye had squandered another opportunity to mend their relationship. Tell me what to do, she said silently to her mother. But no answer came. Vanessa had always preferred to let them work things out for themselves rather than offer advice. For the first time, Skye wished her mother had been different, as perhaps Liberty often did. What would it have been like to have had that fabled shoulder to cry on? What if Skye had given her shoulder to Liberty more often than just those nights in Paris?
Skye shook her head. She couldn’t change her mother or the past and she was tired of asking herself unanswerable questions. So she went outside, hurrying down School Lane to the deserted beach. She sat on the sand and wrapped her arms around herself. The night was cool and she’d forgotten to bring a shawl. If only she could make a fire, as she’d always done on the beach at night as a child, when she knew nothing about blackouts or war.
Around her, darkness dropped slowly and then all at once, like the long fall of a dramatic evening gown. After a time, she heard footsteps and frowned. Surely Liberty and O’Farrell hadn’t come for a romantic stroll by the water? It was hardly Liberty’s style.
“Skye?” A voice she’d know anywhere.
And there was Nicholas, holding out his leather RAF jacket for her. She had to lift her head to see him properly and it was like the sudden and spectacular shock of seeing a moonbow—that once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon that only happened when the sky was a solid and unrelenting black, the moon full and low, and a mist of rain came in behind. Nicholas, her lunar rainbow, an accidental arc of brilliance set against her own dark secret.
“You’re cold,” he said, the gentle concern in his voice too heady for her.
She couldn’t speak so she nodded, accepting the jacket, and then had to close her eyes against the warmth of his body still in the leather, the scent of him all over her.
He dropped to the sand beside her. “My op was canceled. I knew tonight would be hard for you. I had a petrol ration, so . . .” He shrugged. “I’ve always done something on this night to remember your mother. Once, I even made a bowl of porridge the way she used to make it.” He stopped and ducked his head as if he were embarrassed.
If the tantalizing embrace of his jacket around her wasn’t enough, his words just about undid her.
She risked a glance at him and regretted it instantly. He needed a shave and he looked as tired as she’d ever seen him, but it only made him more handsome, more Nicholas, more hers, and so much less the RAF wing commander who was engaged to another woman. How she wanted to place a hand on his cheek, to feel both stubble and warmth tease her palm, to stroke away his tiredness with her fingers. To curl up beside him while he slept.
She took off his jacket, no longer needing the extra warmth, and placed it on the sand beside her.
“Last year, I had to fly on this day,” she said. “It was perfect weather. Too perfect. An hour into the flight, the clouds descended and I thought: this is it. Two of us vanishing into the clouds. But after only a minute I came out the other side. What had looked never-ending was only temporary. Right in the middle of it I saw St. Elmo’s fire and it was like . . .” She faltered, unable to say it: it was like her mother. Vibrant. Alive.
“I’ve only seen St. Elmo�
�s fire once,” Nicholas said wistfully. “It was otherworldly. I remember Margaux said—” He halted.
“What did she say?” Skye made herself ask.
“Nothing. I’ve forgotten.”
But he said it in such a way that Skye knew he hadn’t forgotten. He didn’t want to share whatever small intimacy had passed between him and Margaux in that moment in the sky watching something divine.
The warmth was gone now. In its place was the kind of coldness that embedded itself in one’s bones and never thawed. Her toes ached with it. Her heart too.
And she saw it again, the thing she hadn’t let herself remember: the flash of distaste on Nicholas’s face when Margaux had told him to dance with Skye.
So she had danced with everyone else instead, trying to forget his recoil.
It was only fair that she explain.
She stood up quickly, so she could leave the instant she said it.
* * *
That night in the sky, Margaux had said to him: When sailors saw St. Elmo’s fire appear as tongues of flame atop their masts, they thought it was a good omen. Perhaps that’s what it means for you too. That the war will end. That you and Skye will be together.
The way she’d said it had made Nicholas believe, foolishly, that she was making a prediction. That, like Skye’s mother, she was telling the future. The startling blue flame was like a promise. But of course he couldn’t tell Skye that, which was why he’d stopped so abruptly.
And now Skye was standing up, his brusqueness driving her away again. He was about to reach out a hand, to apologize, to ask her to sit back down, when she spoke.
“I’m about to utterly embarrass myself,” she said, eyes looking out to the horizon. “But I can’t see you again and I need to explain why.”
Nicholas stiffened. He wanted to stand up, to protest, but his limbs were bloodless. Not see Skye again? The idea was insupportable. He stared blindly at the horizon too, that fixed point by which one could tell if they were the right way up, just as Skye had always been his fixed point, keeping him the right way up. “Skye . . .”
She looked down at him and gave him a smile so sweet that his heart stalled.
“I know you won’t want to hear this,” she said, “but I don’t think of you as my childhood friend anymore.”
The minute she said those words he knew for sure that she’d seen him flinch when Margaux had suggested he dance with Skye at the Embassy Club. He’d hoped she hadn’t because he realized it conveyed the exact opposite of what he’d meant. But if she no longer thought of him as a friend, it must be that she thought of him as something less than that. As a person who’d rebuffed her.
He wanted to tear the moon from the sky and extinguish it in the sea so she wouldn’t see the agony on his face. “I was just—” he started to say. Just trying to do the right thing. The right thing in a wrong world. A world he alone couldn’t change.
But she kept talking.
“I think of you as so much more than that. And I shouldn’t.” She stared ferociously at the sand. “Margaux, rightly, would never speak to me again if she knew. And neither will you once I tell you. Because the way I think of you now is . . . as a man. A man who I . . .” Her voice faltered.
Nicholas forced himself to stand, slowly, not wanting to do anything that might make her stop, or leave. The distance between them now was mere inches, the heat between her body and his was scorching. He willed her with his eyes to keep talking. It felt as if every single thing in the world had stopped and was waiting, breath held, for this moment that had been meant to come, that was here at last and was much too big for either of them to handle.
A long silence except for the sound of the water, clamorous against the sand.
Then she said, not blushing or whispering, her voice strong, her head high, every bit Skye, magnificent Skye, “I think of you as a man I want in a way I shouldn’t want someone who’s engaged to be married. A man I love more than anything. So I can’t see you anymore. It hurts too much.”
She breathed in sharply, then pressed on. “Goodbye, Nicholas. Be careful. And stay alive.”
The moonlight falling on her face laid every part of her bare before him. And he saw it then, the pain. He had hurt her. Jesus, how could he?
“Skye,” he said wretchedly.
Goddamn everything. He was always saying her name and then nothing else, keeping everything hidden just as everyone in bomber command and SOE expected him to. So many sentences started but never finished. So many moments with her over the past few months—the whole-body shock of finding her sunbathing on a plane in her brassiere, the torturous dance on the airfield, that exquisite second in the water when he thought his eyes had told her everything and she had maybe understood.
He almost cried with relief when she stretched an arm toward him, but she was only returning his jacket. He took it from her wordlessly, wanting to clasp the hand that had passed it to him. Wanting to utter some essential and unknown word that could undo all of this and redo them, together. But he said not a thing because he had signed the Official Secrets Act and truth was forbidden.
Faced with his muteness, Skye turned and ran back to the road.
The only thing left on the beach was the sharp and abrading sound of his breath in the otherwise silent night.
“Fuck.” He threw the word into the void around him, but it relieved nothing.
He strode to the edge of the water and unbuttoned his shirt, took off his trousers, throwing everything onto the sand. Even the sea thwarted him; he wanted to dive straight in but it was too shallow. He strode out until it was deep enough that he could swim away from the sting of tears in his eyes, away from the feelings that she had and he had and which they could do nothing with, away from himself and away from her. His head hammered. The ache in his chest was diabolical.
He kept swimming. If he returned to the shore, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from going after her. From kissing her. From leading her back to her cottage, and up to her room and into her bed.
It was after midnight when he swam back in, put on his clothes and sat, wet and exhausted, on the sand until dawn.
PART EIGHT
Kat
Twenty-Four
CORNWALL, 2012
Kat didn’t know what to think as Elliott managed to get them both invited back to this other Margaux Jourdan’s house for a cup of tea. She could barely take in the swashbuckling rope bridge over the lake, a bridge she knew her girls would love to adventure over; or the reclining stone maiden who looked so peaceful, as if she had exactly what she wanted; or the sundial surrounded by sunflowers and daisies, like miniature suns themselves. That there were two Margaux Jourdans who were most likely the same age and who had both said exactly the same thing made Kat feel as though she had walked out of reality and into a nightmare. The only thing that felt normal was Elliott’s hand, gripped tightly in hers.
Inside Margaux’s house, Kat perched on a chair and sipped a cup of horridly strong black tea. Margaux sat on the sofa, before leaning over to take a cigarette from a blue packet emblazoned with the word Gitanes.
As the woman smoked, Kat stared. There was something about the way Margaux held the cigarette that fired up the electrons in her brain, but not quite enough that they communicated a complete message. Words swirled in her head: furious words—You’re a liar; confused words—That can’t be your name; sad words—Who are you really, Margaux Jourdan?
Thank God for Elliott, who was still capable of conversation.
“Can I ask you a few of the questions I wanted to ask when I called you last year?” he said to the woman.
Margaux moved her head—Kat couldn’t tell whether she acquiesced or flinched—but her eyes didn’t shift from Kat’s face. Nor could Kat look away from her, even though she desperately wanted to disentangle herself from anything to do with this woman.
Elliott sat beside Margaux. “Were you commissioned into the WAAF as cover for your work with SOE dur
ing the war?” he asked gently.
Margaux inhaled deeply on her cigarette and scrutinized Elliott. “Is she your assistant? You’ve chosen a beautiful one.”
Her voice was like Kat’s grandmother’s, accented indeterminately, but with more of an English circularity to her vowels.
Elliott didn’t rise to the bait. “Of the two of us, Kat is the one with an assistant. We’re spending the day at the house that adjoins your property. A house owned by Kat’s grandmother, also called Margaux Jourdan. What a coincidence.”
Kat waited for the woman to react, which surely she must. But it seemed as if the news that another Margaux Jourdan happened to own the house next door was a matter of unconcern.
The woman stubbed out her cigarette, reached for another, then seemed to think better of it. “The property adjoining mine is abandoned, has been for decades. But in answer to your question: yes, I was commissioned into the WAAF. I did work for SOE. That’s hardly worthy of a writer’s interest.”
Kat was suddenly relieved. This must be the Margaux Jourdan who’d had the life Elliott had almost made her believe had been her grandmother’s. But . . .
It really had looked like Kat’s grandmother modeling Dior gowns in the photo Elliott had shown her and the program notes said that mannequin Margaux Jourdan had worked for the WAAF. And her grandmother had admitted her own connection to the WAAF when she talked about packing parachutes. So perhaps the woman sitting in front of Kat now had stolen Kat’s grandmother’s name? And her history? But which history? The one Elliott had described or the one Kat had grown up with?
“Where were you born?” Kat asked sharply.
“Where were you born?” the old woman said. “Why do you have the right to find out about me when I know nothing about you?”
“Australia,” Kat replied, hoping her truth might force the same from the woman’s mouth.
“Australia,” Margaux repeated. “So far away.” The way she said it implied more than distance.
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