Chapter 42
And yet it wasn’t Charlie – not as she remembered him.
As he pushed himself to his feet with the aid of a stick and limped towards them, Bobby saw that he was gaunt and pale.
One eye was closed, and there was a burn scar that ran over it from his forehead to his cheek.
He wasn’t in his service uniform, but in the hospital blues that marked him as a wounded man.
‘Charlie,’ she whispered.
In that instant, she forgot everything that had happened between them.
The lack of letters, and the pain she’d experienced when she had believed he must have found someone else.
All she knew was that he was hurt, and she wanted to hold him so, so badly.
She stepped towards him, but he turned away from her, scowling.
‘What’s she doing here?’ he demanded of Topsy.
‘I brought her.’
‘I told you I didn’t want her.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Topsy whispered. ‘I know I promised, Charlie, but I couldn’t let you. It isn’t fair. Besides, I didn’t really break my word. I never told her you were here.’
Bobby reached out to touch him, afraid he might be a dream, but he was solid. ‘Charlie, how did you… what’s happening?’
‘I can’t do this.’ Charlie turned back to them, his features hard. ‘You had no right, Topsy. No right at all.’
‘No, you had no right,’ Topsy said staunchly. ‘Do you know how it hurt, when Teddy left me? How much worse it was than anything else he could have done? I won’t watch you destroy yourself. I’m your friend, and I won’t.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Bobby felt light-headed, and sank into a chair. ‘You’re not here. You’re in Binbrook. Mary would have said…’
‘Mary doesn’t know,’ Charlie said quietly. He turned to her, and there was so much pain in his open eye that it made Bobby wince. ‘You have to go, Bobby. I can’t see you.’
She felt so helpless and confused. She wanted to hold him. She wanted to slap him. She didn’t know what she wanted, except to feel him against her and know he had always been hers.
‘You don’t think you owe it to me to tell me what’s happening?’ she demanded, getting to her feet again. ‘Why did you stop writing to me, Charlie?’
He laughed bitterly. ‘Ask my nurse.’
Topsy shook her head. ‘It has to be you. Why don’t the two of you take a walk? Charlie, you know the doctor said you have to keep that leg moving.’
‘I can’t,’ he whispered, closing his eye. ‘I told you. I can’t do this.’
Bobby felt a wave of pity and love for him. She took his arm.
‘Come on,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll talk for both of us, until you feel you can.’
He didn’t resist but meekly allowed himself to be led outside, leaning heavily on his stick. For a little time they walked in silence, out to the lake in front of the house.
‘I missed you,’ Bobby whispered after a while.
Charlie laughed softly. ‘Oh God.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I just… I hear your voice a lot. When I’m sleeping, and sometimes when I’m awake.’
‘I thought you didn’t care to hear it any more. When you stopped writing, I thought…’ She swallowed. ‘That there must be someone else.’
‘Never,’ he said quietly.
She turned to face him, her voice trembling. ‘What happened, Charlie?’
His face twitched, and he didn’t seem able to meet her eyes. Bobby longed to hold him, but she didn’t dare. Not until she could understand. Everything seemed to say that here was a man in deep pain, of the emotional as well as the physical kind.
‘One of our engines was damaged,’ he said. ‘Butcher Bird. Our rear gunner took the bastard down but it was too late, he’d got us. We made it back to Blighty but I had to crash land. We lost two.’ He pressed his eyes closed. ‘Stevens, the navigator. And… and Bram.’
‘Oh, Charlie, no.’ Bobby thought back to her one meeting with the shy lad Charlie had taken under his wing during training, when their bigoted former CO had targeted the boy for his faith. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It was my fault,’ Charlie said in a choked voice. ‘I ought to have ordered the crew to bale out. I thought I could get us all back safely. I was a fool.’
‘You made the choice you had to make in the heat of the moment. If you’d baled out, you might all have died.’
‘You think that helps?’
‘No,’ Bobby said, lowering her gaze. ‘I know it doesn’t. It should, but it doesn’t.’ She glanced at his wounded leg, and the burn over his eye. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone you were here?’
‘I couldn’t bear to have anyone see me like this. Mary and Reggie think I’m still in Binbrook. I’ve been writing to them as if I was.’
‘They’re your family. They love you. Why on earth wouldn’t you want them?’
‘You don’t understand, Bobby.’ He spun away from her.
‘I couldn’t bear to have them know… to have anyone know.
I knew I had to give you up, and it broke me.
I didn’t want anyone. I wanted to have died in the crash, with Bram and Stevens.
At least then you’d remember me as a man.
A hero, even. Now what will you remember me as? ’
She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The injuries. It isn’t just my leg. I can’t…
the quacks say I might not ever be able to…
’ He laughed – an unfamiliar, un-Charlie-like laugh, mirthless and flat.
‘For so long, I dreamed about what it would be like when we were married. Our life together. Our family. It felt like that was what it was for, all the horror – to earn that future. Then to have it snatched away, and know I had to let you go… I couldn’t bear to write. It would only have made it real.’
‘So you hid from it,’ Bobby said softly.
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Perhaps that makes me a coward, but everything had been taken away from me, Bobby. Everything.’ He closed his eye.
‘The shrapnel didn’t just get my leg. The injury goes all the way up my thigh and…
do you understand? I couldn’t be a husband to you.
I couldn’t be a father. The quacks sat me down, and they told me I was half a man.
I died another kind of death, that night we crashed. ’
Bobby stared at him for a long time. He stood leaning on his stick, humiliated, defeated, refusing to meet her eye.
‘Look at me,’ she said softly.
‘Please, Bobby. Just go.’
‘Charlie, for God’s sake, look at me!’
He forced himself to meet her gaze. Still his agitated features worked with strong emotion.
Bobby stepped towards him. She took off her glove and caressed the burn scar around his eye.
‘You’ve been in so much pain,’ she whispered. ‘My poor boy.’
He glanced at the hand on his cheek. ‘You stopped wearing your ring.’
‘I thought I wasn’t welcome to.’ Her fingers ran over the angry red scar tissue. ‘I’d very much like to hold you. If that would be all right.’
‘You ought to go,’ he said again, but without real conviction this time. He didn’t object when she wrapped her arms around him. He just sagged there, and sighed against her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
‘What are you sorry for?’
‘For all the things I promised that I can’t give you. For failing you just as I did the men in the plane. For everything.’
‘The only thing you ever promised me that I gave a single damn about was yourself, Charlie.’
‘The Charlie I promised you then doesn’t exist any more.’ He swallowed a sob, and buried his face in her shoulder. ‘There’s just this left,’ he murmured brokenly.
‘What’s left is you.’
He held her back and looked into her face. ‘I can’t make love to you, Bobby. I can’t give you children. You can’t in all honesty tell me those things don’t matter to you – those things another man could give you and I can’t. Because they bloody have to, don’t they?’
Bobby was silent for a moment.
‘It won’t ever heal?’ she asked quietly.
‘Not completely, the quacks say. Things might never be… like they were before.’
Again, she was silent.
‘It’s all right,’ Charlie said in a hushed, flat tone. ‘There’s nothing to berate yourself for. It’s only what anyone would do.’
Bobby took off her WAAF greatcoat and spread it on the grass.
‘Isn’t it a glorious day?’ she said, sitting down and lifting her face to the sun. ‘Sit by me, Charlie.’
Charlie hesitated, and for a moment she worried he was going to leave, but eventually he lowered himself to the ground.
‘This reminds me of the spring before you went to the RAF,’ she said dreamily. ‘Picnics here, watching the geese swimming about. We always ended up taking half the food back with us. There was too much kissing to be done to spare our lips for eating.’
‘It seems a lifetime ago.’
‘How do you like my uniform?’
He smiled, and looked a little like himself for the first time. ‘Very much. The Air Force suits you.’
‘I’m glad you think so. Ernie King doesn’t approve at all. He thinks women in uniform are an abomination.’
Charlie frowned. ‘King?’
‘Yes, he’s one of the instructors now at Ryland Moor.’
He sat in silence, glaring into the distance.
‘You’ve… been seeing a lot of him?’ he asked after a bit.
Bobby picked a few daisies and started idly threading a chain. ‘A little. He took me for a flip in one of the Wellingtons a few days ago.’
‘He took you up there?’ Charlie scowled. ‘Damn fool! What could he have been thinking, putting you in danger?’
Bobby laughed. ‘He didn’t fly me to Germany or anything. He wanted to show me the Dales from the air. It was beautiful – just like the view from the top of Great Bowside.’
Charlie sighed softly, and she knew he was thinking of the day he’d proposed to her, on top of the mountain as the sun set.
‘Did he try anything with you?’ he asked.
‘Well, he kissed me a couple of times. Oh, and he asked me to marry him.’
Charlie spluttered. ‘He did what?’
Bobby’s lip twitched to see him react. The jealousy seemed to do him good, overcoming for the moment that weary resignation it was so pitiful to see.
‘He wants me to move to Canada after the war,’ she said. ‘Raise a brood of ruddy, healthy mountain children, living the life of gentlemen farmers. It sounds a wonderful life, in spite of the bears.’
Charlie turned away, scowling. ‘Are you not going to leave? I’ve told you enough times that I don’t want you here.’
Bobby rested against him. ‘Must I? I’m quite happy where I am.’
‘You shouldn’t sit so close. Your fiancé might object.’
‘I don’t think he would at all,’ Bobby said softly. She drew the sapphire ring from her breast pocket and slid it back on to her finger.
Charlie stared at it, then blinked up at her.
‘What does it mean?’ he whispered.
‘It means I don’t love Ernie King. I love you, Charlie Atherton, stubborn, foolish and pig-headed as you are.
Whoever you’ve been, whoever you are, whoever you’re going to be, there’s only room in my heart for one man and it’s you.
Ernie knows that. It’s why he and Topsy conspired to get me here today.
I love you, I’ve always loved you and I bloody well want to marry you. ’
‘But I can’t—’
She leaned forward to stop his lips with a kiss.
‘I don’t care,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t walk away from you. I couldn’t, as long as I know you love me still. You do, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do,’ he whispered. ‘But you must care, Bob. How could you not?’
She placed the daisy chain she had been making over his head, and his mouth flickered with a smile.
‘Do you know what Teddy told me the day of his wedding?’ she said. ‘Why he went back to Topsy after having made up his mind she’d be better off without him? It was because he knew that even though he couldn’t give her a child, no other man would be able to love her as much as he did.’
‘Even so, you can’t pretend this doesn’t matter. That it doesn’t make a difference.’
‘I admit it isn’t how I saw our married life together,’ she said quietly. ‘I do want to be with you, body as well as soul. But if I can’t have the first part then I’m grateful to still have the second, and be able to say we belong to each other.’
‘Ernie King could give you so much more than I ever could.’
‘But he can’t change the fact I’m in love with you.’
‘Not… you wouldn’t take me just for pity?’
‘Charlie.’ She pressed his hand to her lips. ‘Don’t you know me better than that?’
He laughed then – a true Charlie laugh – and embraced her fiercely.
‘I thought this was the end,’ he whispered. ‘I thought life had nothing for me any more. And now there’s you.’
She peppered his neck with kisses, and watered it with a few tears too. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’
‘At least go away and think about it though, darling. It’s such a big change in our plans. You shouldn’t make a decision in haste.’
‘If I do, will that make you feel better?’
‘Yes, I think it will. I need to know you truly want this new future. That you’re going into it with eyes open.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘And if you decide it isn’t what you want after all, I’ll never resent you for it. I want you to be happy.’
She sighed. ‘It hurt me a lot when I thought you didn’t care, Charlie.’
‘I’m sorry. I was so deep in the hole, I couldn’t think of any pain but mine. That was wrong. But if you knew, Bobby, how empty everything felt to me after the crash…’ His face crumpled with pain. ‘How I felt I’d rather be dead than have you know what had happened to me…’
‘I do understand,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘I do. But please, don’t ever shut me out like that.’
‘You forgive me?’
‘I suppose I have to, don’t I? If I’m going to be your wife.’
He smiled and kissed her forehead. ‘Like I said, there’s no need to make a rushed decision about it. Take as much time as you need, OK? When you’ve made your choice, I’ll be right here.’