Chapter Five
She didn’t expect to sleep that night. Once she and Clare climbed into their new beds – frozen from the tepid four-inch bath they’d shared, and layered up against the attic’s chill in nightgowns, scarves, cardigans, and multiple pairs of socks – she expected to lie awake until dawn: thinking, remembering; listening for the Lancasters to return.
But the sound of the rain on the attic’s roof was soporific, Clare’s steady breathing was too, and, in the end, Iris was too exhausted, and wrung out by the emotion of the day, to resist their joint lullaby.
She wasn’t aware of the moment she slipped into unconsciousness; rather, it came upon her so swiftly, she didn’t realise she was sleeping at all until the clanging of Clare’s alarm clock whiplashed her awake again at six.
Her eyes snapped open. In her chest, her heart pounded a hectic rhythm to the alarm’s trilling bell. The blacked-out room was pitch dark, and for a second, the splintering noise, and the unnerving vividness of the dream world she’d just left, was all there was.
Then, from Clare’s bed, came the creaking of springs, a crack of bone on plaster, and a gasped expletive.
Groggily, Iris deduced Clare had hit her head on the eaves.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked her, scrambling to the floor, wincing at the pain in her own grazed knees as she flailed among the chaos of their half-unpacked belongings for the belting alarm.
‘No,’ Clare choked, through a sob. ‘Won’t you turn that thing off … ’
‘I’m trying,’ Iris replied, and felt rather than saw the clouds of ice that left her as she spoke. ‘Where did you leave it?’
‘By my case … ’
‘Where’s your case?’
‘On the floor.’
‘I’m on the floor. I can’t see anything.’
‘Where’s the light switch?’
‘By the door.’
‘Hang on. I’ll get it … ’
But before Clare had the chance to, the door flew open, and a woman in a quilted dressing gown appeared, torch in hand, her bottle-blonde hair curled in rags.
Wordlessly, she combed the room with her torch’s beam, locating the alarm not by Clare’s case, but hopping frantically atop a pile of woollens at the foot of Clare’s bed.
The woman swooped, silencing the bell, then turned to Clare and Iris, daggering them with her stare.
‘Did we wake you up?’ Clare asked her, meekly.
‘I’ve been on duty all night,’ the woman replied, coldly. ‘I only just got to sleep.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Clare said.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Iris echoed. And then (because how could she leave it unsaid?), ‘Did Mabel’s Fury come back?’
‘Yes,’ the woman hissed.
Iris drew a sharp breath of relief.
‘Anything else you want to keep me here talking about?’ the woman asked.
Mutely, Iris shook her head.
‘Excellent.’
Tossing the alarm on Clare’s bed, the woman turned on her heel and left, slamming the door behind her, plunging Iris and Clare back into blackness.
‘You see,’ came Clare’s voice, after a short pause, ‘I told you they’d be fine.’
Iris nodded, but didn’t reply, still too overcome to speak.
Mabel’s Fury was back.
He was back.
He was here.
It was him who she’d been dreaming about just now.
She’d been dreaming of him all night: such strange, compelling dreams in which, over and again, she’d seen herself living their reunion scores of different ways: all over the house, and down at the base; inside the breakroom of a control tower she hadn’t yet seen.
In every one of those dreams, when Robbie had caught sight of her, and their eyes had locked, he’d grinned.
Without exception, when he’d opened his mouth to speak, he’d said the same thing, and it had made her balloon with happiness.
It had all felt so real to her, it was almost like it had already happened.
But it hadn’t happened.
Of course it hadn’t.
The day, this day, was still waiting to be written.
It was here though.
It was starting.
Nearly ten years after she and Robbie had so unwittingly said their last goodbye, they were finally going to see one another again.
The two of them had been just six years old when Robbie’s family had moved to Heaton in the autumn of 1924.
‘All the way from London,’ Mr Johnson, the village school master, had announced to the class on Robbie’s first day, and Iris had turned, peeking at Robbie, sat beside Tim Hobbs on the boys’ side of the room.
She could still picture them as they’d been then: Tim with his knee socks around his ankles, and his thick blond hair, that his mother had hated cutting, out of control; Robbie, by contrast, had had his dark hair tamed into a neat side-parting, whilst his sturdy body had been packed into immaculately pressed shorts, waistcoat, and shirt.
He’d appeared older than Tim, older than them all, with a shadow lurking in his blue eyes that had seemed to speak of things seen; matters known.
There’d been a bruise purpling his cheekbone, too, but Iris hadn’t really marked that.
She’d been too caught up in the wonder of Robbie having come from the mythical-seeming London.
It had felt like a foreign country to her.
At that stage, the furthest she’d travelled from Heaton had been to York with her mum for birthday teas at Bettys.
She’d only ever had one home, in the rented cottage she’d been born in.
It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d ever have cause to leave that cottage – although she had, even then, had some vague awareness that the narrowness of her horizons had made her somehow less in the eyes of others: those who’d owned the grand Georgian houses on the village green, and employed Iris’s mother to clean for them.
‘It’s honest work,’ Iris had once overheard her gran scolding her mother, when they’d both believed her in bed.
But Iris had often used to resurface and listen to them talking in the candlelit kitchen, preferring to hover in the cottage’s cold hallway, close to her mum, than remain warm, and alone, upstairs.
‘You should be proud of yourself,’ her gran had gone on, and Iris, hidden in the hallway, had pictured her wagging her arthritis-twisted finger. ‘Proud of what you do for Iris and me.’
‘I wanted more, Mum … ’
‘Too late for that. You’re the one who lifted her skirts.’
Iris hadn’t really understood what her gran had meant by that.
But she’d guessed it had probably had something to do with her father, an army colonel who she’d known better than to ever mention, but who she’d liked to think had been a courageous war hero – albeit one who’d failed to marry her mum before he’d disappeared in the trenches.
Iris hadn’t known many others with fathers who’d fought.
Most of her classmates had been the children of farmers and miners, reserved from conscription.
But Tim’s dad had served, as a surgeon in Flanders, where he’d vanished too.
And Robbie’s father, like Iris’s, had been in the trenches, only he had returned, with a lame left leg, and an abhorrence of noise that had eventually made life in London – amongst so much else – intolerable to him.
That was why, in 1924, when Lord Heaton had begun his doomed fight to hold on to Doverley by selling off the first of his estate’s assets – the dower house on the outskirts of Heaton – Robbie’s father had bought it.
Iris hadn’t questioned where he’d sourced the money from.
She had, after all, only been six. But eventually she’d learnt that everything he’d had, had come from Robbie’s beautiful, harrowed mother, who hadn’t often appeared anywhere around the village, because she’d had bruises, too.
Perhaps it had been Iris and Robbie’s shared awareness of coming from homes with guarded secrets that had first drawn them together.
Or perhaps it had been that Iris’s tiny cottage, and Robbie’s dower house, had lain at opposite ends of the same winding lane, leading them to constantly run into one another on their ways to and from school.
Or maybe it had simply been that Iris’s gran had always packed her jam sandwiches for lunch (Robbie’s favourite), where Robbie’s cook had most usually given him ham and cheese (Iris’s!), so they’d got into the habit of swapping.
Looking back, Iris honestly couldn’t pinpoint the moment when she’d realised that this thoughtful, funny, sometimes naughty, always brave boy from London had started to become her best friend.
What she did recall was that, on Robbie’s first day in Mr Johnson’s classroom, Mr Johnson had noticed the way that she’d been staring at Robbie and rapped her on the knuckles for being so brazen.
Furious, mortified, she’d pulled a face at Mr Johnson behind his back, then, catching Robbie’s smile, beamed at him, her pain forgotten, just because that was the kind of smile Robbie had.
For five years, they’d run wild together, with Tim too.
He’d been Iris’s first friend.
‘Do you ever get sad about your dad, even though you never knew him?’ he’d asked Iris in the playground, the day they’d started school.
‘Sometimes,’ she’d said, taking his chubby hand in hers.
He’d smuggled her a boiled sweet after Mr Johnson’s knuckle-smacking, and nodded his approval when she’d snuck it into her mouth.
‘I made it last,’ she’d said at the end of that day, sticking out her tongue to show him the sliver still left.
‘You didn’t need to,’ he’d replied, grinning. ‘I’d have given you another.’ Then, ‘Want to come looking for conkers with Robbie and me?’