Chapter Six #2
It was in the spring of 1939 that Hans’s father, a left-leaning politician, who Clare never spoke of without a catch in her throat, was executed by the SS.
Hans was invited to join the Luftwaffe then, as a fighter pilot, to demonstrate loyalty to the Reich on behalf of his mother and sisters.
He went, because he had to, but asked Clare to marry him before he left.
‘I cried,’ she said, ‘so did he. His father was gone, and mine was telling me we’d have to leave too.
We were being watched constantly by that point.
Hans couldn’t hold the ring steady when he put it on my finger.
We both knew it was a pipe dream, but we set the date anyway, for his first leave, in September.
I was back here by then, obviously. We left in such a rush when the Nazis moved against Poland, I barely had time to write Hans goodbye.
I don’t even know if he got the letter.’
She still wrote to him, every day: pages and pages that she couldn’t post, but which she said brought him closer, helping her hold faith he was alive.
I haven’t lost faith. Iris wished there was something she could say or do to make it easier for her, but of course there wasn’t.
So, she did the only thing she could: she listened, whenever Clare needed her to.
And now, squeezed her hand.
‘Go,’ said Clare, squeezing her back. ‘You’re wasting time.’
‘Yes,’ Iris agreed, and, chilled by another wave of disquiet – at just how little time she and Robbie might have – she went, in search of him.
The house was all but empty in the lead-up to lunch.
Iris did see a couple of airmen when she returned to the entrance hall – both heading to the officer’s mess in the library (‘Utterly off limits to you,’ the adjutant had told her and Clare) – but they didn’t look at Iris with startlingly blue eyes, nor did their inquisitive smiles make her heart sing.
They weren’t Robbie.
It came to her, as she looked for him – moving from the hall, to the billiards room, out to the misty front steps (she was ready for the uneven one this time, tapping her toes to its edge and skipping past) – that she was revisiting all the places she’d pictured them meeting in her dreams. If only he’d cooperate by appearing.
Casting a frustrated look around the carriage circle, she headed back inside, following those other officers up to the library – where she was just raising her hand to knock on the door when another airman who wasn’t Robbie opened it.
‘Well, hello,’ he said. He had fair floppy hair, and wore tartan slippers. Iris wondered if his mother had given them to him for Christmas. ‘Can I help you? Please say, yes.’
‘Yes,’ she obliged, and didn’t salute him – he was a flying officer, from his single stripe: the equivalent rank to her – just told him she was looking for Robbie Grayson, and hoped he didn’t notice the strain in her voice.
‘Ah, Robbie is it?’ he said, the skin around his bloodshot eyes creasing in a knowing smile. (Clearly, he had noticed the strain.) ‘Sly dog. He never told me he had a girl.’
‘I’m not his girl,’ said Iris, sounding, if such a thing were possible, more strangled yet. But Robbie didn’t have a girl. He didn’t have a wife. ‘We grew up together.’
‘Ah, just friends, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank goodness,’ said the officer, placing his hand theatrically to his heart. His fingers jittered, just perceptibly, belying his carefree act. ‘In that case, I don’t mind telling you he’s definitely not inside.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I am. I suspect he’s catching some shut-eye. That’s what I should be doing.’ Another smile. ‘But then I wouldn’t have met you.’
‘Imagine that.’
‘Quite.’ He cocked his head. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, distractedly.
‘My name’s Lewis.’
‘Hello, Lewis.’
‘And you’re … ?’
‘Iris.’
‘What a pretty name. But I’m concerned you’re about to run away, Iris.’
‘I’m afraid I am.’
‘Damn.’ He sighed. ‘Well, so you at least run in the right direction, Robbie’s in billet 4B. You can have a drink with me later to say thank you.’
‘I’ll say thank you now,’ Iris told him, hastening for the stairs. Billet 4B. ‘Thank you so much.’
But Robbie wasn’t in Billet 4B.
‘I’m not sure where he’s got to,’ said Mabel’s Fury’s bomb aimer, Jacob, who Iris met when she arrived at the hut.
He was sitting outside, despite the bleak weather, slumped in a deckchair at the foot of the hut’s stairs.
He wore a dressing robe over his uniform, and had a newspaper on his lap.
He didn’t seem interested in reading it.
Rather, he’d been lost in thought when Iris had come upon him just now, staring into the icy mist.
A Border collie lay at his feet.
‘Her name’s Piper,’ said Jacob, seeing Iris looking. ‘She keeps coming to call.’
‘She looks like she should be chasing sheep,’ said Iris, thinking of the farms, all around.
She could barely see the flocks grazing in the neighbouring fields, the fog was so thick, but she could smell them: still there, just as they’d always been, in the midst of this madness.
She might almost have smiled, recollecting how she, Robbie and Tim had used to renumber their coats, had she not been so deflated by Robbie’s absence.
‘We think she’s probably retired,’ said Jacob, leaning down to ruffle Piper’s head. ‘One assumes she’s got an owner, but who knows.’ He shrugged. ‘She likes the bacon we give her, anyway.’
‘Maybe that’s why she keeps coming back,’ said Iris.
‘Possibly,’ Jacob concurred.
‘Do you know where Tim is?’ she asked.
‘Sleeping,’ said Jacob, looking not at the curtained hut behind them, but once again into the swirling fog.
Iris turned, following the direction of his gaze, and saw that it was the Lancasters he was staring at, pulled up at their distant dispersal points. There were groundcrew working on some of them, melding flak holes and patching up bullet-tears. Iris could smell that too: the scent of molten metal.
‘Were you hit last night?’ she asked Jacob, chest tightening on her suspicion that they must have been, for him to be fixating on the planes’ repairs like this.
But, ‘No,’ said Jacob, frowning. ‘That never seems to happen to us.’
‘Isn’t that a good thing?’
‘I’m not sure. We’ve been flying together for fifteen months. This is our third squadron. The odds can’t be on our side.’
‘I don’t think that’s how odds work,’ said Iris, as much for her own benefit as his. ‘I’m sure they reset, every night … ’
‘Do they?’ He sounded less than convinced. ‘My fear,’ he said, still eyeballing the planes, ‘is that when our luck runs out, it’s going to do so in spectacular fashion.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Iris, appalled. ‘Please.’
‘You’re right, I shouldn’t.’ With a ragged laugh, he pulled his focus from the planes, back to her. ‘I’m being morose.’ His eyes were as red as Lewis’s in the library, swollen with exhaustion. ‘Don’t tell on me, will you?’
‘Who to?’
‘Rob, when you find him.’
‘That doesn’t feel very likely at the moment,’ she said. ‘Can you really not think where he might be?’
‘Afraid not. But I’ll tell him you came by.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and didn’t ask whether Robbie had ever mentioned her to him.
She wanted to do that.
She wanted to do it very much.
But she was too afraid of hearing Jacob say no.
She’d already trawled the base looking for Robbie’s billet, but did so again anyway, just in case she’d missed him.
Retracing the steps of her dreams all over again, she covered its every fog-shrouded corner before eventually setting back for the house.
A light drizzle had started, a biting breeze with it, lifting the mist. She wished it would stop.
She’d been hoping for the visibility to worsen and ground everyone that night.
My fear is that when our luck runs out, it’s going to do so in spectacular fashion.
If only she could shake Jacob’s laconic voice from her mind.
The lunch bell rang, carrying through the spongy air.
She didn’t pick up her pace, hearing it.
She wasn’t remotely hungry. And, as she saw the men that began to spill through Doverley’s porch, headed for the base’s canteen, she realised how little appetite she had for meeting any more strangers.
She and Clare had been alone in the WAAF’s dining room for breakfast – they’d got there so early that no one working a day shift had yet arrived, and those on nights had already left – but lunch would inevitably be busier.
Prim would undoubtedly be in attendance.
Iris couldn’t face her.
She grimaced at the rapidly advancing men, and decided she couldn’t face anyone.
She stopped walking, considering where she should go.
Then: another sound, piercing through the blanketing cold.
A sound so instantly familiar that it dizzied her, whisking her backwards, across the years, stealing her breath with memories.
It went on: the high, penetrating call of a goshawk.
She turned towards it, peering into the sky above Doverley’s woods.
She couldn’t see the bird circling, but it kept calling, its short-sharp song filling her ears.
And, as her feet moved, taking her into the meadow’s long grass, she didn’t question any more where she wanted to be.
She knew.
She’d never had to find her way to the cottage from the house before.
When she’d run to it as a child, it had always been through that old gateway on Doverley’s boundary, which Robbie had used to heave open.
But even now, after all these years, this woodland felt like home to her.
Instinctively, she sensed where she was going.
The dour day became darker yet, the deeper she pressed into the trees.
The fallen leaves of Doverley’s great ashes and oaks formed a cushion beneath her feet; their branches, a dripping lattice canopy.
Firs vied for space, spindly peaks poking upwards, reaching for the sky.
She inhaled their pure scent and found herself once again catapulted back in time, picturing herself in a faded pinafore: sprinting, laughing; chest bursting in delight.
The image came to her so vividly, it seemed that if she could only turn quickly enough, she might catch her child’s shadow, flitting across the earthen floor: these woods of Doverley a Neverland of sorts, holding a version of herself that would never grow up.
The hawk had fallen silent. The woody silence surrounding her was fractured only by the rustling branches, her crunching footsteps, and the sound of her breaths, quickened by the cold. She moved hurriedly, impatient, now that she could feel herself so close, to get there.
As, quite abruptly, she did, breaking through a thicket of branches to find herself in the cottage’s clearing.
She stalled, heart hammering, reabsorbing its crooked, overgrown form: there, exactly as it had always been, all wild, and broken, and beautiful.
Has it been magicked here for us? Robbie had asked, the first time they’d come.
It’s definitely been magicked, Iris had replied.
‘Definitely,’ she breathed again, now, making her way to the cottage’s weeded front path.
There, she crouched, pushing ivy back from the gate’s swollen, splintered post, and smiled, running her thumb over the engraved names that she and Robbie had left, one long-ago summer.
Letting the ivy drop, she stood, carried on up to the front door, which the wind and time had blown ajar.
She pushed it wide, her hands shaking in anticipation, sudden nerves, over what, she gave herself no pause to consider, because she was slipping into the hallway, which smelt just as it always had – of damp plaster, and old smoke – and looked exactly as she’d always recalled, too, with its low ceiling, and peeling walls.
But it wasn’t its perfect sameness that stilled her feet.
Because the small, dilapidated space she’d entered held so much more than memories, and she wasn’t nervous any more.
She wasn’t alone.
A man in air force blues stood facing her, filling the archway that led to the kitchen.
He was taller than he’d lived in her mind.
Older.
His eyes, that even in childhood had seemed to have seen so much, were weighted with a gravity that spoke of him having borne witness to much, much more.
But they were as blue as she’d always known them.
Every bit as warm.
And when he smiled – as he did: slowly, disbelievingly, happily – they sparked, which absolutely, unequivocally, made her heart sing.
Slowly, he shook his head, and took a step towards her.
She remained rooted to the spot.
It was every one of her dreams, all over again.
He opened his mouth to speak, and she knew already the words that were coming.
She didn’t say that, though.
She still wanted to hear him say them.
So, she remained silent, waiting.
His smile grew, like he knew she was doing that.
She felt her own cheeks move in response.
Then, in a voice that was lower than she recalled, huskier, he let go those words she’d been waiting for.
‘Hello, Clarence,’ he said.