Chapter Fourteen
I feel like going into lunch even less after that, but I don’t do it alone, because Nick once again takes my hand – or I take his; I’m too distracted to register which, and I don’t suppose it really matters anyway.
The meal is at least short. By the time we’ve all sat at the corner table the landlord leads us to, we have less than forty minutes to get through before Blake’s car arrives to collect us, and, in the packed, buzzy dining room, it goes quickly.
I try, as we place our orders with the landlord (dry toast for Emma; ‘Screw Blake,’ she says), to picture the pub as Robbie’s home, but it’s been modernised so much that it’s impossible to imagine it as anything but what it is: a Chef I have this sense that she’s observing me, but every time I turn to check, she doesn’t seem to be looking my way at all.
‘Do you think she remembers my grandparents?’ I ask the others.
‘Possibly,’ says Emma. ‘But I wouldn’t worry, she doesn’t look the sort to shout about it on her story.’
‘Why don’t you go and ask her?’ suggests Felix.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, drily, ‘maybe because I don’t want to tell her about them if she doesn’t.’
And he flicks me with the froth of his pint, just as he would have done before Sicily, which, like his wink out in the road, relaxes me a bit, but not nearly so much that I don’t register that he’s done it.
We talk on, a bit about everything that’s just happened outside and what a surprising tonic it all was, but mostly about the movie, and the coming week.
Unsurprisingly, it’s going to be another hectic one, especially for Emma who, until she heads back to the states, will be in pretty much everything we do.
Over the next six days, we’ll shoot an evening out for all of us on the set of this very pub, then another in our recreated Bettys Bar (‘God, jitterbugging,’ shudders Emma); then, three more scenes in the control tower, another in the canteen, and, at the end of the week, we’ll finally start our night shooting, down on the base, when the remodelled Lancasters will be in motion, re-enacting one of 96 Squadron’s departures for the Ruhr during the spring battles of 1943, which far too many of them didn’t survive.
Frankly, all our concerns about budgets and schedules feel …
obscene … compared to what they experienced.
It’s pathetic that I should be allowing myself a moment’s anxiety about taking part in our sanitised recreation of it, I know it is. Yet, I can’t help myself.
I’m nervous.
For the first time since I saw what I saw from Iris’s window, and heard what I heard, all the planes’ engines really will be roaring.
Effect’s flare path will be alight. I have no idea what that’s all going to do to me, but already I’m bracing for a fight to cling on to my composure.
I can’t afford to lose it, especially now I know that there’s someone on staff talking to journalists.
Plus, everyone on the cast will be there: the boys and extras out on the tarmac, Emma and me, seeing them off.
‘Proving I’m up to it,’ says Emma, breaking apart her toast. ‘I’m kinda tempted to not be, you know.
Now I’m here, I want to stick around a bit longer.
I’m gonna hate leaving you all to it when I go.
And I guess … Well … ’ She gives us all a sorry look.
‘I wish I could stay for Clare. Keep her alive, for as long as I can.’
‘Yeah,’ says Nick, understanding.
We all understand.
Of the four of us, only Felix is playing someone who actually survived the war.
It’s as we call for the bill, and the landlord brings it to us, along with a complimentary sticky toffee pudding (that none of us have an appetite for, but eat anyway, because it would be too rude, and Hollywood cliched, of us not to), that we get on to the subject of Tim Hobbs.
Emma knows about our appointment to see him – I’ve filled her in, swearing her to secrecy – but with everything else going on, I haven’t had the opportunity to discuss it with her properly, and it’s only now, at her probing, that I elaborate on my determination to discover what really happened to Robbie, Iris, and the rest of the Mabel’s Fury crew.
‘I’m certain Imogen has it wrong,’ I say. ‘Iris couldn’t have killed them all. She was too smart, too good. She loved Robbie too much.’
No one disagrees. I am, after all, not saying anything that thousands of Goodreads and reviewers haven’t already said, passionately – just as thousands more have countered them, passionately. (Imogen’s ending is, in essence, marmite.)
But Emma does frown.
‘You think Tim might know what happened?’ she asks, sceptically.
‘I think there are things he hasn’t let on. A plane can’t fly itself.’
Again, it’s hardly an epiphany-like proclamation. Imogen acknowledges as much in her author’s note, suggesting that the crew might have rigged Mabel’s Fury to fly in a straight line for the coast before baling out – so giving Tim, unconscious and full of shrapnel, a chance at survival.
I’ve never really bought into that, though.
To me, it just feels too far-fetched that the six of them would have been able to pull off such a thing, especially in high winds, with their engines shot to bits.
Nick agrees, as does his flight instructor – and they’ve both spent a lot more time in a Lancaster’s cockpit than Imogen.
Other theories about what might have happened abound online, but I’m not convinced by any of them either.
I don’t believe it was Robbie’s ghost who steered his friend home, and I definitely don’t think it was Robbie himself.
He was no coward, and if he’d managed to get the plane close enough to England to crash land it, he’d have remained with Tim to try and see him safely down. His body would have been found.
‘Who was in the cockpit then?’ asks Emma.
‘It had to have been Tim,’ I say.
‘Not a chance,’ counters Felix.
‘He started out in the RAF as a pilot.’
‘Not for long. He only lasted five minutes in training.’
‘A bit longer than five minutes … ’
‘Still, he never trained in a Lancaster. Nick, come on, could you fly one off the bat, in the dark, with failing engines?’
‘Could I?’ says Nick, discarding his spoon on the plate. ‘Yeah, absolutely. Could you? No. No way … ’
‘Sod off.’
‘Seriously, though,’ says Emma. ‘Could you?’
‘Seriously –’ he raises his broad shoulders in a shrug – ‘who knows what anyone might find themselves capable of, fighting for their life.’
‘He was practically dead,’ says Felix. ‘He’d been bleeding out since Berlin.’
‘Only according to him,’ I say. ‘But what if he only got like that in the crash? Or what if his shrapnel wounds were minor?’
‘Why would he lie about that?’ asks Emma.
‘I don’t know. But someone flew that plane. And if Tim was well enough to do that, then he must have been able to hear what Iris said to Robbie on the radio. He heard her say absolutely pancake, didn’t he? He remembered that. He’s remembered so much … ’
‘But surely if he remembered what Iris said that night, and it was nothing that got them all killed, he’d have told Imogen,’ says Emma. ‘Why would he have let Imogen make Iris into their murderer?’
‘I’m not sure he did,’ I say. ‘The way she tells it, he left her to it with the ending … ’
‘Yes,’ says Felix. ‘Because he’s never known what the ending was.’
‘Or,’ I say, ‘because he never imagined she’d pin it on me.’
‘Iris,’ says Nick.
‘What?’
‘Iris,’ he repeats. ‘He pinned it on Iris, not you.’
‘Right.’ I frown. (Did I really just say me?) ‘Yes. Iris.’
‘He still could have asked Imogen to change it,’ says Emma. ‘I mean, she ran the book by him before it went to print, and he gave it the nod.’
I can’t argue with that. That Tim signed off on Iris’s devastating reveal has been the card Imogen’s played over and again with the studio, resisting their endeavours to rewrite it.
Still, ‘Maybe he was worried to push back,’ I say. ‘Maybe he’s hiding something, and was afraid to let it go.’
Emma pulls a disbelieving face. ‘So he threw Iris under a bus?’
‘Hardly. She doesn’t exactly come off as a villain. Just really … sorry. Maybe Tim thought it would be all right to leave her like that … ’
‘Or maybe,’ Felix says, ‘he has no idea what happened.’
‘I think he might.’
‘Even if he does,’ Emma says, ‘you do realise none of this will actually change anything, right? They all still went.’
‘But where?’
‘Into the sea,’ Felix says with a sigh, ‘like thousands of others.’
‘What about Iris though?’
‘Maybe she really did drown herself.’