Chapter Fourteen #3
And Tim laughs – a low, rolling laugh that’s fun, and good – and blindsides me by being as instantly familiar as his stare, triggering a rush of such strange, instinctive affection in my heart.
Then pain, when I see how rapidly Tim’s laughter exhausts him. Within seconds, he starts wheezing, and Roger goes to him, helping him back into his chair.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ Tim tells us, once he’s settled, waving at the room’s single settee, ‘then I won’t feel so conspicuous doing it.’
So, taking off our jackets, we sit, cramming together on the settee’s cushions, our jackets stuffed between us, me ending up in the middle.
‘Comfy?’ Tim enquires.
‘Yes,’ we all lie, ‘thank you.’
In an effort to distract myself from both Nick’s and Felix’s legs, touching mine, I glance around the room.
It’s very snug, with a thick carpet, and roaring gas fire.
In front of us is a coffee table, laden with our promised afternoon tea, and next to the fire is a sideboard that bears several framed photographs.
‘If you’d come a bit sooner, you’d have seen your birthday card there,’ says Tim, following the direction of my stare. ‘Someone’s taken it though, Taken them all … ’
‘We haven’t taken them,’ says Roger, soothingly. ‘We’ve put them away in your bedroom, remember?’
‘Oh yes.’ Tim’s brow furrows. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’m glad you got mine,’ I say.
‘I was very glad to get it,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’ He nods. ‘Good, I wanted to say that.’ He looks to Roger. ‘You won’t need to remind me.’
‘No,’ agrees Roger, ‘I won’t.’ Then, to Nick, Felix, and me. ‘Will you have some tea? Chef won’t want to see leftovers.’
Thanking him, we help ourselves to the spread on the table, exclaiming on how incredible it all looks as we load up our plates (whatever, really; I’ve long since given up on the calorie counting and body-watching that made me so miserable in my twenties), and wedge ourselves back onto the settee.
‘Iris had a sweet tooth too,’ says Tim, as I take a forkful of torte. ‘When we were little, and my mum used to take Rob and me to the pantomime, Rob would save his chocolates for her.’
Silently, I nod.
Neither Felix nor Nick say anything either.
We already knew about the interval chocolates, of course. They’re in the novel. But it really is … surreal … to be hearing about them from Tim. It’s amazing to be sitting here with him at all, Tim Hobbs, talking about Iris and Robbie as real people, not characters in a book.
‘I wish I’d worked harder at making my mum ask Iris along to those pantomimes,’ he continues.
‘She said it wasn’t proper, having a girl out with us, but what she really meant was she didn’t want to be seen with a scruffy girl.
’ He sighs. ‘I hope Iris can see you all, making a film about her. I hope her mum and gran can. And Rob.’ He considers that for a moment.
‘He wouldn’t be surprised. He always knew Iris was the cat’s pyjamas.
’ His eyes meet Nick’s. ‘You understand that I think.’
‘I do,’ says Nick, but not without a pause.
A pause that might be down to nothing more than him being as taken aback as me by this out-of-the-blue observation.
But a pause that nonetheless prompts me to think not of his hand reaching for mine earlier, but, before I can help myself, of the child I know he still yearns for, but which I can never give him.
A pause that reminds me once again of how hard he hit it in all those bars this year, whilst barely being able to pick up the phone to me.
A pause that makes me question whether he really does understand what Tim’s just said.
Because really, what else could he have said to him in response?
We don’t have long with Tim. Just a little over a half hour. Roger remains with us for all of it, perched beside Tim on the windowsill, holding an oxygen mask ready for whenever Tim needs it to get him through another wheezing fit.
Tim doesn’t eat.
He doesn’t drink.
He claims he’s not hungry or thirsty, but I worry, from the way his pale, papery hands tremble, that he’s scared to risk spilling anything in our company.
But despite his frailty, and despite his forgetfulness, he still has plenty to say, and it quickly becomes clear that he’s come to this meeting with an agenda of his own: one that goes well beyond thanking me for my card.
He’s obviously discussed it with Roger, because although Roger didn’t have to remind him about my card, he does prompt him on other things.
Like, Nick’s accent.
‘Oh yes,’ says Tim. ‘Yes. I’d like to hear it please, young man.’
‘Absolutely,’ says Nick, in his Robbie voice, without missing a beat. (No pause for this.) ‘It’s my absolute honour to oblige.’
‘Ha,’ says Tim, beaming up at Roger, ‘he’s got it.’ He turns back to Nick. ‘Perfect.’
‘Thank you,’ says Nick, with a smile of his own, happier than I’ve seen him all week.
‘You’ve even got the bit of Yorkshire,’ Tim says. ‘Rob never lost it. It annoyed the hell out of his father. But he held on to it anyway.’
‘To annoy his father?’ says Nick.
‘A bit of that, I’m sure,’ says Tim. ‘But I think he was also holding on to Iris.’
He’s got plenty to say to me about Iris. That much at least he has no need for Roger to remind him about. He wants me to know how intelligent she was, how sharp and quick-witted, and kind and thoughtful. ‘And fun. Lots of fun. You should have seen her dance. Will you be dancing in the picture?’
‘I will,’ I say, enjoying his use of the word picture. ‘I’ve learnt to jitterbug.’ I’ve loved it, actually. It was the only part of rehearsals I didn’t mess up. ‘We’re shooting some of that this week.’
‘With a band?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And have you discovered Iris’s bedroom yet?’
‘What?’ says Felix, hearing about it for the first time.
Briefly, I fill him in.
‘I’ve been spending some time up there,’ I say.
‘She spent an entire night up there,’ says Nick.
‘You slept there?’ says Felix.
‘Yes … ’
‘Weren’t you cold?’ Tim wants to know. ‘The girls always said how cold it was.’
‘I was pretty cold, yes.’
‘I can’t believe I didn’t know about this,’ says Felix. ‘I want to see it … ’
‘So do I,’ says Nick.
‘Oh, you mustn’t,’ says Tim, wagging a jittering finger at them both, his eyes twinkling as they come to a rest on Felix: this relaxed, assured, swoon-worthy man who’s been cast in his shoes. ‘No airmen allowed up there … ’
‘Didn’t you go, though?’ I ask. I’ve always assumed he must have snuck up, to have been able to show Imogen the way.
‘Not during the war, no. It was a long time afterwards that I went. The house was all shut up. We broke in. She showed me—’ He breaks off.
‘Who?’ I ask.
‘What’s that?’ he says.
‘Who showed you?’
‘Showed me what?’
‘Iris’s room,’ says Roger. ‘You were just saying someone showed you up there.’
‘Was I?’ Tim frowns. ‘I don’t recall, I’m afraid.’
It’s the way he shifts in his chair. My senses prickle with the suspicion that he might not be being quite truthful.
But then he continues, repeating himself – ‘It was years ago. After the war. The house was all shut up.’ – and I decide I’m being unfair.
‘Now,’ he presses his fingers to his scarred forehead, ‘what else was it I wanted to mention … ?’
‘The navigational instruments,’ says Roger.
‘Ah, yes.’ He turns back to Felix, quizzing him on the tools props have given him, then, the reconstruction of Mabel’s Fury, especially the navigator’s blacked-off nest. ‘You can’t just be hopping in and out,’ he says, leaning forward at the importance of it.
‘No light could escape. You mustn’t forget that. It would have been suicide for us.’
‘I’ve got it,’ says Felix, ‘I promise.’
‘All right,’ Tim says, relaxing back in his chair. ‘I’m glad. It’s important to get these things right. People will believe what they see. Now,’ he grapples for his mask, breathing deep as Roger places it to his face. ‘What else?’
‘Doverley,’ says Roger.
‘Ah, yes,’ he says, and, pushing the mask away, goes into how desperately uncomfortable conditions were there, for everyone.
‘It really was damnably cold,’ he says, ‘and there were rats all over the place. Wood rot too. Half of the first floor disintegrated around the time of the Ruhr. Or was it Hamburg?’ He shakes his head.
‘I don’t know. But it had to be replaced, so don’t let your people have it look all just so and tidy …
’ Talking on, he describes the bland food Doverley’s kitchen staff served up, except on ops nights, when the crews were given much nicer, richer food (‘Which we of course all struggled to eat.’); then, the relief everyone felt when ops were off, when they’d pile into motorcars for nights out, heading to York for good times in Bettys Bar.
(‘They had cocktails that could have fuelled a plane to Berlin and back,’ he says.
‘Oh, we had some nights there … ’) He reminisces about the songs the band at Bettys played, and the hangovers everyone suffered afterwards, drinking far too much, because none of them knew if they’d be around to drink the next night.
‘You wanted to mention the fear,’ Roger reminds him. ‘How young the crews were.’
‘Yes, everyone was very young.’ Tim nods soberly. ‘Children, some of them. We had gunners come in who were seventeen, then they’d vanish, gone.’ He blinks, rapidly.
For a terrible moment, I fear he’s going to cry.
But he doesn’t cry.
He keeps talking.
‘Every mission felt like a death sentence,’ he says.
‘Then you’d get a reprieve, flying over the white cliffs at dawn, and feel alive again, until you were taking off for the next one.
’ He blinks more. ‘There’s a lot that gets made of how brave we all were, and of course we did keep going up.
But we had no choice, and we were terrified.
’ His eyes burn. ‘You mustn’t wash over that. You can’t … glamorise … it.’
‘We won’t,’ says Nick. ‘We’re not.’
‘You have our word,’ says Felix.
‘Right.’ Tim exhales. ‘Good. That’s done then.’