Chapter Fifteen #3
And, as they all leant across the table, cheersing, Jacob held up his camera, clicking the shutter, blinding them with the flash.
‘Mon dieu,’ said Mabel, blinking.
‘It works,’ said Jacob.
‘Please don’t do that again,’ said Tim.
‘Take Beth for a dance instead,’ said Clare.
‘Yes,’ said Iris. ‘A birthday dance.’
‘Do you want to?’ said Jacob dubiously to Beth, like there could be any question.
‘I’d love to,’ said Beth, removing her glasses to wipe them again.
‘Give them to me,’ said Clare, grabbing them from her as she and Jacob left, scrambling over the rest of them. ‘They’ll only get in the way. Jacob, just make sure to dance nice and close to her so that she can see you.’
‘And don’t leave her to find her way back alone,’ said Robbie.
‘No, definitely don’t do that,’ said Beth.
‘You’d better hold her hand,’ said Ames.
‘All right,’ said Jacob, and, as though under duress, offered his to Beth.
But Iris didn’t miss his smile as Beth took it. Or the tenderness with which he pulled her to him, carefully navigating her through the crowds for the dance floor.
‘Why won’t he just ask her out?’ she said, turning to Robbie. ‘All these dances, and he hasn’t even taken her on a trip to the pictures.’
‘He thinks it would be irresponsible of him to get into anything with anyone,’ Robbie said, watching them go.
She watched him doing it, her eyes moving over his face, that she loved, and was as handsome as ever, but bruised by new shadows that hadn’t been there at the start of March.
The creases around his eyes – grooves formed from the intensity with which she pictured him staring out of the cockpit – had grown more pronounced too.
He looked so deeply tired.
All of them did.
Lewis – topping up Clare’s glass – appeared closer to thirty than the twenty Iris now knew he was.
They should all be back at Doverley in bed, probably. Getting some rest for once.
‘He thinks I’m irresponsible, being with you,’ Robbie continued, turning back to her, his words sending yet another shiver of unease snaking down her spine.
‘And what do you think?’ she asked him, battling to ignore it.
‘I think if I am, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ A smile played on his lips, pulling at the muscles in his cheeks. ‘I could never resist you.’
‘That’s very good to know,’ she said. ‘And –’ she leant towards him, whispering in his ear – ‘I don’t really wish you were an American.’
‘I don’t wish you were one either,’ he whispered back.
Quietly, she laughed, threading her fingers with his.
‘Will you dance with me?’ he asked.
‘I’ll always dance with you,’ she said.
And, together, they got up.
She didn’t look back at the others as they followed in Jacob and Beth’s steps to the dancefloor, so didn’t register Tim’s eyes on them as they walked away.
Clare noticed him watching them though.
‘Look after that boy, won’t you,’ she said to Iris, much later that night, when, after Bettys’ band had finished playing, and every cocktail had been drained, they’d all crammed back into their cavalcade of motors and returned to Doverley.
‘Which boy?’ Iris asked, crossing to their stained bureau, her mind still with Robbie, on whose lap she’d sat the entire drive home.
‘Tim,’ Clare said. ‘You know, the one who uses up his sugar ration to carry a sweet for you on every mission, just to believe he’ll survive. He loves you so.’
‘Oh, no.’ Pulling her dark hair loose of its grips, Iris dropped them into the bureau’s top drawer and, in the mirror, watched a frown form on her face. ‘We’ve only ever been friends.’
‘He still loves you,’ said Clare. ‘I suspect he’d do just about anything for you if you asked him.’ She sat on her bed, kicked off her shoes. ‘So just … tread carefully.’
Iris didn’t take Clare’s words of caution seriously. Before she climbed into bed, she dismissed them as nonsense, and, telling Clare as much, pushed them from her mind.
Yet, the next morning, when Tim came to see her in the control tower – where she was on duty again, trafficking local circuits for those pilots who’d taken their planes up for a run – she found herself thinking of them.
There was no one else but them in the control room.
Operations were officially off that night, and almost everyone was lying low, in their billets or the mess.
Only four pilots had dragged themselves out to fly, all testing the repairs that their planes had undergone after Essen, and since it was such a small number, Iris was managing them alone.
Sergeant Browning was reading his paper in the breakroom, on standby in case she needed him, and Clare had headed back to the attic to write to Hans.
Robbie, not flying, had gone to see his mother.
Iris had visited Annabelle with him a couple of times now herself – once in February, then again at the start of March – and although Annabelle had been very welcoming, smiling as kindly, and shyly, as she always had (she’d remembered Iris’s love of ham and cheese sandwiches), Iris didn’t want to intrude on her time with Robbie too much.
On both her visits, Annabelle had watched Robbie constantly, so obviously scared to miss a thing.
Throughout the time they’d sat with her, she’d kept her hand on her son’s arm – reassuring herself, Iris could tell, that he was still there, still with her.
‘Will you tell me straight away if anything happens?’ she’d said to Iris in February, when Robbie, fetching her another blanket, had left them alone.
‘Anything official will take time to reach me, and I worry every day that I might be sitting here not knowing he’s hurt.
’ Her helpless eyes had been full of dread.
‘There’s so much I haven’t protected him from, it’s unbearable that I can’t keep him safe now.
But if I could at least know that I’d know … ’
‘You will,’ Iris had told her, somehow managing not to choke on the words. ‘I’ll tell you.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘Guess who I saw doing something they shouldn’t have been last night,’ Tim said to Iris now, sitting in Clare’s vacant chair.
‘Who?’ she asked, glad of his company.
Grateful too for the mug of tea he’d brought her. She picked it up, wrapping her cold hands around it, and took a sip. He’d even remembered to add a touch of sweetener.
‘Eleanor.’
‘Prim.’
‘She didn’t look that prim to me. Clint was giving her a leg up to climb through a window at the front of the house.’
‘Really?’ Iris laughed, picturing it. ‘Did she make it?’
‘Just about.’
‘What time was this?’
‘After three.’
‘Three?’ Her brow creased. ‘What were you doing up at the house at three?’
‘Walking. I couldn’t sleep.’
‘But you must have been exhausted.’
‘I was. I am. I couldn’t … switch off, I suppose.’
‘Does that happen often?’
‘A bit,’ he said, with a shrug that made her frown more.
She shifted in her chair, studying him properly, and, as her eyes moved over the premature lines in his own rugged face, she replayed what Clare had said the night before. Not about him loving her – that was too uncomfortable – but the other thing.
Look after that boy, won’t you.
It came to her that she hadn’t been doing that. Not enough. For all she’d danced, and laughed, and chatted with him, she’d been so caught up with Robbie that she hadn’t paused to question, until this moment, whether Tim, with his happy-go-lucky smile, was all right.
‘You need to sleep,’ she told him, softly, her thoughts moving to the photo he carried of his dad, and his impossible yearning for his protection.
‘Plenty of time for that,’ he replied, with another smile.
She didn’t return it. It was a front, she realised.
A put-off.
Evasive action.
He was scared. Really scared.
Her old friend, who she’d played with, joyously, for years, was beside himself.
‘Can I do anything?’ she asked him, finally seeing those sweets he took on his missions for what they really were: his lifeline home. ‘Help, in any way?’
‘You already do,’ he said, and for a fleeting moment, his smile did falter. His dark eyes became serious. ‘You help all the time.’
A deep fog set in that afternoon, and hung around for the following two days, meaning everyone at Doverley remained on the ground.
They all whiled away long hours at The Heaton Arms, where Clare won a tournament of pool, Beth plucked up the courage to ask Jacob to the pictures herself (‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked her, with a pained look.
‘Pretty sure,’ she said), Mabel and Ames disappeared upstairs to Mabel’s room, and Iris spent much more time with Tim, trying to keep his mind from everything.
‘How is he when you go up?’ she asked Robbie, the two of them watching Tim lose to Clare at pool.
‘Fine. It’s the anticipation he struggles with.’
‘He’s not sleeping. I’m worried he might start making mistakes.’
‘Not a chance. He’s too good.’
‘I think he’s probably due a rest.’
‘Everyone’s due a rest.’
She couldn’t argue with that.
But nor did she, nor Robbie, have any interest in resting when they all returned to Doverley. Not doing that, not wasting time, they escaped to their cottage, wrapping themselves up by the kitchen fire, on the bed of blankets that Iris had long since stolen from Ambrose’s stores.
‘Do you remember when we used to talk about my mum?’ she said, on the second afternoon of the fog, lying with her head in the warm nook of Robbie’s neck. ‘I asked you why you thought it was so bad to lift your skirts, and you said it was because you might catch a cold.’
He laughed, and she smiled, feeling the vibrations of it. She loved lying with him like this, whilst everyone else was far away, and the woods around them were so silent. It felt like they might be the only people in the world.
‘I no longer consider you lifting your skirts to be remotely bad,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, feeling his hand move around the curve of her waist, leaning up to kiss him. ‘Nor do I.’
He hadn’t been her first. He knew that. Just as she knew she hadn’t been his.
Their pasts weren’t something they’d dwelt on – why would they do that?
– but nor had it surprised them that the other had one.
They had, after all, spent the past three years living through a war.
Iris didn’t regret anything that was behind her, or behind him.
It had brought them here, to this. And she never worried about what might materialise from their time together.
Unlike her mum, she and Robbie both knew enough not to chance catching anything, least of all a baby.
She had started to wonder more about her father lately though, now that she was back: who he’d been, where he’d come from, how he’d died.
She’d even summoned the nerve to ask Father Bannister if he knew anything about him, but Father Bannister had told her he unfortunately didn’t know a thing. It was before my time, I’m afraid.
‘The fog’s clearing,’ said Robbie, looking up at the open window above them: the same one Lord Heaton had once yelled at them through. ‘I think we’ll probably go up tomorrow.’
‘Maybe not,’ Iris said, without any real hope.
And the squadron did fly the next night.
They went on another operation to Essen.
It was a night like so many others that had gone before: long, and dark, and cold.
Yet, it was also different.
For Iris, it was different.
‘The strangest thing just happened to me,’ she said to Clare, once it had. ‘I can’t make any sense of it.’