Chapter Sixteen #2
He didn’t say anything about it the next day when I returned to our room to shower.
Already dressed, he told me he’d leave me to it, and went to breakfast.
Watching him go, absorbing the anger in his set shoulders, the disappointment, I resolved that I wouldn’t leave him again that night.
But I did leave him.
I haven’t spent a night with him since.
And although I’ve felt like I’ve been betraying him every time I’ve left him, I haven’t been able to stop myself.
Because, although I still haven’t seen any more flares from Iris’s window, or that face again in her mirror, there have been moments – scores of them now – when, with my head on Iris’s pillow, I’ve listened to the attic’s silence and once again heard something very different: soft breathing; a rhythmic scratching; creaking pipes; clattering footsteps; the echoes of laughter.
In her bed, I’ve continued to have the most vivid dreams.
Two in particular keep repeating.
The first is brief.
I’m in a clinical-feeling hallway, looking at a middle-aged soldier through Iris’s eyes: a colonel, I seem to know.
Go, I urge Iris, over and again.
You need to go.
The second, just as inexplicable, is even more haunting.
I find myself in a dimly lit room with a beautiful, faded woman in a wheelchair.
I’m looking into her eyes, and we’re both crying.
She reaches up, touching my face, and says something that makes me cry more.
I don’t know what that something is.
When I wake, with tears rolling down my own cheeks, I can never remember.
I have no idea who this woman can be.
If I’ve ever even known her.
Or why she leaves me feeling so desperately sad.
Iris spent most of that April afternoon before the squadron returned to Essen in bed. Robbie was busy at the base, so she’d decided she might as well try to bank some sleep. Clare was with her, in bed too, writing again to Hans.
It was his birthday.
‘Twenty-seven,’ said Clare, staring down at her pad. ‘He was twenty-three when I left him. Soon, we’ll have been apart longer than we had together.’
‘It might not come to that,’ said Iris. ‘This war can’t go on forever.’
‘Can’t it?’ said Clare. ‘What if it’s with us now for always?’
Iris didn’t reply.
The idea was too chilling to contemplate.
With a short sigh, Clare resumed her writing.
And Iris closed her eyes, listening to the rhythmic scratch of her pen, the groan of the attic’s pipes, and the footfall of others in the corridor outside.
This effort to sleep felt futile – she was too alert, too aware of the night ahead – but gradually, irresistibly, unconsciousness pressed down on her, with a weight so heavy, it might almost have belonged to another body.
She dreamt.
Kaleidoscope dreams: of the Heaton Arms, Tim’s sweets, and Father Bannister’s apple cake.
Then, Robbie’s mother, beautiful and faded in her wheelchair.
She was crying, reaching out to touch Iris’s own tear-stained face …
With a start, Iris woke.
Scrambling to sit, she pressed her hand to her beating chest.
‘Are you all right?’ said Clare, looking up from her letter.
‘I’m not sure.’ She swallowed. ‘How long was I asleep?’
‘A few minutes. Did you have a nightmare?’
‘Yes.’ Iris nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Will you tell me straight away if anything happens?’ Robbie’s mother had asked of her back in February.
She’d just watched herself doing it.
It had been a dream though.
Just an awful dream.
Resolutely, determinedly, she pushed it from her mind.
The identity of that colonel, and the woman in the wheelchair, aren’t the only unknowns I’ve wrestled with this week. Plenty more have been nagging at me.
Like, who that other woman was: the one with the Ploughman’s in The Heaton Arms who I thought I recognised.
And, who Tim could have been talking about when he mentioned that other woman who showed him up to the attic.
And, whether he was speaking the truth, or was simply confused, when he said Mabel’s Fury had already reached England before Robbie radioed Iris that final time.
Imogen hasn’t been able to shed any light.
I finally met her on Sunday. She came up to Doverley for the Remembrance Service, which was beautiful, and poignant, and finished with Justin Holmes, who’s playing Jacob – who didn’t want to tempt fate by having his photograph taken that last morning before he disappeared – bugling a last post that caused all of us to stare into the clouds, my heart to ache, my throat to burn, and, seemingly, the entire world to stand still.
All I wanted, afterwards, was to go to the cottage. The force I felt tugging me there was huge. I didn’t question what made that happen, or even try to fight it – there’s only so much of that I can do – I simply knew I’d feel better if I went.
But I didn’t go, because Imogen was there, even lovelier in person than on the phone, and I couldn’t just leave her.
Ana invited her to watch some of the filming, and since I wasn’t involved in our next shot, I kept Imogen company, filling her in on Tim’s revelation that Robbie made it back to England.
‘What do we even do with this?’ she said.
‘I wish I knew,’ I told her.
I’ve been racking my brains all week. Obviously, the only thing to do is solve the mystery of what happened, but I can’t think how.
No one can. Google’s no use, it never has been, and, as Ana’s pointed out, there’s no point hiring more researchers either.
We’ve had a whole crew of them working on the movie; if the truth was lurking in an archive somewhere, they’d have found it.
It can only come from Tim.
‘Maybe you should talk to him,’ I suggested to Imogen. ‘He said you’d called … ’
‘What? No. I haven’t spoken to him since his birthday.’
‘Really?’ I frowned.
She said you’d come, Tim said to me.
Was he confused about that, too?
Again, it’s a question I can’t answer.
Yet another frustrating unknown.
‘Why don’t you go see him again,’ said Imogen. ‘You’ve obviously been working some magic with him. Maybe he’ll tell you more.’
I was planning to visit him tomorrow, on our day off.
I don’t suppose I’ll be doing that now though.
Gingerly, I raise my hand to my head, and think it might be bleeding.
It is bleeding.
‘She needs to go to hospital,’ says Nick.
‘Do we call an ambulance?’ says Emma. ‘I don’t think you’re meant to move someone who’s hit their head.’
‘Isn’t that more to do with the spine?’ says Felix.
‘I’m googling it,’ says Naomi.
‘I’ve got it,’ says Ana, tapping. ‘She fell more than a metre, right?’
‘She fell about three,’ says Nick.
‘Then she needs an ambulance.’
‘Are you sure?’ says Blake, who appears to have joined us. ‘That’s going to get a lot of attention.’
‘Fuck off, Blake,’ says Nick. ‘I’m calling one.’
‘This is stupid,’ I say. ‘I’ll be fine … ’
‘Ambulance please,’ says Nick into his phone.
I feel like such an idiot, being the source of all this fuss.
It’s not like Emma and I weren’t warned about the stairs.
Iris came out on to the control tower stairs to watch the squadron depart for Essen, leaving Clare to manage take-off with Sergeant Browning.
Folding her arms, she looked towards the laden planes, stationary and silent at their dispersal points, waiting for them to begin taxiing towards the runway.
She shivered with apprehension, and the cold.
The fog had entirely lifted now, exposing a starlit sky, and beneath it an April frost had set in, shimmering on the tarmac and the stairs.
Piper was at the foot of them, getting tied up by the parachute rigger, Lydia, to stop her running after the planes.
Browning would fetch her into the tower once they’d left, but not before.
She liked to see them off too, and howled if anyone tried to prevent her.
And now here was Prim, coming up the stairs towards Iris, her blonde hair pinned beneath her cap, her legs clad in pristine nylons. She held on to the banister as she walked, stopping herself from slipping.
She didn’t need to be down at the base yet.
As an intelligence officer, her duties wouldn’t start until interrogation, so she could remain in bed until dawn.
But she always spent ops nights in the control tower breakroom, waiting for everyone to return.
Annoying as she was, there was no disputing she cared.
‘Shouldn’t you be inside?’ she demanded of Iris, joining her on the landing.
‘I want to see Robbie off.’
‘Well, I’m going in,’ said Prim, pushing past her. ‘It’s freezing.’
Iris stepped aside, giving her room to pass.
And, in the same moment, as Piper let go a bark, the planes began to fire up their engines, their collective roar filling the night.
It was the noise of the planes that did it.
And the blaze of the flare path.
It hadn’t yet been lit when Emma and I began climbing the stairs, passing Rusty, leashed at the bottom.
The planes hadn’t started up. We went slowly, our leather brogues as good as skates on the frosted wood.
The temperature hasn’t risen above zero for days now, and although the stairs had been gritted, they were still icy.
‘Watch yourselves, please,’ Jeff called after us. ‘I don’t want either of you breaking your necks.’
The shot we were about to film was the last one we had on for tonight.
We’ve been working since sundown, getting everything for this sequence in the can: first, the squadron spilling out of their flight briefing; then, everyone in the parachute queues; then, the ground crew loading the incendiaries; then, Emma and I watching the boys head to their dispersal points.
This final piece was meant to be of us on the stairs, and the planes taxiing to the runway.
It’s an effect-heavy shot, costly and labour-intensive, and the aim was to do it in one take.
‘God, I’m ready for this to be over,’ said Emma to me.