Chapter Twenty #2
Not yet, she thought. Not yet.
She couldn’t be too euphoric though.
They were only the sixteenth plane to return, and that worried her.
It worried them all.
They’d been expecting Mabel’s Fury to arrive last. They’d had to remain over the target longest, after all.
But they couldn’t be the last.
There were still eight planes missing.
‘They’ll come,’ said Browning, gripping his chalk. ‘We’ll wait.’
They did wait. None of them went to interrogation that morning. They remained in the control tower until the sun had fully risen, flooding their glass-walled room with its rays.
But there were no further calls to their switchboard.
No more elated requests to land.
Only the telephone trilled: Prim, ringing from interrogation.
Grimly, Browning listened to her.
He nodded.
Hung up.
Turned to Iris and Clare.
‘Don’t,’ said Clare, guessing what he was about to say.
Don’t, Iris thought, knowing it too.
But Browning spoke anyway.
‘They all went down.’ His Scotch voice was gruff, straining with his effort at control.
‘Heaven Sent baled over the North Sea. They’re safe, they’ve been picked up by one of our patrols.
All the others were taken over the target.
There were fighters everywhere.’ He turned, looking up into the serene summer sky. ‘Picked us off like coconuts in a shy.’
‘Were there … ?’ began Clare.
‘No,’ said Browning. ‘No chutes. Not that anyone saw.’
Mutely, Clare shook her head.
And, slowly, Iris stood.
She went to the chalkboard, touching the names of the seven crews they’d lost.
Then, the blank spaces they’d each left.
Forty-nine lives, reduced to an empty square.
Her fingers came to a rest on the gap beside Q for Queen.
Bucks Boys.
She pictured Lewis’s smile, his floppy hair, and felt a pain in her chest so sharp, she couldn’t breathe.
Where are they? Clare had said.
They weren’t anywhere, any more.
They were gone.
‘We heard them,’ said Tim, waiting for Iris outside the control tower when she finally left it.
She was by herself. Browning had already returned to his billet, and Clare had volunteered to be the one to tidy up from the long night: cleaning the mugs, filing the logs. Wiping the chalkboard. ‘Go on,’ she’d urged Iris, ‘Robbie will be looking for you.’
All Iris wanted was to find him, but she stopped short when she saw Tim, the pain inside her growing as she took in the state of him. His eyes were wild in his haunted face. His skin, pallid. And the sweet, which he pressed absently into her hand, was hot, damp with his horror.
‘Lewis left the transmitter on,’ he said. ‘We heard them. All the way down.’
‘Oh, Tim.’ She choked, pulling him to her, too desperate to comfort him, attempt to comfort herself, to give a damn about whether it was or was not appropriate.
She heard them too, Lewis and his crew, as clearly as if she’d been in Mabel’s Fury herself, their terror shattering the still summer’s morning, filling her ears.
‘They didn’t bale,’ Tim said, into her neck. ‘They couldn’t get to their chutes. They were burning. Everything was burning. They were all so scared.’ His body shuddered. ‘They were so bloody scared.’
‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Shh.’
‘I feel something coming, every time we go up. I know it’s coming. I just don’t know when it’s going to come for us … ’
‘Shh,’ she repeated, automatically, trying not to let his words in. They were panic, she told herself.
Simple terror.
Not truth.
Yet, as Tim clung to her, she replayed her own sudden foreboding, only a few hours before, time is running out, and held him tighter, clinging to him too.
Then, at the sound of an approaching truck’s horn – more bombs, on their way – he pulled back, jerkily wiping his eyes.
Gently, she reached up, doing it for him, and he caught her hand, squeezing it with a tremoring smile.
‘Rob’s at the house,’ he said. ‘He had to telephone HQ, give them a full report. He wanted me to tell you he’d meet you in the woods after.’
‘And you?’ said Iris, as desperate as ever to run to Robbie, but equally reluctant to leave him alone. ‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll try and sleep.’
‘Do that,’ she said. ‘Please, Tim.’ She was still holding his hand. ‘You must try.’
Every airbase had a team responsible for packaging up the belongings of those who didn’t come back: emptying their lockers, changing their sheets, preparing their billets for the next intake.
They were called the Committee for Adjustment, and everyone did their best to avoid them, hating to be reminded of what they stood for.
But there was no escaping them that morning.
They were already everywhere when, leaving Tim at his billet, Iris set off for the woods.
She saw them, sombrely carrying crates full of blankets, books, forgotten lucky mascots – a pair of tartan slippers – and became so overcome by the waste of it, the never-ending waste, that she had to stop, bending over in the long grass, clutching her stomach, fighting to get her gulping, raging grief under control.
It was Prim, of all people, who came upon her.
‘Here,’ she said, laying her hand on Iris’s shoulder, proffering her a kerchief. Her own eyes, reflecting the bright morning light, were red. Calm now, she’d obviously wept too. ‘Go and find Robbie,’ she counselled Iris, just as Clare had. ‘Neither of you will feel better until you do.’
He was already at the cottage when Iris reached it, standing outside in the leafy, dappled sunshine. His face was as pale as Tim’s had been; his blue eyes shadowed by the night.
He didn’t smile, when he saw her.
Just moved, as she moved to him.
‘How have you kept coming back?’ she asked him, her cheek to his beating heart. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Tim told me you heard them … ’
‘Yes.’ Just a single word.
So much pain within it.
‘I can’t bear it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to go again.’ She looked up at him, pouring into her stare how much she meant it. ‘Ever.’
‘Iris, we—’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t you dare tell me you have to.’
‘Iris … ’
‘You need to wear your chutes. Always … ’
‘Iris … ’
‘No, I mean it. What use are they damaged? You need to keep them with you. Keep them safe … ’
‘Iris, please –’ he held her face in his hands – ‘it’s all right.’
‘It’s not.’ Tears burnt her eyes. ‘I’m scared, Robbie.’ Her voice fractured on the admission. ‘I’m so scared … ’
‘I know. But we’re here. For now, we’re here.’
‘It’s not enough.’
‘It has to be.’
‘I want now to be forever.’
‘So do I,’ he said. ‘So do I.’
And then they were kissing: hungrily, urgently, backing each other into the cottage, clutching to one another like they might truly hold fast to life itself.
The August morning was only growing hotter.
Close and still.
There was no risk of either of them catching cold as, together, they stole the only escape they could.
They weren’t careful about that.
For once, they weren’t careful about anything.
They were in too much of a rush.
Too desperate to be together again, after their long separation, and forget, however fleetingly, the war they were trapped in, and which kept on, and on, closing in around them, tighter every day.
Time is running out.
They fell asleep that morning wrapped in each other. When they woke, the goshawk’s call fracturing the soft, enveloping silence, neither of them had moved, it was mid-afternoon, and they had to rush to get back to the house and base before they were missed.
Clare was up in the attic when Iris got there, sitting at their bedroom window with Hans’s box of letters on her lap. She wore a cotton summer dress. Her fair hair was loose on her shoulders. Her skin was bathed in golden sunshine.
Iris would remember that image of her, always.
Going to her bed, she sat heavily down on it. She felt exhausted, despite her long sleep, and disorientated, unanchored by fear and grief.
‘I’ve been torturing myself with whether Hans might have been up there,’ said Clare.
‘I’m scared it was him who killed Lewis and the boys.
’ She looked down at his letters. ‘I want to write to him. I’ve been trying to all day, but can’t seem to find words.
’ A tear escaped her. ‘I don’t feel like he’s here any more. ’
‘Clare, you can’t know that.’
‘Can’t I?’ said Clare, closing Hans’s box, laying her hands atop it.
‘No,’ said Iris.
Clare didn’t reply.
She rested her head against the window, her eyes moving to the base, and the eight empty dispersal points lining the distant perimeter.
Iris would remember that too: how lost she was, staring down at it all that afternoon.
How resigned.
She’d try to guess, over and over again, what else she, so silent and contemplative, had been thinking.
What else she might have been sensing.
I rather think we might have all fallen before.
Whether she had, even then – even if only subconsciously – known.