Chapter Twenty-One #2
Not at all, she replied. I’ve been waiting for your call.
‘I’ve been fascinated by your career,’ she says to me now. ‘It’s enthralled me that you’ve chosen to spend your life slipping realities, when you were such an expert at it as a child.’
‘Did you ever suspect whose reality I was slipping to?’
‘Did it occur to me that you might be inhabiting the past life of Iris Winterton?’ She gives me an incredulous look.
‘No, Claudia. You were a confused, quiet and cautious child. I knew Iris as a headstrong, capable, and frankly sometimes rather rash young woman. I never once connected the two of you. And I’m a scientist. In the business of facts.
It took me a long time to entertain the possibility that there might be some truth in the things you told me. ’
‘But you did entertain it?’
‘I had to. You were so convinced about it all. And I did a great deal of research, talked with colleagues, people I respect, and found other cases like yours. Not many.’ She raises her slender hands.
‘But enough to be able to push my cynicism aside and consider that your visions mightn’t be hallucinatory. ’
‘They’re not. They’re real … ’
‘Well, that’s the troubling thing about hallucinations, Claudia.
They’re extremely good at seeming that way.
No –’ she fixes me with a stern glare, stopping me from interrupting – ‘I’m not trying to dismiss what you’ve been experiencing.
I’m simply stating the obvious, which is that hallucinations would be by far the most plausible diagnosis.
And you really are under a great deal of strain … ’
‘That’s not why this is happening. It’s being here. It’s opened me up.’
‘I’m sure it has. But I’m equally certain you arrived already open to it.
You were an exceedingly lonely and vulnerable little girl.
’ Her face softens, just as it did when she spoke about Clare, allowing me another glimpse of her heart, beating beneath her cashmere jumper.
‘Your grandparents did their very best for you, but you had no real-life friends, and you missed your mother desperately. You craved escape. An alternate reality. And,’ she says, her eyes holding mine, ‘I don’t doubt you need one now. Perhaps even more than you did then.’
‘I haven’t chased this.’
‘Haven’t you?’ She raises a dubious brow. ‘You keep on sleeping in Iris and Clare’s room, which I have to tell you is inexplicable to me. That attic is the most cold and uncomfortable home I’ve had … ’
‘It doesn’t feel uncomfortable to me.’
‘No, because you’re so unhappy. And I’m sorry for that.
I really am deeply sorry, Claudia.’ She leans forward in her chair, so earnest in her sudden sympathy that I have to look away.
‘But perhaps if you weren’t,’ she says, ‘perhaps if you hadn’t come back here heartbroken, you might not have found this all waiting. ’
‘I’m glad it’s been waiting though. I’ve needed it … ’
‘That’s my exact point.’
I open my mouth to argue, then, finding nothing to say, close it again.
I feel like I’ve been aced in a game of tennis.
‘You told me you’ve been having dreams,’ Ellen says.
‘Yes.’
‘Would you like to tell me about them?’
‘I’m not sure where to start,’ I reply, feeling increasingly like I am in a therapy session: the most draining one of my life.
‘Wherever you like,’ she says.
So, with a deep breath, I begin with the two I’ve had most often: of that colonel, and my own warning to Iris to go, you need to go; then, that woman in the wheelchair who touches my face.
‘Can you think who she might have been?’ I ask.
‘Can you?’ says Ellen, which isn’t answering my question.
I don’t press it though.
I’m too preoccupied remembering the emotion I’ve seen in the woman’s eyes.
The deep grief, but also hope.
‘I’ve got no idea who she is,’ I say. ‘She keeps telling me something that makes me cry, but I can’t ever hear her.’
‘That’s dreams for you,’ says Ellen. ‘What else have they shown you?’
‘So much,’ I say, and go on, describing smoky pubs, ice-coated windows, blinking switchboards, sticky sweets, tart apple cake, and a smiling boy in tartan slippers.
Ellen becomes very still when I mention him.
Stiller yet when I talk of the other time I saw her: not in a dream, but life, just as I saw her outside the control tower, only this time inside Bettys Bar, all done up and sitting with a man in a USAAF uniform.
‘And have you had any other such … episodes?’ she asks me tightly.
‘A couple,’ I say, and tell her about them too: first, Robbie’s face coming to life in Tim’s photograph; then, the absolute vividness with which I was transported on Saturday night out of my and Nick’s room, and into the burgeoning warmth of a clear summer’s dawn.
‘I was desperate to warn Iris,’ I say. ‘Make her realise how close the end was coming.’
‘She needed no warning,’ says Ellen. ‘There wasn’t a single person among us who didn’t live with the proximity of death hanging over them. Except perhaps Ambrose.’
‘Ambrose?’
‘Our adjutant. He never seemed to care about anything, except making life more unpleasant than it already was. Such a nasty little man.’ She gives a mirthless smile. ‘I was happy he didn’t get a mention in the book.’
‘You have read it, then?’
‘I have.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘No. It made me extremely angry.’
‘Really?’
I wasn’t expecting that.
In what way? I’m about to ask.
But she talks on, saying Ambrose’s omission from The Bomber Boys is, to her mind, the strongest point in its favour. ‘To my enduring regret, I pandered to his ego. I was silly and naive enough to believe I should do that.’
‘What about Iris? Did she pander to him?’
‘Not at all. Ambrose despised her for it, of course. Robbie too, for always being in her corner. Not that he’d have been anywhere else.
’ She smiles again, more truly this time.
Achingly so. ‘I was desperately envious. We were all a little in love with Robbie Grayson.’ Her eyes glimmer.
‘You of course know what it is to court a man who’s admired like that. ’
I blink at her abrupt change in subject.
Shift in my seat.
‘I’m not sure that Nick and I are courting at all any more,’ I say.
‘No?’ She sounds genuinely surprised.
Clearly, she’s not one for browsing gossip columns.
‘You seemed to be getting on so well when I saw you in The Heaton Arms.’
‘That was the general idea.’
‘I am sorry, Claudia. You really must be in a great deal of pain.’
Miserably, I nod.
Because she’s not wrong.
I am in pain.
And so is Nick.
Other than for on set, we’ve barely spoken since Saturday night.
He told me by text that he’s dropped the case against the clinic in Los Angeles (I’m sorry, Claude, it shouldn’t have taken this for me to be able to hear you), and I suppose that’s something.
Apparently, no one’s really talking about my misshapen uterus online any more either.
They’re all too busy discussing Nick’s naughtiness, back at the start of this month, when he came to stay in Highgate, played chauffeur to Hannah and her friends, opened a tab for them in that London bar, and was pictured kissing a twenty-four-year-old woman.
Not the same one I’ve been obsessing over all these months.
No, it turns out Nick’s been telling the truth about her.
One of her friends confirmed that this week, tagging her (lou93) on a repost of Nick’s kiss that’s gone viral enough to hit the papers, quipping (with multiple laughing emojis) that Nick obviously has a thing for London girls.
Too bad you never could persuade him to try homegrown, Lou.
Hahaha. And, god, I wish I could claw back the emotion I’ve wasted since summer, staring at her face.
Now I have another’s to taunt me.
Chelsea, she’s called, and Nick was caught kissing her within touching distance of my sister.
Hannah didn’t see it happen. She was turned away from them, laughing with a friend. The first she knew about any of it was on Saturday night, when Chelsea posted the photo on her socials, and Hannah’s phone lit up with people demanding to know what kind of a sister she thinks she is.
I feel sick to my stomach that she’s been dragged into it all.
‘I’m fine,’ she’s told me. ‘It’s you I’m worried about. Nick too.’
Chelsea is the older sister of a girl called Elodie who Hannah’s been at school with since primary.
I’ve never liked Elodie, she’s a total user, and I’ve told Hannah countless times to kick her to the kerb.
But when Elodie heard that Nick was driving Hannah and the others to the bar, she turned up too, bringing Chelsea with her: all buxom and doe-eyed, with a plumped-up pout and thick, lacquered eyelashes.
‘Just Nick’s type, basically,’ said Felix, when, breaking the no airmen in the attic rule, he came up there to see me on Sunday morning, sitting on Clare’s bed. ‘Come on, Claude. You know there’s no way he wanted any of this.’
I do know that.
I believe completely that Nick had no interest in kissing Chelsea.
You can tell, if you look at the photo closely, how stunned he is.
He’s told me he was too shocked to immediately react, and pushed Chelsea away the instant he made sense of what was going on.
But how, how could he have been so stupid, getting himself into that situation in the first place?
‘It’s 101,’ I said to Felix. ‘He should have had his wits about him.’
‘Like us, you mean, in Sicily?’
‘That was different.’
‘Not that different. We fell afoul of a camera angle, so did Nick.’
‘We were acting, Felix. It wasn’t real.’
‘It wasn’t real for Nick either, but you’re punishing him anyway.’
‘I’m not punishing him … ’
‘You are. Just like you punished me. And it hurts, Claude. It hurt me. So much that I actually started to question whether it had all been as platonic for me as I’d thought. No.’ He held up his hands, seeing my widening eyes. ‘No need to panic. I’m not about to declare my undying love … ’
‘Right,’ I said, still panicking a bit anyway.