Chapter Twenty-Four
Claudia and Iris
his fear, and shame, and the war’s long shadow.
I want to go to him, press his hands into mine and find the words to make it better for him, somehow.
I feel such an overwhelming instinct to look after him.
Silently, he smiles – a slight, sad smile – like he’s guessed what I’m thinking.
And perhaps he has.
He’s read my letter after all. About fifty-five times.
He knows more than most about the inner workings of my mind.
And Ellen paid him a visit yesterday, spoke to him about a lot of what we discussed.
She said on Wednesday that she’d try to, and left me a voicemail while we were filming last night, confirming she’d managed it.
‘Did he believe any of it?’ I asked her, returning her call on my drive here.
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘It’s obviously been a great deal for him to absorb, which isn’t easy for him.
He really is fading quickly.’ She paused, and I pictured her frowning.
‘He didn’t show me your letter. He still refused to confide in me about any of it.
He insisted it’s only you he’ll talk to, so yes, I think he must believe you hold a link to her.
I’m certain he needs to unburden himself.
’ She sighed. ‘Don’t let him lose courage, will you? ’
Removing my coat, I sit on the sofa I shared with Nick and Felix. It feels empty without them; cold, and overly large.
The coffee table before me has no tea or baked goods on it, just an old leather album, which I eye, curiously.
‘Is this yours?’ I ask Tim.
‘I’m its caretaker,’ he says. ‘It should have been Jacob’s. He took most of the pictures.’
‘During the war?’ I say, heart quickening at the idea; the possibility that there are photos, of all of them, contained in this album’s pages.
‘Yes, during the war.’ His eyes move to the framed picture of the crew on his bureau.
‘That was the last shot of Jacob’s film.
It was a long time before I could bring myself to have it developed.
’ Slowly, he brings his gaze back to mine.
‘Ellie told me you have memories. You said in your letter you’ve seen our past … ’
I nod. ‘There’s so much I haven’t seen though. So much I can’t find.’
‘But what if you’re not meant to? What if these lanterns you speak of are with us to protect us? Shield us from those things it’s not ours to witness?’
‘I don’t want to be shielded.’
He gives me a pained look. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ I say, and, suspecting that his courage really is now wavering, at this eleventh hour, I will him the strength to go on.
And, with a laboured breath, he does.
‘I know myself what it’s like to live at the mercy of an unbiddable mind,’ he says.
‘Even when I was a young man, mine gave me knowledge I had no desire to hold. Warnings, of events looming, with nothing to help me know what to do about them. No specifics. No markers. Just … instincts.’ He swallows.
‘You said your father was the same.’ His voice catches. ‘Noah … ’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Noah Reeves.’
‘Reeves,’ he echoes, and blinks, clearly upset.
About my father?
I don’t ask; he keeps talking, giving me no chance.
‘I’ve been told my mind is failing,’ he says.
‘I’ve felt, these past years, as though it’s crumbling.
Not so much with my lanterns going off, as my stage’s walls coming down.
’ He takes another rasping breath, but doesn’t reach for his oxygen: determined to keep going, I think, now that he’s made himself start.
‘The memories I hold have always been my memories alone. But they haven’t always looked … the same.’
I nod again, and don’t consider asking how many of the memories he shared with Imogen were fabricated. Even knowing that there are things he’s concealed, and twisted, I still trust that most of what he passed on was rooted in truth – however many variations of that truth he might have lived.
His memories, for the most part, haven’t been false, I’m certain.
They’re just from different stages.
Different acts, but not different stories.
‘What about that night?’ I ask. ‘Have you always remembered that the same?’
‘Yes,’ he says, flatly. ‘Nothing about that has ever changed.’
‘And you do remember it?’
‘I can’t forget it,’ he says, and drops his gaze to the album on the table, which I’m by now certain is full of the friends he lost. ‘I couldn’t show this to Imogen,’ he tells me.
‘The faces in it have always felt too … precious … too fleeting, to share with someone who didn’t love them as I did.
But please –’ he raises his wavering hand, gesturing at the album – ‘I’d like you to look. ’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m quite sure.’
And, pulse racing, I get down on my knees, pulling the album towards me, opening it, finding photograph after photograph of the base as it was then: sprawling, and bleak, packed with people who smile and laugh, despite what they’re living through.
The original Piper features plenty: chasing a football with boys in shirtsleeves; lying on her haunches at the steps of Billet 4B; looking dotingly into the face of a bespectacled WAAF who crouches in long grass, stroking her neck.
That WAAF appears in a lot of the photos too, happy and smart, with an adoring expression of her own, that she gives time after time to Jacob, behind the camera.
Beth Twinton, my mind, and logic, supplies, and I feel such pain for her, knowing she lost this man she loved, and who loved her too, so much so that he always had his lens pointed her way, and wrote her into his will.
‘Did she ever meet anyone else?’ I ask Tim.
‘No one like Jacob,’ he says.
I want to ask him about Iris and Robbie: whether I’m going to find any pictures of them here.
But I don’t.
I’m too afraid of him dashing my hope.
Silently, I keep turning the pages, finding a shot of Gus and Ames in a smoky, spartan Heaton Arms, then another picture of the two of them with Henry and Danny, in deckchairs outside their billet.
Behind them, in the billet’s doorway, is the shape of a figure that I think might belong to Robbie, but he’s just a silhouette: the tantalising suggestion of life, rather than life itself.
Impatiently, I turn to the album’s final page.
And, ‘Oh,’ I exhale, taking in the photograph there, of a packed booth in a packed bar, the crowd crammed into it reaching across the table, cheersing their brimming glasses.
Only the glasses are in focus. The people – the men in uniform; the women in dresses – are blurred with movement.
But I can just about make out Tim, a young Robert Redford, and Ames too, with his arm around a slight, striking woman whose eyes are closed for the flash.
Mon Dieu. I see the edge of Beth’s face, and the polka-dot sleeve and curls of another (Clare?
If only she’d move into the shot), then a floppy blond head that makes me think of tartan slippers.
And a couple.
A dark-haired couple who cause my every nerve to tremor, and my breath to freeze in my throat.
They’re turned towards one another, their shoulders touching, the lines between their bodies indistinct, like they’d been made, specially made, to fit together like this.
‘It’s the only picture I have of the two of them,’ says Tim, knowing just who I’m looking at.
‘The only picture I still have of her.’ I raise my gaze to his.
His face is heavy. His dark eyes full of grief.
‘Rob had another. He kept it with him, in his flight jacket.’ His voice rasps.
‘It disappeared too.’ He breaks off, chest heaving, and this time he does reach for his mask, sucking air from it.
‘She took that photograph,’ he says, once he can talk again, looking back at the picture on his bureau. ‘You know that.’
‘Yes,’ I agree.
‘Jacob didn’t want her to.’
‘No, I remember.’ He thought it was tempting fate, Tim told me on my last visit. ‘You said it didn’t change anything though.’
‘How could it have?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, even as I find myself caught in a fresh wave of grief at the idea.
‘It couldn’t,’ Tim insists, consoling me, just like he did before.
I suspected then that he might also have consoled Iris.
I feel even surer of it now.
That she, at least, survived that night.
‘She didn’t want to take it,’ he repeats. ‘I persuaded her.’ He shakes his head. ‘I was terrified of her and Jacob’s superstition. And it was the last flight of our tour. So, I told her to be a sport, give us our picture.’ He closes his eyes. ‘She did it for me.’
Silently, I absorb it.