Letters to the Lost (18 page)

In fact it was even cooler in here than outside. She felt the shiver of goosebumps on her skin again as she walked slowly across the black-and-white tiled floor, her footsteps echoing in the magnificent quiet. They’d instinctively gone their separate ways when they came in, and Lieutenant Rosinski was somewhere behind her now, gazing upwards with the same grave focus she’d seen on his face in the bombed-out church that morning. She headed towards the altar, pulled by some illogical need to explain herself to God. For all Charles’s insistence that He was the universal father who knew and loved everyone, she could never quite stop herself from thinking of Him as a friend of Charles’s – a bit like Reverend Stokes or Peter Underwood – who tolerated her for his sake. Like a guest at a party, she felt bound by courtesy to make some sort of formal acknowledgement.

In the gloom of a side chapel, rows of votive candles glowed. She went in and lit one.

Dear Lord, please keep Charles safe wherever he is and let him know that I love him . . .

The words formed themselves in some dutiful part of her head, while in another she imagined God looking down on her with mild contempt. She was very much the third party in this relationship; He would look after Charles on His own say so, without any prompting from her. She was also struck by the irony of needing to ask God to tell Charles that she loved him. As his wife of less than a year she should be able to do that herself. She did do it, in fact, at the end of every letter, but because he never mentioned love in anything more than a general sense in his impersonal replies, she felt like she was standing on a mountaintop and shouting it into the wind.

As she left the chapel she saw Dan Rosinski leaning against a pillar, arms folded, looking perfectly at ease. Too at ease, Charles would think; God was the universal Father, but He was the kind of strict parent you would address as ‘sir’ and who would frown on such informality. Seeing Dan at a distance she felt an odd lurch beneath her ribs. He was an American soldier; just another one of the thousands that filled the streets of London and towns and cities all across the country, and who appeared on newsreels. And yet he was no longer a stranger. His family was from Poland. His mother was dead. He had a brother called Alek who was with the Ordnance Corps, currently training in Maryland. When he spoke of his father you could hear the affection in his voice. He wasn’t just another American soldier, he was her friend.

When he saw her he detached himself from the pillar and came towards her.

‘OK?’

She nodded. ‘It’s a beautiful church.’

‘You can imagine when it was built that they were virtually turning them away at the door on Sundays. Imagine leaving your dark home with the low ceilings and tiny windows and coming here . . .’

She could. When he said it like that she understood. It wasn’t just a feeling of cowed duty that brought people to church, but genuine wonder. Reverence. The belief that there must be something beyond the small sphere in which they lived their short, dark lives.

‘How come you know so much about it? I mean, I’m a Londoner born and bred, and I don’t know half of what you do.’

‘Back home I studied architecture. I just started my senior year when Pearl Harbor changed everything. I went from sitting in a classroom studying German architecture to sitting in a B-17 and destroying it.’ He looked away, out across the majestic sweeping space of the church.

‘But if you didn’t, the Luftwaffe would have flattened this place by now. Or there’d be red flags hanging down the columns outside and a photograph of Hitler on the altar.’

‘Maybe.’ He smiled, and the clear, pure light filtering in from above showed up the lines of exhaustion around his mouth and the dark smudges beneath his eyes. ‘Come on, I’ll show you something.’

He walked back in the direction from which they’d come. Without speaking she followed him up a winding stone staircase, like the ones taken by princesses in fairy tales. They had to step aside to make way for other people coming down, and when they reached the top she was slightly breathless from the climb, and from the astonishing place in which she found herself. They were beneath the dome, on a narrow walkway that ran around its perimeter. Heaven rose above them in an extravagant, painted canopy of gold and blue, pierced by shafts of ethereal light.

‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.’ All of a sudden her chest tightened and she thought for a painful second that she might cry. First the music, and then this – it was like she’d been walking along a dark corridor lined with closed doors and had suddenly discovered that paradise lay on the other side of them.

‘It’s called the Whispering Gallery.’

‘Why?’

His eyes were warm. ‘Sit down right there and I’ll show you. When I say, you have to close your eyes and lean your cheek against the wall, OK?’

A stone ledge ran all the way around the walkway. It was smooth and shiny with age. She sat down on it and watched him walk away with his easy, unhurried stride. Laughter bubbled up inside her, and a sort of childish anticipation that she hadn’t felt for years. She had to press her lips together to stop it escaping her.

He stopped right opposite her, on the other side of the void, and gestured for her to close her eyes. In the darkness behind her closed lids the laughter was suddenly spiked with something else. Anticipation. A shiver of fear. She leaned closer to the wall and waited. Faint echoes rose from below, footsteps and muted voices, and then a whisper so close and clear it was like a caress in her ear.

‘Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night?’

She gasped and opened her eyes, expecting to see him standing in front of her. But he was where he had been before, leaning casually against the wall on the opposite side of the dome. She blinked, and the laughter spilled out, and before doubts and reality and duty could wither this moment of pure happiness she pressed her cheek against the ancient stone and whispered, so softly it was scarcely more than a breath.

‘Yes.’

13

27 April ’43

Dear Stella

I’m writing this on the train going back to the base, to say thank you. I had the best time last night. OK, so maybe not one of the best dinners, but I’ve got to say Spam rissoles never tasted so good as they did in your company. (And I think that says a whole lot more for your company than it does for the rissoles.)

I don’t know whether I should be writing this letter or not. I don’t know if receiving it will make you feel better or worse. I guess I just have to say the things that are on my mind and leave you to tear them up and put them on the fire if they’re not what you want to hear. I want you to know how special you are. I want you to see that you are clever and funny and interesting. I want you to realize that you are beautiful, although as I write that and remember the way you looked last night in the candlelight, I know that a part of what makes you such dynamite is that you don’t have the faintest idea of how incredible you are.

Believe me, you really are.

Most of all I want you to be happy. You deserve to be. Listening to you last night I got a glimpse of a girl who has lived her short life so far to please others. The fact that you do that is, again, a part of what makes you the amazing girl that you are, but I ’d hate for you to be so focused on the needs of everyone else that you forget your own.

Thank you for listening when I talked about flying, and about the crew. The last week was a tough one and I guess the ones ahead won’t be a picnic either. It’s easier to face them now.

I won’t write again. You’re married, and I understand the seriousness of that commitment. Of course, I’m selfish enough to wish that you weren’t, but I’m also smart enough to have noticed that circumstances aren’t exactly on our side anyway. We had dinner, and you took my mind off of the things I wanted to forget, and helped me to remember the good stuff at the time I needed to most. I’ll always be grateful for that.

Look after yourself – for me. (I figure that telling you to do it for someone else is the best way of getting you to do anything.)

Dan.

They were just words written on a page, but their immediacy took her breath away. Like a swimmer coming up for air, Jess lifted her gaze from the letter and let it wander around the room, taking in the leaf-sprigged wallpaper, the bright scarlet poppies on the tiles in the fireplace, and saw for the first time not just the neglected home of an old person, but the setting for stories she wanted to hear, of secrets she wanted to know. The wind sighed softly in the chimney, and the outside world felt very far away. Sucking in a lungful of air she took the next envelope out of the box and plunged back under, into the echoing world of the past.

8 May ’43

Dear Stella,

It was so good to get your letter. I hadn’t dared to hope that you’d write, but I’m sure glad that you did. My crew was flying at dawn this morning – mission #6 completed – and it was here waiting for me when I got back. Reading it was like hearing your voice.

Stella, I don’t want you to feel guilty. Since Bremen I’ve gotten to be quite an expert on guilt and have come to the conclusion that as emotions go it’s right up there on the negative scale with malice and jealousy. It poisons happiness and makes us believe that we’re not good enough, and that the things we do and the choices we make are wrong. As human beings I guess we’re programmed to try to be happy, and guilt tells us that instinct is bad. I don’t believe that it is. In fact, sitting in the cockpit of a B-17 with German flak and tracer fire coming at you from all sides, it seems like snatching some happiness is the only thing that matters. Or else, what’s life for?

It was just a kiss – a moment on a London street on a warm spring night. You can blame the brandy, or the war, or you can blame me. I’m not sure I could have kept myself from kissing you if I ’d tried, and I sure didn’t want to try. I could say I’m sorry, but the truth is (and I’m too wiped out to write anything but the truth) I’m not, because I liked kissing you. But you are still Charles’s wife. You have not caused him a second’s pain or given away anything that belongs to him. It was a moment, that’s all. A very precious, special moment.

Look after yourself for me.

Dan

PS. You should definitely go to the Fete Committee meeting – don’t let that old girl Marjorie get to you! Hold your head up and remember how strong you are.

17 May ’43

Dear Stella

I just finished reading your letter and I’m still smiling. Don’t ever apologize for writing about everyday stuff. I feel like I’m right there at the Church Fete meeting, although I have no idea what a coconut shy is so I can’t really comment on whether cauliflowers would make suitable replacements for coconuts. But the fortune-teller sounds like a great idea, whatever that Stokes guy says. God might be in charge of our destiny, but I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t pay good money to find out what He has in store for us all right now.

We haven’t flown for a couple days. Every day more crews are shipping in from the US and they look so green we feel like old hands in comparison. There’s a dance on the base tonight, to welcome them all. They’re fixing up one of the hangars with streamers and balloons and sending trucks out around the villages to pick up local girls. I guess this all means nobody’s going to be flying tomorrow either. I don’t know which is worse; the nerves of doing a mission or the boredom of doing nothing.

Remember I told you about Morgan, my co-pilot? Well, this week he finally managed to get himself a bicycle from a kid in the village. Back home Morgan’s folks own a farm out in the middle of Arkansas and he claims he was riding a bicycle practically before he could walk, so he was pretty damn pleased with himself for landing one over here, even though he paid well over the odds for it. (The kid who sold it to him might have looked like a scruffed up choirboy, but he drove a deal like a New York hustler.) Morgan set off for the pub in the village on it last night, bragging that he’d have finished his first pint by the time the rest of us arrived, and promptly rode it right into a ditch. Apart from his bruised pride and a few nettle stings he was unhurt, though Adelman, our bombardier, laughed so much he nearly bust a rib.

The village here is beautiful. When we arrived everywhere was brown with mud but now it’s all turned green, and the trees are all covered in blossom, like snow. It’s hard to imagine a prettier place to fight a war.

Good luck with the rest of the fete preparations – stick to your guns about the fortune-teller, and look after yourself for me.

Dan.

Dear Stella

Thanks for the explanation of the coconut shy, and the drawing too! So the idea is that you aim a wooden ball at a coconut on a stick and if you knock it off you get to take it home? It sounds like my kind of game. And OK, so cauliflowers might not be quite so exotic as coconuts, but you got to work with what you got, right?

For what it’s worth, I think you’re right about the ginger cake as well as the cauliflowers. Your Marjorie Walsh sounds like she could give the Führer a run for his money when it comes to bossing people around, and I’m proud of you for standing up to her. You’ll make a great job of the teas, and I’m prepared to bet that the fete will still be a success even without her scones (but then I’m a Yank and I never had a scone in my life) . . .

Dear Stella