Letters to the Lost (25 page)

The sun glittered between the leaves. In this tent of shimmering green, London and her old life seemed very far away; far enough to give her a detached kind of overview on it. She thought back to Charles’s stiff, business-like proposal and her own grateful acceptance.

‘I think that’s why I agreed to marry Charles, so I’d have a house of my own to keep. I wanted to make jam and sew pretty cushion covers and put little jugs of flowers on every surface. I wanted a baby in a little swinging crib with a patchwork quilt I’d made myself. Not much of an ambition, was it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said softly. ‘Having a family and creating a home, giving them the kind of love and security you never had yourself . . . I think that’s a pretty good ambition to have.’

‘It’s just a shame I didn’t realize how impossible it would be to fulfil in St Crispin’s Vicarage with Charles.’

Across the river the woman in the red headscarf had come outside again. She was carrying a cup of tea and what looked like a newspaper or magazine and she sat on a bench beneath the kitchen window and began to read.

‘So, where would it be, your perfect house?’ Dan asked, his fingers still sifting her hair. She was glad he’d steered the conversation away from the Vicarage. The day was too perfect to be soured. She closed her eyes and luxuriated in his touch, like a cat being stroked.

‘I don’t know – I never really thought about that. An ordinary house in an ordinary street, I suppose. Nothing grand.’

‘I always wanted to build my own house right by the ocean,’ he said sleepily. ‘A house like you’ve never seen before, with big open rooms and glass walls so that you could see all of the horizon.’

She tried to picture it in the dappled, gold-splashed darkness behind her closed eyes. ‘Go on.’

‘The floors would be all wood, but pale wood – beech probably, or birch – and the walls would be white, to reflect the colours of the sky and the sea. The rooms would flow into each other and everything would be spacious and open, so you could really breathe.’

‘Wouldn’t it be cold?’

‘No. The sun would stream in and warm it up. And in winter there’d be a fire. Right in the centre of the living room. Raised up a little.’

‘Oh, that’s good . . .’ She was smiling as she added this detail to the image in her head. ‘With a soft rug in front of it?’

‘If you put one there.’

‘I would. A big one. It might be fur. Yes . . . white fur.’

They were quiet for a moment. His breathing was soft, his body warm and solid against hers.

‘White fur. Mmm . . . I like the sound of that. And I’d make love to you on it, right there in the firelight.’

She tipped her head back to kiss him, and murmured, ‘I like the sound of that too.’

On their last day the mood changed. Like a cloud stealing across the sun the brightness left them. Their voices were more subdued, the silences longer, and there was a new intensity to their lovemaking. They woke in the early morning and Dan drew back the curtains and raised the blackout so that they could see the sun rise over the city’s spires and domes and let its rosy light wash over the bed. He showed her how to sit astride him, so she could look down into his face as she moved her hips. Their gazes fused. He kept one hand on her waist, guiding her, and with the other, worked his gentle, expert magic. Her orgasm gripped her like a lightning strike, and she collapsed onto his chest. He gathered her up into his arms and cradled her as, inexplicably, she cried.

In the aftermath she felt fragile, shaken. The atmosphere between them was achingly tender as they went out into the sunlit morning and, by some unspoken, instinctive agreement, headed away from the city’s heart, wanting to leave behind the streets filled with people and noise and uniforms. Reaching the river, they followed its course south-west.

In King’s Oak the summer meant snapdragons and sweet peas in Alf Broughton’s garden, the smell of hot tarmac and the shrill voices of children playing in the street long into the blue dusk. Here the season was marked by rippling fields of greenish gold, and trees as big and cool as cathedrals. There was a stillness that seemed timeless, and reassuring. They found a pretty pub, with a slightly wild garden that sloped down to the riverbank, and had a lunch of cheese and homemade bread at a wooden table with ducks dozing beneath it. The only other customers were two elderly farm-hands silently supping cider on a bench by the door.

Stella watched Dan walk through the long grass, ducking beneath the low branches of an apple tree choked with honeysuckle, carrying the drinks he’d just bought at the bar. He set them carefully down on the table, which lurched at a distinctly drunken angle: a pint of beer for him, a half for her.

‘Thank you.’ She dipped her finger in the creamy froth at the top of the glass. ‘I’ve cost you a fortune, with all this wining and dining.’

He looked around the unkempt garden, with its uncut grass and buttercups and tangled streamers of honeysuckle, and held up his hands in mock despair. ‘Yeah, you’re a real expensive date. I’m bankrupting myself here trying to keep up with your excessive demands.’

‘I’m being serious!’

‘Well, don’t be.’ He picked up his beer and took a long mouthful, then looked at her. ‘You don’t have to worry about it. Money isn’t a problem. But even if it was . . .’ He smiled that crooked, rueful, beautiful smile. ‘Even if it was, I’d have sold everything I had for these few days. They say you can’t buy happiness, but . . .’ He looked away, out across the river to the humming shadows beneath the trees on the bank, and shook his head, struggling for words. ‘Jeez, Stella . . .’

The tenuous laughter of a moment ago was smashed, swamped, swept away by a tidal wave of emotion. Across the table their hands touched, clasped tightly, as if across a void.

‘What are we going to do?’

He sighed. ‘Carry on as before, I guess. I have nine missions left to fly before my tour ends. Depending on the weather and the mood of the guys in charge it might be two weeks or two months.’

Or never. He didn’t say it, but it was there. A fact. An obscenity, too appalling to acknowledge. From the deep, black waters at the back of her mind questions surfaced about odds and statistics and current expectations. She drowned them all.

‘And then what will happen?’

‘In the normal run of things I’d get sent home, given a few weeks to rest up, and then get sent around the good old US of A selling war bonds or something.’ He let go of her hand, picked up his pint and drank. ‘I’m going to apply to stay here. To transfer to a different squadron or fly with rookie crews or something. Anything. I’m not much of a cook, but hell, I could have a go at that too, if it meant they’d let me stick around.’

‘The war brought us together, but it’s going to keep us apart too. The unfairness of that makes me—’ Her breath caught awkwardly in her throat, in a sort of silent sob.

‘I know.’

Long moments passed. She took a mouthful of beer and, putting the glass down again, traced patterns in the condensation clouding its sides. She didn’t want to look at him because she knew that she would cry. The future had unfurled itself before them. In the distance there was happiness – the house he was going to build on the beach, the fur rug in front of the fire – but it was on the other side of a vast chasm. Crossing it safely seemed impossible.

‘What about me? What shall I do? I don’t want to be married to Charles any more. Life is too short and love too precious to waste in pretending.’

‘Will he agree to a divorce?’

Stella considered this for a moment before answering. ‘I think he has to. I mean, I know the whole sanctity of marriage thing is important to him, but it’s obvious he doesn’t even like me very much, never mind love me. I noticed it last time he came home, when he brought Peter to stay, and it struck me that he’s never looked at me or spoken to me with anything like the warmth he shows to him. And he can’t go on pretending that ours is a normal, happy marriage when it’s obvious he finds touching me as appealing as stroking a slug. I think even he would have to agree that the whole thing has been a rather terrible mistake.’

‘This Peter guy . . . You told me about him in your letter. He and Charles seem pretty close.’

‘Oh yes, they knew each other from theological college, long before I met Charles. They used to go on fishing holidays together.’

She said it in a way that was supposed to make him laugh, but his face stayed thoughtful. Serious.

‘It was quite a coincidence, them being on leave at the same time, and then meeting up at the station like that.’

‘Yes . . .’ Stella felt her smile falter. She’d said the same thing to Charles at the time, but he had snapped that she was being ridiculous; thousands of military personnel passed through Victoria every day. She had shut up then, and not bothered to explain that that was what she’d meant; that the chance of them bumping into each other in the flood of people seemed so small.

Across the table Dan drained his beer and put the glass down carefully. ‘It’s just a hunch, but something about what you said in your letter got me thinking . . .’ He looked up at her with a wry smile. ‘And finding out that Charles isn’t driven wild with desire for you has got me thinking a whole lot more. I might be wrong . . . but I’d say the marriage may not have been a mistake, exactly. More of a . . . smokescreen.’

‘What do you mean?’

He took a packet of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket and slid one out. He knew her well enough not to offer her one now. ‘There are some men – women too, come to that – who aren’t attracted to the opposite sex, but to their own. It’s more common than you might think.’

‘But . . . but isn’t that against the law?’

‘Yep.’ He paused to light the cigarette, cupping his hand around the lighter flame, then continuing as he snuffed it out again. ‘But there isn’t a legal system in the world that can control people’s feelings. And if I’m right about Charles, I guess that’s why he felt the need to marry, so he could carry on feeling how the hell he likes in private. Hey, I might be completely on the wrong page, but—’

‘No . . .’ Stella was distracted, fascinated. It felt like she’d been stumbling around in a landscape where everything was blurred and indistinct and he’d just given her a pair of spectacles that brought it all into focus. ‘It all fits, including why he asked me to marry him in the first place. He obviously knew I was stupid and naïve enough not to suspect anything. And since then, he’s used that to make me believe that I was to blame for everything that was wrong in our marriage.’

Dan took a long, deep lungful of smoke and exhaled slowly. ‘It doesn’t change much, though. You’re still married.’

‘At least I understand now. Actually, I feel rather sorry for him – I’ve always sensed how unhappy he is, deep down. I thought it was all tied up in his calling, and his belief that he somehow wasn’t good enough to please God, or his parents. But now I can see . . . How horrible it must be, loving someone and wanting to be with them forever, and knowing that it’s hopeless.’

He looked at her through the haze of blue. ‘Like us, you mean?’

‘No.’ She stood up and went around to his side of the table. Moving his empty glass to one side she hitched herself up so that she was sitting in front of him on the rough wood, then leaned forward and took his face between her hands. ‘It’s not hopeless for us. Charles tricked me into a charade of a marriage under false pretences. There’s nothing he can do to make me stay now. All you have to do is come through this safely.
Alive
.’

It sounded so simple. In the damp green garden, with the scent of honeysuckle and rank earth and the river, and her face only inches from his, it was obvious. Stay alive. He’d almost believed it was possible.

But the 3 a.m. demons had woken him again, trailing their icy fingers down his back and whispering their sour-breathed truths in his ear.
Two out of three airmen don’t live to see the end of their tour. Losses in the Group currently standing at seventy-two per cent after seventeen missions.
The faces of crewmen he no longer saw in the mess hall emerged from the darkness at the edges of the room and crowded around the bed. There was the ball-turret gunner who’d taken the hit on the milk run to Fruges, the side of his head a bloody pulp as it had been when Dan had watched him get carried off the plane; the pilot and co-pilot of
Sweet Georgia Brown
whom he’d last seen through the glass of the cockpit before their ship spiralled downwards, engulfed in flame.

Sweat drenched his body and his heart punched his ribs. Beneath the sheets his legs twitched from the flood of adrenaline. He turned his head on the pillow, inhaling the scent of Stella’s hair like oxygen, listening to the sound of her breathing and trying to hold on to its slow rhythm. He wanted to pull her into his arms and bury his face in her neck, knowing that she’d turn to him and wrap herself around him and allow him to lose himself in her again. Instead he sat up and, taking care not to wake her, slipped out of bed.

In the afterglow of a bone-melting orgasm sleep had come easily, but he knew that it wouldn’t be back tonight and it wasn’t fair to keep her awake too. In the darkness of the blackout he groped for his cigarettes and went over to the window. Raising the blind a couple of inches he saw that the sky was the smudged grey blue of the hour before dawn, the city still folded in its shadows. He lit a cigarette, noticing the tremor of his hand in the lighter’s flame.

As she’d said herself, none of it was fair. The war. People in Europe being herded into camps because of the family they were born into and the building in which they worshipped. Flak that whistled past one boy’s shoulder and hit another right in the head. Him bringing her here, sleeping with her, talking about a future he knew damned well wasn’t his to promise.

Things were happening; the whole USAAF was alive with rumour and speculation. Meetings had been held, new strategies decided. Fresh crews had been arriving to take up the empty beds at Palingthorpe and all the other bases. An announcement had been made about the Combined Bomber Offensive, which was to see American and Brit flyboys harness their efforts and rain bombs down on Germany day and night, to destroy the Nazis’ military, industrial and economic strength. It sounded great, until you remembered that the Nazis were pretty shit hot at trying to stop that kind of thing, and the only reason new crews were being trained up and spat out onto the ground so fast was because the guys in those meetings knew they’d be needed. Because they knew what the losses were going to be like.