Till We Meet Again (61 page)

Freddy could see that he was trying to shout something at her, over and over, but she couldn’t hear him. She pushed back her helmet so that her ears were uncovered, and a few strands of her hair blew free in the wind, but she was still going too fast to catch his words. The launch had nearly reached him now, and she no longer had an excuse to linger, she realized, expelling her breath. Regretfully, Freddy shut the hood, eased the stick forward, and prepared to head for her destination over a countryside so familiar by now that she could tell when an individual farmer was cutting his hay.

“Freddy, do you know anything about this?” Captain Lydia James, the commanding officer of the women’s ferry pool, asked her, holding up a copy of a newspaper. Freddy inspected the page in question. M
YSTERY
S
PIT
S
AVES
RAF P
ILOT
the headline read, over a story of her feat, written by a reporter who had been at the air-sea rescue station when the pilot of the downed Spitfire was brought in, wet but unharmed.

“I don’t understand, Lydia.”

“I’ve been queried about this incident … this ‘mystery Spit.’ You were flying in that area yesterday. Did you see anything unusual?”

“No, Lydia. I must have missed it.”

“Strange, I can’t seem to find anybody who witnessed anything. That pilot claims he didn’t make out any identifying markings on the plane that saved him, but that the pilot had red hair. They think it may have been one of our lot.”

“That would hardly be likely, an unarmed plane taking on a Messerschmitt. Who would do anything as crazy as that … unless it was one of the men? Why did they ask you? There are three male pilots to every woman. To say nothing of its being against every ATA rule? That RAF pilot was probably in shock.”

“That’s what I’ve told them,” Captain James said with normal ATA formality. “Well, Freddy, good luck tomorrow. Or isn’t that exactly the right thing to say to a bride?”

“I think it’s utterly appropriate, Lydia. Thank you—and thank you again for the week’s ‘compassionate leave.’ ”

“Normal, under the circumstances, wouldn’t you say?”

“Normal but wonderful.” Freddy turned to leave the office, her back to her commanding officer.

“Oh, Freddy—one more thing …”

“Yes?”

“If you want to stay in the ATA …”

“Yes, Lydia?”

“Don’t do it again.”

Longbridge Grange lay dozing, all its inspired sprawl redolent of the scent of late-blooming yellow climbing roses, in the lazily lambent September sun of Freddy’s wedding day. Eve and Paul de Lancel, and Tony’s two schoolboy brothers, Nigel and Andrew, had arrived the night before. With all the Longbridges, they were waiting impatiently outside the front door when Freddy and Jane finally drew up in the MG, driven on the gas denoted as a wedding present by some of the other ATA pilots.

It had been a long courtship, as Freddy had warned Tony, for she was not about to leap into matrimony without a thought for the consequences. She was not infected by the feeling that it was her duty to make some fighting man happy, as were so many noncombatant women, for she was desperately needed at her job, as few women have ever been in the history of warfare.

Although Freddy’s schedule of thirteen days on duty, followed by two days off, rarely coincided with time when Tony could get a day’s leave, they were able occasionally to catch a few hours together at night, when flying was over for the day. Eventually she had capitulated to his determination and his passion. She had fallen reluctantly in love, with many an internal question, many a secret backward glance, which became, in Tony’s perception, a captivating elusiveness.

To cheers and kisses, she emerged with difficulty from the MG, her progress impeded by the arms of the three little girls around her legs.

“Where’s my Antony?” she asked his mother, surprised not to see him.

“Only just on his way. He rang up ten minutes ago … it’s too silly, my dear, but it would seem that you’re going to have a stranger for best man … Patrick’s down with the mumps, today of all days!”

“Better today than tomorrow,” Jane exclaimed. “Who did Tony say he was bringing?”

“One of the boys from his squadron, I imagine … the connection was bad and he was in a rush.”

Freddy turned to kiss Eve and Paul, who both looked perfectly at ease amid the swarm of Longbridge children.
They had visited Longbridge Grange a number of times before, coming out from London by train during the spring and summer of 1941, at Lady Penelope’s invitation, and the two older couples had grown into a warm, easy friendship, motivated just as much by mutual liking as by their hopes that Freddy and Tony would manage to get themselves married, as they quite obviously should be.

“Is it all right for a bride to be starving?” Freddy asked no one in particular. Paul put his arm around her shoulders, tipped her chin up and kissed her forehead. Thank God for this child, he thought, and exchanged a quick glance with Eve. Where was Delphine? Their eyes asked each other the question that had tormented them for so long. They had learned to speak of her as little as possible, for inside Occupied France she was as unreachable as if she were on the dark side of the moon, but the question was never far from their minds. Eve turned away to concentrate on Freddy.

“You’ll need your strength,” she advised her daughter. Eve had been part of all the arrangements, from the wedding in the village church, to which every soul in the neighborhood was invited, to the reception at The Grange, at which they expected only family, restricted by wartime travel problems to some sixty people, which seemed to Freddy an enormous number.

Accompanied by the little girls, Sophie, the youngest, and Sarah and Kate, the twins, Freddy and Jane ate sandwiches in the pantry, warned not even to think of going into the kitchen, where several women from the nearby farms were helping Lady Penelope and Eve put the finishing touches on the wedding feast.

Traditionally, the wedding should have taken place at noon, but since neither the bride nor the groom could guarantee to get there in time, it had been arranged for three in the afternoon, to take advantage of the daylight and still enable all the reception guests to arrive before dark and the blackout.

“I don’t think this is such a hot idea,” Freddy muttered to Jane, as she swallowed the last of her sandwich.

“What’s wrong … stomachache? You ate too fast. You’re excited, that’s all.”

“Excited, shit, I’m in a panic. I’m terrorized. I can’t do it, Jane It’s a mistake. I hardly know Antony. I should never have let you talk me into it.”

“Me?” Jane was indignant. “I never said boo. Do you think I
want
you for a sister-in-law, you half-assed Yank? My brother could have had a duke’s daughter … and here he’s throwing himself away on just another fairly pretty face. You’d never have had a chance with him in peacetime. What’s worse, you’re really a half-assed Frenchie, when it comes right down to it, and in my family we’ve never forgiven William the Conqueror. Should have stayed on his own bloody side of the Channel and left Britain to the Anglo-Saxons. Look, if you like, I’ll go tell Mummy to cancel the whole show. We’ve already lost the best man, so why not the bride too? The wedding presents weren’t up to much anyway … nothing we’d mind sending back. People would understand … since the war everybody’s had to learn to be flexible. If Antony weren’t my brother I could marry him myself so as not to disappoint the guests, but just say the word and we can be back at Hamble before they know we’ve gone. Better yet, we could drive on to London and pick up some cute, hot-blooded, sex-starved enlisted men for a really good time.”

“All right, all right, I’ll come quietly,” Freddy said gloomily.

She dressed in Jane’s bedroom, with Eve and Lady Penelope hovering about. The Longbridge attic had been ransacked for wedding dresses, but nothing that fit Freddy had been discovered, for she was taller than any of the Longbridge brides of past generations. Wartime restrictions and lack of clothing coupons made buying a new wedding dress impossible, yet Lady Penelope had been determined that her oldest son was going to have a bride who looked like a bride.

Wartime had turned her talent for petit point into an almost professional dressmaking skill. For the bodice, Lady Penelope had taken the top of a late-Victorian gown with a low, wide, ribbon-trimmed neckline and balloon puffed sleeves, that began just at the end of Freddy’s bare shoulders. Ruthlessly, she cannibalized two dresses from the period of George III, one of them possessing a pleated, full satin cloud of a skirt, held at the waist by a wide belt. It wasn’t long enough to reach the floor, but served beautifully under a split over-skirt, made entirely of lace, from which trailed a four-foot lace train. Sophie, Sarah and Kate had spent the morning weaving a garland of tiny white rosebuds that held in place a shoulder-length veil, a family heirloom that had been carefully preserved for more than three hundred years, from the time of Charles II.

As Freddy, unresisting, looked at her ongoing transformation in the mirror, she thought that it was getting a little easier to go through with the wedding with each added layer of this extravaganza of time-mellowed, multi-centuried ivory, for the less and less she recognized her out-of-uniform self, the idea of marriage became slightly less implausible. The only familiar sight in the mirror was her hair rising like a fireworks display from the ivory clouds that enveloped her.

Lots of people got married, she told herself. Her mother was married, Lady Penelope, whom she was now supposed to call just plain Penelope, but never Penny, was married … she knew hundreds of married women who didn’t seem to find their condition abnormal or onerous. Why then did getting married seem so strange a thing to be doing on a lovely afternoon? It was, on the other hand, just the right time of day to go flyin’.

“Is Antony all done up too? Uniform pressed and all that?” she asked Jane, out of idle curiosity.

“Antony?” Jane looked vacant, too busy zipping up her pale green maid-of-honor dress to pay much attention.

“Your brother Antony. The groom, or so I’ve been told.”

“Oh my God!” Jane ran off to check and returned in several minutes, stammering hysterically. “There’s no sign of him. Nobody knows anything!”

“Just what was that you were saying earlier about enlisted men, Jane?” Freddy inquired.

“Jane, calm yourself,” Eve said soothingly. “He called to say he was on his way, did he not?”

“Hours ago!”

“Perhaps he’s changed his mind,” Freddy mused. “It does happen, you know, in even the best families.”

“I talked to him,” six-year-old Sophie piped up.

“When, you devil?” her mother demanded.

“A few minutes ago. I was downstairs and the telephone rang so I answered it and it was Antony. He gave me a message.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Lady Penelope almost whispered, so that she wouldn’t scream.

“He gave
me
the message. He didn’t say to tell anyone else,” Sophie answered importantly. “He has a flat tire and he’ll be late. He said to meet him at the church.”

Lady Penelope looked at her watch. “Sophie, Kate, Sarah,
go put on your bridesmaids’ dresses. We’ll leave the house in exactly twenty minutes.”

“What if we have to wait at the church, Mama?” Sophie asked, in portentous tones, sashaying to center stage.

“Sophie Harriet Helena Longbridge … you … are … beginning … to … try … my … patience.” At these ultimately ominous words, the three little girls vanished in a squeaking flurry of white stockings and Mary Janes.

The wedding procession, in horsedrawn carriages, followed by the entire village and all the county neighbors on foot, on horseback, and in other carriages, had arrived in time to see the groom’s car speed up to the church. Tony and his best man managed to duck into the vestry and hurry to the back of the church, just before the bell in the tower struck three.

Once she started walking down the aisle on Paul’s arm, Freddy became a figure woven into a tapestry. She moved through that familiar, noble march, the center of a stately saraband, to music that no one in the church could listen to without also remaining, in some part of the brain, alert for the sound of bombers overhead.

“So that’s your girl,” sighed the best man, Jock Hampton, as he caught his first sight of the regal, tall, heavily veiled figure who approached from a distance. Only a few hours ago he had been about to leave for London on an overnight pass. “Now I understand the mad rush.”

“Shut up,” Tony said out of the side of his mouth, not wanting the sound of a human voice between himself and the sight of Freddy, although she was unrecognizable. As tall and straight as he was, Tony was still a good two inches shorter than the lanky, blond Californian who had been with the Eagle Squadron from the beginning, months before Tony himself had become Squadron Leader. The two young uniformed men in RAF blue waited silently, while the organ played until Paul brought Freddy to the altar, and put her hand in Tony’s.

Jock Hampton fell a pace back and watched them repeat their vows. He could barely make out Freddy’s veiled face in the dim light of the old church. The heirloom lace was so thickly encrusted that it covered the color of her hair, and it wasn’t until she threw it back, after the ceremony, so that she could kiss Tony, that he got his first real look at her. The hair
stood up on his scalp even before he had a coherent thought. Not just because she was beautiful, surpassingly beautiful, but because he had seen her once before and he knew already that he could never forget her face. The first time he’d laid eyes on her had been twenty-four hours ago, when she had pushed back her helmet and waved at him, twenty-four hours ago, right after she’d saved his life.

The largest room of the oldest wing of Longbridge Grange had been thrown open for the wedding party. Freddy danced with every one of her new relatives, before Jock Hampton felt it was proper to cut in on her, as she did some sort of teenaged box step with her new brother-in-law, Nigel.

“I was trying to say thank you,” he said, as he took her in his arms.