Till We Meet Again (64 page)

He loved Freddy madly, Wing Commander the Honorable Antony Longbridge thought, as he deposited a pile of moth-eaten blankets and pillows under one of the flowering pear trees near the dovecot for the picnic, but somehow she’d changed from the girl he’d married. Or, to be fair, could it be that he’d changed, since this fucking sinus condition had developed? The thing didn’t bother him at all except when he was climbing to twenty thousand feet, or diving from twenty thousand feet, but it had made him unserviceable, landed him at a desk, commanding a wing of thirty-six fighters, instead of being allowed to pilot his own kite. If you couldn’t fly to the limit, you were no damn good at all. Sinus! Christ, what a bloody bad show! To be fair, to be scrupulously fair, even over-fair, was it perhaps the difference between the earthbound, like him, and the freedom of the pilot, like Freddy, that caused him to feel a difference in her?

And what was that difference, exactly? Surely she hadn’t always had the aura of … was it
command?
 … that she had now. She looked so damned dashingly on top of the world in that uniform he was planning to burn the second the war was over. Burn her uniform, weigh her black shoes with pebbles and sink them in the river, cut up her forage cap into a million small pieces, take her wings and hide them for a thousand years, make her grow her hair down to her knees and wear dresses that showed her tits right down to the nipples, to hell with what people would say, and give her a good spanking to let her know who was boss—he couldn’t wait! Surely she hadn’t always been so utterly enchanted by what she was doing, so that on the occasions when they managed to spend her two days off together, she rattled on about her bombers until he was tempted to tell her to shut up? He was proud of her, damn it—who wouldn’t be proud of a wife as brave as she was?—but a bomber was just a bloody lumbering big bus on wings, didn’t she realize that? Didn’t she understand that the messiah hadn’t come when they’d invented the Norden bombsight? Wouldn’t you think that she might be a little more … tactful … about the kick she got out of her work, considering that he couldn’t properly do his, not the way he wanted to?

In fact, thought Tony, sitting down on one of the blankets and folding his arms around his knees, wouldn’t it have been normal if she’d retired from the whole show two years ago, when Annie was born? The ATA was a civilian organization, after all, and Freddy could have left without any criticism from anyone, but no, she flew every day right till the beginning of her sixth month, when she couldn’t squeeze into her uniform any longer, no matter how cleverly she eased her waistbands. Only then did she stay put here at The Grange, probably driving his poor Mum as crazy as she’d driven him—true, he admitted it, they hadn’t planned on having a child in the middle of a war, but when you got married these things had a way of happening; what was he supposed to do, apologize? Then she’d produced the kiddie at the end of eight months as if she didn’t intend to wait a second longer than necessary, and three months later she’d gone back to the ATA, as strong, as lively, as much of a buccaneer as ever, leaving darling little Annie with his mother and Eve and Sophie and Kate and Sarah and anyone else who felt like taking care of her, which, naturally, they all did, so that Annie probably thought that she had six or seven mothers, poor little bugger.

The thought of Annie made Tony smile. She was an inquisitive elf, who never walked if she could run; already she knew every vegetable in the walled kitchen garden, every tree and every yew hedge around the house, every rose and every dog and every horse that had ever come near the house. She took a serious, almost precocious interest in these living things, which she far preferred to toys. She was so delicately balanced on her little feet, as graceful as a larch on her slender legs and as fastidious as a kitten, his little Annie was, and she didn’t fly anything, not even a balloon, and if he had his way, she never would. No, she’d grow up as demure and dainty as she was now, deep in a peaceful green countryside, learning to ride and do needlework as well as his mother, and to speak French, of course, which she already did with Eve, who came out to Longbridge Grange to see her whenever she could. Ah, his Annie would be a proper English gentlewoman. And as soon as the war was over, the minute peace was declared, he’d get Freddy pregnant again, and then when she’d had that baby, he’d start all over until she had enough children so that she’d wonder what she’d ever found to fill all the long, lazy hours she’d wasted during
the war. Bombers? Fighter planes? What were they, she’d ask? How could any machine ever built interest the mother of so many children … especially when she had to put her husband first, as any good wife would?

She loved Freddy, she really loved her, thought Jane, as she helped her mother carry out the food for the picnic, but the longer she knew her the more she realized that there was something about Freddy that just resisted giving itself up and blending into the unity that made up a proper family. Sometimes she thought that the two of them had talked about everything two females possibly could talk about, particularly when they were sisters-in-law and fellow pilots, and then Freddy would suddenly drift away with a look as if she were seeing something Jane had never seen, as if she were thinking about something Jane could never understand. She’d never asked Freddy about those moments, but she knew that there was a mystery in her past—about a man, of course, what else could it possibly be?—that meant too much to her to ever be revealed. The eternally surprising blue of Freddy’s eyes would grow dim, and her quick, sporting smile that wrinkled her nose would disappear, and for just a moment she’d seem not to be there at all.

Whatever the mystery was, it explained why flying meant more to Freddy than it ever would to her. In a way Jane envied Freddy her constant passion, the way a married woman, not unpleasantly bored with her husband, would envy young love in its first wildness. When the war was over, Jane didn’t think that she’d ever want to look at an aircraft again. Soon it would be five years of climbing in and out of the blasted things—oh, it had been wonderfully exciting and challenging to be able to do the job, especially as it grew more complicated—and, without question, it was still the most direct possible way of replacing a man for battle that any girl would ever know. On occasion, it was just as good sport as ever, especially when you drew a bomber to ferry. Freddy was dead wrong about that bloody Yank Minneapolis-Honeywell Supercharger—it was much more reliable to use the standby screws, one for each engine, but who could win such a theoretical argument? Come to think of it, did she really give a good goddamn, or had she just bickered about it to be companionable?

Jane put down the platter of corned-beef sandwiches and
covered them carefully against potential attack by insects. She glanced at Tony, sitting lost in thought, and thought that he looked the way she felt. Some of the heart had gone out of her when Margie Fairweather, who had started with them back in the earliest days, was killed when the Proctor she was flying had engine failure. She’d managed to land it safely in a field but it had blown up in a hidden ditch before the engine could be stopped. There had been other deaths in the ATA, many others, but Margie’s had been the saddest of all, for she’d left behind a small baby. Her husband, Douglas, also of the ATA, had been killed on a volunteer mission over the Irish Sea in bad weather, four months earlier. Did Freddy never think of little Annie when she took over the controls of the heaviest planes that had ever been flown in this war? It wasn’t something you could ask her, somehow, any more than you could ask Jock why he kept on flying with his squadron when he’d had so many missions that he could have chosen, with honor, to fly a desk ten times over. You had to accept the fact that Freddy was willing to take the risk, baby or no baby.

Where was Jock, she wondered. Probably, on this rare day that found them all able to come back to The Grange for a few days, he was talking to Freddy about—what else?—the bombing of Germany that would soon, very soon now, prepare the way for the invasion. All of England seemed, when she flew over it, to have become one vast staging ground for the combat to come. Men and materiel were collected so thick on the ground and at the seaports that it was a wonder the whole island didn’t sink under their weight. And after the invasion, after the victory that they all prayed must come, what would Jock do with himself?

Unquestionably, Tony and Freddy would live down here in the country, leading the life led by fifteen generations of Longbridge landowners and gentleman farmers. She herself would go to London and have a series of fabulous escapades, one after another, each one more thrilling than the last, until she had her final fling and found the man she could settle for, and did the right thing by her Mama.

But Jock? Jane Longbridge sat down on a blanket with her back to her brother, so as not to seem to want to interrupt his thoughts, and contemplated the question of Jock Hampton. Perhaps, after all, she was lucky that Freddy’s sneaky, ingenious attempts to throw her and Jock together had failed.
What if he had fallen in love with her, as Freddy had intended him to do? Now she’d have to be worrying about going back to California with an American husband and adapting to a new country and a new way of life. Another war bride.

No, she was fortunate indeed that it hadn’t worked out that way. She had—Jane prayed—almost stopped being in love with Jock. If anyone had ever told her that she’d do something as girlishly banal as caring for a man who didn’t love her, she’d have hit him over the head with a bottle of whatever was handy … but she loved him, alas, with an absurd, passionate, painful intensity, although no one, not even Freddy, knew it. The cure she chose was as humiliating as it was trusty.

She had only to look at Jock and Freddy together, only to see that the beautiful blond fool of a Californian—whose face Jane ached to touch, ever since Tony and Freddy’s wedding—was still in love with her sister-in-law, only to see that Freddy still didn’t know it, to feel her heart harden a little more against him. Soon, very soon, the shell around her heart would have grown as tough as a crab’s, and thoughts of Jock Hampton and his eyes and his lips, his Viking face, would no longer trouble her nights and darken her days.

As for Freddy, Jane congratulated herself, she could honestly say in her heart of hearts that she’d never been jealous of another girl, and she didn’t intend to start now. Poor Jock … when the war was over he’d undoubtedly leave England, and although he’d become an honorary member of their family, who knew how often he’d be able to come back again? And when he saw Freddy after the war, a Freddy in a twin set and a tweed skirt, with a bunch of children and a house to run, would he still be in love with her? She’d be a bit plump then, probably, and perhaps her hair would have started to fade—even to gray a bit—and she’d be preoccupied with the new baby or a sick dog or a cook who hadn’t worked out—yes, in a few years, inevitably that’s the way Freddy would be. She’d grow out of some of her piss and vinegar … England would get to her yet. On the other hand, Jane thought approvingly, she herself would still be enjoying her flings. Ten years of lovely flings would hardly be enough to compensate for the deprivations of thirteen days on duty and only two off. How soon, she wondered, would decent stockings come back after the war?

He was still more or less fond of Freddy, Jock Hampton thought, as he leaned on the windowsill of his room and looked out at Tony and Jane sitting in what looked like a comfortable silence on the blankets under the flowering pear tree, but why the fuck couldn’t she stop singing “Till We Meet Again” to his goddaughter? When the Eagle Squadron had still been intact, for a year after her marriage, she and Tony had joined them at the squadron’s favorite pub as often as she had leave. Each night, as they sat drinking and smoking and trying not to think about the men who hadn’t come back from the latest sortie, she’d sung to them for hours on end, songs of today and songs of World War I that she’d learned from Eve. The evening had never been over for anyone until Freddy had sung that last lovely line, those last words, “Till we meet again,” which Jock had always believed, against all logic, was a private promise made directly from her to him. She didn’t know it—but he did, and that was what mattered.

Annie’s room was right next to his, and even through the thick walls he could hear Freddy’s lilting voice as she waltzed the little girl around and around. Didn’t Freddy realize that it was the kind of tune that got stuck in your mind and didn’t stop driving you crazy for months? Why couldn’t she sing “Mairzy Doats” or something forgettable like that? He could always tell her to stop, he supposed, but how can you tell a mother that the sound of her singing to her child is a torment? How could you explain to her that you’d find yourself hearing that old tune when you should be concentrating on one of the dozens of pretty, willing girls you had to beat off with sticks in London? They didn’t call pilot’s wings “leg spreaders” for no reason … they even worked for Second Lieutenants, but rank sure had its privileges.