Till We Meet Again (65 page)

He could always go out and sit with Jane and Tony, or else find Lady Penelope in the kitchen and give her a hand—the cook was getting too old to be much help—but something had made him unable to move from his observation post. It must be the weather. Everyone in England said it was the hottest May in memory—back home, in San Juan Capistrano, California, U.S.A., it would just have been another nice day, the sort of day on which you’d have a hard time trying to decide whether to surf or play tennis, so you’d end up doing
both. Or maybe it was the kind of day on which a guy like himself, in love with speed, in love with danger, in love with excitement, in love with flying, might just hear one word too many about a big show going on overseas in England and manage to dig up the train fare to Canada and get enough flight training so that he could join the Eagle Squadron.

It was exactly on this kind of day, four years ago, that he’d said good-bye to his family and set off—maybe that was why he felt so restless. Not just restless … moody. In fact, he was pissed off for some inexplicable reason … unquestionably pissed off, which was damn peculiar, for he hadn’t had an opportunity to come to The Grange for months now, and he should be enjoying every second of it. Didn’t this beat leading his squadron through the hostile air toward Germany, escorting the slow-flying bombers, protecting them from the German antiaircraft guns and fighter planes until they approached the target? Didn’t this beat flying back through a sky shit-full of flak, until you could see the coastline below and all you had to worry about was being shot down in water that was never anything but very fucking wet and very fucking cold? And yet, when he was doing his job, he never felt pissed off like this. He might feel bored or terrified or furious or insanely victorious, but one thing about that Mustang P-51, that fucking brilliant fighting machine, that glorious gun platform with wings, was that its pilot never had the time to feel pissed off. Pissed off, in his book, was as maddening as a constant low fever, an aggravation, an irritation, an itch you couldn’t scratch, a thirst you couldn’t satisfy, no matter how much you drank.

One of the reasons he kept on flying was that he knew if he let them bump him up to Headquarters he’d feel pissed off all of the time, instead of just some of the time. Group HQ grounded him every once in a while; saying that he was due for a rest, but they couldn’t keep him on the deck for long. If you wanted to fly and you weren’t sick or loony, they just had to let you go and do it, Lieutenant Colonel or not.

When he’d left home to join the Eagle Squadron, he’d just been another wild, sky-mad, inexperienced college kid of twenty who couldn’t stand the idea of missing the fun. Now he was twenty-four; he’d learned that fun and war weren’t the same thing during his first mission, but he was deeply glad that he’d come to the right place for the wrong reasons. Before the Eagles had been transferred to the United States
Army Air Corps, they’d shot down the equivalent of six Luftwaffe squadrons, and that was way back in ’42, two centuries ago. Not too shabby. And they hadn’t even had their Mustangs then.

Shit, why was he sitting up here waxing philosophical when he could be doing some good in the kitchen? Naturally, Freddy wasn’t there—she probably didn’t even know how to put together a decent ham sandwich. What a hopeless wife she’d make for Tony after the war—it really made him feel sad just to think about it. A great guy like Tony deserved better. He deserved a girl who’d been brought up to do things graciously, a girl with his own kind of traditions in her blood, a girl who’d sink into the pleasures of peacetime with nothing more on her mind than making him happy. His best friend—the best friend he’d ever had in his life—had every right to a wife who put him first in everything. That was the only kind of girl he’d even
consider
marrying, himself, that was for damn sure.

Instead, poor old Tony was stuck with Freddy, the bossiest bitch a man could imagine.
Everything was wrong with Freddy
. She was too stubborn, too spunky, too aggressive, too determined to have her own way, no matter what. So what if she’d once saved his life? It only went to show what a thoroughly
unreasonable
female she was. How poor Eve and Paul had put up with her all those years, when she was learning how to fly, was beyond him. They might just as well have had a boy like him instead of a tomboy like Freddy, who didn’t seem to know she was a mother, much less a wife.

Jock looked down on the lawn and saw Freddy and Annie emerge at a gleeful run. She’d dressed the kid in a pair of tiny blue overalls—now wasn’t that typically dumb of her—did she want to turn his goddaughter into a tomboy too? Wasn’t one enough in the long-suffering Longbridge family? And look at her; what did she think she was playing at, all done up in a strapless flowered sun dress as if this were the fucking French Riviera? Shit, she even had on red high-heeled sandals—she must have been raiding Jane’s closet again. Well, at least it made a change from that navy blue uniform she usually sailed about in like some sort of damn corsair, looking as if she expected him to salute her, with that big smartass smile and that infuriatingly friendly look in her eyes.

Without knowing that he’d done so, Jock got up from his
seat by the windowsill and followed Freddy downstairs and outside, no more able to resist being close to her than he’d been able to pull himself away from the sound of her voice while she sang to her daughter.

Freddy lay full length on one of the old blankets, a slim version of one of Renoir’s luscious redheads who had happened to borrow her dress from Matisse. She had crossed her bare arms over her eyes to shut out the brightness of a sun to which she had become unaccustomed, and kicked off her shoes so that she could wriggle her bare toes in its warmth.

Whiskey, corned-beef sandwiches and Milky Ways made a mysteriously satisfying combination, she decided; each one was a form of perfection in itself, yet, when taken one after the other, they turned into a total treat that couldn’t be explained by the individual parts. Was she feeling this deep contentment because so many of the people she loved were within touching distance? In a few hours her parents were expected on the train from London, and that would make it complete … if only Delphine were here. As the thought came into her mind she felt the same unexpected plunge of her heart that attacked her each time she realized how long it had been since any of them had had news of Delphine.

France lay so heartbreakingly near. Barely a day passed when she didn’t see its coastline from a cockpit, and yet there might as well have been a concrete wall built around the country, reaching up into the clouds, an impenetrable prison wall that allowed no one to see what was going on inside. Her father would have been notified, through the headquarters of the Free French in London, and their network of radio communications with the Resistance, if anything out of the ordinary had happened to Delphine, and he’d had no news in years. They all had to reassure each other that Delphine was managing to get along somehow, but the lack of any contact was increasingly painful. It was something that she and her parents only talked about among themselves; it wasn’t fair to lay another burden on the Longbridges, who had so many children of their own to care for, to say nothing of Annie.

Darling little Annie, she thought, listening to Jock and Tony and Gerald all vying to tempt her into their laps, had probably caused less worry than any baby ever born. She looked a little like Delphine; she had the same perfect little chin, and lips that tilted up at the corners even when she
wasn’t smiling. She’d been named after Anette de Lancel, much to her grandfather’s pleasure, but to Freddy, Annie would always recall the nickname that everyone in the ATA used for the faithful taxi Ansons that had flown them to and from the aircraft they’d ferried some forty million miles within England since the war began. She opened her eyes to see Annie sitting on Gerald’s shoulders, her arms wrapped around his neck.

Near him, Jock lay frowning at the sky. What was wrong with Jock anyway, she wondered fleetingly. If only he hadn’t been so busy making out like a bandit, he and Jane might have made a couple, as she’d plotted they should. Then they’d all truly be one happy family. She lay back and closed her eyes again, thinking that some people—including Jock, she suspected—didn’t approve of her decision to return to flying so soon after Annie’s birth, leaving her at Longbridge Grange with her mother-in-law and her bevy of prepubescent aunts. But she had come to England in 1939 to do a job—never mind what had brought her here, never mind if she had been following in Mac’s footsteps rather than thinking for herself—and that job would not be over until the war was won. As one of the only thirteen women in England who had the training to fly four-engined aircraft, how could she even consider retiring to spend all her time on one small infant, particularly when Penelope was so willing to take Annie into her practical and experienced care?

Whenever she had her two days off, or even overnight, if she could get a lift from another ATA pilot to the little airport recently built near The Grange, she came home to her daughter, so long as she could report back, without fail, to White Waltham the next morning.

In what other country in the world were the airdromes so close to each other that they were like subway stops, she wondered? There was one less than every ten miles now, many of them on the vast lawns of great homes, on cricket fields, polo fields and soccer fields, many of them so new that they weren’t included on any maps, so that, like every other ATA pilot, she put in a lot of time at the Maps and Signal Office, memorizing the positions of the latest landing fields on her route and their surrounding landmarks.

Stirlings delivered to Keevil, Spitfires delivered to Brize Norton, Warwicks to Kemble, Mosquitoes to Shawbury, Halifaxes to Yorkshire, she thought in a sleepy litany—so
went her days. The only plane she hadn’t been trained to fly was a Flying Boat, and she bet she could handle one if she had to.

Lying here with her eyes closed, Freddy visualized the island that was England as one vast, complicated map, crisscrossed by the many pathways that were so deeply engraved in her mind: the railroad lines, the roads, the forests, the factories, the rivers, the castles and manor houses, the narrow corridors created by thousands of barrage balloons that protected the big cities, the church spires and even the traces of the old Roman roads that still could be seen from the air. Would it ever become a three-dimensional countryside to her, turn into no more—or was it no less?—than this home, with its many rich acres clearly surrounded by boundaries and walls, or would it always remain a two-dimensional map?

Why wonder? Whatever happened after the war wasn’t worth bothering about, because the only thing that mattered now was winning.
When?
When would the invasion come? Baking here lazily in the sun made her feel as if she were goofing off, although the weariness of the last thirteen days was deep in her bones and she knew that she must take advantage of this respite. Jane was as tired as she … or was she restless? She’d been awfully snappy at breakfast. Did she just need to get laid?

And if only Tony too looked happier. That weary, tight, almost angry look he had on his lean, lined face seemed more set each time she saw him again, after the long absences their jobs imposed on them. It must be due to the weight of responsibility he had now. What could it be like to send thirty-six planes up every night, after spending all day making plans with the officers responsible for arming and fueling and maintaining each flight, and then sleeping only fitfully after the flight took off, for what wing commander could really sleep when his men were over Europe? Before they were due back, he’d be up, sweating out the return of his planes early the next morning. No wonder he looked so drawn and far away. She tried to chatter enough to take his mind off his preoccupations whenever she could, for ferrying was such a simple job compared to his, but it didn’t seem to help somehow.

Thank God they had The Grange to come back to from time to time. She lived with Jane and a bunch of other girls in a cottage they’d rented near White Waltham, while Tony
lived at the base. It was a rotten way to conduct a marriage, but war was a rotten way to conduct a world, and until one was over, the other would have to be endured.

“Annie,” she said, half-opening her eyes, “do you think you could leave those nice men alone long enough to come and give your mother a little kiss?”

19

D
ELPHINE stepped resolutely out of her house on the Villa Mozart, but when she saw the huge black Mercedes parked on the cobbles of the narrow street, she stopped moving abruptly, as an involuntary prohibition rendered her incapable of entering the automobile that General von Stern had sent for her. She had been carrying a black chiffon wrap, bordered in silver fox. Now she flung it quickly over her shoulders and clasped it tightly around her with both hands, as if the flimsy garment could protect her.

“If you please, Mademoiselle,” the driver in his Nazi uniform said politely, opening the door. Only the familiar, courteous formula enabled her to force her legs to carry her into the car. During the drive to the house on the Rue de Lille, she sat rigidly, as far back in the seat as possible, so as not to be seen through the windows, yet unwilling to allow her back to actually rest against the cushions of the automobile. She breathed shallowly, her gaze riveted, in a trance of loathing, on the helmets on the heads of the driver and the armed soldier who sat beside him.

She had been obliged to allow the general to send his car for her. Delphine had had no car or driver since the Occupation began; there was no fuel for taxis in the spring of 1943, no transportation except by bicycle or foot or Métro—how, in her long, bare-shouldered evening dress and the diamonds Bruno had advised her to wear, could she otherwise have reached the formal dinner party? Bruno had promised her that the cultivated and surprisingly decent general who had requisitioned his house would listen to her fears and set in motion the search for Armand. He had further assured Delphine that she must not be nervous, for she was to be the guest of honor, and she would find herself among people of her own world.