‘It’s all right, Alec,’ she said. There was no mattress.
‘I’ll spread out my greatcoat. You’ll be as warm as toast.’
‘But you haven’t got your greatcoat …’
She looked, and saw that he had it, over his arm. He spread it out carefully over the floor, and then he folded up his long legs, sat down and smiled up at her. She had never looked down on him before. He seemed so much younger. His fair hair sprang thickly from the crown of his head. She put out her hand to touch it, and again he caught hold of her.
‘Come here. Come on, Issy, we haven’t got much time.’
Of course they hadn’t. She understood it as well as he did: no, not understood but knew. There were no miles of empty, fertile fields beyond the hut. There was a bare half-mile before the airfield began. As she sat down beside him, he was already taking off his jacket.
For a moment Philip moved in her mind like a ghost. He was walking away to the car, case in hand. A miniature Isabel trotted at his side. Now they were driving together, two small creatures on their way to a destination Isabel no longer remembered.
It was too cold to take off their clothes and even Alec couldn’t see any blankets. They clutched each other through wool and cotton, pushing aside fabric until they touched skin. She put her lips on his bare neck and pressed into the warmth of him. He tasted of salt and cotton, Lifebuoy soap, cigarettes and engine oil. She nuzzled him with teeth and tongue, taking him in.
It was soft underneath her, as if they were lying on a mattress. She felt the prickle of the greatcoat as he pulled away her clothes to touch her. He smiled and touched her cheek as if there was all the time in the world but then they were caught up and shaking together, all lips and mouths, spit and wet hair trailing across her face, and then she was opening herself to him wider than she had ever known, and he was in her, part of her, so deep she forgot everything.
Chapter Eight
THERE WAS A place for his head between her chin and her breast. They lay for a long time like that, slowly returning to themselves. Perhaps they’d been asleep for a while. His hair was dark at the roots with sweat and his face was huddled against her. He must have got engine oil from the bike onto his hands and then run them through his hair, for she could smell the oil, and something else, like cordite after a firework explosion. He had twisted a length of her hair through the fingers of his left hand. When she stirred, it tugged like an anchor.
I must go home, she thought, I’ll be late.
Home … But where was home? Her mind struggled in a darkness that was new to it. It was as if Alec had entered her mind as well as her body, taken her and left himself there. He had possessed her. Possession, she thought, and her mind shivered for an instant in terror. But no, he was warm and breathing, as warm as she was. She would not think of anything different. They belonged together. Time had cracked, and given them to each other.
She shifted position, moving carefully so as not to disturb him. There was nothing in the world she wanted more than for him to stay there, where he was, against her. Her thighs were sticky. He’d come inside her and she’d held him tight, not wanting him to withdraw even though she knew they should be careful.
Home … But instead of the drab rooms of the flat, a grey stone farmhouse filled her mind. Its image developed. There was a line of washing blowing on the green, to one side of the house. The back door was half open and she found that she knew what lay inside. She knew the kitchen with the range that had to be black-leaded until it shone. Her fingers had learned the exact pressure to put on the cloth as she buffed up the surface. There was the Dutch airer that came down from the ceiling on thin twisted red-and-cream ropes. She knew how it swung, and how she had to loop the rope around the hook while she was hanging up the clothes, so that the rope would not pay out suddenly and dump the rack full of clean washing on the floor. In winter, the clean clothes smelled of her cooking. She didn’t mind baking smells, but she didn’t like it when her blouses reeked of roast meat.
As Isabel watched, the kitchen stopped being empty. Shadowy figures were starting to form, drifting like smoke at first and then spinning themselves into solidity. She snatched her mind away. They would dissolve if she didn’t look at them. Above all she didn’t want to see their faces. A sense of terrible urgency seized her and she shook Alec awake.
‘Alec! Alec! I must go home. Look at the time.’
He rolled over, away from her, and lay on his back bewildered, collecting his thoughts.
‘What’s the matter, Issy?’
‘I can’t be late. He’ll get worried.’ Worried was code. It meant suspicious.
‘I thought you said he was going to York with his brother?’
‘No,’ said Isabel. Alec’s words moved in her head, making no sense. ‘I never said that. He hasn’t got—’
‘Stay a bit longer,’ he said, reaching out for her. His eyes were as open to her as the sky. ‘Don’t go yet, sweetheart.’ Again his endearment moved her, melted her, but she scrambled to her knees, fastened her clothes and brushed them down with her hands. There was a strong, musky smell of sex. She smoothed her hair, knotted it at the nape of her neck and reached into her pocket for her handkerchief. She spat on the cotton and wiped around her eyes and mouth. Alec was dressing swiftly. He stopped, and said to her, ‘Do my face too.’
‘You’re fine. It doesn’t need it.’
‘Go on.’
She spat on the handkerchief again and wiped around his mouth, and then wiped his forehead. He was right: his face wasn’t clean. There was a film of grime on the cotton now, as if engine oil had sweated from the pores of his skin. But his skin was so fair and close-textured – so sweet to her touch …
‘Your handkerchief smells nice,’ he said.
‘I keep lavender in my handkerchief drawer,’ she said, and saw herself in a garden she didn’t know, snipping flowers off hoary lavender bushes, to dry them. Tentatively, she followed the memory further. There she was, coming indoors with a basket full of lavender. As she reached the green paint of the back door she saw that the sun had blistered it, and it was beginning to crack. But there was nothing to be done about that. It was impossible to get paint these days. She pulled the door open with her foot and then pushed it wider with her hip, because she hadn’t a free hand.
Now she remembered back to her first meeting with Alec. It was all coming clear, as the flat and Philip grew cloudier and more distant. These were that other one’s memories, and now they were hers, too. The farmhouse; her life there; the woman she’d been. Geoff had met Alec in the pub, got talking about cricket, and asked him over for high tea on Sunday. There was a cottage loaf, their own honey and an apple cake. Geoff had told her Alec was from Newcastle, and he’d been been over in Canada on the Air Training Plan. Canada! she’d thought. The furthest she’d ever been was York.
She’d always loved a Geordie voice. There was no more than a trace of it in Alec, but it was there. He was an educated man, an officer. He’d liked the baby. He had put his hand down into the basket where he slept, and stroked the baby’s cheek, awkwardly, as if he wasn’t used to babies. A pang went through her. He looked up, smiled, and she saw how his eyes were dark blue, almost navy. He was a big man, bigger than Geoff, but his touch on the baby’s cheek was so light that William didn’t stir. She had to drop her eyes.
She put the heavy teapot on the table, and began to slice the loaf. She could sense him watching her. She poured the tea.
‘I suppose you’ll go home, when you get leave,’ she said, for she wasn’t going to ask him if he was married. Most of them weren’t, she knew; they were too young. How old would he be – twenty-two, twenty-three? But they always looked older than they were.
‘That’s reet, canny lass,’ he’d answered softly, teasing her. She’d given a little gasp, as if she had a stitch. Geoff was supping his tea noisily, and didn’t hear.
Isabel caught her breath. What she was remembering did not belong to her. I am Isabel Carey, s
he told herself. I live in Kirby Minster. My husband is a doctor and his name is Philip Carey. She muttered the words to herself like a spell, and Alec, the Alec of now, heard her. He glanced at her, she shook her head, deprecating herself, and he turned back to doing up his bootlaces. Now he was whistling under his breath. It caught at her, how content he looked, and she found she was smiling too. He looked up.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You were smiling.’
‘I like watching you when you’re doing something like tying your laces. You know how you can be quite close to someone – and yet there are expressions of his that you’ll never see? When he’s working, or on his own in a train compartment.’ She was thinking of Philip. He was sharp in her mind again. She saw him tracking across the countryside, uncovering it lane by lane, on his own and not even thinking of her.
‘Only quite close?’ Alec asked teasingly, but she had Philip in her mind and she stared without understanding. ‘I’d have said we were closer than that.’ He looked into her eyes boldly. Philip would never do that. For him, what they did in bed was a world apart from their daytime selves.
‘Very close,’ she said, with a swagger to match Alec’s, letting her naked self appear in her face. Why had she let herself think of Philip now? She must push him away. It wasn’t safe to have the two of them together in her mind: Philip and Alec.
Suddenly Alec’s smile disappeared. His attention switched from her. He was frowning, preoccupied. ‘It can’t be late,’ he said, as if to convince himself.
‘It might be. It’s ridiculous, neither of us wearing a watch.’
She could hardly believe he’d been so careless. He had to have his watch with him. It had to be accurate to the minute. He was the Skipper. A minute – a second, even – might be a life. He’d told her that they all synchronised their watches at the end of the briefing.
Alec was looking at his wrist, where the watch should be. There was a paler strip of skin where the strap usually covered it. She looked at the beauty of his wrist, the way it turned, the springing hairs that were darker than the fair hair on his head. She felt as if the blood were leaving her face, a backwards tide taking her life with it. She had got to touch him, have him—
‘Can’t think what happened to it,’ he said. ‘Must be in the hut.’
He meant the long Nissen hut where they slept, with one iron stove to heat it. He had his slip of a single room, because he was an officer. He had his iron bed, his locker, his table, the muddy walk to ablutions. It was one hell of a way. You’d spend half the day walking if you didn’t have a pushbike. These hostilities-only bomber stations were all the same. Nothing but mud, barbed wire, concrete and corrugated iron. Temporary cities thrown up in the middle of cabbage fields.
‘It’d better ruddy well be there. If I’ve dropped it in the mud—’
‘It’ll be by your bed,’ said Isabel.
He glanced uneasily over his shoulder, at the white glare of the winter afternoon.
‘Better get a move on. I can take you back on the bike, Issy.’
She fastened Syd’s jacket and put on the helmet as they crossed the fields to the lane. Now she felt bolder. She was Alec’s girl, who rode pillion on his bike. But as they came out of the hut, Isabel heard the sound that had haunted her childhood: a Lanc’s engines – Merlin engines. An engine caught, then roared into life. And then the next, and then the next, and then the next. Port outer, port inner, starboard inner, starboard outer. The engines roared at full throttle, then the sound eased and died back.
‘That’ll be N-Nora,’ said Alec.
‘You can’t know that!’
‘She’s had repairs to the port outer. They’re testing,’ he explained, as if to a child, but she saw that he was already more than half over the border into his own country beyond the wire, in the engine noise, knowing what every reverberation meant. The intensity of his listening seemed to pull the sound towards them.
‘You’ve got to go,’ she said, before he could say it.
‘Yes.’
But he stood irresolute, his eyes on her. She realised that he was waiting for something, and then she knew what it was; nothing high-flown, just the jacket he’d borrowed for her from one of his crew. ‘You’ll need this,’ she said, stripping off Syd’s jacket. ‘Here.’ She was already pulling off the leather helmet.
‘You won’t be cold?’
There was something graceless in the way he asked the question, as if it didn’t much matter whether she was cold or not. She was suddenly not quite real to him. Isabel shivered with the sudden lifting-off of the warm sheepskin lining, and with the sense of her own self suddenly ghost-like. Alec’s mind must be elsewhere; surely he wouldn’t leave her like this otherwise, in the middle of nowhere, without a coat. ‘Feel how thick my jumper is,’ she said, wanting to make something better of it than the reality. ‘I’ll be warm as toast. I’ll go back across the fields.’
Alec folded the jacket, tucked the helmet inside and strapped it to the carrying rack. ‘You sure?’
‘Sure.’
He swung himself onto his motorbike and kicked down on the starter. He was leaving. She reached out, and touched the leather of his jacket, as if for luck, but he didn’t notice. As the bike moved forward he gave her a thumbs-up, and then the wheels spun in the dry mud and he was gone.
The roar of his bike vanished instantly, as if cut off. Wintry quiet enveloped her. Dry leaves rustled where they had drifted at the foot of the hedge, and the same thrush hopped through the undergrowth. She’d need to get going. She had to walk back to town, and by the time she got there it would be dusk.
But Isabel did not turn in the direction of the town. Instead, she walked the other way, towards the airfield. She had to see it again.
There was no sound of aircraft. No vehicles passed her. The lane was narrow and overgrown. She walked steadily, keeping her eyes down until she had rounded the lane’s curve and knew that if she looked up she would be able to see the broken wire and the huge emptiness of the airfield.
She heard an engine behind her. Almost as soon as she heard it, the lorry was on her. It swept past with its canvas-covered load, so close that it grazed her sleeve. The driver didn’t even sound his horn. She jumped back, and as she did so a second lorry passed, and then a third. She waited, pressed against the hedge, while the convoy passed. There must have been ten lorries. She saw their drivers’ faces, tired and indifferent, pushing on. The smell of exhaust gripped her throat. She was trembling. The lorries had ploughed past as if she were nothing. The men didn’t glance at her.
But still she was drawn onwards, towards the perimeter fence. Suddenly the air filled with sound, as if someone had turned up the volume switch on a radio which had been playing, muted, all the while. She heard engines, and, above the noise of the engines, she heard voices.
The guardhouse roof was intact. Figures in uniform moved around it. Lorries were passing through the gate, one by one, stopping by the guardhouse for the driver to show his papers, and then moving on.
She looked along the perimeter fence. It was perfect. The airfield’s buildings were complete. There it lay, a hastily built city with its temporary air hardened by use. She scanned the low curves of Nissen huts, the brick admin block, the control tower with tiny figures visible through the unbroken glass windows. Somewhere there would be a bomb store, camouflaged against air attack. Charlie knew all the names of the bombs, and how heavy a load the Lancaster could carry in its bomb bay. Tallboy, Wallis bouncing bomb, cookies and Grand Slams. As the bombers lumbered above their heads, climbing, Charlie would guess at where they were going and what they were carrying, just as if he’d been in the briefing with the crew who were now passing above them, and had seen the chart with its routes marked by tape.
In the distance, a tractor hauled a long train of bomb trolleys. She shaded her eyes and stared into the hangar opposite her. Through the dazzle of winter light she thought she saw the sh
adow of a Lanc, with ground crew swarming over it. Must be serious damage, she thought, or they’d do the repairs out at dispersal.
Isabel closed her eyes. Waves of sound beat against her ears: the noise of a hive, full of purpose, humming with its own life. Alec was in there somewhere. He would smell of Isabel, as she smelled of him. If she was real then he was real too.
She and Charlie had both known the outlines of aircraft. They’d fought to be first to identify each one as it flew overhead. Once, only once, it had been a Junkers 88, in broad daylight, coming in so low that a ploughman had said in the pub, ‘I saw his dom face.’
Now she opened her eyes and saw the face of the airfield. It was here. It was not a ghost, or if it was one, then she was too. It had imprinted itself too deep for time to wipe the landscape clean. The air crew cycling from mess to barracks would be glad of the dry weather. Even so, there was mud wherever she looked, and she saw how it would deepen and become a sea as winter wore on, and then it would freeze, and thaw, and freeze again. The mud would be there, churned by boots and wheels, until spring came. The mud would outlive the men.
‘Alec,’ she said under her breath. The sky was loud with the noise of Merlin engines. She moved forward until she was pressing her hands to the fence, but no one turned or appeared to see her. The wind blew harder, and the windsock by the taxiway closest to her filled with it and pointed at Isabel. It seemed to be the only thing that knew she was here.
Her body ached from the wind. It was so cold; she couldn’t remember ever being so cold. Why had she told Alec she would be warm? The wind penetrated her. She was raw to the bone and yet she couldn’t leave. She had to watch them. A couple of ground crew walked past her, along the perimeter track. One of them whistled tunelessly in the teeth of the wind. The other talked animatedly, as if to himself, about a football game. His words trailed past Isabel in snatches. His boots, striking the concrete, were clodded with mud.
The Greatcoat Page 8