A Fragile Peace

  She shook her head, smiling. In the distance they heard the low drone of a large formation of aircraft. Tom turned his head, listening. ‘Ours,’ he said. ‘Lancasters from the sound of it.’

  ‘Do you think it’s working? Bombing the German cities, I mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  It was becoming darker by the minute. She glanced around the room. ‘This place belongs to Robbie’s family?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s jolly convenient. We use it sort of unofficially, if we want a bit of peace and quiet. I spend quite a bit of time here.’

  ‘May I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Isn’t Robbie a little – well, young for you? A little – inexperienced?’

  Real amusement rang in his laughter. ‘Afraid I’m leading the poor little lamb astray? Don’t you believe it. No one’s too young in this man’s army. Robbie’s all right. And, let’s say, he makes an undemanding drinking companion…’

  ‘He thinks you like him.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘—and hero-worship is hard to resist?’ The moment she had spoken she thought the words were too harsh. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, quickly.

  He regarded her pensively. ‘Has anyone ever told you that you say sorry far too often?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, somebody’s telling you now,’ he said pleasantly.

  They sat in not unfriendly silence. The sun had gone now, leaving a rosy light in the sky and a faint sheen of gold in the lace of the tree tops.

  ‘You’re very quiet?’

  She stirred, spoke her thoughts candidly, her brow furrowed. ‘I was just thinking. About this afternoon. It only just seems to be sinking in. We could have been killed, couldn’t we?’

  ‘Yes. Takes a bit of getting used to, doesn’t it?’ A match flared in the gathering darkness. She looked at him in the flickering light, astonished to discover that every line of his face, every movement of his spare body was familiar to her. Had he really been in her mind and memory that much?

  ‘I ought to go,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, stay a while. You’ve been through a tough time this afternoon. In fact – it occurred to me –’ he leaned forward, cigarette glowing ‘– there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go back to camp for the night. I’m on duty at six anyway. You could stay here in peace – get a good night’s sleep—’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly put you out so…’

  ‘Nonsense. You aren’t trying to say that you’d rather drive on?’

  ‘Well – no – but—’

  ‘It’s settled, then.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ She could not keep the relief from her voice. She knew that she would not now have reached Tonbridge in daylight, and the thought of hotel-hunting in the blackout did not appeal at all.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  She relaxed, leaning back in her chair, sipping her beer. In the peace of the evening, the events of the afternoon seemed all at once like events from a nightmare. Without volition she found herself recalling the indescribable noise, the terror. A bloodstained figure loomed, staggering – ‘Bastards! Bastards!’ She shuddered.

  ‘Are you all right?’ His voice was quiet.

  ‘Yes. Fine.’ But she was not. Her sudden and unexpected loss of nerve was in her trembling voice. She clenched her hands hard. Stupid!

  There was a movement in the dimness and he was beside her, perched on the arm of her chair, her shaking hands grasped hard in his. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a natural reaction. Don’t think about it. It’s over. We’re all right. Nothing happened.’

  She remembered the sodden bundle that had been lifted from the ditch. A man is dead. Nothing happened? Oh, God, the world really has gone mad. She ducked her head, tears stinging. Tom lived through this or something like it almost every day of his life. As had Buzz. And Buzz had died. She bowed her wet cheek to the warm hands that held hers, felt his sudden stillness at the intimacy of the gesture. For the space of a dozen heartbeats they sat so. Then she lifted her head. ‘I’m sorry.’ She could hardly see him in the darkness.

  A long finger brushed her sore face, smudging the tears. ‘I thought I told you,’ Tom said pensively, ‘to stop saying sorry?’ His face was not a hand’s breadth from hers. She sat quite still, head tilted back, waiting, sensing his hard-held control, willing it to break. He hesitated, obviously expecting her to move away.

  ‘Tom?’ She did not care that her voice begged, would, she knew, have begged had he demanded it.

  He kissed her then, softly and carefully, as gently as if she had been an unpredictable child, easily frightened. In two long years no one had touched her so. A surge of physical excitement flooded her, painfully urgent. She lifted a hand, pulled his mouth hard against hers and then, feeling his faint, surprised resistance, with a subtlety she had not known she possessed, released him, her fingers light on the nape of his neck, her lips soft. This time it was he who, suddenly and fiercely, pulled her to him. Moments later he let her go and stood up, abruptly. She sat, touching with her tongue that place on her lip where his teeth had bruised her, and waited. She heard him move across the room, heard the swish of the long curtains. Then a small, shaded light clicked on. He stood in the shadows, watching her, his straight, dark hair untidy across his forehead.

  A long moment passed in perfect stillness.

  ‘I think I’d better go,’ he said, carefully.

  ‘No.’ Her voice was clear and perfectly steady.

  ‘Allie…’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ She had never dreamed that she could want anything as much as she wanted his touch at that moment. ‘Stay.’ She lifted her chin, her cheeks burning. ‘Please?’

  ‘Allie – you don’t mean that…’ He moved towards her, stopped, more uncertain in his movements than she had ever seen him. ‘You’ve had a bad fright. You don’t know what you’re saying—’

  ‘I know perfectly well what I’m saying. I’m – asking you –’ she almost lost her breath to that, had to make a physical effort to control her voice ‘– not to go. I mean it, Tom.’ She was trembling. Would he never move? Don’t make me ask again. Please don’t.

  The distant sound of a plane buzzed in the silence.

  She stood up but would not – could not – move towards him. He was frowning, studying her. ‘You really mean it.’

  ‘Yes.’ She saw the flicker in his eyes, knew the mounting excitement that matched her own. Yet still he did not move.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She flinched as if he had slapped her.

  He flicked his hair from his eyes, not looking at her.

  ‘Why not?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘Tom, why not?’

  ‘Because – because the time isn’t right – the reasons aren’t right—’ There was an edge of desperation in the words.

  ‘How do you know that? How can you know it?’

  He spread his hands into the distance between them. ‘Allie, try to understand. I can’t commit myself. My life is not my own—’

  ‘I’m not asking for your life. I’m not asking for a commitment. I’m asking you to stay with me. Tonight.’

  He looked at her, long and steady. Shook his head. ‘You won’t understand, will you? I can’t.’

  ‘Won’t, you mean.’ Bitter with mortification and disappointment, she turned from him. ‘What’s so different between me and my sister?’

  ‘God almighty!’ He stared at her, and then as the sense of the words reached him, in two steps he had reached her, catching her upper arm with hard fingers and swinging her to face him, taking easy refuge in anger. ‘What in hell’s name’s that supposed to mean?’

  The fury in his face, the pain of his fingers, brought the relief of rage. She shook herself free, violently. ‘Do you want it in words of one syllable?’

  He stared. Then, ‘Christ,’ he said, bitterly, ‘what do you think I am?’

  ‘I saw you myself, there in the f
lat, that morning after the party. You have a key – what do you expect me to think?’ She was aware of a kind of miserable relief at having spoken the words at last, careless for the moment of his white-faced anger.

  He stepped away from her. ‘Do you really need me to tell you that your sister was so dead drunk that night that she couldn’t stand up?’ he asked at last, his voice stone-cold, the words clipped. ‘Or are you now going to suspect that that’s the way I like my women?’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘There was no one else there to look after her, if you remember. Her brother and sister had troubles of their own.’

  It had the undeniable ring of truth. She took a breath. ‘I’m—

  ‘Say it,’ he said, very hard.

  ‘—sorry.’

  ‘I should bloody well think so. As for the key—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘As for the key, she lent it to Richard, years ago, and he passed it on to me. I had meant to return it. I have now done so. Christ, Allie – do you really know me as little as that?’

  The words, an open if unconscious plea, took her by surprise. She blinked, saw again the bleak exhaustion in his eyes, the spare tension of a body under too much strain. In that moment, suddenly and irrationally, she would have given her life to comfort him. She clasped her hands, forcing herself to calm. Now. Now, or the chance would slip from her for ever; she would never be able to bring herself to this again.

  ‘Tom.’

  He lifted pale, impassive eyes.

  ‘Answer me just one question. Honestly.’

  He waited.

  ‘Do you really want to go?’

  He turned away. ‘God almighty.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then stay. You don’t have to give me anything you don’t want to give. I’m not asking for tomorrow or the next day. I don’t need declarations of undying love. I want you. Now. And I think you want me.’ She moved to him, stood without touching him, looking into the tired face that was almost on a level with her own. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Then why go?’

  ‘Because I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of – hurting you.’

  ‘I’m not a baby.’

  His face softened at last. ‘You think I don’t know that? That I haven’t known it for longer than you have?’

  ‘Well, then…’

  ‘It isn’t just that—’

  ‘—I know.’ She lifted a hand and with her finger traced the line of his mouth, seeing the shock of excitement in him at her touch, knowing his iron control almost gone. ‘Listen to me, please. You’re free. And always will be. I wouldn’t try to tie you down. I won’t become a responsibility. I promise.’ She moved closer to him, slipped her arms about his neck. ‘We’re here. We’re alive. Now’s what counts. Let tomorrow take care of itself.’

  She remembered those words, that she knew to be lies, in the brightness of morning when she woke to find him gone with neither word nor sign of what the night might have meant – remembered them, the price she had willingly paid, and wept.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Allie and Tom saw each other only four times in the two months that followed before, with very little warning, Tom’s squadron was posted to Sicily with the invading Allies. They spent his short leave together in a London agog with news of the German defeats in the Soviet Union and amid open talk of an Allied invasion of the mainland of Europe. Their relationship, to Allie’s relief, had gone strangely unmarked by friends and family, largely because both of them wished it so, and for those few days they took a room in a small and rather dingy hotel in a tree-lined avenue near Kew Gardens. To Libby, Allie conveyed the impression that her absence was due to business, and her sister, absorbed as always in her own affairs, did not question her.

  Allie, in the days, sometimes weeks, that intervened between her meetings with Tom, had had time now to come to terms with her feelings for him. To her own astonishment she discovered them to be steady and intense. Love. An emotion she had foolishly believed she would never feel again after Buzz. After the first week she had stopped trying to analyse the whys and wherefores of her emotions. It had happened – that was enough. It was as though, through the years, the glimpses she had had of that other Tom, the Tom she knew she now loved, had served to lead the way through a maze of misapprehension to understanding, for now, slowly, she was coming to understand him, to know the stiff pride and irritating arrogance that was his defence against a world he felt always to be hostile, the fear of failure that drove him relentlessly to excellence, the weakness that preserved his strength for himself alone and shied from taking responsibility for others. She knew he cared for her; how much, or how little, she did not know. Despite her own strong feelings, she demanded nothing of him that he was not ready unthinkingly to give; she had promised this difficult man that he would be free, and she was determined to keep that promise – knowing anyway that the surest way to lose him would be to break it. In many ways she knew him to be right: Tom would never give up operational flying, and with the war moving into a new and obviously offensive phase, this was no time to insist on life-long commitments, even had he been the man to make them. Physically their relationship was better than any she had known, even with Buzz. His lovemaking was the most exciting thing she had ever experienced, and if it bore the unmistakable assurance of long practice, she did not care; while he was there, loving her, laughing with her, quarrelling with her, infuriating her, she knew herself happy again. She did not ask for more. And neither did she give away all her own secrets.

  They spent their four precious days in summer London like tourists – walking hand in hand along the paths of Kew Gardens; sitting beneath the trees and watching the river and its life beneath its safety net of barrage balloons; dodging taxi-cabs around a boarded-up Eros in Piccadilly Circus; dancing until the small hours to an American dance band on a postage-stamp floor while, outside, the sirens wailed; making love at any hour of the day or night that they found themselves in their dim little room with its narrow, creaking bed. She was surprised by his passion – he, who always seemed so collected, so utterly self-possessed, used her sometimes with a kind of fury that, afterwards, tempted her to tears for him. But most of the time their lovemaking was just that – a physical manifestation of emotion made more poignant by the imminence of separation. Inevitably, the last hours came and they found themselves wandering in silence along the Embankment watching the quiet, dirty waters of the Thames as they swirled against the piers of Westminster Bridge.

  Allie looked down at their linked hands. ‘You will write?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you will – take care?’

  He smiled.

  ‘I hate goodbyes.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Let’s not say it.’

  ‘All right.’

  They stopped. A flock of pigeons strutted up to their feet, grumbling throatily as they pecked. ‘Even the pigeons are getting thin,’ Allie said. She looked out across the river. ‘Funny, isn’t it – you and me, here. Who’d have thought it a year ago?’

  ‘I would.’ His voice was serious. ‘I always knew you harboured a secret passion.’

  ‘I didn’t!’ She looked up in time to see his laughter. ‘Oh, you!’ She leaned against him, her chin resting on his shoulder. ‘As a matter of fact, I used to think you insufferable. Still do, sometimes.’

  ‘What happened?’ She detected, beneath the lightness of his tone, real interest.

  ‘I found you were human after all. Who could resist that? You?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ She lifted her head to look at him. ‘You had no time for me at all. You thought me a – a plain, sanctimonious little—’ She stopped.

  ‘—pain in the arse?’ He supplied obligingly.

  ‘Something like that.’

  He cocked his head. ‘For y
our information,’ he said, the old, abrasively mocking expression on his face completely belying the words, ‘I always did harbour a secret passion.’

  ‘Liar.’

  He grinned. They walked to the river wall, leaned over it to look down into the water.

  ‘You aren’t sorry?’ she asked, after a moment.

  ‘Good God, no.’ There was no denying his sincerity this time. He reached a finger, lifted her chin and kissed her, very softly. ‘That night? At the cottage?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know what it took. Don’t ever believe I don’t.’

  She blinked.

  Thank you,’ he said, very quietly, the words almost lost in the roar of traffic. ‘For that and for everything. I would never have had the guts.’

  She could not for a moment speak.

  ‘Now,’ he kissed her, lightly, ‘I have to go. And since we aren’t going to say goodbye then I guess we’ll just have to say – what?’

  ‘See you soon?’ Her voice was not quite as steady as she had hoped.

  ‘Right. See you soon.’ He looked at her, smiling, for a long moment before turning away.

  ‘Tom?’

  He turned back.

  She looked at him helplessly, words locked in her throat, knowing that what she had not told him before she could not possibly tell him now. ‘Take care,’ she said.

  ‘I will.’ He stepped back from her, his hand lifted, then in two steps had turned and walked swiftly away.

  She watched him, unblinking, until he dodged across the wide busy road and was lost to sight.

  * * *

  Charlie Jessup died a few days later. On the morning of the day of his funeral, Allie and Sue walked up the lane to the downs and leaned by the stile where they had seen, nearly three years before, the first formations of enemy bombers heading for London. Hawkinge, with its memories, was spread, patched and battle-scarred beneath them.

  Sue tilted her cap to the back of her head. ‘Poor old Charlie.’

  Allie nodded.

  ‘Still – in the end – I guess it was for the best. He could have died a lot harder, in the circumstances.’

  They stood pensively, their eyes on the grey, distant Channel. ‘Well,’ Sue said at last, more cheerfully, ‘looks like we’ve got them on the run, eh? Russia – Africa – Italy—’