The Light Over London

by Julia Kelly

I tutted at him because no one calls me pretty, but I was more pleased than I could say.

  “What about Kate and my friends?” I asked.

  “They’d write.”

  I shook my head. “My mother would never let me.”

  “Darling, one day you’ll stand up and think to yourself, ‘I’ll just leave and no one will stop me.’ And then you’ll wonder why it took you so long.” His voice held such conviction—as though he knew it would come to be.

  I want to believe that he’s right.

  5 March 1941

  I saw Paul again today. He took me for a walk along the water in Newquay. He wanted to buy me ice cream, but I laughed and told him no one would be selling it in the winter when the wind is still so biting.

  We talked about everything, as we always seem to do when we’re together. He told me about Christmas in London with his family. They always have champagne before their dinner, and once, when his father was carving the goose, it flew off the plate and onto the floor! His mother burst out laughing. She sent it back down to the kitchen—they have a cook named Mrs. Dunn who comes every day, which does sound grand—and it came back with all of the good meat sliced and bread to make sandwiches. They called it their Christmas picnic.

  After our walk, I was shivering so much that Paul insisted we stop at a hotel that had been commandeered by the Royal Marines to billet its officers. He joked that it was a shame it would be so long before we could celebrate a Christmas together and drink champagne. I was so happy that he might want me to meet his family that I let it slip that I’ve never had champagne. He immediately ordered a bottle even though it was three o’clock in the afternoon. I was shocked that they had any at all because good alcohol can be scarce these days, and I tried to tell Paul I didn’t want it because of the expense. He just laughed and told me that I was worth it.

  The champagne was delightful, all bubbles and fizz, and I drifted back to the bus stop in a daze.

  7

  LOUISE

  “Rationing jam? What’s next?” Mrs. Bakeford muttered, locking the shop door as a fog rolled down the high street.

  Louise couldn’t help but agree with her as she buttoned the last button on her coat. Despite the signs they’d put in the window and at the counter, the entire day had been spent explaining why the housewives of Haybourne couldn’t purchase more than their allotted portion of jam and preserves. She’d been cajoled, importuned, and even yelled at by old Mrs. Harper, whom she’d never particularly liked anyway.

  “It’ll be better in a few weeks’ time. They’ll be used to it then, just like they were with tea and meat,” she said, reassuring herself as much as Mrs. Bakeford.

  “Let us hope so. I’ll see you tomorrow, Louise.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Bakeford,” Louise said, hooking her handbag over her wrist and starting the short walk home.

  If the day had left her tired, at least there was the prospect of seeing Paul that week to lift her spirits. He hadn’t been able to tell her exactly when he’d be able to secure an afternoon’s leave—he was flying a series of exercises—but he was confident he’d be able to steal away at some point. He’d let her know through Kate, who had been more than willing to act as a go-between, but that didn’t mean her cousin was entirely silent about the arrangement.

  “People will find out at some point, you know,” Kate had said the day before after church.

  Louise had glanced around, but her mother and Kate’s were chatting, both with folded arms, their handbags hanging off their wrists and swaying slightly with every punctuated point. Their fathers had rushed out as soon as the service had ended to stand with four other men from the neighborhood, each with a pipe or a cigarette clamped in his mouth.

  “No one’s paying us any mind,” said Kate, nudging her with her elbow.

  Louise blushed. “You can never be too careful in Haybourne. Everyone always seems to know everyone else’s business.”

  “And they all have an opinion to go along with it. But that’s why you need to think about this. Otherwise you’ll wind up with your mother and Mrs. Moss in the parlor all over again.”

  “I know, I know. I just . . . I just want a little more time.”

  Once she’d explained to him the difficulties she’d faced after their trip to the beach, the last few weeks with Paul had been blissfully uncomplicated as they’d avoided meeting in Haybourne again. She liked that he leaned in when she told him stories about growing up in the village because he hadn’t heard them all before. And she loved when he spoke about his family, his travels, his life. He was different from any other man she’d ever met. Raised in a mansion flat in Kensington, he doted on his mother and revered his father, a prominent barrister and Master of the Bench at Lincoln’s Inn. Paul had read history for his degree with a mind to entering politics, before the war had broken out. He’d been one of the first men from Cambridge to join up.

  It seemed extraordinary to her that this man who belonged to a glamorous world so removed from her own had chosen her, a girl who’d hardly ever ventured out of Cornwall save for the few times she’d visited her mother’s sister in Bristol. Louise hadn’t even seen London, while Paul kept a bedsit on what he called a bohemian street in Chelsea for when he was home from university, even if he’d told her it had nothing more than a gas ring for making tea and an electric fire to keep him warm.

  “You’ll have to write to Gary too,” said Kate, her voice sympathetic.

  “Why should I?” Louise asked, suddenly angry. “It’s our mothers who’ve gone mad, not us.”

  “Because when you tell your mother that you’re in love with a flier, you’ll be happy to know that Gary has backed away quietly. Even Aunt Rose can’t shame a man into marrying a woman whose heart’s already taken.”

  Her lips parted, ready to deny that she was in love with Paul, but something stopped her. “I’ll think about it,” was all she had said before her mother beckoned her over to say hello to Pastor Egan.

  Kate’s words still echoed as Louise let herself in through the garden gate. Maybe all it took was a month to find the man who made her heart quicken when she saw him. She should think the entire idea barmy, but wasn’t she always reading newspaper articles and seeing movies where couples fell madly in love, the pressure and uncertainty of war only accelerating declarations that were inevitable?

  Inside, she unknotted the scarf she’d tied over her hair to protect it on the wet evening. She was just hanging up her mac when her father appeared in the parlor doorway. One look at his grim expression, and her blood froze. Quickly, she ran through the list of men she knew who were fighting. Kate’s brothers, Harry and Michael. George, John, and Richard from school. The baker’s son. Euan, the butcher’s assistant, who’d only been called up two weeks ago, even though he’d put his name down for the navy as soon as he turned eighteen. Gary.

  “What is it, Da?” she asked. “Has there been bad news?”

  Her father’s lips thinned even further, but he just said, “You’d better come join us, Lou Lou.”

  She followed him, fear tingling through her, but when she crossed the threshold into the parlor, she understood. Sitting in a spindly chair, his cap in hand, was Paul.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, taking a step toward him. Her mother’s voice stopped her.

  “Flight Lieutenant Bolton has come to call on you.”

  “Louise . . .” Paul made to rise from his chair, but her mother coughed, sending him back down again.

  “You can only imagine our surprise to open the door and find him standing there, given that we’ve never been introduced,” said her mother.

  “Rose.” Her father’s voice sliced through the air, drawing all three of them up straight. “I’m sure the gentleman has his reasons for coming.” He turned to Paul. “You fly Spitfires?”

  “I do, sir,” said Paul. “I’m a pilot. I was stationed at RAF Trebelzue.”

  “ ‘Was,’ ” her father said. A look of understanding passed
between the two men, and her father nodded. “We’ll leave you for a few moments.”

  Louise’s mother’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Arthur, I don’t think—”

  “Come along, Rose,” her father said, standing at the door to the parlor.

  Her mother hesitated, her reluctance easy to read, but she followed her husband nonetheless. With one last look back, her father shut the door behind him.

  The ticking of the mantel clock counted off the seconds as Louise stared at her twisting hands, unable to unravel the emotions warring in her. Thrilled to see him. Shocked that he was in her parents’ home after she’d done so much to uncomplicate this part of her life. Worried about what his presence really meant.

  “Louise.” He choked on her name as he said it.

  “Why are you here?” she asked again.

  “My unit just received orders. We’re leaving Cornwall tomorrow.”

  She dropped into a chair. “No.”

  “I’m not supposed to be here. We weren’t granted leave. I jumped base.”

  “Paul, what if anyone finds out?”

  “Whatever the RAF wants to do with me, they can.” He rose now, crossing the room and falling to his knees in front of her chair. “I had to see you.”

  Tears pricked at her eyes, and he gathered her hands in his, the press of his warm skin comforting her.

  “Where are you being sent?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “But when will we see each other again?” The first tears had begun to fall, but her voice, though soft, was still steady. They would see each other. They had to.

  He lowered his forehead to their clasped hands. “I don’t know. When I can next get leave long enough to come here.”

  But Louise knew that could be months.

  He lifted his eyes to hers. “Will you write to me?”

  “Oh, Paul, I’ll write to you every day. How could you think I wouldn’t?”

  Lifting her hand, he kissed her knuckles. The sweetness of the gesture made her ache.

  “I know I don’t have the right to ask it, but I’d hoped you would say yes. These last weeks . . .” He cleared his throat. “These last weeks have been everything to me.”

  She placed a gentle hand on his jaw, cherishing her last few chances to touch him. “Me too.”

  Pushing up on his knees, he kissed her. Hot tears slipped down her cheeks, and for the first time she hated the war not as a far-off thing that raged across the Channel, but as the brutal hand that would tear him from her and thrust him into a danger she could only imagine.

  He broke away, letting out a long, steadying breath. “I want you to take this.”

  He held out his hand, his compass balanced in the middle of it.

  “Oh, Paul, I can’t. It’s your talisman.”

  “It’s more than that,” he said. “It was my uncle’s when he was in the Royal Flying Corps. It’s one of the few things of his we have left, and it’s my most precious possession.”

  “No, I won’t have you flying without it.” She closed his hand around it and brushed her lips against his cheek. “If you really want me to have it, give it to me the next time we meet.”

  He shuddered, as though he was trying to hold back a wave of emotion too powerful to name, but he nodded nonetheless. “I should leave. I just might stand a chance of making it back to base before anyone notices I’m gone.”

  She nodded, no longer trusting herself to speak.

  He pocketed the compass and then pressed a piece of paper into her hand. “This is my service number. Write to me, Louise. Promise me you will.”

  “You’ll write to me too?”

  “Every day I’m able,” he said.

  They stood together, looping their arms around each other’s waists as they crossed the ivory carpet that was her mother’s pride and joy. At the door, he kissed her again, with a soft brush of his lips, and then smoothed her hair out of her face.

  “Be happy, Louise Keene,” he said. And then he was gone.

  In the hall, she swept away her tears and swallowed hard. She placed one hand on the banister, ready to climb the stairs to her room when the dining room door swung open so hard it hit the wall.

  “You irresponsible, uncaring girl,” her mother hissed. “What were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mum,” she said, her voice unnaturally calm despite her shaking hands.

  “Carrying on with that pilot when Gary is actually fighting.”

  Enough. What had started as dropped hints and sighing wishes had become a strange, twisted idea of her future. She’d indulged her mother too much, believing it was easier to simply nod and smile than to risk a spiraling rant.

  “There is nothing between Gary and me except for your hopes,” she said.

  Her mother crossed her arms. “He’s the only boy in Haybourne suitable for you.”

  “And what if I don’t want to stay in Haybourne?” she snapped. “What if I don’t want to spend my days keeping Gary’s house and arranging flowers for the altar at All Souls and seeing the same people I’ve seen every day of my life?”

  “You ungrateful child. Gary will give you a good life, which is more than you deserve.”

  “I don’t care about any of that!”

  Her mother rushed forward, grabbing her by the back of her neck. Louise yelped, new tears springing to her eyes at the tug of the hair caught between her mother’s pulling fingers.

  Drawing Louise’s face close, her mother dropped her voice to a dangerous whisper. “I’ve done everything for you, and I will not see you give it all up for a pilot who will forget you as soon as he leaves Cornwall.”

  “Mum!”

  “Nineteen years. Nineteen years of cooking and cleaning and laundering for a child I hardly wanted, and this is how you repay me? You were supposed to be worth all of this.”

  “You’re hurting me,” Louise whimpered, her hands clasped around her mother’s wrist as tears flowed freely down her face.

  “What is this?” Her father’s voice boomed through the entryway. In an instant, her mother’s grip loosened, and Louise stumbled back. She pressed a hand to her scalp, trying to dull the throb of pain at her roots.

  Her mother threw out a hand in Louise’s direction. “She’s going to ruin everything, Arthur.”

  Her father’s gaze sliced over to Louise. “Go upstairs to your room.”

  It had been years since her father had sent her to her room as punishment for some childhood transgression, but she didn’t protest. Instead, she lunged for the banister and scrambled, half falling, up the stairs. But at the top, she stopped when she heard her mother say, “You coddle that girl.”

  “And that’s worse than what you do to her?” her father shot back.

  “I am trying to give her a better life.”

  “The life you wanted to have? You’ve made it clear from the day we married that you weren’t happy with me, but these airs, Rose? They stop now.”

  “It’s not putting on airs to want to not be the postmaster’s wife and have a house barely big enough to entertain.”

  “This is our home,” her father said. “This is our life.”

  “I was supposed to have more than this,” her mother hissed. “That was the plan, but if you’d taken more precautions—”

  “Then you wouldn’t have fallen pregnant and had to marry me and stay in Haybourne? It’s been nineteen years. Just say it.”

  Louise squeezed her eyes shut, her breath coming fast and ragged. She had to leave. This house. This village. In her mother she saw what her life would be if she stayed.

  Creeping down the carpeted hall, Louise let herself into her room. She’d been silent and still for her whole life. Paul had been the first real risk she’d ever taken. The first time she’d ever dared step out from within the tight confines of the box her mother had kept her in for all these years. And what was worse, she could see now that she’d let her mother d
o it. But her mother would not be the one to blame if Louise allowed this to go on.

  She pulled out her old school bag, a battered leather satchel with a soft brown patina, and set it on her bed. Moving methodically, she began to pack. In went underthings, stockings, a sweater, two shirts, her green tweed skirt, and a brown dress with fluted sleeves. Her mac was hanging on a hook downstairs by the door, but her good wool coat was still in her wardrobe. She grabbed it and the soft cherry-red muffler she’d knitted for herself last Christmas out of wool unwound from an old sweater.

  From out of her nightstand drawer, she pulled her diary. Carefully, she tucked the scrap of paper Paul had pressed into her palm between the pages marked by a red ribbon. She’d memorize his service number later, because she didn’t trust herself not to forget it now, as adrenaline pumped through her body. She slipped the diary into her bulging satchel and swung the long strap over her head.

  She stopped, giving one last glance around her room. It had been her sanctuary for so long, but she could see now that if she stayed, it would feel like a prison.

  Her eye landed on the postcard. Its cheeriness was incongruous with her life, but she crossed the room, wiggled the card free, and tucked it into her bag before buckling the flap closed.

  She took a deep breath. “You want more.” Then she unlocked the window, slid it up, and hooked her leg over the sill.

  The satchel bumped against her back as her feet caught hold of the trellis nailed to the side of the house. Fortunately, it was March, and the broad beans her father had trained up it had all died back that winter. A few scraggly, dead vines clung to the wood frame, but nothing impeded her progress.

  This was the first time she’d climbed out of her window, and her hands shook a little as she inched her way down. The trellis would hold—she knew that much from the number of times Kate had stolen up it on her way home from some date or another—but knowing that and putting it to the test were two entirely different things.

  One foot, one hand, she chanted in her head, forcing herself to make slow progress. The trellis moaned once, and she froze, fearful her parents might hear her. But no one came.