Skye snatched her eyes away, caught off-guard by the sudden jolt inside her. She had spoken to men a-plenty over the past two-anda-half years, seen a thousand ways to combine different features – eyes and hair and face and physique – and none of those combinations had stirred anything in her. But at least twice now Nicholas, her friend Nicholas – when he’d smiled at her, or sat as he was now, spotlit by moonshine – had caused her body to respond in a way she didn’t understand. Friends were like kittens: they did not cause feelings other than a comforting, contented warmth.
‘How’s your mother?’ she asked, needing to fill the space between them with words rather than her peculiar thoughts.
‘Worse,’ he said, reaching for the flask. ‘Sometimes it’s like … I don’t know; it’s like she’s barely alive. I write to her. But I doubt she knows who I am any more.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Skye said, unable to stop herself from touching his arm – how could she listen to him speak so bleakly and not offer any comfort? ‘And I’m sorry again,’ she said, removing her hand.
‘Don’t be. Like I said before, Margaux wouldn’t mind.’ He turned the conversation. ‘What about Liberty? Is she still an amateur prize-fighter?’
‘My turn for the whiskey,’ Skye said abruptly.
Nicholas watched the emotions she couldn’t hide transcribe themselves on her face. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
Skye sipped from the flask, not feeling the burn of alcohol in her throat, just the warmth and the promise of forgetting, for one night, all the things she tried not to think about.
She started by telling Nicholas about Liberty’s astonishing transformation in Paris. ‘Then,’ Skye said, ‘when I was eighteen, I wanted to leave France and go home. I’d waited until Liberty was seventeen and able to look after herself. I honestly didn’t think she’d care if I left; we spent hardly any time together. And Paris was never home for me.’ Skye’s voice faltered on the last sentence.
‘I’m prying,’ Nicholas said in apology. ‘It’s just so strange that I knew everything about you for four years and now I feel as if I know nothing at all.’
‘You’re not prying. I mightn’t talk about her much but I think about Liberty all the time. I tell myself not to though. I feel … guilty.’
There it was: stark fact, spoken aloud for the first time.
‘You’d never do anything to hurt your sister.’ Nicholas examined the grey flecks of ash on the tip of his cigarette. ‘I know that.’
‘But I did,’ Skye said. ‘After I told her I was leaving, Liberty screamed at me. She said …’ Skye breathed in smoke, then released it. ‘She said that if I broke my aunt’s promise by running away then our mother would haunt us forever. I told her it was my dearest wish to be haunted by my mother.’
‘Skye,’ Nicholas said, but she shook her head.
‘Don’t,’ she said, blinking hard. A tear spilled out anyway.
Above, the clouds shuffled restlessly, obscuring the starlight. The music from the sports hangar crescendoed, and Nicholas stood up on the wing.
‘In there,’ he pointed in the direction of the hangar, ‘it looked as if your dancing might have improved over the past ten years. But I won’t know for sure until you dance with me.’ He jumped to the ground and held out his hand. ‘Please?’
‘All right,’ she said, confused. Then realisation hit her: she’d bored him by talking about Liberty.
She slid off the plane and, to hide her embarrassment, busied herself with squashing her cigarette beneath her shoe. She’d dance with him once – he’d danced with other WAAFs in the hangar so that would be fine – but she wouldn’t mention Liberty again.
He took her hand and her eyes skittered up to meet his. She saw in them an expression of such tenderness that it made even her bones hurt; it was tenderness of a kind she hadn’t realised she craved.
His other hand touched her back. ‘I couldn’t just sit there and listen to you when you sounded so sad,’ he whispered. ‘Tell me the rest.’
She finally understood. The only way he could offer her comfort was like this: dancing as men and women did all the time, whether they were engaged or not. And so, in the familiar circle of his arms, as they moved to the distant music, she told him what she had never spoken aloud to anyone. She told him that she’d stayed in Paris for Liberty, who’d repaid Skye by soaking her bed in water and puncturing the tyres of her bike.
‘So I left the following year without telling her,’ she finished.
Nicholas’s hold on her hand tightened.
‘Now I wonder if all those things were just her way of begging me to stay,’ Skye said in a low voice. ‘Doing what she could to get my attention. She didn’t want to come back to England. But I missed Cornwall so much. Maybe so much that I chose it over my sister. That’s why I feel guilty. She’s never written to me since. All I know is that she’s in England somewhere. I think she hates me.’
‘She has no reason to,’ Nicholas said softly. ‘You wanted to leave; she wanted to stay. You told her your plans. She was eighteen, not a child.’
‘But I promised my mother I’d look after her.’ Her voice was so close to a whisper that she thought Nicholas might not hear. But he did.
‘Your mom knew how much you loved Cornwall,’ he said, narrowing the distance between their bodies by just an inch but increasing five-hundred-fold the empathy contained in that space. ‘She, more than anyone, would have understood. I understand. Those years in Cornwall were the best gift of all: my family had been taken from me, but then, somehow, this other family, this incredible family, was given to me instead. It made my childhood something to remember rather than something to forget. If I’d been able to escape from New York and go back to Cornwall, I would have.’
Nicholas looked down at her and she saw him unshielded. Not the wing commander in charge of a squadron, but a man who, despite the missing years, knew Skye Penrose better than most people did. A man who was doing something secret and dangerous for her country, and for his too, but who still had time to listen to her. A man who wasn’t afraid to let her see all the different pieces of him concealed behind the uniform.
Their dance slowed to a drift.
‘You know,’ he said, concern on his face, ‘if the war doesn’t end soon, you’re going to fade away. Dancing like this I can feel that you’re almost as skinny as you were when you were twelve. Do they feed you in the ATA? You didn’t really mean it when you were up at my base and said you’d only had a chocolate ration since breakfast, did you?’
Skye, on the other hand, could tell that Nicholas wasn’t skinny. Rather he was well-built and muscular – a man, of course – as if flying and exercise took up his time between suppers. He wasn’t fuelled by adrenaline and cigarettes as she and the other ATA women were.
‘We don’t get bacon and egg breakfasts or suppers when we return from a day’s flying,’ she said lightly.
‘So you did mean it?’
She didn’t answer.
He frowned. ‘How often don’t you eat?’
His tone was gentle rather than interfering, and suddenly she wanted to move closer still, to place her head on his shoulder while they swayed to the music. To feel his voice slide softly past her ear.
She inhaled sharply. She’d obviously had too much whiskey if she was thinking about resting any part of her body on Nicholas Crawford. ‘Let’s talk about something less serious,’ she said, searching for diversions. ‘Something funny would be perfect.’
‘Okay,’ he said, thinking, then smiling a little.
‘What?’ she said, her mouth lifting up at the corners in anticipation of his next words.
‘Talking about your mom made me remember something I never told you. Something funny. Although I didn’t think it was funny at the time,’ he added.
‘You have to tell me now,’ she said.
‘Well, when she was giving me swimming lessons, she sat me down and talked to me about the birds and the bees, about how my body would
change and how yours would too.’
He gave a wry smile at the look on Skye’s face and she thought she saw his cheeks flush, just a little.
‘Back then, I had no real idea what she was talking about,’ he went on. ‘But I realised, the day I left Cornwall, that what she’d been trying to tell me was to make sure I never took advantage of you, of the closeness of our friendship. She didn’t know I’d be leaving before either of us was old enough for that and we need never have had that excruciating conversation.’
Skye found herself back in Cornwall one summer morning, arm bruised from Liberty’s pinching fingers, about to defy her mother’s orders and march off to the beach to escape her sister. Nicholas had returned from his swimming lesson monosyllabic and had remained so for the best part of the day.
‘I remember one day you came back so red I thought the sun must have baked you,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t look at me, even though I wanted to show you how impressive my bruises were. Was that the day?’
He nodded. ‘She told me you’d grow breasts and I was too afraid to look at you in case it happened right before my eyes. I didn’t quite grasp that it was a more gradual process.’
Skye doubled over with laughter. ‘Oh God, you didn’t?’
Nicholas began to laugh too and for a time neither of them could speak.
‘We’ve covered the full range of emotions tonight, haven’t we?’ he said at last when they’d recovered.
‘We have.’
And then they both seemed to realise that they were no longer dancing, or laughing, just standing together in the darkness of an airfield. In that darkness, her eyes held by his, Skye felt like she was caught in a plane spinning aerobatically and unstoppably towards him. Her fingers curled into her palm so they wouldn’t, on terrible impulse, reach out to touch him.
A movement behind Nicholas. Another man walking towards them. His hair glimmered gold in the moonlight and Skye knew it was O’Farrell and that it was time for her to leave.
Nicholas leaned back against the Lizzie and lit another cigarette. Before O’Farrell was close enough to hear, he said, ‘I missed you, Skye.’
‘I missed you too,’ she said. Then she walked over to O’Farrell and slipped her arm through his.
Fourteen
Nicholas finished his cigarette, had another decent slug of whiskey, then returned to the sports hangar to find Margaux. She was watching Skye dance with O’Farrell.
‘She looks like a fairy dancing with a giant,’ Margaux said when Nicholas joined her.
‘More like a selkie dancing with a giant,’ Nicholas replied, seeing again what he’d sensed outside: that Skye’s regime of working hard and forgetting to eat made her look tiny compared to the well-built O’Farrell.
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘A mythological sea creature. Skye’s mom used to tell us stories about them.’
Margaux faced him, no longer watching Skye and O’Farrell. ‘You must have been in England for quite some time as a child if you knew her mother well enough to have listened to her stories.’
‘Four years.’
‘I should probably know that.’ Margaux’s smile was, as always, a smooth curve of lip that didn’t touch her eyes.
‘You probably should.’ He smiled at her too, and they stood in companionable silence for a few minutes.
‘You know,’ he said suddenly, as one dance ended and another began and Skye remained in O’Farrell’s arms, ‘I’m going to send her some of the oranges I got last week in Algiers. 161 Squadron is more than well-fed. We don’t need them.’
‘Why don’t you take her out for a meal too? If tomorrow goes well, I won’t be here for at least a couple of months, perhaps longer, and it will give you something to do besides drinking too much whiskey.’ She cocked an eyebrow at him and Nicholas gave her a half-smile because Margaux always knew everything and could somehow tell he’d been emptying his whiskey flask that night. ‘The moon period’s almost over,’ she finished. ‘Which means you’ll soon have time.’
‘Maybe I will,’ he said.
No, he would. It had been the most difficult thing of all not to write to her after he’d seen her at Biggin Hill two years ago; like pushing against gravity and hoping to win. So often he’d sat down to write a letter in which he didn’t tell her anything about where he was or what he was doing, but he knew that would be like standing on a rooftop and shouting it all out, thus breaking the Official Secrets Act – Skye would have known something was amiss. But he could send her oranges and take her to dinner, as Margaux had suggested. He felt himself smile the way he only did when he was with Skye.
Then he saw O’Farrell draw Skye in closer, whispering in her ear, and the two of them disappeared outside. He couldn’t shift his eyes from the doorway through which they’d left, even though he could feel Margaux watching him.
Later, as Skye, Rose and Joan cycled through the sightless blackout to their cottage, their head-torches providing three slivers of light, the distant boom of flak and fighters over France faintly heard, Joan said to Rose, ‘You’re smiling so hard your teeth will light a path for the Germans. Don’t tell me you’re falling for someone?’
Rose laughed. ‘Perhaps,’ was her coy answer.
‘The pilot from Nicholas’s squadron?’ Skye asked. ‘Really?’ ‘Richie Jenkins,’ Rose said. ‘He was nice. And that squadron seems to have made its way into a few of our hearts.’
‘What do you mean?’ Skye squeaked, only just avoiding a pothole. ‘O’Farrell,’ Joan said. ‘Something has gone terribly wrong in the world – apart from the obvious,’ she added as more enemy gunfire sounded in the night – ‘if you two are returning smitten from a night out, but my heart is undisturbed.’
‘O’Farrell,’ Skye said faintly as they drew up at the cottage, her mind playing over her final dance with him, recalling the way he’d led her outside and kissed her, and how it had felt somehow less than she’d wanted it to.
Even though it was March, for two days snow had been falling to earth in a great purging deluge. For those two days, Skye had been sitting in a freezing hut in her flying suit and sheepskin jacket, having been assigned a priority-one wait. It meant she had to remain with the Spitfire she was to ferry from Chattis Hill to Colerne until the very first sign of improvement in the weather. Then she was to get in the plane and deliver it. It was the only time they were allowed to ignore the eight-hundred-foot cloud base rule – a priority-one wait meant that lives were at stake and every second’s delay was another blow to the still-floundering Allies.
But with the weather the way it was, even Skye, their so-called fog-flyer, hadn’t managed to get airborne. And waiting meant doing nothing, which meant thinking. She remembered waking up the morning after dancing with Nicholas, a whiskey-headache pounding her skull. At first she’d been relieved because it meant she had drunk too much. But the next moment, she’d recalled Nicholas’s smile, how he’d looked sitting on the wing of an aeroplane with his elbow propped on his knee and her whole body had felt suddenly and unacceptably warm.
She stared out the window, needing to let the memory go. She could just see the trees now, and the runway. It was time to forget about Nicholas and to fly.
It was the most difficult flight of her life and considering she’d been shot at by enemy planes and had propellers fall off while airborne, that was saying something. She had to stay beneath the soggiest blanket of thick black clouds, the base of which was only three hundred feet from the ground. It forced her to fly as low and as slow as she’d ever flown in her life, sticking to every sleeper of the railway track that was her marker, shaving the trees with her jet stream, knowing that to lose sight of the ground in a snowstorm like this would be fatal. When the railway did a double loop in Savernake Forest, she didn’t fly over the loop – picking up the point where it headed north – as she ordinarily would. She looped with it, and was never so pleased as when she knew she was only a couple of miles from her destination.
Then she saw a shape dead ahead and coming straight for her. A Lancaster, an elephant in the sky, on course for a collision.
She heard herself swear as she hauled the Spit onto its tail and gave it full throttle. She almost ducked, as if that would help, horrified to see the disbelieving face of the Lancaster’s rear gunner almost within handshaking distance of her.
Then she was in the cloud, and she braced herself for the tail of the enormous plane to clip her underside, thanking God it had dived down while she had instinctively gone up. Nothing happened. But now she was stranded in the blindness of cloud.
Don’t panic, she told herself.
It was impossible to describe what it felt like to be adrift in cloud, with no way of knowing in which direction lay the earth or the heavens, as discombobulated as if thrown into the deepest part of the ocean, tumbled around, and then let loose with no guiding light. Her heart was giving the engine stiff competition for both pace and volume and she clutched at the collar of her suit, desperate for air.
The only thing she could do was take the Spit straight back down and pray that what she thought was down was not, in fact, up. Below her, if she was very lucky, would be the airfield rather than a forest or the Lancaster or the edge of the world.
Was this how her mother had felt? Fatalistic, knowing there was only one possible choice, and that was to plunge, sightless, and hope.
The cloud thinned. There was a flash of green. Stray tufts of cloud. More green. An airfield, too close.
She landed heavily but didn’t care. She was alive.
They had the blood cart and crash wagon ready for her but thankfully she didn’t need either. She sat, incapable of movement, as the Lancaster crew and the engineers rushed out to greet her.
A thumping noise alerted her that someone had climbed onto the wing. A man unbuckled her straps, held out a hand and said, ‘Can I help you?’
‘I could have done with some help ten minutes ago,’ she said shakily, hoisting herself up.
‘I told you it was a woman,’ she heard someone say and she looked down and saw the gunner who had passed her by so near in the sky.
The Paris Secret : A Novel (2020) Page 15