The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  His sincerity had her staring at the Halifax on the runway outside rather than at him. “That would be fun,” she said, voice small. “And much better than being here.”

  Nicholas walked to the end of the table and picked up a jar. “This would have to be the toughest assignment of all,” he said. “I know what they’re like here, and that this is probably a bit insignificant set beside you wanting to give me your scarf, but I brought these for you.” He passed her the jar.

  It was full of the tiny cowrie shells Skye had used to collect. They shone in the sun like childhood and summer and a prewar world. She looked at Nicholas, unable to speak, every tear she’d been too stubborn to cry over the past month threatening to break the dam of her self-control.

  “I’ve had them since I left Cornwall,” he said, lifting one finger to touch, so quickly, her cheek. “I thought something of home might help.”

  It took her a minute to speak, and when she did she gave him the truth, like she always had. “I’m doing my first solo in the Halifax today. All day I’ve been thinking I need something to remind me who Skye Penrose is so I don’t crash and ruin any chance of a woman flying a four-engine bomber again. This,” she looked down at the jar, “is just what I needed.”

  “I’m glad it was my day off then.”

  He smiled at her and she smiled back, and somehow it wasn’t just a simple action of the mouth. It was an entire bodily feeling that her feet wanted to move to as if it were music.

  “I have to go,” Skye said reluctantly, clutching the jar.

  She walked out of the office, leaving behind the boy she’d been mourning for ten years. But she no longer wanted that boy back. She wanted the man Nicholas had become, and with whom she hoped she had a new kind of friendship.

  Her first takeoff in the Halifax was as smooth as a cowrie shell’s surface. The landing was another matter. It wasn’t graceful, but she’d seen plenty of Halifaxes thunder to the ground over her time in the ATA. Then, instead of climbing out, she fired the Halifax up and taxied back to the runway and, to Dluga’s astonishment, did her ten takeoffs and her ten landings all in a row, each better than the last.

  * * *

  The new year had advanced onward and winter was almost over when Skye returned to Hamble, eager to see all her friends. Cloud mantled the sky quickly and unexpectedly as her train drew into the station and she hoped none of the ATA women were trapped in it.

  Rose was the first to sweep Skye into a hug when she appeared in the lounge. “I forbid you to ever go away again,” Rose said. “Now, tell us when we’ll be able to get our hands on a Halifax.”

  “I’d rather get my hands on something with warmer blood,” Diana said, and the eruption of laughter made Skye beam for the first time in ages.

  But it couldn’t last, not when the war thundered on and even God seemed to have withdrawn his protection and left them all as vulnerable as ants scurrying across a busy runway. Pauline’s voice sounded over the tannoy, summoning them all into the lounge.

  Joan, who must have just landed, arrived white-faced. “Honor’s dead,” she said baldly.

  “No.” Skye shook her head. “She can’t be. Not another one.”

  “She is.” Pauline, her voice strained, strode in behind Joan.

  “Someone’s always flying into a hillside lately.” Joan whispered the terrible truth.

  “Five ATA pilots died this morning,” Pauline continued. “Honor, plus four of the men.”

  “Five?” Skye repeated, wanting Pauline to contradict her; to agree that Skye had misheard.

  But Pauline only said, “An unforeseen inversion layer is covering most of England. It’s impossible to fly out of.”

  As with so many things, Honor’s death wasn’t to be spoken of again. While the women’s training on how to fly new classes of airplanes involved overt instruction, their training on handling death was unexpressed but somehow known to all. They could not talk about a friend dying in a plane one day and then go out and fly the next. It would break them all. But weren’t they all, right now, a little broken, Skye thought.

  As the women left the ferry pool that evening after a long and silent afternoon, Joan said, “I can’t stand everyone sitting around and not talking about it.”

  “Talking won’t bring her back,” Rose said.

  Outside, day submitted to night and everything in that predusk slip of time turned ashen; a hue that matched Joan’s face exactly.

  “Come with me,” Skye said, walking not to the main gate but to the runway, the place where flights began and where they were supposed to end.

  Skye took Joan’s hand in her own, and Rose’s too, and the three women stood on the tarmac looking up at the sky to which they had given Honor. A gift the sky did not need but had taken all the same.

  A light shower began to fall, the kind of rain that gentled down sometimes on a sunny July day, the kind of rain that was always followed by a rainbow. It dampened their faces in a way that tears could not.

  The rain stopped as abruptly as it had started, but there wasn’t enough sun for a rainbow, and the crescent moon hadn’t the power to create any such phenomenon. So Rose began to sing a song about that wondrous place over the rainbow where there were only clear blue cloudless skies.

  If only the skies were always blue, Skye thought as she tightened her grip on her friends’ hands. If only there were no clouds and no storms and no inversion layers, just stars and bluebirds and a lullaby land where war never happened, and nobody died and everyone’s dreams came true.

  She closed her eyes and listened to Rose’s voice fading as her throat tightened over the words. All their faces were wet now, but not from the rain.

  Thirteen

  The following week, Rose urged them all to go out to a night of movies and dancing at RAF Tangmere, which had installed a brand-new cinema in one of the hangars. She thought it might be the thing to cheer them up. So they cycled to Southampton, then caught the train to Chichester. It was an uncertain night, the full moon hidden behind thick clouds that threatened rain, and the women prayed they’d make it to the base without a soaking.

  They were lucky. They made it through the main gate and found the sports hangar where the cinema was located before the deluge started.

  Joan immediately paired off with a flight sergeant, but Rose and Skye did what they always did: deflected some familiar attention so they could watch the movie in peace, reasoning there was no need to couple themselves off until the dancing began.

  They were about to sit down when Skye heard her name called. She turned to see O’Farrell grinning at her.

  “This is a nice surprise,” he said.

  Skye remembered that she’d decided to give O’Farrell a chance. “Come sit with me,” she said. “But make sure Rose isn’t lonely.”

  Rose smiled winningly and O’Farrell hollered for one of the men Skye had seen at the secret base in Bedfordshire to join them, which he did, plying Rose with charm.

  “What are you doing at Tangmere?” Skye asked O’Farrell as he maneuvered them toward some empty chairs.

  “A few of us are here for a couple of weeks.” O’Farrell indicated the doorway.

  Nicholas Crawford and Margaux Jourdan were walking through it. Nicholas offered Skye a stiff nod and didn’t wait to see it returned. Skye only just swallowed her “Oh” of disappointment. It was as if their conversation at Leavesden had never happened; as if the man she’d shouted at that night at the base in Bedfordshire was the real Nicholas, and the other—the one she’d hoped she’d reignited a friendship with—had been a figment of her overtired and, at the time, overemotional imagination.

  “What’s the deal with you and Crawford?” O’Farrell asked, noticing the awkward greeting.

  “I knew him when I was ten,” Skye said. Then added, trying not to sound sad, “That’s all.”

  “So I won’t be stepping on any toes if I claim the first dance with you later? It’s not a good idea to get on the wrong side of your wing
commander.”

  “He has a fiancée, so I don’t think he’s in a position to object if you dance with me.”

  “Good.” O’Farrell dropped his arm over the back of her seat. Skye settled back against it, determined to enjoy herself.

  “Not flying tonight?” she asked offhandedly, hoping he might say more, still wondering what on earth his squadron did that was so important she had to sign the Official Secrets Act.

  He shrugged. “Grounded tonight because of the weather.”

  Which didn’t tell her anything.

  The movie started. At the bottom left corner of the screen, three rows in front, Skye could see Margaux’s head resting on Nicholas’s shoulder.

  “Smoke?” O’Farrell offered her a Lucky Strike and she took it even though she hated American cigarettes. He lit it for her, the flame illuminating the contours of his sharply handsome face and also the couple beside him who were familiarizing themselves with one another’s lips.

  O’Farrell stood up. “Let’s go sit down in the back. Otherwise I’m going to have to start correcting their technique.”

  Skye laughed. “That I’d like to see.”

  She followed him to the other side of the room, where she could no longer see Nicholas’s head or Margaux’s. She felt her shoulders drop down from around her ears.

  “This is better,” she said as she sat down.

  “You didn’t seem too interested in the movie,” O’Farrell said, studying her face intently. “You sure are beautiful.”

  He leaned over and kissed her lips gently, not at all how she’d imagined he would, and she was momentarily charmed.

  When he drew back, he said, “You know, I’m not looking for someone to marry, and I’m not looking for someone to warm my bed for a night or whenever it suits me. Dance with whoever you want, whenever you want. I’m not a cage. I’m just looking for someone who’s also fighting a war and who sometimes needs something to get them through it.”

  As he spoke, Skye felt a sharp stab of loneliness, a loneliness she could hear mirrored in his words. Of course they were both surrounded by people every day, her at the ferry pool at Hamble and him at his own base; but up in the sky there was nobody around, and it must be worse for him because his friends must die more often than hers did. He probably saw them blown up right before his eyes, whereas she only heard about it in the aftermath. An empty bed after a night like that must feel like the loneliest place of all.

  So she tucked her head onto his shoulder and he draped his arm around her, fingers lightly tracing over her neck as they watched the movie together.

  * * *

  When the movie was finished and the gramophone wound and the dancing began, an unquiet energy filled the room.

  As O’Farrell led Skye out to dance, they passed Margaux and Nicholas, whom O’Farrell acknowledged with a “Sir.”

  Nicholas nodded at him and said Skye’s name, and Margaux ignored them both as Nicholas drew her in to dance.

  Skye managed two dances with O’Farrell before he was claimed by one WAAF, and then another. It didn’t pay to choose such a good-looking man to distract oneself with, she thought wryly.

  Nicholas was just as popular, and Margaux seemed perfectly at ease with him dancing with every mooning female whose interest in him outweighed her fear of Margaux. Nicholas chatted and laughed with each of them easily and they all walked away looking lovestruck, even as he returned to Margaux’s side after every dance.

  Skye was similarly blessed with dance partners and the music was suitably inspiriting—“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World.” But would they, Skye wondered, and she wished for a song that wasn’t about war and absence.

  She excused herself for the next dance. As she was coming back from the bathroom, she found Margaux leaning against the wall, red-lipsticked mouth drawing on a cigarette, dark brown hair set with precision, self-possession radiating from her like a searchlight even in her WAAF uniform.

  “Gauloises?” Margaux asked, proffering the pack.

  How the hell had Margaux managed to get hold of French cigarettes? But then, how had Nicholas? Amid the melange of feelings she’d experienced when she last spoke to him, Skye realized she hadn’t asked him that most obvious of questions.

  She shook her head. “No, thank you.”

  “You prefer Players?” Margaux’s tone was sardonic, and her words accented enough to suggest she’d been born in France and must therefore wake up every day knowing that her country and her kinsmen and possibly her family were suffering the wretchedness of German occupation.

  Skye relented. “Nobody with any taste prefers Players. I dream of Gitanes but this is close enough.” She took the cigarette and then felt she couldn’t really walk away. “Are you based at Tangmere?” she asked. “Or up in Bedfordshire?”

  “I move up and down with the pilots,” Margaux replied. “They’re here for a fortnight, so I am too.”

  “You’re lucky you get to work so closely with your fiancé.”

  Margaux shrugged. “You’re the first female pilot I’ve met,” she said, turning the conversation.

  “We do exist,” Skye replied lightly, wondering how much more small talk she needed to come up with to pay for the cigarette.

  “Where did you learn to fly?” Margaux asked, walking toward the hangar as if she expected Skye to accompany her.

  Skye explained about her mother, curious as to why Nicholas hadn’t told Margaux that Skye’s mother had taught him to fly. “And then I had lessons in France for a few years. I lived there after my mother died.” She switched the focus away from herself. “You’re obviously French. And your name . . .”

  “Yes, the name.” Margaux blew out a long, thin and elegant stream of smoke. “It’s like wearing a badge that declares me an exotic species. Margaret, people always say after I’m introduced to them. Or, Can I call you Meg?” She lifted one acerbic eyebrow. “The English are the only people in the world who could get Meg from Margaux.”

  Skye laughed. There was no way she would ever dream of calling this poised and aloof woman Meg.

  “Skye. How are you?” Nicholas’s polite voice broke in and Skye’s mirth creased at the edges.

  She managed a “Fine, thank you,” and a “Thanks for the cigarette. Excuse me” to Margaux before she slipped outside. She walked past the Belfast hangars where the Tangmere squadrons’ Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mustangs and Typhoons were waiting; past the main store, the engine workshop and the parachute store—all the flat-roofed, boxy and ill-featured buildings that Skye adored because, without them, planes couldn’t fly. Fuel and oil and damp scented the air as she reached the armory.

  On the grass behind it, hidden away, she found the black Lysanders lined up like abandoned dragons. It had stopped raining so she clambered up onto the Lizzie with the mermaid painted on it and, with her back leaning against its body and her legs stretched out over the wing, she smoked two Players in a row. After the Gauloises, they tasted like discontent.

  She heard footsteps and expected it was O’Farrell come to find her, but the head that rounded the nose of the plane was dark, not blond.

  “Skye,” Nicholas said, starting. He studied her face with a quizzical intensity, then ran a quick hand through his hair. “Every time I see you, it’s like falling through time and being eleven again, and war is something from a long time past. But then I remember the war is now, and I’m not eleven and you are . . .”

  He paused and she wondered if the stiff greeting in the sports hangar was simply an expression of the same disturbance she felt when she saw him; a disturbance arising from an inability, despite what she’d thought at Leavesden, to finish that sentence. You are . . . what? An old friend? A new friend? Some other unnameable and unknowable thing?

  The music waltzed toward them as the breeze picked up. Skye concentrated as ferociously on her cigarette as if it were the first time she’d ever smoked. Nicholas studied the ground wi
th the same intensity until the clouds thinned to wisps and the moon glimmered through, lightening the night.

  He looked back up at her. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Sure,” she said lightly, mimicking his accent, and he grinned and swung himself up beside her, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a cigarette—another Gauloise.

  “Margaux’s?” she queried, and he nodded.

  “Who would have thought,” he mused as they both watched smoke drift like tendrils of cirrus into invisibility, “that we’d both finally be old enough to fly airplanes by ourselves, smoke cigarettes and,” he pulled a flask from his pocket, “drink whiskey.”

  “And get engaged,” Skye said breezily. She accepted the flask and took a long drink. “When are you getting married?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t decided.”

  Skye felt her eyebrows quirk up in surprise. “Really? I thought engagements were either superfluous or else a quick step from a bed to the altar these days. That marrying was the point, given how precarious life is.”

  “We aren’t in a hurry,” was all he said. Then, “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  He sounded genuine, as if he truly understood the breach Skye’s heart had endured when her mother died. She felt her eyes tear up and she stubbed out the cigarette, finding it impossible to inhale, let alone suck in air filthy with smoke. His next words were so surprising that they stole even more of her breath.

  “I read about it in the newspaper,” he said. “A woman dying in an airplane was such a strange thing back then that the news made it into the New York Herald Tribune. I decided to steal money from my aunt, escape from school, fly to England and come to the memorial service. I only made it as far as the subway station before I was taken back to school and caned.”

  “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I thought that because you didn’t write . . .”

  “I wrote to you every damn day for two years,” he shot back.