The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  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.

  She shook her head, unable to believe that her gender was still the most surprising thing about what had just happened.

  “We had no idea you were coming in,” the engineer said. “The Spit that took off after you turned straight around and went back to base. Your ops officer at Hamble thinks you’re dead. You’d better give her a call.”

  “Have a cup of tea first,” the Lancaster pilot added.

  “And maybe a cigarette,” Skye said wryly.

  * * *

  News of what happened reached Pauline’s ears and Skye’s ferrying schedule was lighter for the next couple of weeks. So much lighter that one afternoon she finished a rare hour early, but had to wait at the base in case anything came up. A beautiful April sun shone; the snow had obviously been winter’s last flourish before spring unleashed her magnificence upon a weary England. Skye took herself outside, smiling at the warmth, so glad to still be alive that she decided to do something she hadn’t done since autumn.

  She made her way to the far reaches of the airfield, behind one of the hangars, where a couple of Spitfires sat. She climbed onto a wing that had been warmed to just the right temperature by the sun. Then she unbuttoned her blouse, slid it off and lay on her back in just her skirt and brassiere—which was pale blue silk and had come with her from France. Every time she put it on she prayed it would outlast the war so she wouldn’t have to resort to ration lingerie. For most people, it was probably too cold for sunbathing. But to Skye it was glorious. She let the heat sink into her and the tension of her near-miss melted away.

  She didn’t hear footsteps, only heard someone say her name. She sat up, startled, to find a man in an RAF uniform turning away from her when he saw what she was wearing.

  “What are you doing?” Nicholas demanded, his back to her, voice half an octave higher than the last time she’d heard it.

  Skye lay down again, mouth twitching, trying not to laugh. “Sunbathing,” she said demurely.

  “On the wing of a Spitfire?”

  “It’s actually very comfortable. You should try it.”

  She heard him laugh, which made her laugh too. She imagined a row of RAF pilots lined up on the wings of their planes, sunbathing. That would definitely give Diana’s heart something to flutter over.

  She reached for her shirt and slipped it on. “You’ve seen me in my swimming costume.”

  “You looked a little different the last time I saw you in your swimming costume,” he said, voice not quite steady, and Skye’s hands on her buttons faltered.

  “People change in ten years,” she said, her voice altered too. She smoothed down her shirt. “You’re safe; I won’t scald your eyes anymore.”

  He turned back and smiled, and Skye almost fell off the wing. If O’Farrell’s smile made a woman weak at the knees, Nicholas’s smile made her forget she had knees.

  “It seems you haven’t broken your habit of showing people your underwear,” he said, then his cheeks colored and he swore softly. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. As if—”

  “As if I regularly lie in wait for pilots on the wings of planes wearing only my brassiere?” She couldn’t maintain her faux-annoyance for more than a few seconds before she started to laugh again.

  He ran a hand through his hair and gave her a rueful grin. “I thought you were about to start yelling at me again. But hopefully you won’t yell when you see what I’ve brought you.” He held up a bag.

  “Oranges?” Skye stared in disbelief, then slid down to the ground, needing to inspect them at close range to make sure they were real. She hadn’t seen an orange for two years.

  “I remember you used to like orange juice for breakfast,” he said.

  “I did. Thank you.”

  “And I’m taking you out for dinner. I was telling Margaux how lucky we are to have a mess and cooked meals after ops and that I wanted to bring you some oranges and she said I should buy you dinner as well.”

  Skye tried not to let her mouth fall open. Margaux had told her fiancé to take Skye out for dinner. She really wasn’t the jealous sort.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Skye protested, even though she wanted to have dinner with Nicholas. She’d had fun talking with him at the dance. Conversation between them was effortless, and it made her stop thinking about the war and remember another kind of life.

  “I want to,” he said. “I’m not flying tonight because I’m going back to Bedfordshire tomorrow, so I caught a ride here on the taxi plane with one of your friends. I’ll stay the night at an inn in town and catch a ride back tomorrow.”

  “Who was flying the taxi?”

  “Rose.”

  That at least meant a more subtle level of questioning about Nicholas than if it had been Diana flying the plane. And Rose’s questions could be easily answered by reminding her that Nicholas was a childhood friend. That was all.

  “Dinner would be lovely,” Skye said. “Thank you. Let’s take these to the lounge first though.” She indicated the oranges.

  Nicholas followed her across the airfield to the lounge, where the oranges were leapt upon by Rose and Diana as if they were foie gras.

  “Are you going to save any for yourself?” he asked Skye, and she heard exasperation in his voice.

  “I’ve got one,” she said, holding it up. “Let’s go.” She wanted to slip out while the fuss over the oranges was at its peak and nobody would see that she was leaving with Nicholas.

  They walked past her cottage, where she dropped off her orange, and then to the Bugle, where Nicholas booked himself a room for the night. They found a table inside, and Skye hoped that tonight everyone from the ferry pool would stay home and not dine at the Bugle too.

  Mrs. Chambers, the wife of the owner, greeted Skye. “Hello, love. Who’s your handsome fellow then?”

  “This is my friend”—even Skye co
uld hear her emphasis on the word—“Nicholas. I’ve known him since I was young.”

  “Well, any friend of Skye’s is always welcome,” Mrs. Chambers said. “I’ve managed to cobble together a chicken pie out of nothing but it’ll be gone before long. How about I get you some now?”

  “Yes please,” Skye said, and heard her stomach rumble loudly.

  Nicholas laughed. “And that is why I’m taking you to dinner.”

  Skye laughed too and relaxed at last, sitting back in her chair, sipping the wine Mrs. Chambers had somehow found for them. “Cheers,” she said, raising her glass. “Here’s to . . .” She considered what would be appropriate, then came up with, “Surviving.”

  Nicholas grimaced. “A macabre toast, but given the circumstances I’ll raise my glass to it.”

  Mrs. Chambers brought their chicken pies, and Nicholas carved off half of his and added it to Skye’s plate despite her protests. Then he looked at her, as serious as she’d ever seen him.

  “While we’re on the subject of surviving . . .” His fingers turned a pack of cigarettes over and over. “Skye . . .” Another pause and then it all came out. “I saw a friend from Colerne last week. He entertained everyone with a tale of a ‘beautiful dark-haired dame’ who’d not only ventured out in the filthiest weather we’ve had when almost every other plane in England was grounded, but that a Lancaster had almost landed on her and she’d bounced out of the plane asking for a cigarette as if nothing was the matter. I know it was you. Don’t,” he said vehemently, “don’t fucking die.”

  He didn’t apologize for swearing. He didn’t appear to realize how he’d spoken, seeming only to care that Skye heard him and made him a promise. She put down her fork, her throat now too tight to swallow anything.

  “I was so scared,” she said quietly, seeing again the Lancaster, just an arm’s length away, and the crew’s faces so close.

  “I know,” he said, and in his eyes she could see his RAF dead, just as her ATA dead lived in her despite her stubborn pretense. She and Nicholas were separated from those souls by simple luck, not the power of pocket watches and scarves.

  And she felt it then, like the kick in the back from a Merlin engine suddenly throttled up: the absolute certainty that Nicholas could not die either. If he did, it wouldn’t matter if there was a war or not. Her world would end.

  If they were still ten and eleven, they might have pricked their fingers to seal the promise. All she could do now was stretch out her hand across the table, hoping that a handshake had an effect as binding as a blood vow.

  “Don’t you die either,” she said.

  As their palms met, Nicholas’s thumb slid over the arch of skin where her forefinger curved around to her thumb. His fingertips brushed against the back of her hand. She had shaken hands a thousand times before but she had never shaken hands like this.

  “I’m glad I found you again,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  * * *

  After dinner, they went for a walk along the river.

  “Do you miss swimming every day?” he asked.

  She grinned. “What makes you think I don’t still swim every day?”

  He laughed. “Of course you do. Even though no one in England is allowed to swim in the sea, Skye Penrose manages to breach the coastal defenses and convince everyone in the village of Hamble to turn a blind eye to her rule-breaking. Is that about right?”

  “I didn’t have to convince everyone,” she said. “Just those who get up early, like the baker. Half of Hamble beachcombs for souvenirs and debris so I’m not the only one. And it has its benefits. The beachcombers found a crate full of wheels of Camembert washed up last year and I came home with two. No growling stomach that week.”

  “After all that pie, it shouldn’t make a noise for a week this time either,” he said, smiling.

  “Maybe a couple of days at least.”

  Others out walking nodded as they passed and Skye wondered what they must look like: a man and woman in uniform, out together, but not together in the way that most men and women walking at night in uniform were. Their hands weren’t joined and there was a decorous space between their bodies. Only their eyes touched fleetingly every now and again, before pulling quickly away.

  “I miss the water,” Nicholas said. “I can’t remember the last time I swam in the sea.” He stopped and leaned his forearms against the river wall, and Skye sat atop it, facing him. “Do you still have the house in Porthleven?” he asked.

  “Yes. But I haven’t been there for two years. Two days off isn’t quite enough time to take the train and I don’t have a car, so I’ve never learned to drive.”

  “I’d love to see it again. Find out if it’s the same as I remember or if . . .” He hesitated. “If I’ve somehow made it into more than it was. Or if I haven’t quite made it into enough.”

  “Every time I go back, I find the reality far surpasses my expectations.”

  “That cove,” he said wistfully. “There’s no other place like it.”

  “There isn’t,” she said, smiling to think that he still adored her home the way she did, that his New York City and Harvard upbringing hadn’t ruined the unelaborate for him. “We were so happy, weren’t we? Sometimes, now, I forget that happy exists. And I feel guilty, when so many people are dying, for coveting it. Do you think it will all end—the worry, the fear? No,” Skye corrected herself, “the need to not feel the worry or the fear, because if we did, how would we ever fly an airplane again?”

  “It will end,” he said grimly. “I don’t know how, or whether the end might be worse than now. Sometimes I don’t even know whether to pray for the end or not.”

  “That’s why I swim,” she said as she contemplated the future that lay out there, somewhere beyond reach, beyond prophecy. “When someone dies, or nearly dies, and I can’t talk about it, I can at least hit the water as hard as I like and it doesn’t complain. What do you do?”

  “At the risk of sounding like the clichéd American pilot, I guess we drink whiskey, O’Farrell and I.” He straightened up, turned to lean his back against the wall and rubbed a hand tiredly over the back of his neck. “Special Duties is a place of well-curbed and bridled emotion. It has to be. Except if it’s midnight and we’re not flying, you’ll find the younger ones and the new recruits so full of whiskey that they’ll try to walk across a ceiling beam and fall off and break their arm, and various other stupid dares. O’Farrell and I watch with resignation, because if you tell them to stop they think you’re doubting their courage and that only makes them do something even more stupid. That’s when you know their emotions are only just in check. I started a football competition because there was no goddamn way I was going to play cricket, and I try to make them dare one another on the comparative safety of the field. O’Farrell and I run circles around them while they try to make sense of the rules.” He grinned. “It makes me a terrible person that I make them play American football instead of cricket, doesn’t it?”

  She laughed. “I’d say that if it stops them falling off ceiling beams it can only be a good thing.” She almost didn’t ask because they’d moved from seriousness to lightness, but she had to. “How old are those younger ones?”

  “Special Duties doesn’t take eighteen-year-olds. Our youngest is twenty-three.”

  Nicholas was twenty-five. “Only two years younger than you. And you’re in charge of a squadron.”

  “I feel a thousand years old inside, Skye.”

  His voice was low and she had to lean in close, too close, to hear it. Don’t, she wanted to whisper. Don’t talk like that. Because right now, all she wanted was to slide off the wall, step in front of him and lean the back of her body into the front of his, to feel his arms wrap around her, his chin rest on her shoulder, his breath warm against her cheek as she held on to him and he held on to her. To stand like that all night long and not let go.

  “I wish I could fix that,” she said softly.

 
; “You do,” he said, his lips so near her ear. “You always do.”

  A raucous group of ATA pilots swept past then, bringing with them the sharp sting of reality and leaving behind them the echoes of common sense.

  As they passed, Skye did slide off the wall, but she faced the water, shaking off her strange imaginings. “How’s O’Farrell?” she asked, in order to move the conversation into less turbulent space.

  “Same as always.”

  “Flirting with every WAAF who crosses his path then?”

  Nicholas didn’t answer.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I know what he’s like. I’m not looking to him as a safe harbor for my heart or my feelings. You’re lucky you’ve found someone for that,” she added, as much a reminder for herself as anything. “Will you and Margaux go back to New York after all this is over?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t do a lot of future planning.”

  “Do you think your mother will be able to attend the wedding?”

  Nicholas stared fixedly at the ground. “Margaux doesn’t know about my mom. We don’t talk about the past. My relationship with Margaux is . . .”

  He met her eyes at last and Skye braced herself for what he was about to say. A physical thing? She couldn’t help the involuntary shudder as she thought about Nicholas engaging himself to someone out of pure lust. But that wasn’t Nicholas. Except neither was it Nicholas to keep so much to himself, to give Margaux nothing except who he was right now, which was only half of the Nicholas Crawford Skye knew.