by Iona Grey
Two more missions down. Four more to go. If I get through them you will marry me, won’t you? Somehow? I don’t care if it’s just the two of us standing in the ruins of St Clement Danes at dawn, just so long as you’ll promise to spend your life with me.
I love you Stella. Take good care of yourself for me.
D x
8 August ’43
Darling Stella
Sorry for the long silence, and for my last letter, which I have a feeling might have sounded kind of crazy. I didn’t know it at the time but when I wrote it I was right in the middle of coming down with the ’flu. It was the real deal – fever, hallucinations and aching so bad all over that I was sure I ’d been shot up and couldn’t remember it happening. When I came round in the hospital I thought the blonde nurse was German.
The worst thing is that the boys have finished their tour without me, but since they’ve also finished without Johnson and Harper I guess I’m the lucky one. Morgan and Adelman came to see me after their last mission. They smuggled in a bottle of bourbon and we managed to get disgustingly drunk before the nurse rumbled us and threw them out. If there’s one thing worse than having the ’flu, it’s having the ’flu with a crushing hangover, I can tell you that.
I’ve been stood down for ten days, and lying here hour after hour I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t got sick I could be done by now. I could be in London, in the house in Greenfields Lane, with you. I think about you all the time, and it’s a bittersweet kind of pleasure. Bitter because it makes me miss you more, and sweet because – well, for obvious reasons.
I’m hoping to be passed fit for flying again in the next couple days, and will be assigned a new crew. That’ll be tough, but only four more missions and I’m done, and we can make a start on the rest of our lives. I don’t know what will happen, but we’ll always have a place to be together now, however and whenever.
Take care of yourself for me, darling girl.
Dan x
Jess was smiling as she finished reading; smiling because there it was – the first reference she’d found to the house in Greenfields Lane – and also in sympathy with Dan Rosinski and his ’flu. She knew how he’d felt, especially with the confusion. The weird thing was that while she’d been in the same situation it was him she’d been dreaming about. Him and Will, anyway; the two had become kind of interchangeable. She felt her cheeks heat up again remembering how he’d appeared through the fever’s fire and chaos and touched her face with his cool, gentle hands. The rest of the world had long since slipped out of focus and she wasn’t sure what was real and what was delirium, but she’d felt his strength and his kindness. And she’d known she could finally stop struggling because he was there, and she was safe.
She must remember to say thank you. God, she wished she had a mirror – she probably looked all kinds of hideous. Gingerly she altered her position in the bed, taking care not to knock the tube in her hand as she tried to tug the ugly gown into some kind of arrangement where it didn’t look like a paper sack. She turned towards the window again. The outside world was nothing but a pewter grey background in which the brightly lit ward was reflected, and she was just pulling her fingers through her lank, greasy, sawn-off hair when she caught sight of him coming back. She turned round quickly, her heart giving an odd little skip.
He was carrying a tray on which were two cardboard cups and a piece of fruit cake wrapped in cellophane. He had nice hands, she noticed as he put one cup down on her locker, then pushed back the hair that had fallen over his forehead. Nice hair too. And an incredible smile.
‘The cake looks fairly sad, but there wasn’t much else and I thought you might be hungry.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and the tightness in her chest was nothing to do with pneumonia.
26
1943
‘Are you going to eat that?’ Nancy eyed the dried piece of Genoa cake that Stella was absent-mindedly turning to crumbs. ‘Only, if you’re not, I will. I’m starving.’
Stella pushed the plate across the table. She’d only ordered the cake because she’d sensed the disapproval of the Nippy when she’d only asked for tea; Nancy had been late and, it being a Saturday, there were lots of other people waiting for tables. She had no appetite lately – the worry, she supposed. Dan was out of hospital now and back on duty and every day she woke up with a sick feeling in her stomach, knowing that he could be in the sky and heading for the heart of Germany, all the guns of the enemy ranged against him.
Across the table Nancy polished off the cake and took a packet of expensive-looking cigarettes from her handbag. Lighting one, she settled herself back in her seat. ‘My feet are killing me,’ she said, crossing her legs and drawing attention to her high-heeled cream leather shoes. She’d given up the salon and, funded by Len, devoted her days to the pursuit of beauty, though it didn’t seem to bring her much satisfaction. ‘I’ve already been all round Debenham and Freebody looking for a dress but honestly, I wouldn’t scrub the floors in the flimsy old rags they’re selling in there. I want something stunning. Something sophisticated.’
‘Have you got coupons?’
‘Oh yes, loads.’ Nancy waved her cigarette dismissively. ‘Len can always lay his hands on them. It’s finding something worth spending them on that’s the problem. I need nylons as well,’ she sighed, extending her leg and picking at a run with scarlet-tipped fingers. ‘Don’t suppose there’ll be any of those to be had in the shops for love, money nor coupons.’ She looked up at Stella with sudden interest. ‘Here, don’t suppose you’ve got any lying around, from your Yank . . . ?’
‘I’ve got the packet he gave me in Cambridge, but they’ve been worn a good few times. They’re not bad though – you can borrow them if you like.’
Nancy’s face fell again. Being with Len had spoiled her for second-hand. ‘Thanks all the same.’ She exhaled a plume of smoke with an edge of irritation. ‘You’d think he’d keep you well supplied with little treats like that, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not like they’re short, is it? Bit tight if you ask me.’ She shot Stella a sly glance. ‘Not giving them away to someone else, is he? One of them village girls he’s met at a dance on the base?’
Nancy always became sharp when thwarted, but since she’d been seeing Len it was as if any softness she’d once had had been stamped out, or hidden beneath the black-market silk blouses and the mysteriously acquired trench coat. Anger flared through Stella’s veins like a flash fire, and she set her cup down in the saucer very carefully. ‘He gives me lots of things,’ she said quietly. ‘More than I ever dreamed I’d have.’
‘Yes, well, there’s a war on. Fancy promises of undying love don’t keep you warm and looking presentable, do they? Give me a few pairs of nylons and a decent lipstick any day.’
‘He’s given me more than promises.’
‘Oh yes? Got a ring, have you?’ Nancy looked at her with withering pity. ‘Stella, angel, you’re too nice for this world. I don’t want to sound cruel, but I don’t want to stand by and see you get hurt neither, because you can bet as soon as he’s flown his last mission he’ll be off into the wide blue yonder and he won’t look back. I’m not saying it hasn’t meant something, but let’s face it, it ain’t going to last. A wartime romance, that’s what it is. God knows, we need a bit of romance. It’s about the only thing that’s in plentiful supply these days.’
Coming to the end of this speech, Nancy took another drag on her cigarette and stared moodily out of the window. It was a bright September afternoon, but cold enough for people to have unearthed threadbare coats from the backs of wardrobes. The year was turning.
‘A house,’ Stella said softly, almost to herself. ‘He bought me a house.’
It was as if the words stopped time for a second. Nancy froze, and when she moved again her face and voice were curiously blank.
‘A house?’ She tapped her cigarette over the cheap tin ashtray on the table and gave an abrupt little laugh. ‘Where?’
‘C
hurch End. It’s tiny and old and hidden away on a little back lane. I love it.’
She said the last bit almost defensively. Nancy ignored it. ‘Blimey. So you’re leaving the Rev then?’
Stella nodded and swallowed the last of her tea. It was cold and almost made her gag. ‘You were right. I should never have married him. I . . . I had no idea. About anything.’
‘So when are you going to tell him?’
‘I don’t know.’ A wave of inexpressible weariness crashed over Stella, as it did so often these days. ‘It’s hard to find a good moment when he’s hundreds of miles away in Italy. It’s not the kind of thing I can put in a letter, sandwiched between news of the runner bean glut and Reverend Stokes’s latest sermon. Maybe I’ll even have to wait until the war’s over: I’ve been listening to the wireless – it seems we’re making proper progress so it surely can’t be too long. In many ways I think he’ll be relieved. I know appearances are important to him, but he knows as well as I do that the marriage was a mistake.’
Nancy’s pencilled eyebrows shot up, though whether her scepticism was directed at the idea of the war, or Stella’s marriage ending wasn’t clear. ‘What about the God thing? Marriage vows made in church being unbreakable and all that?’
‘I know it’ll be difficult for him, but I hope he’ll see that we have a right to try to be happy, especially after all these years of struggling and hardship. Surely that’s what God would want?’
Viciously Nancy squashed the end of her cigarette into the ashtray and ground it down. ‘I don’t think it’s that simple with God. After all, he’s a man, ain’t he?’
Double summertime had ended and the days seemed to shorten rapidly. In the garden everything was ready at once, making the challenge of feeding Reverend Stokes slightly easier but providing endless amounts of tedious work; picking, peeling, slicing, sterilizing jars and eking out sugar for jam. Another season of apples swelled and sweetened, and Stella made apple sauce in preparation for Blossom’s impending demise.
She wrote to Dan and told him how she could no longer bear to go round with scraps from the kitchen and watch her snuffling through them, rooting out the choicest bits with surprising delicacy, oblivious to the fate that was soon to befall her. It seemed like a betrayal. It also gave Stella a sense of superstitious unease: what if God was looking down and watching her going about her daily chores, similarly oblivious that disaster was about to strike?
No matter how hard she tried to shake it off, a sense of doom stalked her through those late September days. Even receiving a letter from Dan – while wonderful – offered small comfort because she knew that it would have been written three or four days earlier, and was well aware how much could change in that time. The censor ensured she only read half of what he wrote to her about operations, but combined with what she picked up from the nine o’clock news on the wireless it was enough to know that a major air offensive was underway.
Leave passes were like hen’s teeth. Since those enchanted first days in the house they had never had another night there, although twice they managed to snatch a handful of hours together when he’d been on stand down and had hitched a ride on a supply truck. He’d been able to give her no notice, and she had no idea if or when such a meeting might be possible again, which only added to her unsettled feeling. Each day was a round of hope and dread, waiting and disappointment.
To make matters worse, the last time they had met at the house they’d come close to arguing. She had already been there when he arrived and he had walked straight into her arms as she opened the door. Wordlessly they had gone upstairs and made love with silent intensity, until tears slid from her eyes and into her hair.
Afterwards they lit a fire in the grate downstairs and sat in front of it, drinking the whisky he’d brought with him as the sweet autumn afternoon cooled into evening outside. The raw feeling she’d had for weeks was back, as if she’d lost a layer of skin which had left her emotions too close to the surface. She’d reached for him again, wanting to wrap herself around him and feel the strength of him inside her. Reluctantly he’d pulled away, murmuring into her hair, ‘I haven’t got another rubber.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘I do.’ Sighing, he sat up and raked a hand through his hair. Muscles moved beneath the skin of his bare back – he’d lost weight since he’d been in hospital, and the realization made her want to hold on to him even more. ‘I care about you too much to land you with a baby.’
‘I want a baby.’
‘So do I. But not now, not like this. I want to raise our kids in a safe world. One where we can be together all the time, not just in furtive moments that feel like they’re stolen from someone else.’
‘But what if you don’t survive to see that perfect world?’ The words sprang like malevolent toads from the dark swamp of despair inside her. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, dripping onto her raised knees as she hugged herself on the floor. ‘Dan, what if you don’t come back? Couldn’t you at least let me have a part of you to live for?’
‘Sweetheart, you would have.’ He knelt in front of her, his expression terribly sad. ‘You’re a part of me, and if that happens, if I don’t come back, I’d want you to live for yourself. I’d want you to have choices and the freedom to make them; to leave Charles, if that was what you wanted, and come here and be safe. It would be hard, but a whole lot harder if you had a baby.’
She knew he was right, but that only made it worse. Later, before he left, she had apologized for her childish, unreasonable behaviour and he had kissed her gently, sweetly; utterly forgiving. But she couldn’t quite forgive herself for spoiling their precious time together. It played on her mind and added to the sense of dread. What if that was the last time she saw him?
All of this was going round in her mind as she stood at the sink washing Reverend Stokes’s breakfast dishes one morning. She had run out of soap and the water was greyish and greasy, with bits of powdered egg floating like primitive life forms in it. A sulphurous whiff rose from it, like bad drains. Her throat constricted with nausea.
There was a knock on the back door. The effort of going to open it seemed too great, so she shouted, ‘Come in!’
Ada appeared, her old tweed coat thrown over her kitchen pinny, her head swathed in a scarf. She bustled over to the table, carrying a wicker basket and the clean, cold smell of autumn.
‘Morning love. Thought I’d bring you the first pickings.’ She lifted a bloody newspaper bundle from the basket and dropped it proudly on the table. Stella looked at it in horror.
‘What is it?’
Laughing, Ada folded back the red-edged pages to reveal a glistening mound of crimson flesh and nest of greyish snakes. ‘A good bit of liver, some loin, some chitterlings, bacon of course—’
Blossom.
The iron tang of blood filled Stella’s nostrils. She clamped a hand over her mouth and nose to block it out, and, cannoning off the table and the wall just about made it to the lavatory beside the scullery before she was violently sick.
*
‘Better?’
Ada watched her with a mixture of sympathy and concern as she sipped her tea. Blossom’s mortal remains had been wrapped up again and removed from sight, though Stella could still smell the metallic reek of flesh. Since when had her nose been so sensitive?
‘A bit, thanks.’ She took another dutiful sip. In all honesty she would have preferred water, but it would have been ungrateful to say that when Ada had been kind enough to make a pot of tea. Wearily she acknowledged that it would also be ungrateful, and ungracious, to say that she was still feeling wretched and would rather be left alone. Ada had taken off her coat and hung it on the hook on the back door, and seemed to be prepared to stay until she was sure Stella was all right. Pinned by her sharp gaze, Stella dredged up a smile. ‘It’s the change of seasons. Always a bad time for illness.’
‘Felt like this for a while, have you?’
‘A week or so, although I haven’t b
een sick before. I thought I was fighting it off, but obviously not. I’ve been so tired . . .’
Ada gave a soft little chuckle. ‘Poor lamb. You’re in the club, ain’t you?’
For a moment Stella was nonplussed. She thought of the bloodstained newspaper parcel and its gruesome contents. The pig club. She was in the pig club, that’s why Ada had come round.
‘What I mean is . . .’ Ada’s voice gentled. ‘Could you have started a baby?’
Stella’s jaw dropped. Thoughts chased each other like leaves in a gale across her mind. A baby? But Dan had been so careful . . . so determined. Could fate have intervened, just like it had when it had brought them both to the church, and taken him to the house? Some great plan that was written in the stars . . .
‘A baby?’
Tentative joy glowed inside her, like the first traces of pink dawn on the night horizon. He couldn’t mind now it had happened, could he? A baby. Dan’s child. She could almost hear its laughter echoing through the little house on Greenfields Lane.
Ada chuckled affectionately. ‘Don’t sound so shocked, love. It happens. And my guess is that you must be about two and a bit months on, which is exactly how long it is since Reverend Thorne was home on ’is Embarkation Leave.’
Oh God . . .
Charles.
Her cheek grinding against the fireplace and grit in her mouth. Slime between her thighs. Indecent acts.
The pink glow died and there was nothing but darkness.
The bell sounded for the end of visiting time, jolting Will back into the present. Looking up, he was surprised to find that while he’d been reading the letters it had gone completely dark. The windows were squares of black; shiny like tar, sealing off the world outside.
He stretched and rubbed a hand through his hair and looked down at the letter in his hand. Reading quickly – a skill he’d perfected at university – he’d almost caught up with Jess. He could understand how she’d become so involved in the lives of Dan Rosinski and Stella Thorne. Even without being able to read Stella’s side of the correspondence their story had leapt from the brittle pages and dragged him in.