‘You’ve been in the service a long time, haven’t you, sir? I remember your saying.’
Caroline had been right, he must seem like Methuselah to her. How could he seriously imagine that he could hold any interest for her at all, other than the compulsory one as her commanding officer?
‘Yes,’ he said shortly. ‘A fair while.’
‘You like the life, though, don’t you, sir?’
It is my life, he almost answered. I have nothing else I care about. Except you. And I can never have that. Aloud he said: ‘It has its drawbacks, of course, but on the whole it’s a good life. Worthwhile.’
‘You do a wonderful job, sir. Everyone admires you.’
He looked at her, surprised. It never occurred to him that he might be admired. Respected, yes. Feared, certainly. But not admired. She had spoken warmly and honestly, and he felt himself reddening. He cleared his throat.
‘One does one’s best. I couldn’t do the job without the help of the WAAF, and that’s a fact that I’m happy to acknowledge.’
It was her turn to blush. ‘Thank you, sir. It’s good of you to say so.’
‘Not really. It’s the truth, as it so happens, though, as you may remember it wasn’t always my view.’
She laughed suddenly and so did he, with a faint hope stirring in his heart as they laughed together.
‘Will you stay in when the war’s over?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t really thought about it, sir. Perhaps they’ll disband the WAAF anyway – like they did after the last war.’
He smiled. ‘I rather doubt that. I think we can say that you have proved your worth beyond dispute.’
She smiled too and put up her hand to tuck a wisp of hair behind one ear. The small, womanly gesture made him catch his breath. He longed to see how her hair would look loose about her face instead of in that neat roll she always wore. He pictured himself taking out the pins, freeing it with his fingers . . . He picked up his wineglass again quickly. As he did so, the sight of the four rings on his sleeve reminded Felicity of what she had been in danger of forgetting – who and what he was. He had shown another side to his character: a completely different sort of man that she had not realized existed beneath the austere exterior – shy, unsure of himself and, she suddenly understood, very lonely. She looked at him with new eyes and then away quickly as he met her gaze.
She tried to cover the uneasy moment by speaking briskly: ‘It’s very kind of you, sir . . . this dinner. It wasn’t necessary. I could have managed perfectly well.’
‘I don’t doubt it, but I’m glad you didn’t deny me the pleasure. Do you think that as we’re off duty you could forget the “sir” for a while?’
The colour came into her cheeks again. ‘Oh . . .’
‘Please try. And I’ll drop the “Section Officer”. Just for this evening.’
She returned his smile rather nervously, he thought. And who could blame her? He spent most of his time putting the fear of God into people and keeping a clearly-marked distance from them, and she must be thinking that he was going soft in the head. It was a long while since he had acted the ogre with her but he had never dared to lower his guard further in case she might begin to suspect how he felt about her. He was not her only admirer on station, he knew; he had seen several young officers trying their luck but, apart from Speedy Dutton she seemed to have no serious interest in any of them. Dutton, he’d heard, had gone missing over France and he could not suppress the uncharitable wish that he’d stay there. It would be typical of him, though, to turn up again like a bad penny.
She managed not to say ‘sir’ more than once or twice during the rest of the meal, but it was clearly an effort. He kept the conversation as light as he could – well away from the war, from the station and from anything to do with service life. For a while he allowed himself the pretence that they were just a normal dinner couple with nothing standing between them, and for a while he almost convinced himself. It might have been the good food and the wine, or even just the pleasant atmosphere of the little restaurant, but he thought she was almost feeling that way too towards the end of the meal. He spun it out for as long as he dared, ordering liqueurs, drinking very slowly, delaying signalling for the bill, but, finally, she began to look anxiously at her watch.
‘I ought to telephone my father to let him know I won’t be there tonight or he’ll be worried.’
‘Of course. We’ll ask if you can do it from here.’
But the restaurant’s telephone was out of order.
‘There’s a quiet hotel not far away that I thought would suit you,’ he suggested. ‘You’ll be able to telephone from there.’
He shone his torch along the whitened kerb edge for her as they walked in the direction of the Brompton Road. Just as they reached it the air raid siren suddenly went, its eerie rising and falling wail sounding shockingly loud in the dark.
‘False alarm, I’m sure,’ Palmer said. ‘Some unidentified aircraft causing a bit of a panic. But we’d better take cover, just in case. My house is only across the road and there’s a very safe cellar there.’
Caroline’s house, he should have said, he reminded himself. His RAF pay could never have run to the Georgian house in the Georgian square in Knightsbridge. He unlocked the front door and shone his torch into the blackness of the hall.
‘I’ll have to do the blackout before we can turn on any lights. Can you see enough to come up the stairs?’
She followed him up to the first floor, guided by the torch beam, and into what was probably the drawing-room. The searchlights’ white beams were criss-crossing the sky beyond the long windows but there was no noise of any aircraft. She could hear Group Captain Palmer moving about and the rattle of blackout blinds coming down over the windows, and then the swish of heavy curtains being drawn across. She waited in the darkness as the torchlight bobbed across the room and then he switched on chandelier lights. She gasped.
‘What a beautiful room!’
The furniture was French, the upholstery pale blue, the rugs Chinese, the wallpaper watered silk. She saw her reflection in a huge gilt-framed looking-glass over the mantelpiece and her WAAF uniform was completely incongruous in its surroundings.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My wife has excellent taste and the means to indulge it.’ He switched on some table lamps and turned off the glittering chandelier. ‘We could stay up here for a moment, if you like . . . so long as we don’t hear any aircraft or ack-ack. Unless you prefer to go down to the shelter at once.’
She had had more than enough of sitting in shelters. ‘I’d prefer to stay here, I think, sir.’
It was ‘sir’ again, he noted. ‘Let me take your coat.’
He helped her off with it and draped it over the back of a chair beside her suitcase. He switched on the electric fire that stood in the grate. ‘Would you like a drink?’ He moved towards the drinks cabinet that he knew would be very well stocked.
‘No, thank you, sir.’ She seemed very ill at ease.
‘I think I’ll have another brandy . . .’
When he turned round from pouring it he saw that she was staring at the large oil painting of Caroline that hung on the wall. She had been painted wearing a long white muslin gown and carrying a big straw bergère hat with blue satin ribbons. The background was sunlit meadows and blue skies with fleecy white clouds.
‘That’s a lovely portrait of your wife.’
‘Yes,’ he said heavily. Caroline’s affair with the artist had lasted six months before she had tired of him. She had spent a great deal of time in some Chelsea attic and taken to wearing flowing garments. Her Bohemian phase. ‘She’s away in Gloucestershire at the moment.’
With her latest lover, no doubt. Not that he cared a damn. He drank some of the brandy. ‘Would you like to try that phone call now?’
Tactfully, he left her alone in the room. She got through to Trunks on the white telephone and the connection was surprisingly quick. Her father’s voice sounded faint, though.
He would be holding the instrument gingerly, she guessed, and speaking from too far away. It was the only real modern convenience in the rectory and he had resisted its installation for a long time before parish needs won the day. She explained what had happened, but she didn’t mention the air raid warning, or where she was.
She was replacing the receiver when Group Captain Palmer came back into the room.
‘Did you get through all right?’
‘Yes, thank you, sir.’
‘I hope he wasn’t too worried.’
She shook her head with a wry smile. ‘I think he’d forgotten I was coming. He’s very absent-minded. My mother used to keep track of everything for him, but now it’s rather chaotic.’
‘Has she been dead many years?’
‘Eleven. She died when I was fourteen.’
He did not need reminding that she was only twenty-five to his forty-four. ‘How very sad for you. You must miss her very much.’ He could scarcely remember his own parents. They had both died a long time ago of fever in India and he had never seen much of them when they were alive. They had faded into the dim, distant past along with aunts and uncles, teachers and schoolfriends whom he hadn’t seen for years and years. He retrieved his glass of brandy.
‘Sure you won’t have a drink?’
‘No, thank you, sir.’
There was an awkward silence. She had remained standing behind one of the blue brocade chairs, keeping it as a barrier between them. The situation, he realized, was hopeless. She was probably deeply embarrassed by it and only wished to be gone. He tried to smile jovially.
‘Well, looks like it was a false alarm . . . I expect the All Clear will go any minute. As soon as it does I’ll take you round to that hotel. It’s quite near.’
‘Thank you, sir. You’ve been very kind.’
I’m not kind at all, he wanted to say. I’m in love with you. As passionately in love as any young man could be and more deeply than I knew was possible. If I had the guts I’d tell you so here and now, but I haven’t because I’m so afraid that you’d be appalled and disgusted, or worse, amused. And that you’d ask to be posted away and I’d never see you again.
There was another long silence. They stood facing each other and she saw the desperate look in his eyes. In the restaurant she had felt pity for him, and understanding, but now she began to feel something much more than that and it was so surprising and so overwhelming that she could neither move nor speak. They went on staring at each other in silence.
The All Clear went suddenly, sounding its long steady note. It was the first time he had ever been sorry to hear it. He put down his glass and picked up her greatcoat from the chair.
‘We can leave now.’
He held out the coat for her and she slid her arms into the sleeves, her back to him. When she turned round she began to thank him again and then faltered as she saw his expression. Before he could stop himself he had grasped her by both shoulders and pulled her towards him. Her mouth felt as soft as he had always imagined it to be, and as sweet. He let her go abruptly.
She grabbed at her suitcase and fled from the room. He followed her down the stairs slowly and wretchedly, knowing that he had lost her. She had reached the front door when he was halfway down and was struggling with the difficult catch in the dimness of the hallway.
He said, but without any hope, ‘Felicity, please don’t go.’
She turned and looked up at him.
‘I love you,’ he said humbly. ‘Stay with me. Please.’
He held his breath because she had stopped trying to open the door. After a long, long moment she set down the suitcase on the floor.
Nineteen
WINNIE HAD NEVER known cold like it – not even in the worst winters in Suffolk, working on the farm. Out at dispersal the wind was merciless and chilled her to the bone. She had been issued with a leather jerkin and oilskins to wear over her overalls and had added a thick pullover, scarf and mittens from the Comforts Fund; the oilskins kept out the worst of the wet but nothing could keep out the bitter cold. The only warm place was close to the stove in the wooden hut where she tried unsuccessfully sometimes to thaw out her frozen fingers.
The day now began in pitch dark. She dressed hurriedly in clothes still damp from the day before and went out to wipe the rain or frost from the saddle of her bike before cycling the two miles to the camp for breakfast. She drank the hot tea and took the bacon sandwich with her, eating it as she biked out to dispersal. As dawn broke she was helping to take the covers off the picketed aircraft. After a hard night frost it was a slippery, dangerous job scrambling up onto the wings and the closed cockpits gave no good handholds. The canvas covers were stiff and unwieldy in already numb fingers and flapped violently like loose sails in the wind.
One morning, when she was doing a plug change, one of the plugs slipped from her cold fingers and fell down into the engine. She tried frantically to retrieve it but it had fallen into an inaccessible place and there seemed nothing for it but to confess to Chiefy. The twenty-four plugs all had to be accounted for on a change and a loose one could not be left somewhere in an engine where it might do damage. Winnie was close to tears. She had come so far without making any serious mistakes and Chiefy, though he would never show it, seemed better disposed towards her than he had ever been. One small sparking plug would soon change all that. It would be back to cleaning oil filters, and fetching and carrying.
It was Ginger who came to her rescue with a bit of wire and a magnet which he produced, magician-like, from the pocket of his dungarees. After a bit of jiggling and fiddling around down in the engine the plug reappeared, as though by magic too, clamped firmly to the magnet.
‘Useful trick to know,’ he told her. ‘And another one is to shove a bit of rag under where you’re working then if you drop a plug or something it’ll land on that.’
She wasn’t sure how she’d have managed without Ginger. He helped her in all sorts of ways, showing her the quickest and best methods, the good short cuts and the bad ones. And warning her of the dangers.
‘Always watch out for the props, love. You can’t see ’em when they’re spinnin’. Walk into one and it’ll cut you to little pieces. Ever ’ad a dekko at Shorty’s right ’and?’
Winnie shook her head. Shorty was a very tall, gangly aircrafthand on general duties.
‘Not much of it left. Used to be a flight mech ’til the silly sod swung a prop one day and left is ’and stuck up in the air. Sliced all the fingers off neat as sausages.’
They went on brewing cocoa up on Ginger’s tin-can brazier down in the dugout, out of the wind, and whenever he could he nicked food from the cookhouse for her. Once he brought some empty beer bottles and filled them with boiling water so that she could tuck them inside her battledress for warmth. Another time he presented her with a little copper brooch in the shape of a Spitfire that he’d made out of a penny. She pinned it to her dungarees.
‘It’s lovely, Ginger. Thanks.’
‘Now there’s a real beauty of a ’plane for you,’ he told her. ‘Makes the poor old Hurry look like a workhorse.’
‘I still like the Hurricanes best. I don’t know why, but I do. Better than any of them.’
They talked about a pilot who kept complaining of a mag drop where none existed.
‘Don’t want to worry about that, sweetheart,’ Ginger said, spearing another piece of stolen bread on his screwdriver. ‘Chiefy says he’s yellow. Any excuse not to go up.’
And they talked of a new rigger.
‘Dim as a ruddy Toc H lamp,’ was Ginger’s scornful verdict. ‘They should’ve sent us another WAAF. We’d’ve been a sight better off.’
‘Tell that to Chiefy.’
‘I did.’
‘Whatever did he say?’
‘Can’t repeat that. But that’s just ’is way. Thinks a lot of you now, you know. Though you’d never guess it, and he’d make sure you never did. Remember that French-Canadian laddie caused all that trouble ab
out you t’other day?’
Winnie nodded. She held her hands over the fire and rubbed them together. ‘He didn’t want to fly my Hurry, did he? Not a bit.’
Ginger grinned. ‘I was in Chiefy’s office when ’e come in and shouts there’s a woman sittin’ in ’is cockpit. “Yes,” says Chiefy, all innocent-like, “that’s my flight mech and she’s warming the engine up for you, sir.” So this bloke goes mad and starts to stamp about the place and yell that ’e’s not flyin’ any aircraft some bloody woman’s been fiddlin’ about with . . . Chiefy waits ’til ’e’s finished, then ’e says, quiet as anythin’ but very firm-like, that there’s no other aircraft available. An’ then ’e says that ’e’ll be a lot safer in that particular one than any other ’cos you take more trouble than all the men put together.’
Winnie put her hands over her cheeks. ‘Did he really say that?’
‘True as I’m sittin’ ’ere,’ Ginger told her, spreading the toast with marg for her. ‘Mind you, pigs’d fly ’fore ’e ever said anythin’ of the kind to you. But I ’eard it with my own ears.’
That was another thing Ginger did for her: boosted her spirits, encouraged her, made her feel that she wasn’t doing so badly after all.
The incident with the French-Canadian pilot had shaken her for a bit. He had been shockingly rude to her and she had watched him take off, in tears, and waited anxiously for over an hour until he returned and landed safely. He had strode past her on his way to the crew room without a glance or word.
Most of the pilots were pleasant enough, though. Some, she thought, treated you rather like a piece of equipment – as though you weren’t really there at all. She didn’t think they meant it, it was just that they had other things on their mind than being nice to the flight mech who looked after their aircraft.
One of a new intake of pilots was specially charming. Nothing wrong with his nerves, Winnie thought thankfully, as she went to help him. No nervous stumble as he sprang up into the cockpit. No shaky hands as she passed him the straps over his shoulders for fastening. No white, strained face. He smiled at her and thanked her nicely. The blue silk scarf that he wore round his neck exactly matched his eyes. She hopped down off the Hurricane’s wing root and watched as he taxied out. No imaginary mag drops either. He took off quickly and smoothly. Nothing to worry about there.
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