Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  The thought of Annie made Tony smile. She was an inquisitive elf, who never walked if she could run; already she knew every vegetable in the walled kitchen garden, every tree and every yew hedge around the house, every rose and every dog and every horse that had ever come near the house. She took a serious, almost precocious interest in these living things, which she far preferred to toys. She was so delicately balanced on her little feet, as graceful as a larch on her slender legs and as fastidious as a kitten, his little Annie was, and she didn’t fly anything, not even a balloon, and if he had his way, she never would. No, she’d grow up as demure and dainty as she was now, deep in a peaceful green countryside, learning to ride and do needlework as well as his mother, and to speak French, of course, which she already did with Eve, who came out to Longbridge Grange to see her whenever she could. Ah, his Annie would be a proper English gentlewoman. And as soon as the war was over, the minute peace was declared, he’d get Freddy pregnant again, and then when she’d had that baby, he’d start all over until she had enough children so that she’d wonder what she’d ever found to fill all the long, lazy hours she’d wasted during the war. Bombers? Fighter planes? What were they, she’d ask? How could any machine ever built interest the mother of so many children … especially when she had to put her husband first, as any good wife would?

  She loved Freddy, she really loved her, thought Jane, as she helped her mother carry out the food for the picnic, but the longer she knew her the more she realized that there was something about Freddy that just resisted giving itself up and blending into the unity that made up a proper family. Sometimes she thought that the two of them had talked about everything two females possibly could talk about, particularly when they were sisters-in-law and fellow pilots, and then Freddy would suddenly drift away with a look as if she were seeing something Jane had never seen, as if she were thinking about something Jane could never understand. She’d never asked Freddy about those moments, but she knew that there was a mystery in her past—about a man, of course, what else could it possibly be?—that meant too much to her to ever be revealed. The eternally surprising blue of Freddy’s eyes would grow dim, and her quick, sporting smile that wrinkled her nose would disappear, and for just a moment she’d seem not to be there at all.

  Whatever the mystery was, it explained why flying meant more to Freddy than it ever would to her. In a way Jane envied Freddy her constant passion, the way a married woman, not unpleasantly bored with her husband, would envy young love in its first wildness. When the war was over, Jane didn’t think that she’d ever want to look at an aircraft again. Soon it would be five years of climbing in and out of the blasted things—oh, it had been wonderfully exciting and challenging to be able to do the job, especially as it grew more complicated—and, without question, it was still the most direct possible way of replacing a man for battle that any girl would ever know. On occasion, it was just as good sport as ever, especially when you drew a bomber to ferry. Freddy was dead wrong about that bloody Yank Minneapolis-Honeywell Supercharger—it was much more reliable to use the standby screws, one for each engine, but who could win such a theoretical argument? Come to think of it, did she really give a good goddamn, or had she just bickered about it to be companionable?

  Jane put down the platter of corned-beef sandwiches and covered them carefully against potential attack by insects. She glanced at Tony, sitting lost in thought, and thought that he looked the way she felt. Some of the heart had gone out of her when Margie Fairweather, who had started with them back in the earliest days, was killed when the Proctor she was flying had engine failure. She’d managed to land it safely in a field but it had blown up in a hidden ditch before the engine could be stopped. There had been other deaths in the ATA, many others, but Margie’s had been the saddest of all, for she’d left behind a small baby. Her husband, Douglas, also of the ATA, had been killed on a volunteer mission over the Irish Sea in bad weather, four months earlier. Did Freddy never think of little Annie when she took over the controls of the heaviest planes that had ever been flown in this war? It wasn’t something you could ask her, somehow, any more than you could ask Jock why he kept on flying with his squadron when he’d had so many missions that he could have chosen, with honor, to fly a desk ten times over. You had to accept the fact that Freddy was willing to take the risk, baby or no baby.

  Where was Jock, she wondered. Probably, on this rare day that found them all able to come back to The Grange for a few days, he was talking to Freddy about—what else?—the bombing of Germany that would soon, very soon now, prepare the way for the invasion. All of England seemed, when she flew over it, to have become one vast staging ground for the combat to come. Men and materiel were collected so thick on the ground and at the seaports that it was a wonder the whole island didn’t sink under their weight. And after the invasion, after the victory that they all prayed must come, what would Jock do with himself?

  Unquestionably, Tony and Freddy would live down here in the country, leading the life led by fifteen generations of Longbridge landowners and gentleman farmers. She herself would go to London and have a series of fabulous escapades, one after another, each one more thrilling than the last, until she had her final fling and found the man she could settle for, and did the right thing by her Mama.

  But Jock? Jane Longbridge sat down on a blanket with her back to her brother, so as not to seem to want to interrupt his thoughts, and contemplated the question of Jock Hampton. Perhaps, after all, she was lucky that Freddy’s sneaky, ingenious attempts to throw her and Jock together had failed. What if he had fallen in love with her, as Freddy had intended him to do? Now she’d have to be worrying about going back to California with an American husband and adapting to a new country and a new way of life. Another war bride.

  No, she was fortunate indeed that it hadn’t worked out that way. She had—Jane prayed—almost stopped being in love with Jock. If anyone had ever told her that she’d do something as girlishly banal as caring for a man who didn’t love her, she’d have hit him over the head with a bottle of whatever was handy … but she loved him, alas, with an absurd, passionate, painful intensity, although no one, not even Freddy, knew it. The cure she chose was as humiliating as it was trusty.

  She had only to look at Jock and Freddy together, only to see that the beautiful blond fool of a Californian—whose face Jane ached to touch, ever since Tony and Freddy’s wedding—was still in love with her sister-in-law, only to see that Freddy still didn’t know it, to feel her heart harden a little more against him. Soon, very soon, the shell around her heart would have grown as tough as a crab’s, and thoughts of Jock Hampton and his eyes and his lips, his Viking face, would no longer trouble her nights and darken her days.

  As for Freddy, Jane congratulated herself, she could honestly say in her heart of hearts that she’d never been jealous of another girl, and she didn’t intend to start now. Poor Jock … when the war was over he’d undoubtedly leave England, and although he’d become an honorary member of their family, who knew how often he’d be able to come back again? And when he saw Freddy after the war, a Freddy in a twin set and a tweed skirt, with a bunch of children and a house to run, would he still be in love with her? She’d be a bit plump then, probably, and perhaps her hair would have started to fade—even to gray a bit—and she’d be preoccupied with the new baby or a sick dog or a cook who hadn’t worked out—yes, in a few years, inevitably that’s the way Freddy would be. She’d grow out of some of her piss and vinegar … England would get to her yet. On the other hand, Jane thought approvingly, she herself would still be enjoying her flings. Ten years of lovely flings would hardly be enough to compensate for the deprivations of thirteen days on duty and only two off. How soon, she wondered, would decent stockings come back after the war?

  He was still more or less fond of Freddy, Jock Hampton thought, as he leaned on the windowsill of his room and looked out at Tony and Jane sitting in what looked like a comfortable silence on the blankets under the flowe
ring pear tree, but why the fuck couldn’t she stop singing “Till We Meet Again” to his goddaughter? When the Eagle Squadron had still been intact, for a year after her marriage, she and Tony had joined them at the squadron’s favorite pub as often as she had leave. Each night, as they sat drinking and smoking and trying not to think about the men who hadn’t come back from the latest sortie, she’d sung to them for hours on end, songs of today and songs of World War I that she’d learned from Eve. The evening had never been over for anyone until Freddy had sung that last lovely line, those last words, “Till we meet again,” which Jock had always believed, against all logic, was a private promise made directly from her to him. She didn’t know it—but he did, and that was what mattered.

  Annie’s room was right next to his, and even through the thick walls he could hear Freddy’s lilting voice as she waltzed the little girl around and around. Didn’t Freddy realize that it was the kind of tune that got stuck in your mind and didn’t stop driving you crazy for months? Why couldn’t she sing “Mairzy Doats” or something forgettable like that? He could always tell her to stop, he supposed, but how can you tell a mother that the sound of her singing to her child is a torment? How could you explain to her that you’d find yourself hearing that old tune when you should be concentrating on one of the dozens of pretty, willing girls you had to beat off with sticks in London? They didn’t call pilot’s wings “leg spreaders” for no reason … they even worked for Second Lieutenants, but rank sure had its privileges.

  He could always go out and sit with Jane and Tony, or else find Lady Penelope in the kitchen and give her a hand—the cook was getting too old to be much help—but something had made him unable to move from his observation post. It must be the weather. Everyone in England said it was the hottest May in memory—back home, in San Juan Capistrano, California, U.S.A., it would just have been another nice day, the sort of day on which you’d have a hard time trying to decide whether to surf or play tennis, so you’d end up doing both. Or maybe it was the kind of day on which a guy like himself, in love with speed, in love with danger, in love with excitement, in love with flying, might just hear one word too many about a big show going on overseas in England and manage to dig up the train fare to Canada and get enough flight training so that he could join the Eagle Squadron.

  It was exactly on this kind of day, four years ago, that he’d said good-bye to his family and set off—maybe that was why he felt so restless. Not just restless … moody. In fact, he was pissed off for some inexplicable reason … unquestionably pissed off, which was damn peculiar, for he hadn’t had an opportunity to come to The Grange for months now, and he should be enjoying every second of it. Didn’t this beat leading his squadron through the hostile air toward Germany, escorting the slow-flying bombers, protecting them from the German antiaircraft guns and fighter planes until they approached the target? Didn’t this beat flying back through a sky shit-full of flak, until you could see the coastline below and all you had to worry about was being shot down in water that was never anything but very fucking wet and very fucking cold? And yet, when he was doing his job, he never felt pissed off like this. He might feel bored or terrified or furious or insanely victorious, but one thing about that Mustang P-51, that fucking brilliant fighting machine, that glorious gun platform with wings, was that its pilot never had the time to feel pissed off. Pissed off, in his book, was as maddening as a constant low fever, an aggravation, an irritation, an itch you couldn’t scratch, a thirst you couldn’t satisfy, no matter how much you drank.

  One of the reasons he kept on flying was that he knew if he let them bump him up to Headquarters he’d feel pissed off all of the time, instead of just some of the time. Group HQ grounded him every once in a while; saying that he was due for a rest, but they couldn’t keep him on the deck for long. If you wanted to fly and you weren’t sick or loony, they just had to let you go and do it, Lieutenant Colonel or not.

  When he’d left home to join the Eagle Squadron, he’d just been another wild, sky-mad, inexperienced college kid of twenty who couldn’t stand the idea of missing the fun. Now he was twenty-four; he’d learned that fun and war weren’t the same thing during his first mission, but he was deeply glad that he’d come to the right place for the wrong reasons. Before the Eagles had been transferred to the United States Army Air Corps, they’d shot down the equivalent of six Luftwaffe squadrons, and that was way back in ’42, two centuries ago. Not too shabby. And they hadn’t even had their Mustangs then.

  Shit, why was he sitting up here waxing philosophical when he could be doing some good in the kitchen? Naturally, Freddy wasn’t there—she probably didn’t even know how to put together a decent ham sandwich. What a hopeless wife she’d make for Tony after the war—it really made him feel sad just to think about it. A great guy like Tony deserved better. He deserved a girl who’d been brought up to do things graciously, a girl with his own kind of traditions in her blood, a girl who’d sink into the pleasures of peacetime with nothing more on her mind than making him happy. His best friend—the best friend he’d ever had in his life—had every right to a wife who put him first in everything. That was the only kind of girl he’d even consider marrying, himself, that was for damn sure.

  Instead, poor old Tony was stuck with Freddy, the bossiest bitch a man could imagine. Everything was wrong with Freddy. She was too stubborn, too spunky, too aggressive, too determined to have her own way, no matter what. So what if she’d once saved his life? It only went to show what a thoroughly unreasonable female she was. How poor Eve and Paul had put up with her all those years, when she was learning how to fly, was beyond him. They might just as well have had a boy like him instead of a tomboy like Freddy, who didn’t seem to know she was a mother, much less a wife.

  Jock looked down on the lawn and saw Freddy and Annie emerge at a gleeful run. She’d dressed the kid in a pair of tiny blue overalls—now wasn’t that typically dumb of her—did she want to turn his goddaughter into a tomboy too? Wasn’t one enough in the long-suffering Longbridge family? And look at her; what did she think she was playing at, all done up in a strapless flowered sun dress as if this were the fucking French Riviera? Shit, she even had on red high-heeled sandals—she must have been raiding Jane’s closet again. Well, at least it made a change from that navy blue uniform she usually sailed about in like some sort of damn corsair, looking as if she expected him to salute her, with that big smartass smile and that infuriatingly friendly look in her eyes.

  Without knowing that he’d done so, Jock got up from his seat by the windowsill and followed Freddy downstairs and outside, no more able to resist being close to her than he’d been able to pull himself away from the sound of her voice while she sang to her daughter.

  Freddy lay full length on one of the old blankets, a slim version of one of Renoir’s luscious redheads who had happened to borrow her dress from Matisse. She had crossed her bare arms over her eyes to shut out the brightness of a sun to which she had become unaccustomed, and kicked off her shoes so that she could wriggle her bare toes in its warmth.

  Whiskey, corned-beef sandwiches and Milky Ways made a mysteriously satisfying combination, she decided; each one was a form of perfection in itself, yet, when taken one after the other, they turned into a total treat that couldn’t be explained by the individual parts. Was she feeling this deep contentment because so many of the people she loved were within touching distance? In a few hours her parents were expected on the train from London, and that would make it complete … if only Delphine were here. As the thought came into her mind she felt the same unexpected plunge of her heart that attacked her each time she realized how long it had been since any of them had had news of Delphine.

  France lay so heartbreakingly near. Barely a day passed when she didn’t see its coastline from a cockpit, and yet there might as well have been a concrete wall built around the country, reaching up into the clouds, an impenetrable prison wall that allowed no one to see what was going on inside. Her father would hav
e been notified, through the headquarters of the Free French in London, and their network of radio communications with the Resistance, if anything out of the ordinary had happened to Delphine, and he’d had no news in years. They all had to reassure each other that Delphine was managing to get along somehow, but the lack of any contact was increasingly painful. It was something that she and her parents only talked about among themselves; it wasn’t fair to lay another burden on the Longbridges, who had so many children of their own to care for, to say nothing of Annie.

  Darling little Annie, she thought, listening to Jock and Tony and Gerald all vying to tempt her into their laps, had probably caused less worry than any baby ever born. She looked a little like Delphine; she had the same perfect little chin, and lips that tilted up at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling. She’d been named after Anette de Lancel, much to her grandfather’s pleasure, but to Freddy, Annie would always recall the nickname that everyone in the ATA used for the faithful taxi Ansons that had flown them to and from the aircraft they’d ferried some forty million miles within England since the war began. She opened her eyes to see Annie sitting on Gerald’s shoulders, her arms wrapped around his neck.