They’d felt like they’d been about to, though.
As Prim had passed her, and she’d turned towards the noise of the planes, her whole body had flooded with adrenalin: the strongest sensation of somehow already being in the process of falling.
‘I was about to slip,’ she said.
‘No you weren’t.’
‘I felt like I was.’
Prim narrowed her eyes. ‘Have you been drinking Clare’s brandy?’
‘No.’
‘I should hope not,’ said Prim, carrying on inside.
Iris remained where she was, her frown deepening.
She really had felt like she’d been tumbling.
Slowly, she looked over towardsMabel’s Fury, now taxiing towards the runway, and, reached up, touching her hand to her head.
She wasn’t sure what made her do that, either.
Or probe her skull for a bruise.
There was no bruise.
Of course there wasn’t.
She hadn’t fallen.
And yet, as she pressed harder on her scalp, she was filled with a certain sense of a moment hurdled.
A pain missing.
‘How bad’s the pain?’ Nick asks me, still on the phone to 999.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘I can’t really feel it.’
‘You heard that?’ Nick says, into his phone.
They heard it.
‘The ambulance is on its way,’ he tells me.
I open my mouth to protest again.
I don’t need an ambulance,I intend to say.
But, ‘Can you come too?’ I ask Nick instead.
‘Of course I’ll come,’ he tells me.
And I realise, as he tightens his grasp around mine, that, for the first time since last Friday, he’s holding my hand.
‘The strangest thing just happened to me,’ Iris said to Clare, once the squadron was gone, Browning was fetching tea, and they were alone in the control room. ‘I can’t make any sense of it.’
‘Sense of what?’ said Clare, leaning back in her chair.
