‘No,’ she agrees, ‘but we got off on the wrong foot. With Clare, I never found my way back.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Clare? I really didn’t know her. But –’ she frowns – ‘I did want to. She was the kind of person it felt very cold, being onthe outside of. I suspect that it was rather wonderful, having her for your friend.’
‘Yes,’ I say, thinking of Emma, and how much I’m going to miss knowing she’s around, once she’s gone.
‘She was fun,’ Ellen continues. ‘And sad. And much too young.’ She sighs. ‘I wept for her when she went.’
Slowly, I nod and, hearing the first drops of rain pattering the room’s windowpanes, turn to them, staring out at the bleak morning.
They’ll be getting started at Doverley.
I feel a weight of resignation pull through me at the scenes they’re about to immortalise.
‘Was there anything that anyone could have done?’ I ask Ellen.
‘Countless things,’ she replies. ‘But no one did them.’
‘But—’
‘They didn’t do them, Claudia,’ she repeats sharply, with a firmness that startles me. ‘There’s plenty we’ll never know about the past, and only one thing we can be completely certain of.’ She gives me a hard look. ‘We can’t change it.’
Clare’s birthday dawned cold and bleak, the leaden clouds blanketing Doverley promising heavy rain. They wouldn’t be going out to celebrate that evening. Ops were scheduled on, despite the bad weather, and despite the boys having only just returned from Frankfurt.Mabel’s Furywas once again on battle orders, and both Iris and Clare had been rostered on duty as well.
They’d worked on Iris’s birthday the month before, too. And on Robbie’s. For his twenty-fifth, he’d flown to Turin and back. Later that morning, Iris had driven with him to visit hismother, helping her out into the autumnal sunshine for the picnic she’d arranged – of champagne, and ham and cheese sandwiches – and after, Iris and Robbie had spent the night hidden away in a B&B, both of them on twenty-four-hour leave passes that Robbie had extracted from Ambrose, who’d undoubtedly worked out the lay of the land between them now, but neither of them cared any more. Perhaps it was reckless of them, but time had come to feel so finite that they couldn’t waste it worrying about detection. And Ambrose still had no idea about the cottage so, as long as they were seen to be toeing the line elsewhere, there really wasn’t a great deal he could do.
‘If you’d only marry me, there wouldn’t be anything he could do anyway,’ said Robbie. ‘I’d enjoy telling him that.’
‘I’m not going to marry you just so you can put Ambrose in his place,’ she said.
‘Marry me because I love you, then.’
‘Please,’ she said, ‘not yet. I can’t talk about this yet.’
Frankfurt was rumoured to be the target again that night. Robbie had returned from it at five that morning, it was now just gone ten, and in eight short hours he’d be on his way back.
The target was almost always somewhere in Germany, now that Italy had finally surrendered.
How have you kept coming back?Iris had asked Robbie after that terrible raid when Lewis, and all those others, had fallen.
I don’t know, Robbie had told her.
But he and the boys – still spearheading every attack they were sent on as master bomber – now had only eight sorties left to go.
Iris wasn’t relaxing.
She couldn’t allow herself to hope.
She was too scared to do that.
Especially now.
Filling her lungs, she leant against the frame of her bedroom door, staring down at the letter she’d just collected from her pigeonhole, her veins coursing with a thousand different emotions, joy, tentative joy, murmuring through them all.
She hadn’t told Robbie that she’d visited a clinic.
He didn’t know that she’d caught a bus to York the week before, and had been watching the post ever since, waiting for this letter to come.
