Claudia
Ican’t visit Tim today, impatient as I am to.
I’ve stayed with Ellen too long and am late getting back to make-up, who I’m with for an hour, having my hair pinned and my face painted so that I can ruin it all for the cameras in the aftermath of Clare’s death.
Iris never actually held Clare in her arms, like I’m about to hold Emma. She does it in this movie because that’s the way Imogen wrote it in her book: Iris sprinting to the rainswept scene, where she has to be dragged away from her friend’s body by Robbie. I feel no nerves about whether I’ll be able to pull off her tears. Frankly, I’m so full of them, it will be a relief to once again let them go. But I do feel extremely unsettled by Ellen’s revelation, just before I left her, that Imogen’s version of this event is, like her ending, pure fabrication.
Because in this instance, Imogen wasn’t the one who made it up.
Tim was.
Hetold Imogen that this is what happened, so we all have asterisks covering our scripts reminding us that we’re not allowed to change any of it.
‘It was Tim who had to be prised off Clare,’ Ellen said tome in her living room. ‘Everyone came out of their billets when the firing started, and Robbie made straight for Tim, pulling him away so that the stretcher bearers could get to Clare. Tim thrashed out, sobbing his poor heart out, but Robbie held him fast, quietening him, and got him back to their billet before he could make any more of a scene. I think it was then that he accepted how dangerously frayed Tim had become.’ She frowned sorrowfully. ‘I’d been aware of it for a while. You could always tell in interrogation. These days of course, someone in his state would be signed off, given understanding and time to heal. Back then, he just had to keep going, or he’d have been discharged with LMF.Lack of Moral Fibre.’ Witheringly, she sighed. ‘It was a different time, it cast a very long shadow, and Tim’s still carrying a great deal of shame. It didn’t surprise me at all that he’s had himself portrayed as such a stoic in the book.’
He really has. There’s not so much as a hint that he’s struggling to cope with anything in Imogen’s writing.
Of all the crew, it’s only Jacob, the bomb aimer, who’s shown to experience any kind of debilitating fear.
‘But you see that’s wrong too,’ said Ellen. ‘To me, he never seemed scared, so much as pragmatic. A realist who was resigned. He was very much in love actually, with a woman called Beth Twinton, who came to be a dear friend to me. He refused to discuss the future with her. It maddened her, but after he was killed, she discovered he’d left her a great deal of money. She used it to set up a school near his parents’ home in Barnes, which I’m sure would have made him happy. He’d been their only child, and Beth lost her parents in the Blitz. Jacob was doubtless hoping they’d look after each other. He really never believed he’d survive.’ She sighed. ‘Like poor Clare.’
‘How did Iris find out about her?’ I asked.
‘Robbie told her. I took him up to her and Clare’s room.’
‘He was there?’ I said, and even as I did, pictured him, kneeling on the floor beside the bed I’ve been sleeping on, waking Iris: his face wet from the rain, his eyes looking into hers.
I can picture him now.
Hear his voice.
Iris.
Iris…
‘I was next door,’ Ellen told me. ‘Her sobs came through our wall.’ She pressed her hand to her chest. ‘Like I’ve said, I wept for Clare myself. Wept for them all.’
Within a couple of hours, I’m sobbing too, in the mud beside Emma’s prone body, the rain soaking through my woollen uniform, dripping chillingly down my neck.
Nick is pulling me, not Felix, away.
I fight him, but he keeps a hold of me.
He wraps his arms around me, fast.
‘Iris,’ he says.
Iris…
I hear them both.
I turn to Nick, and I see them both.
Two rain-drenched faces, flickering in and out of my focus.
‘I can’t bear it,’ I say.
I know,that other voice tells me.
