‘Yes,’ he says, flatly. ‘Nothing about that has ever changed.’
‘And you do remember it?’
‘I can’t forget it,’ he says, and drops his gaze to the album on the table, which I’m by now certain is full of the friends he lost. ‘I couldn’t show this to Imogen,’ he tells me. ‘The faces in it have always felt too … precious … too fleeting, to share with someone who didn’t love them as I did. But please –’ he raises his wavering hand, gesturing at the album – ‘I’d like you to look.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m quite sure.’
And, pulse racing, I get down on my knees, pulling the album towards me, opening it, finding photograph afterphotograph of the base as it was then: sprawling, and bleak, packed with people who smile and laugh, despite what they’re living through. The original Piper features plenty: chasing a football with boys in shirtsleeves; lying on her haunches at the steps of Billet 4B; looking dotingly into the face of a bespectacled WAAF who crouches in long grass, stroking her neck.
That WAAF appears in a lot of the photos too, happy and smart, with an adoring expression of her own, that she gives time after time to Jacob, behind the camera.
Beth Twinton,my mind, and logic, supplies, and I feel such pain for her, knowing she lost this man she loved, and who loved her too, so much so that he always had his lens pointed her way, and wrote her into his will.
‘Did she ever meet anyone else?’ I ask Tim.
‘No one like Jacob,’ he says.
I want to ask him about Iris and Robbie: whether I’m going to find any pictures of them here.
But I don’t.
I’m too afraid of him dashing my hope.
Silently, I keep turning the pages, finding a shot of Gus and Ames in a smoky, spartan Heaton Arms, then another picture of the two of them with Henry and Danny, in deckchairs outside their billet. Behind them, in the billet’s doorway, is the shape of a figure that I think might belong to Robbie, but he’s just a silhouette: the tantalising suggestion of life, rather than life itself.
Impatiently, I turn to the album’s final page.
And, ‘Oh,’ I exhale, taking in the photograph there, of a packed booth in a packed bar, the crowd crammed into it reaching across the table, cheersing their brimming glasses. Only the glasses are in focus. The people – the men in uniform; the women in dresses – are blurred with movement. But I canjust about make out Tim,a young Robert Redford,and Ames too, with his arm around a slight, striking woman whose eyes are closed for the flash.Mon Dieu.I see the edge of Beth’s face, and the polka-dot sleeve and curls of another (Clare? If only she’d move into the shot), then a floppy blond head that makes me think of tartan slippers.
And a couple.
A dark-haired couple who cause my every nerve to tremor, and my breath to freeze in my throat.
They’re turned towards one another, their shoulders touching, the lines between their bodies indistinct, like they’d been made, specially made, to fit together like this.
‘It’s the only picture I have of the two of them,’ says Tim, knowing just who I’m looking at. ‘The only picture I still have of her.’ I raise my gaze to his. His face is heavy. His dark eyes full of grief. ‘Rob had another. He kept it with him, in his flight jacket.’ His voice rasps. ‘It disappeared too.’ He breaks off, chest heaving, and this time he does reach for his mask, sucking air from it. ‘She took that photograph,’ he says, once he can talk again, looking back at the picture on his bureau. ‘You know that.’
‘Yes,’ I agree.
‘Jacob didn’t want her to.’
‘No, I remember.’He thought it was tempting fate,Tim told me on my last visit. ‘You said it didn’t change anything though.’
‘How could it have?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, even as I find myself caught in a fresh wave of grief at the idea.
‘It couldn’t,’ Tim insists, consoling me, just like he did before.
I suspected then that he might also have consoled Iris.
I feel even surer of it now.
That she, at least, survived that night.
‘She didn’t want to take it,’ he repeats. ‘I persuaded her.’ He shakes his head. ‘I was terrified of her and Jacob’s superstition. And it was the last flight of our tour. So, I told her to be a sport, give us our picture.’ He closes his eyes. ‘She did it for me.’
