Then it would be straight into enemy flak, and the guns of patrolling ME-109s.
Drawing a sharp breath – needing, quite suddenly, to distract herself – Iris moved to her bed and, sitting on it, leant over the edge, pulling out her case, which she’d kicked beneath.
She needed to keep busy, she resolved. Unpack.
She didn’t unpack.
She looked up at the ceiling again.
The lamp’s swaying had stilled.
Other than for the drumming rain, there was no longer any noise coming from above at all.
‘He’ll be all right,’ came Clare’s voice.
‘Will he?’ said Iris, bringing her gaze down to meet her friend’s sympathetic stare. She understood this fear Iris was feeling, of course, all too well. She – in love with a pilot whose identity she’d confided in no one but Iris – had been scared for him since 1 September 1939.
‘Of course he will.’
‘How can you know?’
‘I have powers.’ Clare smiled. ‘This is the beginning of your story. Not the end.’
‘Robbie and I have had our beginning.’
‘Fine. This can be your middle, then.’
‘Our middle,’ Iris echoed. ‘I like that.’
‘Good. Now –’ swinging herself to sitting, Clare reached for her own case – ‘what do you say to a medicinal brandy?’
‘You’ve twisted my arm.’
‘Excellent. If you wouldn’t mind seeing to the lights.’
And, whilst Clare rooted around for the bottle, Iris got up to do just that.
She paused again at the window, before letting the blackout fall. The flares were all being extinguished now, disappearing one-by-one. It came to her that when they burned again at dawn, they’d stand for something very different: life, not death; hope, andhome.
Let him still be here to see them, she entreated whoever might be listening, up in the silent sky.Let Clare be right, and let this be our middle.
I wasn’t ready for our end.
She dropped the blackout down.
I never will be, not for that.
Chapter Five
She didn’t expect to sleep that night. Once she and Clare climbed into their new beds – frozen from the tepid four-inch bath they’d shared, and layered up against the attic’s chill in nightgowns, scarves, cardigans, and multiple pairs of socks – sheexpectedto lie awake until dawn: thinking, remembering; listening for the Lancasters to return. But the sound of the rain on the attic’s roof was soporific, Clare’s steady breathing was too, and, in the end, Iris was too exhausted, and wrung out by the emotion of the day, to resist their joint lullaby. She wasn’t aware of the moment she slipped into unconsciousness; rather, it came upon her so swiftly, she didn’t realise she was sleeping at all until the clanging of Clare’s alarm clock whiplashed her awake again at six.
Her eyes snapped open. In her chest, her heart pounded a hectic rhythm to the alarm’s trilling bell. The blacked-out room was pitch dark, and for a second, the splintering noise, and the unnerving vividness of the dream world she’d just left, was all there was.
Then, from Clare’s bed, came the creaking of springs, a crack of bone on plaster, and a gasped expletive.
Groggily, Iris deduced Clare had hit her head on the eaves.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked her, scrambling to the floor, wincing at the pain in her own grazed knees as she flailed among the chaos of their half-unpacked belongings for the belting alarm.
