My initial intention, when I reach the room, is to grab Nick’s car keys and drive to Heaton. My grandparents didn’t live in the village itself – their house was just outside it, on one of those post-war estates built by the government to replace all the homes that had been destroyed by the bombing – but I’d obviously have been in and out all the time. It might well even have been in Heaton that I used to visit Mrs Ellen with her jar of Rich Teas. I can’t be sure, and haven’t asked Mum, knowing we’d only end up in another argument about MrsEllen’s existence. What I am certain of is that I feel a whole bag of emotions at the prospect of returning there – apprehension, curiosity, anxiety – so don’t want to be doing it for the first time in costume, about to shoot. I need to at least try and get my head straight first.
I’ve told Nick that I’m planning to go. Unlike the movie’s publicity department, he knows all about my past here, just like I know he was born and raised in Montana, by a mum called Lola and a dad called Brad, who are both great, and kind, and fun, and cried,happy tears, when we told them we were having a baby, and who I have no doubt cried again when Nick broke it to them that he now never will. At least, not with me.
Nick’s their only child. They still live in the house he grew up in, whereas I’ve never had one of those. Mum did her best for us when she first brought me down to live in London; she was actually a bloody superhero, barely twenty-three, grieving her parents, and working full time in a law firm, before retraining in psychotherapy, all the while moving us from rental to rental, regrouping each time a landlord sold our flat, or hiked the rent too much, somehow always managing to keep me in the same school catchment. She met Phil when I was nine, but I was fourteen before we moved in with him in Highgate. Phil says convincing Mum to do that was the hardest he’s ever had to work at anything. Mum’s told me she was scared of letting me depend on him, in case he vanished, like my father.
Which Phil of course never did. He’s been the kindest and best dad I could have hoped for; I’ve never felt like he’s loved or treated me any differently to Hannah or Lisa – neither of whom were born on a kitchen floor, but in the maternity wing of the Whittington.
They’ve asked me, over the years, about Mum’s parents, our grandparents: what they were like; what Mum was like, when they were around.
‘I’m not sure I really saw her that much,’ I’ve told them truthfully, and don’t blame Mum for that. Like I say, she did her best, and her best was pretty amazing.
I can’t remember much about the January afternoon that Nan and Grandad died, skidding on black ice, head on into a tractor, driving the three of us home from a trip to York. I have no recollection of what we’d been doing in York, or the crash itself. What I do recall, vividly, is that it was the tractor’s driver who extracted me from my backseat booster, with arms that shook, and blood pouring from his head.
‘You’re safe,’ he said, wrapping me in his coat. ‘Someone was watching over you.’
I didn’t have a scratch on me.
Everything’s hazy after that. I don’t know who called the ambulances, or how long it took them to appear, or whether I went alone to the hospital, or with the tractor driver. Mum says a woman from social services looked after me while the hospital staff tracked her down. It took them hours, apparently, and I’m not sure what I did while I waited for those hours to pass. It’s all a blank until the moment Mum arrived, rushing into the room I was in, her pale face wet with tears. She came straight to me, bundling me up to her, and hugged me for so long, and so tight, that in all I’ve forgotten, I’ve never forgotten that.
‘You mightn’t have forgotten much else either,’ said Mum the other night at dinner. ‘It could well be waiting, ready to resurface when you get back there.’ She turned to Nick, her expression imploring; scared, almost. ‘You will look after her, won’t you?’
‘If she’ll let me,’ said Nick.
‘I don’t need looking after,’ I said, and at the time, two hundred miles away in Highgate, I didn’t believe that I did.
I still don’t want to believe it.
Don’t want to be a worry.
But as I stand by Nick’s side of the bed, his keys in my hand, I discover I don’t want to go back to Heaton.
Not yet.
And maybe, actually, not alone.
Instead, I spend most of the morning down in Doverley’s empty dining room, resolutelynotwaiting for Felix to reply to my message, but parked at a table with my worn copy ofThe Bomber Boysnovel, combing over the scene Nick and I massacred last night. Because it hasn’t felt miraculously better for the light of a new day. If anything, it feels worse, now I’m looking back at it: too fraught, and stiff, and overdone.
Can I please see it?I texted Ana, when I woke.
Nope, she replied.
So, it’s as bad as I think?I said.
Nothing’s as bad as you think, she told me, with a smiley emoji that did nothing to reassure me. Ana never uses emojis.
It’s definitively as bad as I think.
But no matter how many times I reread the passage in the novel, I can’t find anything there to help me work out how we should fix it. There’s no dialogue – that much I already knew – but now I return to the pages, I realise there’s also weirdly a lot less description than I’ve held in my mind. In mymind, this first meeting between Iris and Robbie has lived so vividly that it stuns me how sparing Imogen’s portrayal of it actually is.
The scene, like all of the novel, is written in Iris’s retrospective voice. She’s already dead – not that Imogen reveals that until the end of the book – and narrating what is in effect a novel-length letter of contrition to Robbie’s unreachable ghost.
When you said my name, it sent me still,she tells him.As I met your stare, I saw you as you were, and a thousand other ways, too. Present pixelated with past, and every moment we’veknown coursed through my mind. It was a glorious show, but one that played out as a subtext, no match for the reality of you, there, with me…
I read on, skimming over the remaining couple of paragraphs – how Iris and Robbie start talking, then stop, because there’s too much to say, and don’t kiss, because they daren’t,not yet– and find myself frowning, irritated by how unconvinced I suddenly am by this now too. Probably because I’m viewing it through the lens of my own and Nick’s stilted performance. I throw the book down, stare at it for several seconds, then pick it back up, flicking to the author’s note.
Whilst this story is, of course, inspired by true life events, Imogen writes,it is nonetheless a story. My story. I’ve been extremely fortunate to spend the time I have with Tim Hobbs, listening to his memories, but there was plenty he didn’t bear witness to, well beyond the final disappearance of Iris, Robbie, and the rest ofMabel’s Fury’s crew. He was a friend to Iris and Robbie, but by no stretch their constant companion, and, as with all great love affairs, theirs largely played out in private. Tim wasn’t with them. Nobody was. So, whilst I’ve done my utmost to stay true to the facts, where I have them, this novel should not be taken as a history. I never forgot, when I was writing it, that Section Officer Iris Winterton and Squadron Leader Robert Grayson were two very real people, whose lives were cut tragically short. Although I feel like I do now know them, the reality is that I didn’t know them at all, and it would be a huge presumption to suggest that they – and especially Iris – should be judged on the basis of these fictional pages. This novel is an imagining of what led them to their deaths, nothing more. The truth about that, and so much else, belongs to them, and them alone.
I set the book down again, less stroppily this time, and lean back in my chair, focusing on Tim’s face on the cover.Like Robbie, he’s looking into the camera, but none of the other boys are. They’re either looking at each other, or, in the case of Jacob the bomb aimer, down at the Border collie, Piper, who’s sitting at his feet. It’s occurred to me before now that they probably weren’t ready for the shot to be taken. What I’ve never really thought about though is that Tim’s attention is on the photographer anyway. Just like Robbie’s is. And if that photographer reallywasIris, then wouldn’t that add weight to Imogen’s theory that Tim was in love with her, too?
