I don’t know what to say.
I feel nauseatingly lightheaded.
My hands shake.
My entire body does.
‘It was Jacob’s camera,’ he says, his words slurring. ‘We all clubbed together, gave it to him for his birthday.’ His voice fades to nothing.
His eyes once again droop shut.
They don’t reopen.
He’s dreaming again, but this time, I don’t wonder what he’s dreaming about.
He’s with his friends, I’m certain, back in the spring of 1943, jitterbugging in Bettys Bar for Jacob’s twenty-third birthday, making the most of a scarce night off from fighting the Battle of the Ruhr.
I draw a breath, fighting to get my tremoring under control, and, in the space of that breath, the gas fire crackles, very warm, the room swims, my vision flickers again, shifting,morphing,and I find myself inside Tim’s dream, standing in that packed, pulsing bar, which I somehow recognise: my ears roaring with music I’m certain I’ve heard before, my skin slick with sweat.
A hand closes around mine.
I feel it.
I feelit.
It belongs to a man who would never actuallyusethe expression the cat’s pyjamas, but who’d also never pause before agreeing with anyone that I am.
It belongs to a man I love, very, very much.
A man who stops me shaking.
A man whose touch is warm.
A man who I’m deeply afraid to ever let go.
Chapter Fifteen
Iris
April 1943
In the packed, pulsing heat of Bettys basement bar –the dive,as everyone called it – his hand took a hold of hers, and she turned to him, kissing him through the fear that, from nowhere, assailed her, because he was here, they were both here, and for tonight at least she wouldn’t have to tell him to climb to angels anywhere, or vector anyhow without her.
It was late April. This time the night before, he’d been flying to Essen. This time tomorrow, who knew what he, or any of them, would be doing. Maybe the squadron would fly again, maybe they wouldn’t. Regardless, it wouldn’t be long before they were ordered on another operation, and Iris would take her position in the control room, send them all off with a green for go, and helplessly watch Robbie accelerate away.
When I have enough money and a motorcar, I’ll take you with me everywhere I go, he’d promised her, back when they were children.
But he couldn’t take her to Germany, and Germany was where the squadron always got sent these days. There’d been no trips to Italy for weeks. That endless full-mooned night of Iris’s first shift at Doverley, when all of 96 had returnedfrom Milan, felt as though it belonged to several lifetimes ago. Far too many lifetimes had been ended since. Most of February had been quiet, with ops frequently scrubbed for bad weather, and she and Robbie had managed to steal much more time together than they’d been forced apart. But then March had arrived, and with it an inundation of orders from Bomber Command for attack after attack on the Ruhr region and beyond, with streams of up to a thousand planes leaving England some nights, following their designated pathfinders on raids over some of the most heavily defended cities in the Nazi empire: Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin. In the past six weeks, countless civilians must have been killed – mothers, grandparents,babies– whilst 96 had lost fifteen crews, seven of them flying under the codename V for Verity.Hamps Heroes, whose operator had been so elated that February night he’d broken radio silence returning from Milan, were long gone, and although Lewis in his tartan slippers was still around, Group Captain Fred Lacey with him, scores of others weren’t.
They were all here too tonight. Iris could sense them everywhere: the ghosts of the present, dancing and drinking alongside the ghosts of the future.
Placing her free hand to Robbie’s face, she leant into him as their lips touched, fighting to quieten the voices of those ghosts in her mind, and focus instead on the here, the now,this moment.She didn’t want to dwell on whatever new targets the strategists in Bomber Command might be busy identifying. Or all the lives that had been taken, and would continue to be lost. She didn’t want to think about how,in this moment,fresh recruits were arriving at training camps all over Britain to learn the dark arts of bombing, whilst women in dungarees and headscarves were clocking in for night shifts at factories, rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work solderingtogether new Lancasters and Halifaxes and Stirlings for more terrified airmen to die in.
She couldn’t think of the sickening waves of fear that kept taking her unawares – like another just had now – filling her with foreboding so strong it felt almost like a warning: bleak, but certain, that this middle she and Robbie had found wasn’t going to last, because their end, that she’d never be ready for, was already waiting for them, not so far away at all.
So, now, here,in this moment, she didn’t think of that.
She kissed Robbie, wrapping him in her arms – laughing as the band struck up ‘A String of Pearls’ and he swung her around – and thought only about how they were in Bettys, together, under the jurisdiction of nobody’s rules but their own, certainly not the adjutant’s, and were celebrating Jacob’s twenty-third birthday, with everyone who was still here safe, and alive, and happy, for one more night at least.
