The adjutant,Ambrose, hadn’t come out that night – no one had invited him – but plenty of others had made the journey from Doverley, speeding along the pitch-black country lanes in a convoy of borrowed, gifted, and inherited motors. Practically every WAAF and airman was there, including Prim (who Iris just could not condition herself into thinking of as Eleanor), and Beth Twinton, and the group captain Fred, who’d brought his wife Miriam, leaving their baby daughter back in Heaton with a sitter. Lewis was out too, along with the rest of hisBucks Boys, as were all the crew fromMabel’s Fury. Ames, the flight engineer, was ecstatic because his French fiancée, Mabel, the plane’s namesake, had surprised him a few hours before by turning up at Doverley, fresh off the boat from a spell in France, working for whom she wasn’t at liberty to say, doingwhat she couldn’t say either, only that it had beentrès, trèsproductif.
She was staying at the Heaton Arms whilst she was in town, along with all the other wives and fiancées and girlfriends of Doverley’s airmen who snatched whatever opportunity they could to visit. Plenty of them were at Bettys that night too, drinking and jitterbugging, clinging to their own here and nows.
Keeping her grasp firmly around Robbie’s, Iris went with him, pushing through the teeming throngs for the booth that everyone else was already getting themselves settled in. They’d only just arrived but she was already perspiring in the bar’s cloying heat.Glowing,Prim would doubtless correct her. Iris glanced across at her, well apart from the others and ensconced with her American beau, Clint, at a table for two. Unlike him, and all the other men present that night, Prim wasn’t in uniform, but done up to the nines in a silk dress. Neither Iris nor any of the WAAFs from Doverley had worn uniform either – they didn’t have to, they weren’t on duty – and had collectively turned the icy attic pungent with hairspray, perfume and nail polish before they’d left.
‘Ambrose won’t be happy if he finds out about that,’ Prim had remarked, pausing at Iris and Clare’s open door, eyes on the red polish stain spilling across their drawers from the bottle Clare had just knocked over.
‘Tell on me why don’t you?’ Clare had replied, mopping the polish up.
‘I won’t tell,’ Prim had said huffily, flouncing away. ‘I’d never do that.’
‘Only because you’ve got your own secrets to keep,’ said Clare.
Which Prim did.
A favourite of Ambrose’s, she’d never had any of the issuesIris and Clare had encountered securing leave passes from him, but that would doubtless change if he were to get wind of themischiefshe was indulging in out of bounds, with an American of all things.
Ambrose held a very dim view of the Americans.
‘As you know I have a low tolerance for tardiness,’ he’d told Beth, ‘and they were inexcusably late to this war.’
Prim wasn’t the kind to be late to anything, and Iris suspected Ambrose wouldn’t be averse to getting up to a bit of mischief with her himself. Beth agreed. She said he always became very flustered whenever Prim – not a plotter, as Iris had initially guessed, but one of the station’s intelligence officers – delivered her post-interrogation reports to the offices for transmission to HQ.
‘He always offershertea,’ she said. ‘And biscuits. I fear it might break his skinny little heart if he were to get wind of Clint.’
Prim had met Clint at the end of February, after the USAAF had opened up a new base on the other side of Heaton from Doverley. He was a clerk rather than an airman, which Prim could get quite prickly about, insisting he’d have got his wings if he could, but was short-sighted, and flat-footed, and colour-blind. (‘Christ,’ Robbie had remarked soberly when she’d told him all about it, ‘that’s quite a list.’) Iris suspected, actually, that Clint’s lack of wings was part of his appeal for Prim. Beth had been stationed with her the year before, down in Cambridgeshire, and had told Iris and Clare that she’d lost three beaus there, one after the other. None of them had been serious, she’d only ever had the chance to go on a couple of dates with them, but after the third had gone down, the other men had decided she was too unlucky to associate with. Like V for Verity.
‘It was pretty awful,’ Beth said. ‘I wouldn’t have wished it on my worst enemy.’
Neither would Iris.
And truly, Prim wasn’t her worst enemy.
She was just …prim.
Clint at least seemed to make her happy. She certainly loved to talk about his family’s acres of land in Colorado, and he kept her well supplied with nylons and chocolate.
Not that she’d offered to share those luxuries with the rest of them. Iris still hadn’t managed to replace the nylons she’d torn on Doverley’s front steps and, like most other women that night, had come out bare-legged. No one wanted to wear woollens to the dive.
‘Do you wish I was an American, Clarence?’ Robbie asked, dipping his head towards her as they passed by Prim and Clint.
‘Every day,’ she said. ‘Every, single, day.’
And he grinned.
They’d come to Bettys often since February. Whenever they did, she thought of her mum and their teas upstairs, which had hurt, to start, but these days felt more comforting than anything. It was the same whenever she’d returned to Bramble Lane for evenings out at The Heaton Arms (Robbie had been right, you really couldn’t avoid it); initially, everything about being back there had caused her pain: passing her old home; seeing the brass knocker her mum had used to polish on the door; the milk bottle stand on the step; that crooked stile out to the sheep-filled fields, where, before Iris’s gran’s arthritis had got so bad, she’d used to take Iris for walks. (Slow down,she’d shouted after Iris, whenever Iris had run off.You’ll start a stampede.) But day by day, week by week, that pain had eased, until Iris had come to realise how much she liked being back in the old lane. It had made her mum and gran real to her again: the memories of them no longer something to fear, but cradle close. And although she had wept, the first time she’d visited their graves with Robbie – she’d sobbed – it had probably been long overdue. As she’d sunk against Robbie’s chest and let her tears go, she’d felt acceptance flow through her. She hadn’t even known, until that had happened, just how fiercely she’d still been fighting the truth of her mum and gran’s deaths.
Father Bannister often came out to see her when she was in the graveyard, always bringing her a slice of his housekeeper’s apple cake, baked with preserves from his orchard.To save you the effort of scrumping,he’d say, chuckling at his own joke, no matter how many times he repeated it.
Sometimes, he called by The Heaton Arms in the evenings, and whenever he did, would stand everyone there a round, the Americans included – who, whatever Ambrose’s views on their timing, were unquestionably fighting this war now, flying their raids in broad daylight, creating their own army of ghosts.
Iris had heard stories of fights breaking out between American, British and Canadian airmen over the different levels of dangers they believed themselves to be facing, but she hadn’t seen any of that in Heaton. Although the odd jibe got exchanged about Brits not being able to target, and Yanks not being able to see in the dark, it was always done in jest, and never escalated. They all knew what each other did, and no one was interested in trivialising it. They just wanted to survive.
‘Did you resent us for not being here?’ a pilot from New York had asked Robbie, back in March, after Jacob had mentioned Robbie had flown in the Battle of Britain.
‘Quite a few of you were,’ Robbie had replied.
‘Not as many as now.’
