‘Oh, no.’ Pulling her dark hair loose of its grips, Iris dropped them into the bureau’s top drawer and, in the mirror, watched a frown form on her face. ‘We’ve only ever been friends.’
‘He still loves you,’ said Clare. ‘I suspect he’d do just about anything for you if you asked him.’ She sat on her bed, kicked off her shoes. ‘So just … tread carefully.’
Iris didn’t take Clare’s words of caution seriously. Before she climbed into bed, she dismissed them as nonsense, and, telling Clare as much, pushed them from her mind.
Yet, the next morning, when Tim came to see her in the control tower – where she was on duty again, trafficking local circuits for those pilots who’d taken their planes up for a run – she found herself thinking of them.
There was no one else but them in the control room. Operations were officially off that night, and almost everyone was lying low, in their billets or the mess. Only four pilots had dragged themselves out to fly, all testing the repairs that their planes had undergone after Essen, and since it was such a small number, Iris was managing them alone. Sergeant Browning was reading his paper in the breakroom, on standby in case she needed him, and Clare had headed back to the attic to write to Hans.
Robbie, not flying, had gone to see his mother. Iris had visited Annabelle with him a couple of times now herself – once in February, then again at the start of March – and although Annabelle had been very welcoming, smiling as kindly, and shyly, as she always had (she’d remembered Iris’s love of ham and cheese sandwiches), Iris didn’t want to intrude on her time with Robbie too much. On both her visits, Annabelle had watched Robbie constantly, so obviously scared to miss a thing. Throughout the time they’d sat with her, she’d kept her hand on her son’s arm – reassuring herself, Iris could tell, that he was still there, still with her.
‘Will you tell me straight away if anything happens?’ she’d said to Iris in February, when Robbie, fetching her another blanket, had left them alone. ‘Anything official will take time to reach me, and I worry every day that I might be sitting here not knowing he’s hurt.’ Her helpless eyes had been full of dread. ‘There’s so much I haven’t protected him from, it’s unbearable that I can’t keep him safe now. But if I could at least know that I’d know … ’
‘You will,’ Iris had told her, somehow managing not to choke on the words. ‘I’ll tell you.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘Guess who I saw doing something they shouldn’t have been last night,’ Tim said to Iris now, sitting in Clare’s vacant chair.
‘Who?’ she asked, glad of his company.
Grateful too for the mug of tea he’d brought her. She picked it up, wrapping her cold hands around it, and took a sip. He’d even remembered to add a touch of sweetener.
‘Eleanor.’
‘Prim.’
‘She didn’t look that prim to me. Clint was giving her a leg up to climb through a window at the front of the house.’
‘Really?’ Iris laughed, picturing it. ‘Did she make it?’
‘Just about.’
‘What time was this?’
‘After three.’
‘Three?’ Her brow creased. ‘What were you doing up at the house at three?’
‘Walking. I couldn’t sleep.’
‘But you must have been exhausted.’
‘I was. I am. I couldn’t … switch off, I suppose.’
‘Does that happen often?’
‘A bit,’ he said, with a shrug that made her frown more.
She shifted in her chair, studying him properly, and, as her eyes moved over the premature lines in his own rugged face, she replayed what Clare had said the night before. Not about him loving her – that was too uncomfortable – but the other thing.
Look after that boy, won’t you.
It came to her that she hadn’t been doing that. Not enough. For all she’d danced, and laughed, and chatted with him, she’d been so caught up with Robbie that she hadn’t paused to question, until this moment, whether Tim, with his happy-go-lucky smile, was all right.
‘You need to sleep,’ she told him, softly, her thoughts moving to the photo he carried of his dad, and his impossible yearning for his protection.
