And although I’ve felt like I’ve been betraying him every time I’ve left him, I haven’t been able to stop myself. Because, although I still haven’t seen any more flares from Iris’s window, or that face again in her mirror, there have been moments – scores of them now – when, with my head on Iris’s pillow, I’ve listened to the attic’s silence and once again heard something very different: soft breathing; a rhythmic scratching; creaking pipes; clattering footsteps; the echoes of laughter.
In her bed, I’ve continued to have the most vivid dreams.
Two in particular keep repeating.
The first is brief.
I’m in a clinical-feeling hallway, looking at a middle-aged soldier through Iris’s eyes: a colonel, I seem to know.
Go,I urge Iris, over and again.
You need to go.
The second, just as inexplicable, is even more haunting.
I find myself in a dimly lit room with a beautiful, faded woman in a wheelchair.
I’m looking into her eyes, and we’re both crying.
She reaches up, touching my face, and says something that makes me cry more.
I don’t know what that something is.
When I wake, with tears rolling down my own cheeks, I can never remember.
I have no idea who this woman can be.
If I’ve ever even known her.
Or why she leaves me feeling so desperately sad.
Iris spent most of that April afternoon before the squadron returned to Essen in bed. Robbie was busy at the base, so she’d decided she might as well try to bank some sleep. Clare was with her, in bed too, writing again to Hans.
It was his birthday.
‘Twenty-seven,’ said Clare, staring down at her pad. ‘He was twenty-three when I left him. Soon, we’ll have been apart longer than we had together.’
‘It might not come to that,’ said Iris. ‘This war can’t go on forever.’
‘Can’t it?’ said Clare. ‘What if it’s with us now for always?’
Iris didn’t reply.
The idea was too chilling to contemplate.
With a short sigh, Clare resumed her writing.
And Iris closed her eyes, listening to the rhythmic scratch of her pen, the groan of the attic’s pipes, and the footfall of others in the corridor outside. This effort to sleep felt futile – she was too alert, too aware of the night ahead – but gradually, irresistibly, unconsciousness pressed down on her, with a weight so heavy, it might almost have belonged to another body.
She dreamt.
Kaleidoscope dreams: of the Heaton Arms, Tim’s sweets, and Father Bannister’s apple cake.
Then, Robbie’s mother, beautiful and faded in her wheelchair.
She was crying, reaching out to touch Iris’s own tear-stained face …
With a start, Iris woke.
