He didn’t resist but meekly allowed himself to be led outside, leaning heavily on his stick. For a little time they walked in silence, out to the lake in front of the house.
‘I missed you,’ Bobby whispered after a while.
Charlie laughed softly. ‘Oh God.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I just… I hear your voice a lot. When I’m sleeping, and sometimes when I’m awake.’
‘I thought you didn’t care to hear it any more. When you stopped writing, I thought…’ She swallowed. ‘That there must be someone else.’
‘Never,’ he said quietly.
She turned to face him, her voice trembling. ‘What happened, Charlie?’
His face twitched, and he didn’t seem able to meet her eyes. Bobby longed to hold him, but she didn’t dare. Not until she could understand. Everything seemed to say that here was a man in deep pain, of the emotional as well as the physical kind.
‘One of our engines was damaged,’ he said. ‘Butcher Bird. Our rear gunner took the bastard down but it was too late, he’d got us. We made it back to Blighty but I had to crash land. We lost two.’ He pressed his eyes closed. ‘Stevens, the navigator. And… and Bram.’
‘Oh, Charlie, no.’ Bobby thought back to her one meeting with the shy lad Charlie had taken under his wing during training, when their bigoted former CO had targeted the boy for his faith. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It was my fault,’ Charlie said in a choked voice. ‘I ought to have ordered the crew to bale out. I thought I could get us all back safely. I was a fool.’
‘You made the choice you had to make in the heat of the moment. If you’d baled out, you might all have died.’
‘You think that helps?’
‘No,’ Bobby said, lowering her gaze. ‘I know it doesn’t. It should, but it doesn’t.’ She glanced at his wounded leg, and the burn over his eye. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone you were here?’
‘I couldn’t bear to have anyone see me like this. Mary and Reggie think I’m still in Binbrook. I’ve been writing to them as if I was.’
‘They’re your family. They love you. Why on earth wouldn’t you want them?’
‘You don’t understand, Bobby.’ He spun away from her. ‘I couldn’t bear to have them know… to have anyone know. I knew I had to give you up, and it broke me. I didn’t want anyone. I wanted to have died in the crash, with Bram and Stevens. Atleast then you’d remember me as a man. A hero, even. Now what will you remember me as?’
She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The injuries. It isn’t just my leg. I can’t… the quacks say I might not ever be able to…’ He laughed – an unfamiliar, un-Charlie-like laugh, mirthless and flat. ‘For so long, I dreamed about what it would be like when we were married. Our life together. Our family. It felt like that was what it was for, all the horror – to earn that future. Then to have it snatched away, and know I had to let you go… I couldn’t bear to write. It would only have made it real.’
‘So you hid from it,’ Bobby said softly.
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Perhaps that makes me a coward, but everything had been taken away from me, Bobby. Everything.’ He closed his eye. ‘The shrapnel didn’t just get my leg. The injury goes all the way up my thigh and… do you understand? I couldn’t be a husband to you. I couldn’t be a father. The quacks sat me down, and they told me I was half a man. I died another kind of death, that night we crashed.’
Bobby stared at him for a long time. He stood leaning on his stick, humiliated, defeated, refusing to meet her eye.
‘Look at me,’ she said softly.
‘Please, Bobby. Just go.’
‘Charlie, for God’s sake, look at me!’
He forced himself to meet her gaze. Still his agitated features worked with strong emotion.
Bobby stepped towards him. She took off her glove and caressed the burn scar around his eye.
‘You’ve been in so much pain,’ she whispered. ‘My poor boy.’
He glanced at the hand on his cheek. ‘You stopped wearing your ring.’
