‘I thought I wasn’t welcome to.’ Her fingers ran over the angry red scar tissue. ‘I’d very much like to hold you. If that would be all right.’
‘You ought to go,’ he said again, but without real conviction this time. He didn’t object when she wrapped her arms around him. He just sagged there, and sighed against her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
‘What are you sorry for?’
‘For all the things I promised that I can’t give you. For failing you just as I did the men in the plane. For everything.’
‘The only thing you ever promised me that I gave a single damn about was yourself, Charlie.’
‘The Charlie I promised you then doesn’t exist any more.’ He swallowed a sob, and buried his face in her shoulder. ‘There’s just this left,’ he murmured brokenly.
‘What’s left is you.’
He held her back and looked into her face. ‘I can’t make love to you, Bobby. I can’t give you children. You can’t in all honesty tell me those things don’t matter to you – those things another man could give you and I can’t. Because they bloody have to, don’t they?’
Bobby was silent for a moment.
‘It won’t ever heal?’ she asked quietly.
‘Not completely, the quacks say. Things might never be… like they were before.’
Again, she was silent.
‘It’s all right,’ Charlie said in a hushed, flat tone. ‘There’s nothing to berate yourself for. It’s only what anyone would do.’
Bobby took off her WAAF greatcoat and spread it on the grass.
‘Isn’t it a glorious day?’ she said, sitting down and lifting her face to the sun. ‘Sit by me, Charlie.’
Charlie hesitated, and for a moment she worried he was going to leave, but eventually he lowered himself to the ground.
‘This reminds me of the spring before you went to the RAF,’ she said dreamily. ‘Picnics here, watching the geese swimming about. We always ended up taking half the food back with us. There was too much kissing to be done to spare our lips for eating.’
‘It seems a lifetime ago.’
‘How do you like my uniform?’
He smiled, and looked a little like himself for the first time. ‘Very much. The Air Force suits you.’
‘I’m glad you think so. Ernie King doesn’t approve at all. He thinks women in uniform are an abomination.’
Charlie frowned. ‘King?’
‘Yes, he’s one of the instructors now at Ryland Moor.’
He sat in silence, glaring into the distance.
‘You’ve… been seeing a lot of him?’ he asked after a bit.
Bobby picked a few daisies and started idly threading a chain. ‘A little. He took me for a flip in one of the Wellingtons a few days ago.’
‘He took you up there?’ Charlie scowled. ‘Damn fool! What could he have been thinking, putting you in danger?’
Bobby laughed. ‘He didn’t fly me to Germany or anything. He wanted to show me the Dales from the air. It was beautiful – just like the view from the top of Great Bowside.’
Charlie sighed softly, and she knew he was thinking of the day he’d proposed to her, on top of the mountain as the sun set.
