She was, she abruptly understood, in love with Ruth.
This realization, in those words, came to her fully, finally, on her second day in London. She was at Austin Reed picking up her uniforms, standing and looking at herself in a cheval mirror while the tailor fussed with the cuffs of her blue jacket, and she wished Ruth were there to fill the awkward silence with chatter, and as she thought about Ruth, she saw her own face change.
She recognized her flushed and fearful expression in a way she had not been able to recognize the inward sensations from which it sprang, and the knowledge shocked her, both that the object of her love was a woman （besides the woman in Cordova, she’d never thought much about women） and that she was capable, after Barclay, after so many years up in the north trying to freeze her heart solid and let the wind erode it down to nothing, of falling for anyone at all.
But the question was what to do, and the answer was nothing. Ruth was a warm and loving friend, but surely she would find Marian’s feelings strange or disgusting or frightening. Ruth was married. Marian thought she might have sensed a charge between them the night they’d slept nestled together on fire watch, but surely that had been in her imagination. Surely Ruth had only been keeping warm. Surely there was no way Ruth would ever be interested in…Marian didn’t know how to name what she wanted. Possession, maybe. Touch, certainly. Closeness they already had, but Marian wanted something more purposefully important. She couldn’t risk explaining such desires to Ruth. Ruth would want nothing more to do with her, and that consequence was unacceptable—although, even as Marian told herself this, she could not entirely believe that Ruth would banish her.
Ruth always seemed to understand. Why should she not understand this, too?
Because it was deviant; because it was offensive; because Ruth would be horrified and betrayed. In any case, even if by some miracle Ruth understood, understanding was different from reciprocation. Understanding without reciprocation would have the same result as revulsion, really: the loss of Ruth. Had Marian fallen in love right when they first met without even knowing it, when Ruth had taken her chin in her hand and studied her? She had fallen when Barclay looked at her at Miss Dolly’s. Why did she respond so to being looked at?
Once, the sirens had sounded when she and Ruth were at the Red Cross Club, but rather than going down into the shelter, they’d gone up on the roof, into the calamitous night. Everyone said the sporadic raids were nothing compared to the worst of the Blitz, when huge pink mountains of smoke had seemed to dwarf the sky itself, but still there was the grinding throb of German engines, the soft burst of incendiaries, the dumb blank faces of the barrage balloons, planes caught like moths in the sweep of searchlights. Bombs thudded against the city. Antiaircraft shells flashed white in the sky. Beyond, visible in patches through the smoke and drifting cloud, the stars shone impassively.
Fires had burned, though not near the Red Cross, and Marian had wondered if there were people inside the flames. Of course there were, but still she hoped that somehow there were not. Ruth, without looking away from the spectacle, had taken Marian’s hand. What disproportionate comfort Ruth’s small hand had brought, her warm grip seeming to counterbalance the city lying belly-up, growing brighter and brighter as the flames spread.
As she left Austin Reed with her heavy parcel of uniforms, Marian didn’t know how she would face Ruth, how she could pretend nothing had changed. The feeling of safety and ease would be gone, and Ruth’s presence would bring only loneliness and longing. She should wait for her infatuation to pass. People could fall out of love. It seemed almost inevitable that they did. And if she stepped back from the giddy immediacy of her feelings, she saw mercy in the impossibility of their fulfillment: She could not be trapped by love again. She would not be.
When she returned to the Red Cross Club, it seemed like divine providence that instructions were waiting for her. She was not to go back to Luton but straight on to White Waltham to upgrade to Class II airplanes. She would not have to face Ruth, not right away.
* * *
—
White Waltham was in a pleasant market town called Maidenhead （“Lord, that name,” Ruth had said）， with timbered houses along a sedate stretch of the Thames. Marian found a room in a small hotel not far from the airfield that was only a bit more expensive than a billet. Back to the ATA classroom she went to learn about superchargers and carburetors and on and on. After two weeks of lectures, she was in the air again, in Harvards like the one she’d checked out on in Montreal, startling in their power after all her puttering cross-country flights in Tigers and Magisters.