Sir Lindsay was heir to a brewing fortune and owned a nearby aerodrome he’d given over to the ATA. He was not a pilot himself but an enthusiast, a collector of pilots and airplanes, who seemed delighted the war had brought so many of each to his doorstep.
The aerodrome was crowded with a shifting assortment of most everything the RAF flew, though Marian, not yet qualified to fly all the types, mostly flew taxi planes and cleared Spitfires churned out by the factory at Castle Bromwich. Less frequently, she picked up Oxfords from Ansty and Defiants from Wolverhampton and flew to and from maintenance units in the Cotswolds.
Or at least she did these things in theory, as the dense industrial haze that hung over the midlands grounded the pilots many—perhaps most—mornings. Sometimes three whole days might pass when they couldn’t fly, even as increasingly urgent messages came from Castle Bromwich about all the shiny new Spits piling up. On the days Marian flew deliveries, if she finished before dark a taxi plane might bring her back to Ratcliffe, or she might return via train, or she might have to find lodgings wherever she was, which was not always easy or even possible. It wasn’t rare for her to find herself lugging her overnight bag and parachute through closed-up unfamiliar little towns, looking for a place to sleep.
* * *
—
One February night, grimy from delivering a Spit to Brize Norton and another from there to Cosford, Marian returned to Ratcliffe and noticed the door to the next room standing open. She peeked in. A woman leaned over a partially unpacked suitcase. Marian stopped, elation surging up before she could tamp it down. “Ruth!” she said.
Ruth straightened, coolly unsmiling, a dress in her hand. “They said you were in the next room. I asked if there was anywhere else, but there isn’t. You’ll have to blame the ATA.” She’d asked for Hamble, not Ratcliffe, she said. She was taking the place of the English girl, who’d gone to upgrade to twin-engines. “Don’t worry. I won’t get underfoot.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Marian said helplessly. She hadn’t been aware of being unhappy, but her burst of joy at seeing Ruth felt like a relief, an antidote.
“I don’t know what to say to that,” Ruth said, hanging the dress in her wardrobe with a clatter. “You dropped me completely.”
“I’m sorry—I really am.”
“Are you? Being sorry’s all well and good, but I think you owe me an explanation.”
Marian hesitated. She couldn’t tell Ruth the truth, but she didn’t want to lie. “Could you trust me enough to forgive me even if I don’t explain? You’re right I’ve behaved badly. There’s a reason, but could you trust that it doesn’t matter?”
Again Ruth looked her over, gauging her sincerity. “We’ll see.”
They were awkward for a few days, but then they were as they’d been in the beginning, better even, more grateful for each other. Ruth had been lonely, too, she said.
The Ratcliffe dinner table was dramatically enlivened by Ruth’s presence. She dove headlong into the conversation, and when, a week into her residency, ski planes came up （Marian suspected Ruth had somehow steered the conversation toward them）， she said, “Marian, tell them about taking off from the mudflats.”
And what could Marian do but describe herself rocking from side to side in her old Bellanca, trying to unstick the skis from the stinking muck at Valdez.
“Why did you have the skis on at all if there was no snow?” Sir Lindsay wanted to know.
She explained about bringing supplies to the high mines, landing on glaciers even in the summer, and Sir Lindsay’s interest was so apparent, his questions so probing, leading her inexorably from one anecdote to the next, that she scarcely noticed she was behaving almost as a raconteur, holding the whole table rapt. Though, when she finally hit a patch of astonished silence after describing a williwaw blowing her off a glacier, she clammed up, embarrassed, sawed fixedly at her meat.
Sir Lindsay turned to Ruth. “You’ve unlocked our sphinx,” he said. “Well done.”
* * *
—
Marian had been avoiding meeting Eddie, had ducked other invitations from Ruth but never a direct plea until the Morse code message came through the wall. Until then, if Ruth said Eddie would be in London, Marian would beg off, ride her motorbike alone to Leicester or Nottingham or elsewhere. If Ruth said Eddie couldn’t get away, Marian would go into town with her, and they would stay at the Red Cross Club, and all would be as it had been. Dinners, movies and plays, cocktails, dancing.