Once, by a stroke of good luck, they’d been caught out together the same night in Lossiemouth and had found a pub whose dour proprietress had informed them brusquely that “You’ll have to share a room. It’ll be cozy, I’m afraid.”
“I suppose we can manage,” Ruth had said, “if we must.”
There was glee to be taken from the subterfuge, from the world’s lack of imagination, and Ruth showed her how to take it, though Marian knew that for Ruth there was also bitterness at the necessity of secrecy. People had begun asking them if they were sisters, even though they looked nothing alike: Ruth short and buxom and dark; Marian tall, narrow, and fair. “They’re picking up on our closeness,” Ruth said, “but they don’t know what to make of it, so they draw the only conclusion they can think of.”
Yes, Ruth always said, we’re sisters.
Not that Marian could imagine wanting to flaunt their relationship. She didn’t wish she could write to Jamie and tell him she was in love because no part of her wanted to face his surprise, his consternation. She didn’t think he would berate her for being immoral—as an artist he knew all types—but she thought he would be uncomfortable in a way that would wear a groove between them. The groove would deepen and widen into a chasm bigger than the immense wedge of the planet that already separated them. He wouldn’t be able to keep from imagining what she and Ruth did together, and she feared that revulsion would inevitably creep in, grow on his idea of her like mildew.
She wouldn’t say she’d discovered a firm preference for women, but neither would she now confidently say that she preferred men. In this moment she would choose Ruth over anyone, but still she missed, a little bit, the inherent imbalance of power she’d felt with a man, the momentum toward submission, toward breaching, the demanding solidity of a cock. She tried not to let herself think about Barclay. After him, with other men, even Caleb, he’d reverberated in her like an echo, sometimes only faintly, sometimes as violently and shockingly as a gunshot in a canyon thought to be empty. With Ruth, though, no echoes intruded. With Ruth, the act was more egalitarian and, surprisingly, in some ways more carnal, driven by a grasping sort of resourcefulness, a blind determination to merge.
The first few times they were together, Marian hadn’t put her mouth on Ruth, but when she finally did, she’d found saltiness, pungency, flesh inside flesh, a rawness unlike anything on a man’s body. Her own clitoris, as much as she had ever confronted it, had struck her as embarrassing and extravagantly ugly, like a turkey’s wattle, but Ruth was clearly pleased with her own and smitten with Marian’s. She treated the little flap as important, central, even deserving of reverence. An idol in a hidden shrine.
* * *
—
When the stars aligned, they went out in London with Eddie. Ducking into crowded, smoky rooms, loud with jazz and yeasty with spilled liquor, Marian got the same giddy, feral thrill she’d had as a child when embarking on some adventure with Jamie and Caleb: rambunctious joy heightened by the conspiratorial nature of their triangle. Marian knew Ruth had told Eddie they’d become lovers, something Eddie acknowledged only subtly, by directing a welcoming, brotherly warmth at Marian. She imagined he must have affairs of his own. How could he watch planes just like his, flown by men he knew, burn and fall, and not seek pleasure, release, comfort, life?
“Marian saved my life, you know,” Ruth said one night in May, arching a dramatic eyebrow as she sipped from her cocktail. They were celebrating Eddie’s return from his fifteenth combat mission. If he survived twenty-five, he could go home.
Eddie turned to Marian with mild curiosity. People were saving each other’s lives all the time. “How’d you do that?”
“Don’t look at me,” Marian said. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
“Yesterday I was taking a Fairchild from White Waltham to Preston—” Ruth cut herself off, reached across the table to touch Eddie’s arm, said in a sweet schoolteacher’s voice, “You might not know this, Eddie, but to get there you have to fly through the Liverpool corridor. Do you know what that is?”
Amused, he said, “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“It’s a strip of air space two and a half miles wide between the Liverpool balloon barrage and the one at Warrington. Anyway, I’d already gone in when out of nowhere, I was in cloud. Truly out of nowhere. One minute, clear sailing. The next, nothing but white. It turns out it has to do with the dew point. Some strange phenomenon.”