After lunch, cloud came in, and around three the meteorological office washed them out for the day. Marian left on her motorbike. Most of the girls in Hamble were billeted in little brick cottages, but Marian preferred the Polygon Hotel in Southampton, seven miles away. She’d wanted space between herself and the ferry pool, some semblance of privacy.
Puttering along toward Southampton, dodging drab green jeeps and trucks full of the Americans who’d been arriving in greater and greater numbers, she wondered if the man who’d come looking for her could have been Jamie. She thought he was in the Pacific, but, on the other hand, she hadn’t heard from him in more than a month. He’d been in Papua New Guinea when he mailed his last letter, being eaten alive by mosquitoes and rotted by mildew. So much for paradise, he’d written. He seemed to roam freely through the war. Maybe the navy had decided he was needed in the European theater, to chronicle the eventual invasion. All these Americans piling up in Britain, their camps sprawling along the south coast, were surely to be put to use before too long.
In midsummer she’d received Sarah Fahey Scott’s manila envelope with the copy of Life inside, a paper bookmark stuck between the two pages taken up by Jamie’s painting, and a card with a brief message:
We’ve never met, but I’m an old friend of your brother’s and have heard enough about you to wish we might be friends too. I was so grateful he looked me up when he passed through Seattle last month. He asked me to forward this on—that’s his painting in there, being seen by millions, but I’m sure you’d know his work from a mile away. My mother sends her best wishes, by the way. She called you “a force,” which is her highest praise.
Marian had wondered why Jamie had not told her he’d seen Sarah again and whether perhaps a letter had been lost. She’d studied the painting: a P-4 landing on some godforsaken speck in the Bering Sea. The subject wasn’t his, but the execution was, the slight warp to the perspective and the sureness with which he’d suggested the clouds, the hovering white crown of a volcano, the reflections on the waterlogged runway. The airplane was well done—accurate without being fiddly. She didn’t envy the pilot. When she’d been in Alaska there hadn’t been many places to land in the Aleutians, certainly not as far out as Adak or Attu, and little reason to go. The weather was so murderous the sky there might as well have been a direct portal to the great beyond.
When she reached the outskirts of Southampton, it was only four but already sunset. She parked her motorbike and was making her way toward the Polygon Hotel’s revolving door when someone caught her arm from behind.
Caleb. Caleb in an army uniform. She clutched at him. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a war.”
She pushed him back. “But here. It was you this morning. Why didn’t you leave a note?”
“I left a message.”
“The girl who took it couldn’t even remember your name, just told someone to tell me ‘a man’ had come by. Oh!” she said, interrupting herself. “Your hair.” Of course his braid would have been cut off, but she hadn’t thought about it. She plucked his garrison cap from his head and reached up to touch his short hair, saying, “I thought it might be Jamie.”
“Ah.” He seemed to absorb her implied disappointment without offense. “Is he in England?”
“As far as I know he’s in the Pacific. Before that he was in Alaska.” She studied him. Besides the hair and a deep tan he looked remarkably unchanged from when she’d last seen him, when they’d clung to each other in the dirt behind his cabin. She said, “I’m so glad to see you.”
“I couldn’t remember which of us was mad at the other. I decided to chance it.”
“Well, not me.”
“Not me, either.”
They smiled. The sound of an engine bulged in the sky. She craned to look. A Spit, barely discernible against the darkening sky. “Did you marry that girl? The teacher?”
“No.”
She absorbed the news with a nod, less relieved than she would have expected. “Come inside.” As they walked toward the hotel, she said, “Somehow I knew you were all right. Tell me where you’ve been.”
“Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily. Now here.”
“No wonder you’re so brown. All those places?”
Caleb said, “What has Jamie been doing?”
“He’s a combat artist. Did you know such a thing existed? He draws and paints for the navy.”