England
December 1943
A few days later
“Is there still the someone?” Caleb asked Marian one night as they danced. It was an accidental London rendezvous, lucky timing. The dance hall was decorated for Christmas.
“Yes.” In the month since Caleb’s arrival, Marian’s life would have been much simpler if she had seen a way to introduce him to Ruth, but she knew Caleb would intuit that Ruth was the someone, and Ruth would be jealous and territorial no matter how many assurances Marian offered. So the weeks had been dominated, in large part, by logistical concerns: how to spend time with each of them without alerting the other and how to avoid ATA gossip. The complexity of her schedule and the general wartime hecticness provided some cover, but there had been close calls. Caleb’s camp was in Dorset, nearer to Marian than Ruth’s posting at Ratcliffe, and so she saw him a bit more often, though occasionally Ruth got assigned a taxi flight to Hamble or a delivery to the Spitfire repair depot and showed up unexpectedly.
Only in the air did Marian ever fully relax. Flying, she was where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to do. No one could reach her or ask anything of her.
On the other hand, she had made the unexpected discovery that the contrast of a present lover with a past one actually amplified her tenderness for each. What was the harm in being loved by both? Who was she to turn her back on such abundance after never before having quite enough love? Who knew how long any of them had to live, anyway. Caleb would go to Europe whenever the invasion happened, and ATA pilots died at about the same dismal rate as those in the RAF.
He found a pocket of space in the crowd to spin her out and pull her back. “If he’s so important, why can’t I meet him?”
The song ended, and a new one began, a swell of woodwinds, brass shimmering on top. They turned mostly in place, cocooned by other couples.
“Why do you want to?” she said.
“I’m curious.”
“No, you’re not. You think you’d look good in comparison. You think no one could measure up to you.”
She felt him smile against her temple. “That too.”
When the song was over, she started to move away, but he pulled her back. He pulled her back, but she was the one who kissed him. Bound up in him, feeling his need through the strength of his grip, she had a sudden flash of Barclay, of being engulfed and erased, compressed down to nothing. The difference was that Caleb felt her panic, released her. She fled, pushing through the crowd. Caleb let her go.
* * *
—
On Boxing Day, some words came through the telephone in the ferry pool office, and after Marian had absorbed the sense of them, that Jamie had been killed, her first reaction was fear. What a terrifying idea that Jamie should be dead. Why had such a horrible hypothetical event been phrased as fact? If such a thing were to happen, if Jamie were to be killed, she would not be able to bear it. She recoiled from the idea.
But there was Jackie Cochran’s voice again, all the way from across the Atlantic. “Marian? Marian? Did you hear me?”
“Why would you say that?” Marian said. “That’s impossible. He’s an artist, not a soldier. He’s painting the war.”
There was a silence in which Jackie must have been gathering her excuses for making such a bad joke, readying her apology. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Jackie said, and for an instant Marian was relieved. “But I’m afraid it’s true. His ship was sunk.”
Marian set down the receiver.
Someone rapped on the phone-box door. Marian jumped, startled. A man was there, another ATA pilot. He drew back at the sight of her. “Sorry,” he said. “I was only wondering if you were done in there.”
She felt her lips move, but nothing came out. She pushed at the door, couldn’t make it open because her body had turned to vapor.
“Are you all right?” the man said, opening the door.
She brushed past him, perhaps through him, like a ghost.
They’d been grounded all morning because of weather. She went to the ready room and pulled on her heavy flying suit and fur-lined boots anyway, picked up her bag and parachute. She drifted out to the Spit she was meant to deliver to Cosford, climbed in and took off without going through her checks, noticing in an abstract way that the lights at the end of the runway were red, not green. Immediately she was in cloud. The murk pulsed with circles of light like those that appeared when she pressed on her closed eyelids. Presently she noticed her eyes were indeed closed. She opened them. The air remained resolutely gray. Was she right side up or upside down? Did it matter? She had no sense of where she was, no interest in what she might be about to crash into. In another moment she punched through and was between a blue dome and an unbroken layer of fleecy white.