Some of the fellas have warmed up a little too much. I’ve got an admirer. A persistent one. I keep telling him I’m married, that my husband’s a POW, and he says, you know it’s wartime, don’t you? Like because there’s a war I’m obliged to lust after someone with a face like a rotten mushroom.
Maybe you mind that kind of attention less than I do. I guess you did miss men, after all. Funny story—a crew of our girls moving bombers landed because of weather at some hick town and got thrown into the local lockup because women aren’t allowed out in slacks after dark there. The sheriff wouldn’t believe they were pilots. Guess it’s not a funny story. You push on men and eventually you get to the bedrock of it all, which is that they think they’re better than us. And they’re the ones who made this war. I’ve been thinking about that. We get angry and nothing happens. Men get angry, and the whole world burns up. Then when we want to do our part, they’re always trying to keep us out of danger. Because heaven forbid we should be allowed to decide for ourselves. Their worst fear is that one day we’ll end up owning our lives same as they do.
I’m ranting—sorry—partly because I’m trying to work myself up to say you hurt me awfully even though I know you were in a terrible state. I wanted to be the one you turned to, and when you went to him instead, scraps weren’t going to be enough. Seems unfair I’d be the one to feel bad about leaving, but I do. Do you feel bad? It would mean a lot to me to know that you do. But, either way, I wanted to say this: In case anything happens to either of us, you should know that from my end anyway, we’re okay. I don’t know if I can say all’s forgiven, but most is. I couldn’t have stayed after what happened, but I still miss you and send my love.
Yours always,
Ruth
* * *
—
Marian hadn’t seen Ruth again after that night in the Polygon, after she’d chosen Caleb, hadn’t heard from her until the letter.
Thousands of ships clung to the south coast like a bloom of gray algae, choking the harbors. For weeks, Marian had watched the buildup. All of it seemed to push and strain against the Channel, threatening to overflow.
Caleb’s camp had been sealed in preparation for the invasion.
At Hamble, she was given a Vultee Vengeance to take to Hawarden. From there she was to deliver a Wellington bomber to Melton Mowbray, but a gale came up before she could leave.
She found a room above a pub. In the morning, the rain still lashing down, she called Hamble and was told to stay put. The second evening, after a desultory day spent at the movies, she and another stranded ATA pilot, an Englishman too old for the RAF, had a drink. “I heard,” he said, “that the invasion fleet set out this morning but turned back because of this.” He cast an incriminating glance at the windows, the splattering rain. “I don’t envy the poor sod responsible for forecasting.”
Marian nodded. She could summon little interest in the invasion, though she knew it must be done if the war was ever going to end. She could not fear for Caleb. Jamie’s death had muffled everything. Only in bed with Caleb had she felt any stirrings of life, and occasionally in the air, too, when she gazed on inanimate splendor: clouds furred on their bottoms by rain, a fat slug of pink light that thickened and yellowed on the horizon and became the moon, distant clouds full of lightning, things that would happen regardless of the war, would happen even if humans didn’t exist. Of all the suffering in the past, the best she could say was that it was already over. At some point, the invasion would be, too.
“I flew in the Great War,” her companion said. “I never would have imagined I’d live to see a greater one.”
The description—great, greater—irritated Marian, though she knew he was only trying to say something about magnitude.
“I must seem terribly old to you,” he said. Both forlorn and flirtatious. She glanced at his wedding ring.
“No,” she said. Age had ceased to matter. The young lived nearer death than the old.
He turned his pint glass around and around on its cardboard coaster, and she thought he was working up his nerve to ask her up to his room. It was the war; they might as well. Maybe the sensation of life could be drawn from his body. “Do you want to come upstairs with me?” she said.
He looked up sharply. “I suppose I ought to? Something to mark the occasion?”
Already she felt weary, regretful of her invitation, but going to an empty room would be worse.
* * *
—