Paper Doll (18 page)

After a pause Robin shifted her gaze from Snowberry to Bryant. “And you?” she asked.

“It's bad. It's the worst thing in the world,” he said. He wanted to reassure her. He felt the way he had when his mother had discovered him doing something childish and destructive, like vandalizing street signs. He didn't have the words. “But you know. I met you. I got to know good pals I can depend on. It teaches you stuff like that.”

She sighed. “I suppose we shouldn't browbeat you so. I suppose we're just trying to understand.”

The comment let everyone off the hook, and in celebration Snowberry attempted Crosby speaking: “Well now, little miss, that's the kind of spirit that'll Back the Attack.”

“Oh you,” Jean said. “It's like having a boy with a drinking problem.”

“Now the boys ‘n' me would like to bring you a little ditty—”

Bryant slid a pickle in his mouth. Snowberry did a passable Crosby Choking. The girls applauded.

When it was fully dark, they moved the table inside and Jean and Snowberry played cards while Elizabeth listened to the radio. Robin led him out to Cardinal Newman's hideout, claiming there was a phosphorescent glow of some sort emanating from deep within which was visible on certain nights. When they had reached the corner of the garden, they walked forward slowly hand in hand, Bryant setting his feet down with edgy heel-to-toe caution. The ground and the air felt damp. Robin said, “Here,” and lowered herself to a crouch and he followed. The earth clearly gave way to a different value of darkness and he could feel and smell the cold cellar air below. His fingertips touched rough stone.

“Do you see it?” Robin whispered.

He considered equivocating and said no.

She leaned back and sighed. “Sometimes it doesn't light up for visitors.” Her voice was pleasantly sexual in the darkness. “I can't say I know why.”

He settled onto his knees, and judged by the angle of her silhouette that she was gazing at him. He could smell rich earth, rotting leaves.

“Bobby,” she said.

He leaned forward and kissed her, in the darkness softly catching the corner of her lips and her cheek.

“I don't seem to like that many boys,” she said. “Mother says I seem to think I'm too good for them.”

He thought, God, I'm some Romeo. She does everything first. She arranged herself so that his chest formed a kind of a chair back for her. “I think often of my grandmother Janie,” she said. “My mother's stepmother. She grew up on a croft, Laghie, in the north of Scotland. I have a photograph of her, windswept and frightened, on top of a carthorse. She kept illustrations of all the birds in the area, and Mother says my artistic ability came from her.” She rubbed her eye once, carefully, with a fingertip, reminding him of Jean. “She was always said to be very vain, and sad.” Bryant tried to imagine this woman, and saw Robin with her arms folded in a tartan skirt standing in a wagon. “At sixteen she left home and went to Glasgow to train as a nurse. Mother has another snap of her at a cottage hospital. She became engaged to a young man who farmed another croft. Everyone in the family called it a miracle she'd found someone good enough for her. Naturally, he was killed. She never really recovered.” She scraped the edges of the man-hole stone with her fingernail, the tiny scratching audible.

“Eventually, she married my mother's father, but Mother says she spoke about that farmer to her dying day as though he were just out of town for a bit, as though he'd just stepped out to the pub. In the cottage hospital photo she's still happy, standing in her stiff white uniform, with such a sad, shy smile. Mother always says, Robin, that's your picture, Robin, that's your smile, until I'm so frightened I can't bear to look at it and have to put it away. The last time I got so cross Mother swore she wouldn't bring Janie up again.” She shivered, and patted her arms. “I'm frightened for you, Bobby. I'm frightened for me, as well.”

“Don't be scared,” he said.

“That's fatuous advice, isn't it?” she said.

He reached his hand down into the hole. The rock wall was cold and lined with water.

Her face was very near his. “You can't separate out the fear,” she said. The seriousness of her expression made the possibility of disaster erotic. She kissed him, holding his chin up to hers, with the draft from the hole cooling his legs and feet.

Inside, they curled together into a big wingbacked chair facing the quiet hearth. The arms were doilied where they had gone threadbare. She was wedged in beside him and had her fingers on his throat and her thumb on his collar.

“I was working with the village children,” she said. “Did I tell you? A drawing class. One day as something special I brought in a banana. A friend of a friend of Mother's had gotten two from a Yank serviceman. You should have seen their eyes. We all said it together:
ba-na-na.
As if that were a little bit of possessing it. And we all drew it.” He touched the fine hairs on her neck, and she took his hand lightly and sniffed his fingertips. “I knew they all entertained the vague hope that it would be shared, or go to the best drawing. I suddenly had this unpleasant feeling of power. I had intended to take it home, but you should have seen their faces. We cut it into sixteen pieces and ate them in tiny nibbles, as I've always imagined one ate caviar.”

She turned his head with the gentle pressure of two fingers on his cheek and kissed him. She took in her breath softly. “I remember being saddened a part of their childhood was missing. Perhaps I thought that was the worst thing about war, the way it robbed childhoods. I remembered at their age trekking home past the shops and windows of iced cakes, iced all with lavenders and pale greens.”

There was a pronounced thump upstairs and then silence. Some board creaking followed. They caught each other gazing upward and smiled.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

Robin leaned her head against the wingback. “I hope Jean's careful,” she said. “You don't suppose Gordon would be careful, do you?”

“I don't suppose so,” he said.

“She's had hideous luck with men.” She was pressing her thumb into the valleys between his knuckles, one by one.

“You make it sound like a raffle.”

“I suppose it is. The great love of her life was a Wellington gunner from Nottinghamshire. She spent two weekends with him and announced one morning she was PWOP.”

“Pwop,” Bryant said.

“Pregnant without official permission,” she explained. “It's an RAF term. We used to joke about it, before it happened. He treated her horribly. Said she wasn't boxing him into anything. Gave her the name of a doctor.”

“And she went?”

“The night before, he stayed over, and that morning,
she
had difficulty in getting
him
up. He didn't say anything, made a packet of tea, and ate cake in front of her. Complaining about a hangover. Completely oblivious.”

Bryant felt bad for her. “What happened?”

She sighed. “He disappeared during what they called a lull in fighter activity. Jean still visits his mum.”

He imagined the two of them chatting quietly before the photo on the mantel, the guy's home clothes hanging in forlorn rows in the other room.

“I'm sorry.”

“We talk a lot about living for today, and What Might Happen, and everything feels so rationed we don't want to miss a thing, but we have responsibility, here. We're dealing with people, and it can be very serious. It is very serious.”

He swallowed and tried to remain still.

“I don't know what kind of arrangement you have back in the United States with your girl Lois, but I doubt very much it encompasses something like this. You must in some way make clear in your own mind what you think you're doing.” She stroked his chest, near the breast pocket that held condoms. He swallowed. “You're no longer another cheery Yank. You're my Bobby, and that scares me.” She kissed him on the cheek, holding her lips pressed to it. “I haven't the words,” she whispered, and he felt fear, and responsibility, and excitement. He wondered if in some unguessed-at English way he'd been outmaneuvered or committed himself. She had his face in her hands, and she kissed him, and when he relaxed she closed her eyes.

She went upstairs to send Gordon back to his room when the clock read 3:30 by the light of a kitchen match. Bryant remained in the chair, too excited to sleep, imagining she would come back down in a filmy nightgown and a torrent of emotion. After a few minutes the upstairs fell completely silent, and he lingered unhappily on the prospect that she was still tossing and turning quietly, her resistance breaking down. He dozed eventually and dreamed of Vera Lynn singing to him at a barbecue, and when he awoke, Jean was clinking around the kitchen, making ersatz coffee, and it was cool and light in the living room. He rose stiffly and said hello with a weak smile. “Waiting for Father Christmas?” she asked. She removed the blackout shutters and behind her, when his eyes adjusted, he could see daffodils under the apple trees, the lawn grayed with dew.

“They're both sleeping,” she said. They sat in silence, Bryant self-consciously attempting to mat down his hair and clear the sleep from his eyes. When the water was ready, she poured the coffee. It smelled like the woods.

“What's the ditty? ‘Because of Axis trickery, my coffee tastes like chicory,'” she said.

He smiled. “It's fine.” He was determined not to make some sort of horrible gaffe by referring to her troubles.

She was listening to the morning noises of the cottage. “How long has Gordon been having those dreams?” she asked.

He looked away, embarrassed. “Since a mission we flew a little while ago. He said they were getting better.”

She sniffed skeptically. “I'm happy not to have seen them earlier, in that case.”

“Was he a bother?”

She laughed aloud. “You're a queer one, Bobby Bryant. I can't decide whether you're very nice or very thoughtless. Probably both.”

He was taken aback. “Why do you say that?”

She waved him off, her attention returning to the garden. Puff was hunched near the bluebells.

“Maybe she sees something,” Bryant suggested.

“Her friend's buried there,” Jean said. “A stray. Passed on in her sleep, very mysterious. We buried her in the garden yesterday morning before you came.”

Puff pawed at the tilled ground. The loose earth popped and trembled.

“Puff isn't giving up,” Jean said.

The cat dug more frantically. Dirt ridged her forehead, above the eyes.

“Jeez,” Bryant said. “Kind of morbid.”

Puff plunged in and pulled, struggling, and the ground heaved and broke loosely and the weight below came free slightly, a paw showing like a lost mitten. Puff sprinted a foot or so away and turned to watch, coiled. Nothing happened. Puff watched, clumped dirt falling from her head and back like the coating from fried chicken.

Jean watched without expression. Bryant rubbed his nose.

Puff lay in the frosted grass, looking on with complete concentration. They rose finally and went into the garden to retrieve her, scuffing dirt over to rebury the exposed paw. They brought Puff inside and cleaned her with damp soft dress remnants used for rags, and while she lay around licking herself with detachment, the final hour of Bryant's leave passed with the two of them gazing on the yawning cat in glum silence before going to wake the rest of the house so that the boys could get back to base on time.

They were going on practice missions, the CO told them, and they were going to take them seriously, and if they didn't take them seriously, they were going to end up dead. Collisions during assembly were becoming all too frequent as larger and larger bombing groups were attempted for the raids. Six aircraft had been lost in other squadrons in the last five days without enemy intervention. Fifty-seven men. Pilot error and insufficient vigilance, especially in poor visibility, were the official culprits. The CO demonstrated with his hands flattened and bobbing closer to one another: heavily laden bombers momentarily unbalanced by turbulence had little room for safe recovery in a tight combat formation. At times single aircraft and even whole formations were becoming lost and crossing into the formations of others in the general pre-dawn chaos. The 341st nearby had had the particularly humiliating distinction of having to abandon a mission altogether.

They were going to work on assembly. The assembly ship was to be the first off the airfield, and would fly to the designated point and begin firing flares. They were to follow at minimum intervals and assemble in formation as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The assembly ship was a battle-weary B-24 called
You Can't Miss It.
It was bright yellow with huge red polka dots, and a kelly green tail. The men loved on fairly clear days such as this to fly right up to it and earnestly ask for radio confirmation of its status as assembly ship.

If the balloon didn't go up in the next few days, the CO continued, they could count on additional gunnery training flights. The standard procedure had been to fly over the British coastal ranges firing away at the targets towed by tired old RAF Bostons. Now
that
was a job, Lewis said, that had to be the most dangerous in the armed forces, towing those targets while planeloads of ginks and shnooks let fly.

Bomber Command, the CO mentioned with exaggerated care, had reason to believe that the gunnery instructors back in the States had not been as precise in their scoring of cadet shooting as they might have been. The comment got a big roar of laughter from the aircrews. A month earlier in one of those spectacularly embarrassing incidents the Air Corps seemed able to produce every four weeks or so, one of the target-towing Bostons had been shot down. The Brit pilot had hit the silk so angry he had brandished a revolver at the contrite B-17's that flew past his chute.