Sentimental Journey (50 page)

Half an hour later she was inside the transport plane, buckled in her seat and waiting for takeoff. The seats were more comfortable than most. The plane had been a Pan Am commercial liner before becoming a private charter that Maggie had Coop contract to fly the women into Canada, where they would sign the final ATA papers and then fly on to London to meet Maggie Caldwell Cooper and become the first American women to fly for the war effort. History. In a few days Charley was going to be a part of history.

The noise level in the plane was something else. The women were all talking at once, excited and happy and scared, laughing and giggling, because this was finally it—all they had worked for.

“Charley!” Dolores was hanging over her seat. “Look outside. Quick!”

Charley leaned forward and looked out the oval window.

A dusty black truck sped through the gates of the airfield and raced down the maintenance road heading toward the north runway. The plane’s engines were running, but the door was still open, the metal stairs still wedged against it.

She unbuckled and moved to the aisle.

“Run, Charley, or you’ll miss him!”

Charley went out the door and ran down the stairs. She glanced over a shoulder. They were still loading the luggage into the belly of the plane. She ran forward, across the asphalt toward Red, but a ten-foot-tall chicken-wire fence was between the maintenance road and the runway.

Red braked the truck and was out the door as she reached the gate.

“You made it!” she said, out of breath.

“I didn’t even try to call. I just read the first message and drove like hell to get here.”

“I’m sorry about dinner.”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

She gripped the fence tightly with her hands.

He reached out and covered her white knuckles with his long freckled fingers. “Take care of yourself.”

“You, too.”

He nodded.

“I’ll write you and let you know where we end up.” Sure.

“When you’re up in those B-17s, think of me drinking tea and eating crumpets.”

“And ferrying airplanes. Don’t forget the best part. But I hear those RAF boys are all spit and polish, full of boast and bull crap. You watch out for them.”

She laughed. “I will.”

“You’re a damn fine looking woman, Charley Morrison.”

“Red . . . ” She couldn’t seem to find the right words. His name hung in the air between them before she finally said, “I have to go.” “I know.”

“Bye, Red. Take care.”

“Bye, Cinderella. Be sure to duck.”

“I will.” She turned and ran for the plane and up the stairs. At the doorway, she paused and looked back, one hand on the edge of the doorway. A breeze from the starboard engine whipped her hair into her face, and she brushed it aside.

Red was still standing at the fence, looking tall and slim and handsome in his OD uniform.

She waved.

He waved back, then stuck his hands in the pockets of his loose slacks and didn’t budge from that same spot. She wondered what he was thinking and when she would see him again. If she would ever see him again.

She ducked down and went inside, walked along the rows, and sat down in her seat, then strapped in. They closed the door. As the plane began to taxi, she leaned forward, peering out the window.

She waved her fingers at him again, that tall red-haired man with a heart as big as
Texas
, a man who was good and fun and who kissed her like she was a real woman instead of a strange and foreign land to be conquered.

He had moved and was standing at the open door of his truck, watching the plane take off. He slipped his hat off his head and waved it high in the air.

The plane sped past and took off.

She kept looking out the plane window for the longest time. Her breath fogged the window and she swiped it clear with her fingers, still looking back, looking back, until Red and his truck were nothing but small, dark spots on the long, flat miles of clay-colored ground.

PART EIGHT

GREAT BRITAIN
,
1942

“I
GET
ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY
WELL
”

A reporter for the London
Times
wanted to interview him. When he balked, his commander suggested it was good for the RAF and for the country’s morale. The number of kills credited to a flying ace was newsworthy. Let his countrymen cheer No. 77 Squadron’s victories the same way the men in the squadron cheered his rise and continued success as top ace for more than a year.

But Skip suspected this interview wasn’t about morale but a search for altruism. He didn’t care to discuss his duty. There was no glory in it for him, and he didn’t want some stranger asking him his motive or digging into his private life so the prime details could be plastered all over the newspapers. What “inspired” him was no one’s bloody business but his own.

There were, however, some distinct advantages to being your country’s top pilot, other than a quick rise through the official ranks. He’d received another commission a few days before. Thank God and country there were no more promotion exams.

He was now Lieutenant Commander and would be taking over the squad when Henderson, his flight commander, moved on to Biggin Hill. Along with Skip’s exalted position of hero came some modicum of power. There was something about British nature that made them cater to those with an elitist attitude, whether deserved or not.

When it served his purpose, Skip used his image as paragon of the skies. This morning it served his purpose. He paid Mallory, who had three fewer kills, to sit in for him with the reporter, and Skip took an unplanned leave home to Keighley.

To get there, he drove a Riley 9 open tourer that belonged to Hemmings and had one of those stubborn crash gearboxes instead of the synchromesh gears fitted onto later models. After an hour, he had mastered a shift that was so smooth only the rev of the engine gave away a gear change.

Out in the countryside the air was cool, and the car moved along sportingly. It was somewhat surreal, driving past the barrage balloons in towns and villages and the blackened places where bombs had blown out huge holes in fields near airplane and munitions factories. Before long, he was passing only the occasional hay wagon with a plodding team or a farmer’s tractor. Then it was as if the war were a lifetime away.

He entered the estate road through stone gates and parked in front of the house, a three-story stone manor that would comfortably billet his entire squadron in classic, English-country-house style. But he didn’t go up the stone stairs and inside the huge front doors. Instead, he walked around the west wing, then stood there with his hands buried in his trouser pockets as he looked out at the lands before him, at rolling green hills with clumps of ancient elm trees, at the woods thick with oak trees and streams that ran clear all year, then off into the distance at the purple haze of hills.

Time seemed to stand still for him, those past decades of his life spent here. As a lad, he had been too young to understand his ties to Keighley because he seldom left it, and when he did, it was only to go to another family home—the house in Town or his great-uncle’s grand estate in the Cotswolds.

It had been when he first went away to school that he understood how Keighley had silently seeped into his pores, until it was buried so deeply under his skin it became the meat and bone of him. Before long Greer was just as much a part of home to him, so whenever he came back here with her, he saw this place as his beginning, their beginning.

Human joy colored what you viewed in blindingly bright rainbows. When he was in love, he had looked out on his lands with a great sense of peace. Greer’s death changed everything. Afterward, he saw it all in shadows, grays and darks that mirrored his broken soul the way the images turn nightmarish in the negative of a photograph, so horrible that you can almost not bear to look at it.

But those days felt as if they had passed, the days when his anger at her death was fresh and he dared not look to the east. He could look now and see the neighboring estate that belonged to her family, and in between their lands sat the lake, blue and calm. Nearby, a slab of hard, gray stone marked the spot where they had first met.

Memories were what destroyed those who loved and were left behind. He had learned that the hard way when he once made the mistake of staying in the somewhat repaired townhouse while on an overnight to
London
. Sitting in the old study, he had glanced up expecting to see her. It shook him to the bone.

Later he had walked down the stairs and stopped, when he thought he saw a flash of color: a bit of a floral skirt disappearing into another room. In the middle of the night, he awoke to the smell of
Ma Griffe
. In the morning, he awoke crying and calling her name. Those bleak moments took his breath from him, stopped his heart, and stole a minute or two of his life, before reminding him all over again that he had none.

But now he could look to the east, yes, he could, in the way a dead man’s eyes look into nothingness after being disembodied from his rising soul. Numb, he moved along the walk, almost forgetting why he’d come, until he caught sight of a figure through one of the long first-floor windows and stopped where he was.

His mother was sitting in the music room, her silhouette visible through the fine lace curtain that would be covered with blackout cloth in a few hours. She looked china-fragile, the woman with a spine of steel who never shied from anything, especially if it meant a good fight. Audrey Cecile Benton Inskip loved to do battle. She claimed it was in her blood, since her family dated back to
Hastings
.

Ah, Mother, the devils we must face.

His aunt had written to him. Audrey refused to do much of anything now, Aunt Eleanore told him, but sit in the house day in and day out and stare at nothing. She would not let anyone read to her. She would not let anyone assist her with meals. She wanted to bathe and dress herself and be left completely alone. She balked at help of any kind, even from the servants. Imagine . . . this from the woman to whom servants were always as much a necessity of life as daily bread and who had never even run her own bath.

But last month his mother had tried to pension off all the household help. She refused to pull the call bell. She flooded her bath and dressing room. One day last week, she fell trying to get down the stairs alone. Luck was on her side, and she only managed to badly sprain her ankle as opposed to cracking open her stubborn head.

It was this final act that had precipitated his aunt’s wire asking him to come home. According to Eleanore, his mother had been difficult enough to handle before the fall, but now, with her ankle the size of a melon, her whole manner had reversed. She was not fighting everyone any longer, but instead slipping into a deep and silent depression.

He went into the house, quietly closed the doors, and stood in the hall outside the music room, looking inside where sunlight spilled through the curtains. Oddly enough, the finely wrought lace cast almost monstrously distorted shadows on his mother’s ageless face. He was stunned at her pallor and the way she seemed to have shrunk into a tiny creature that was huddled in an overstuffed chair and looked like a porcelain doll from fifty years ago.

She faced him, sitting up a bit and with a surprising suddenness looking more like herself, except her eyes were flat and opaque. “George?”