She squeezed my hand. ‘But you didn’t.’
Within five minutes a young American civilian presented us with a bottle of champagne. I nearly fell off the chair with shock. It was Bob Ernst, the man who’d driven me to Paris last month.
‘Nice to see you again, Rose Justice,’ Bob said, grinning from ear to ear and holding out his hand. He shook hands with me warmly. ‘Who’s your friend?’
I gulped, and remembered how to be polite. ‘This is Maddie Beaufort-Stuart. She flew with me in the ATA.’
‘You’re a pilot too, Maddie!’ he exclaimed. ‘Never met a flygirl in my whole life, and Rosie knows ’em all.’ He poured and handed out glasses.
‘Victory!’
‘Victory!’
I took a sip – the first sip was awful. The contrast with the months of turnip soup was so extreme, and the last time I had champagne was on a date with the boy who’d got married to someone else while I was in prison – I’d only found this out a couple of days ago. With the first sip my anger at that thoughtless betrayal hit me again like a kick in the ribs, and I made a face like I’d never drunk champagne in my life.
Bob laughed. ‘It’s the idea of the thing.’ He didn’t have a chair. The place was packed. He squatted down next to us.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. Bob had picked me up at a refugee centre in Belgium, with Irina Korsakova and Ró?a Czajkowska, the prisoners who had escaped with me.
‘Looking for you, Rose,’ he said seriously. ‘I’ve been looking for you ever since I waved goodbye to you at the Embassy. I thought I’d never forgive myself for not making sure you were safe.’
I put my glass down on the crowded table we were sharing with about a dozen other people. I stared at Bob.
‘Looking for me?’
‘I knew you were here at the Ritz, and you hadn’t checked out,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t tell me what room you were in – fair enough – and I would have felt pretty underhanded watching the lobby to catch you going in and out. So I thought I’d sit in the bar in the evening, and maybe you’d come down one night. As long as you were still checked in, you might come down. So I waited. And you did.’
I didn’t say anything at first. Finally I asked the only thing that mattered. ‘Did you look for my friends?’
Because that was what I was most upset about: losing Irina and Ró?a. It was mostly my own fault. But a little part of me blamed it on Bob, for taking me away from them without me realising they weren’t travelling with us in the back of our convoy.
‘I did look for your friends,’ he said. ‘I managed to get the unit details of the Red Cross folks we camped with. One of the wounded GIs remembered it. But I don’t know where they are now. Probably still on their way back to Sweden – I think it’ll take them a while because they were stopping along the way to set up field clinics, like the one we camped with. They’re off the US Army’s beat, that’s for sure. I tried contacting their HQ in Stockholm, but I always get blindsided by the girl on the switchboard. And I don’t know your friends’ last names, or how to spell their first names – how are they going to find Russian Irene and Polish Rosie among tens of thousands of refugees they’re relocating? When things settle down we might have better luck. It’s been making me crazy. They can’t just disappear.’
We had their unit details.
It was a start.
Maybe Bob thought I was upset with him, because he added quickly, ‘The real reason I’m in Paris is that I’m on an assignment for my paper – I think I told you that. But I’ve got a sort of more creative personal project I’m working on now too – it’s a story for a literary journal out of Olympia University in Ohio, about people coming home. I got the idea after I dropped you off. I couldn’t stop thinking about you and your team. So since then I’ve started talking to others like you.’
‘Like me?’
‘You said you’d been in prison in Germany, but you were in a camp, right? You weren’t a prisoner-of-war. You’re a civilian. So I guessed you must have been in a concentration camp. There are plenty of camp survivors in Paris, on their way home, men and women both. You get an eye for spotting them.’
‘We’re all skeletons,’ I said, and looked away, my face burning.
‘No,’ Maddie suddenly interjected. ‘It’s summat in the eyes. You look like you’re in shock.’
Bob slapped the table and everyone’s glasses tinkled. ‘That’s it exactly. The POWs from the military prison camps are skinny too, but anyone who’s been in the concentration camps – they all look a little crazy.’ He bit his lip and reddened. ‘Sorry. Not you.’
‘It’s OK. I bet I do. I bet that’s how you figured it out.’
I felt a little crazy.
‘Well,’ Bob said, leaning back on his heels, ‘I’m telling you this because you said you wrote poetry, and I thought you might want to send something to the poetry editor at my magazine. It’s quarterly, and they’re doing a special issue focused on the war – social issues, how the war’s affected education, things like that. There’s a story about the massacre of university staff in Poland and a story about the past five years of Hollywood films, so you get some idea how flexible they’re being. If you wrote anything this year –’
Maddie leaned across me and coolly accepted the offer on my behalf, as though she were my literary agent. ‘She’ll take your card.’
He had it ready and waiting in his breast pocket. I felt a little bit like a starlet being discovered by a director. I nodded. I didn’t smile, but I let him know I’d consider it. Maybe this was the way I could tell people about it – without having to say anything, just the way I’d given my notebook to Maddie.
‘I’ve got a few new poems,’ I said cautiously. I wasn’t convinced any of them were good enough to be published in a literary magazine. I wasn’t convinced any of them would even make sense, outside Ravensbrück.
‘That’s my girl,’ Bob said, and refilled our glasses.
I picked mine up again, and took a tentative sip of victory champagne. I remembered now I’d drunk champagne at Maddie’s wedding too, and it tasted better when I was prepared for it. It wasn’t sweet but exciting – new and exotic and sparkling, but dry and cold too – like everything that day, joy mixed with agony.
‘Thank you!’ I said, and held my glass to Bob and Maddie and the light. ‘Thank you for waiting.’
There are four forces which work together if you want to put something into the sky and have it stay there. One of these is lift.
Lift is made when the air pressure under a wing is greater than the air pressure over the wing. Then the wing gets pushed upwards. That’s how birds fly. That’s how kites fly – a kite is basically just a solitary wing. That’s how airplanes fly.
But people need lift too. People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without something buoying them up.
There’s nowhere else in the world I’d have rather been to celebrate victory in Europe than in Paris on VE Day, but I don’t know if I’d feel the same if it hadn’t been for my friends Maddie and Bob generating lift for me – buoying me up at the heavy ebb of my life.
2. Weight
Each force in flight is balanced by an opposing force. The opposite of lift is weight. Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight.