“It’s the Old English word for ‘truth,’ ” Teddy said, his eyes still on the dog.
“Of course. That makes sense.” She squeezed his arm and Teddy thought of the officer’s wife last night. Nancy smiled at him and said, “Are you happy, darling?”
“Yes.” He had no idea any longer what that word meant, but if she wanted him to declare happiness then he would. (“The mistake,” Sylvie said, “is thinking that love equates with happiness.”) “I was going to tell you,” he said, relenting and offering the Halifax anecdote that he had denied her the previous day, “I was in the mess last week, playing cards actually. We were on ops that night, Wuppertal, and there’s always this lull around mid-afternoon, after you’ve done all your flying checks and you’re waiting for the briefing—” He felt her arm slacken slightly. He would happily have listened to the everyday details of her life if she had cared to offer them up. “Shall I go on?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then I heard an aircraft engine—nothing unusual about that, obviously, but then Sandy Worthington—my navigator—poked his head round the door of the officers’ mess and said, ‘Come and see, Ted, it’s the new Halifax, the Mark III.’ ”
“And it’s much better, it’s got a different tail,” Nancy piped up, like a keen pupil pleased with their memory for dull facts.
“No, that’s not the interesting thing—although it is, to me, very interesting because it will save lives. So anyway, I borrowed a bicycle and raced along to the runway—the mess is a long way, it’s a big airfield—” Nancy picked up a piece of driftwood and threw it into the sea for the dog, who seemed to consider retrieving it and then thought better of it. “And the aircraft,” Teddy continued, “was just taxiing along the perimeter fence to the dispersal, and guess who had flown it there?”
“Gertie?”
Now at last he had her attention. “Yes, Gertie. It was such a surprise.”
Nancy’s elder sister was in the Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying aircraft to and fro from squadrons, factories, maintenance units. She had gained a pilot’s licence before the war and Teddy remembered how envious he had been. The men in Teddy’s squadron, although they didn’t always admit it, had a lot of respect for the ATA girls (“women,” Gertie amended). They flew anything and everything at a moment’s notice—Lancs, Mosquitoes, Spitfires, even the American Fortresses—feats of aviation that would have defeated most RAF pilots.
“Yours, I think,” the CO said to Teddy as they stood at dispersal with Gertie, admiring the new aircraft.
“Mine?” Teddy said.
“Well, you are squadron leader, Ted, methinks you should have the best kite.”
“She flies well,” Gertie said to him. And so Q-Queenie became his.
Gertie was treated as an honorary officer and invited into the mess for tea (“And scones! How lovely.” They weren’t). By chance, rather than her having to catch a train, there was an aircraft that needed to be flown to a maintenance unit to have its twisted fuselage straightened out. Aircraft hadn’t been designed for the kind of violent manoeuvres that corkscrewing necessitated (neither had he, Teddy often thought). Gertie had not set any male hearts a-flutter during her brief sojourn—except perhaps the CO’s, who remarked that she had “guts”—for, like Winnie, she was a straightforward, rather homely type. Teddy tended to rank the Shawcross girls (“women”) in terms of attractiveness—he suspected everyone did—from Winnie, the least pulchritudinous, down to Nancy and elfin Bea. In his heart he believed Bea to be the most attractive, but loyalty to Nancy usually censored that thought. “Each Shawcross girl is smaller and prettier than the last,” Hugh had said once when they were younger. Millie, in the middle, would have been most annoyed to hear this judgement.
Gertie got a good send-off from the squadron, partly because she had delivered the very welcome new “Halibag” and partly because of her connection to Teddy, “like a sister-in-law” he had explained, as he supposed she would be if there were an afterward. A little huddle gathered at the control caravan for her take-off, Teddy amongst them, and they all waved as vigorously as if she was off on a raid to Essen rather than delivering a Halifax to an OMU in York. She waggled her wings in farewell and roared off into the blue. Teddy felt proud of her.
“I haven’t seen her in ages,” Nancy said.
“You haven’t seen anyone in ages.”
“Not by choice,” she replied, sounding rather brittle. He was being unfair, of course the war must be taking a toll on her too. He tucked her arm tighter into his and whistled to the dog. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll buy you a sandwich in the station tea rooms. There’s plenty of time before the train.”