“Are you all right, Mrs. Romaine?” the lovely Asian flight attendant was asking her. They were all lovely to you in First Class. Viola supposed that was what you paid for. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Sad film,” she said, indicating her blank TV screen. “Do you think I could have a cup of tea?”
She negotiated passport control and baggage retrieval and walked towards the exit, pulling her suitcase behind her. The automatic doors to the Arrivals hall swished quietly open. There was a driver on the other side of the barrier holding up a sign with her name on it. He would take her to a very nice hotel, and then tomorrow or the next day—she seemed to have lost her schedule—she would do a “Meet the Author” event and give a reading, “a little preview” from her new book, Every Third Thought, out next month. She seemed to recall she was also down for a couple of panel events as well. “The role of the writer in the contemporary world.” “Popular versus literary—a false divide?” Something like that. It was always something like that. Literary festivals, bookshops, interviews, online chats, you were just filling up other people’s empty spaces really. But they were filling up your empty spaces too.
She approached the driver. He would have no idea who she was unless she identified herself. She swerved away from him, carried on as if that was her intention all along, took the escalator back up to the check-in area, found the Singapore Airlines ticketing desk and bought a ticket to Denpasar.
She imagined the look on Sunny’s face. (“Surprise, surprise!”) They would get everyone on the train. Somehow or other.
30 March 1944
The Last Flight
The Fall
He had just whistled for the dog when he spotted a pair of hares in the grassy field that lay on the western side of the farmhouse. March hares, boxing like bare-knuckle fighters, the spring madness upon them. He caught sight of a third hare. Then a fourth. Once when he was a boy he had counted seven at one time, in the meadow at Fox Corner. The meadow had gone now, Pamela reported, ploughed up for winter wheat for hungry wartime mouths. The flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion, the ox-eye daisies, all gone, never to come back.
The hares might be convinced by the new season but it didn’t feel much like spring yet to Teddy. Pale clouds scudded across a washed-out sky. They were driven by a sharp east wind that was blowing all the way from the North Sea across the flat landscape, whipping soil off the dry tops of the bare furrows. It was the kind of weather that lowered the spirits, although Teddy’s were lifted a little by the sight of the jousting hares and the high, fluty notes of a blackbird answering his own whistle from somewhere unseen.
The dog heard his whistle too—Lucky always heard him whistle—and was making a headlong dash in his direction, blithely unaware of the hares’ sparring match taking place in the field. The dog roamed far and wide these days, quite at home in the countryside, although equally at home, apparently, in the Waafery. When the dog reached him it sat promptly, gazing up at his face, waiting for its next orders.
“Let’s go,” Teddy said. “We’re on ops tonight. Me,” he added. “Not you.” Once was enough.
When he looked again the hares had disappeared.
The orders had come down from Bomber Command HQ at High Wycombe this morning, but only a small handful of people on the station—Teddy one of them—was ever given early notice of the target.
As a wing commander he was discouraged from flying too frequently, “or we’d be losing a wing commander a week,” as the CO put it. All pre-war notions of hierarchy in the RAF had long since been upended. You could be a wing commander at twenty-three, dead at twenty-four.
He was on his third tour. There had been no obligation to sign up for it, he could have returned to instructing, he could have requested a desk job. It was “madness,” Sylvie wrote. He tended to agree with her. He had flown now on over seventy raids and had come to be regarded as untouchable by many on the squadron. This was how myths were made these days, Teddy thought, simply by staying alive longer than anyone else. Perhaps that was his role now, to be the ju-ju, to be the magic. To keep as many safe as possible. Perhaps he was immortal. He tested this theory by getting himself on the battle-order as often as possible, despite protests from higher up.
He was back with the first squadron he had served with, but now they were to be found not on the comfortable brick-built, pre-war RAF base that had housed them near the beginning of the war, but in a hastily erected township commandeered from corrugated iron and mud. It would only take a few years after they left (for leave they surely would—even the Hundred Years War had come to an end) for it to return to fields. To the brown, the green and the gold.