Page 13 of The Dark of the Moon
He picked up the sheets of paper we’d been poring over and tapped them on the desk, squaring them up, before tucking them away into a folder. I wanted to ask him more, but sensed he already felt he’d said enough, and his gesture was dismissive, so I went back to my table in the next room where the Baby was just finishing its next cycle. But I was intrigued by – and just a little proud of – the fact that it had been Polish mathematicians who’d helped us get to where we were.
The telegram from my brother Frank was waiting for me when I got back to my digs that morning, having completed my shift. The bus dropped me off by the gate and I trudged wearily up the path, looking forward to the breakfast Mrs Webb would have set out in the kitchen for me and then a few hours of blissful sleep in the bed that Jess would have vacated as she was currently on day shifts. MrsWebb was hovering in the hallway when I went in. ‘Sorry, Philly love,’ she said. ‘This has just arrived for you. I’m afraid it may be bad news.’
A cold dread gripped me. We all knew what those telegrams meant.
Teddy’s death hit me hard. I think it reopened the wounds I was carrying from losing Amy and added a few new, even deeper ones as well.
His Spitfire had been hit in a dogfight over the Channel. He’d managed to fly back to the base, but the plane was badly damaged, and he’d crash-landed. They said he was killed on impact.
I got compassionate leave to go home for the funeral. It was a long, exhausting journey on slow-moving trains all the way back to Dundee. I’d been numb until that point, unable to believe we’d lost him. But as we rattled across the Tay Bridge, the waters grey and choppy far below, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the panic I used to feel after Amy’s disappearance, struggling to breathe as my chest constricted with fear and grief. The squaddie sitting across from me asked, ‘Are you all right there, lassie?’ His familiar, broad accent and kindly concern broke the dam of my tears and I started to sob.
He helped me off the train and carried my bag all the way to Frank’s door, even though Broughty Ferry was well out of his way, making sure I was in safe hands before heading off to see the ‘wife and twa bairns’ he’d told me about on the journey up from Edinburgh.
I scarcely recognised my mother. I hadn’t seen her or Frank for two years, but they both looked as though they’d aged by more than a dozen. I suppose I must have done too. The war did that to people. Mother had given up her apartment in Edinburgh when the war broke out and moved back to be with Frank and his family.
I thought I wouldn’t make it through the funeral. It was just too much to bear, seeing Teddy’s coffin driven up to the church in the hearse, holding up my mother as her knees buckled so she wouldn’t collapse to the ground. She had insisted on a full Catholic mass, finding some comfort in the religion of her childhood, I suppose, and who were we to disagree? We aren’t supposed to outlive our children. But that war took so many children, leaving a generation of devastated parents in its wake, as well as all the other damage it did.
I didn’t register who was sitting behind us in the church, even when we walked out between the pews lined with mourners, the sea of faces blurred by my tears. Our family was well known in the city because of the factory, and many, many people had turned out to pay their respects. But as I stood beside the grave, the bitter easterly wind drying my eyes, I glanced across and saw a man standing a little apart from the rest of the crowd. He looked familiar, in his air force uniform. One of Teddy’s colleagues from his squadron, I thought at first. Then I blinked, looking again. And it was the sight of Ben standing there, his gaze steadying me, his eyes telling me how much he still loved me, that helped me through the awful, unbearable moment when the first spadeful of earth hit the coffin in which my beloved brother lay.
He came back with us to the house, offering my mother his arm, holding my hand on the other side. After the funeral tea, he asked me to go for a walk with him beside the firth. The sun was trying to break through the clouds here and there, and the waters sparkled like a thousand diamond teardrops in the stiff breeze.
‘I had to come, Philly. Your brother was one of the best among us. And I knew how hard you’d be hit.’
I walked beside hm in silence, unable to speak, as all the emotions of the day washed over me in waves.
‘I’ve never stopped thinking about you, you know,’ he went on. ‘There’s never been anyone else. And Teddy’s death has shown me what an idiot I’ve been, giving you up like that ... because I was so afraid of losing you that I ... well, I lost you.’
He stopped in his tracks and turned to face me. ‘HaveI lost you, Philly? Have you given up on me? Is there someone else now?’ His eyes searched my face, his expression betraying desperation and wretchedness.
‘There’s no one else.’ Chance would be a fine thing, I thought, picturing my work at Bletchley Park, the all-consuming hours, the relentless shifts. On my precious days off, I simply slept. But his words made my pulse quicken, as hope stirred within me.
An answering spark of hope flickered in his eyes. ‘Where are you working these days?’ he asked.
‘In Buckinghamshire,’ I replied, deliberately keeping it vague. ‘Doing some administrative work.’ Making it sound as dull as possible was a good way of discouraging further questions, I’d found. ‘And you? Still flying Spits?’
‘I have been,’ he said. ‘But I’m being deployed to a new base. Going to be on Lizzies.’
‘That’ll take some getting used to, I imagine,’ I said.
Flying Lysanders – or ‘Lizzies’, as they were affectionately known – after Spitfires would be like driving a London bus after being behind the wheel of a sports car. They were solid aircraft, their lumpy, rounded lines somehow bringing to mind an elephant or a hippo. Spitfires were the fastest aircraft we had, whereas Lysanders were the slowest. They could remain airborne at speeds well below a hundred knots without stalling, which made them ideal for reconnaissance sorties. I’d delivered one or two in my days as a ferry pilot and enjoyed the sensation of being so high up in the cockpit, feeling as if I was sitting on a throne with the whole kingdom spread out beneath me.
He laughed. ‘It certainly will.’
‘Will you be on recon missions?’
‘Something like that.’ He glanced out across the water towards Fife on the far shore.
So we’re both being evasive, I thought. Enough said.
‘Do you think I could come and see you sometimes, if we ever manage to get some leave at the same time, that is?’
‘I’d like that, Ben.’ I knew the chances of us both having a day off when we could meet were probably slim to none.
‘And I’ll write to you, if I may?’
‘I’d like that too. Very much.’
I’d thought I could never again feel anything other than an unbearable grief on the day of Teddy’s funeral, that terrible, ghastly day when we had to commit my brother’s body to the ground. But Ben took me in his arms and held me tight, standing there beside the silver water with the seabirds crying overhead as a sudden ray of evening light pierced the clouds. And he made me see that it just might be possible to go on living after all.
