‘You’re going to get better,’ she told him, more confidently than she felt. ‘You can count on that because I won’t settle for anything else. I can be a bully when I set my mind to it, and that’s what I’m going to do. You told me once you weren’t good at taking orders, but you’ll take mine. Get well! There! That’s an order, do you hear?’
She struggled to keep the jokey note in her voice, but at last it was more than she could bear. Her words trembled into silence and she laid her face against his hand while the tears flowed.
‘Come back to me,’ she whispered. ‘Come back to me. I love you with all my heart. I’ll never love anyone else. You don’t have to love me. Just let me care for you.’
After a while she raised her head again and looked closely at the man who lay without moving, barely breathing.
‘I have to believe that somewhere, deep inside your heart, you can hear me,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps you’re even conscious of it now, and soon you’ll wake and remember. Or perhaps my words will come back to you without you even knowing how or when you heard them. Oh, my love, my love, can I creep into your heart without you even noticing, and then just stay there?’
A long sigh came from him. Summoning all her courage, she laid her lips gently against his. ‘I thought I’d never kiss you again,’ she murmured. ‘Can you feel me? Can you feel my love reaching out to you? It’s yours if you want it.’
Another sigh. She looked down on him tenderly. ‘Yes, oh, yes,’ she breathed. ‘You’re coming back to me. You are.’
Her joy soared as Mark opened his eyes. For a long moment they looked at each other.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
CHAPTER TEN
FOR a long time now everything in his life had been jagged. It started with the danger that threatened whenever he took to the air, but he accepted that. It was the life he’d chosen. But then he found that the sunlight was jagged and threatening, making him reluctant to face it. Worst of all was the soft jaggedness of darkness and the insidious fear that kept him awake, all the more alarming because he didn’t understand it.
It had started when she broke their engagement. He’d been cool and self-contained, as befitted a man who could have any woman, shrugging off her desertion. She’d set him free. She’d said so herself, predicting that the other women would throw a party.
‘You won’t remember that I exist,’ she’d said.
Then the numbness that shielded him had begun to disintegrate and a spark of temper had flared. He’d accused her of cruelty, something he’d never felt from any woman before. When she’d gone the anger stayed with him, making him act unlike himself. He’d gone drinking with friends that night, casually remarking that his engagement was over. One of the others, a hearty, shallow young man called Shand, had made the mistake of congratulating him. Overwhelmed by rage, Mark had launched himself on the imbecile and might have killed him if his friends hadn’t hauled him off in time.
After that, everyone regarded him differently. His friends kept watchful, protective eyes on him, lest he break out again. From Shand he received awe and respect, which disgusted him.
‘Well, at least someone managed to shut the little blighter up,’ Harry Franks observed once. Harry had joined the Air Force on the same day as Mark and they had immediately become friends. ‘You should be proud of that.’
‘He’s not worth it,’ Mark snapped.
‘I agree. But he might have hit the nail on the head. Maybe you really are better off without this girl. You aren’t in love with her, are you?’
‘How the hell do I know?’ Mark roared.
Harry nodded wisely, his expression suggesting that if he’d known things were like that, he wouldn’t have asked.
Mark’s inner fury continued, all the worse because he didn’t understand it himself. Dee had broken the engagement in a way that suggested that he was really dumping her, thus preserving his dignity. So what was there to be angry about? Especially with her?
But he knew that if she were here this minute, he would explain to her exactly why she was wrong about everything, make her admit it and ask his forgiveness for misjudging him. Then he would replace the ring on her finger as a symbol of his victory. It was the only way to deal with awkward women.
‘We belong together,’ he rehearsed. ‘We’ve always known what each other was thinking, and that’s never happened to me with anyone else. I didn’t want it before. I’ve tried to keep my thoughts to myself because I didn’t trust anyone else, but with you I couldn’t do that and I didn’t mind. I even liked it. Do you realise that? You did something for me that…that…and then you abandoned me.’
No, he couldn’t say these things. They sounded pathetic, and at all costs he wasn’t going to be pathetic. But there were other ways of putting it so that she would see reason. If only she was here!
But she wasn’t, and she didn’t contact him.
He even began to jot down his thoughts, to be ready to confront her. But it was a fraught business. He slept at the base, sharing a small dormitory with five others, all ready for action at any moment in the night. It was hard to find privacy and if he heard someone coming he had to stuff his papers into a small cupboard by the bed. Once he did this so hastily that the contents of the overfull cupboard fell out and he found himself confronting a small bear in a frilly dress.
It was the one she’d given him at the fun fair, having bought it for the ludicrously expensive price of one shilling and sixpence.
Dee seemed to be there, teasing him out of the jagged darkness. ‘She’s going to keep an eye on you…and report back to me if you get up to mischief.’ Then her voice changed, became loving, as he remembered it. ‘And look after you.’
‘Are you reporting back to her now?’ he murmured. ‘I wonder what you’ll tell her.’
Then he stopped short, wondering at himself, knowing how it would have looked if any of his comrades had caught him talking to a toy.
But not her. She would have understood. Did she still talk to the Mad Bruin he’d given her? Did she still have it? He found himself hoping that she did. But of course he would never know.
The sound of the door opening made him quickly hide the bear. This was private, between Dee and himself, the one thing that still united them across the miles and the silence. In an obscure way, it was a comfort to a man who’d never admitted to himself that he needed to be comforted.
He hadn’t given the toy a name, but in his mind she became ‘Dee’. Incredibly, there was even a physical resemblance. Not that the little bear had Dee’s features, but she had her expression-wry, teasing, unconvinced, a look that could be summed up as, Oh, yeah? Which was absurd if you thought about it, but he didn’t think about it. He just appreciated it.
He began to keep his little friend with him, unwilling to leave her in the locker where she might be discovered. An inner pocket in his loose flying jacket made a useful hiding place and one day, almost forgetting she was there, he took her onto the plane with him.
It was a fierce and terrible sortie, a bombing raid on an enemy armaments factory in early 1943. Resistance was fierce, with Messerschmitts, the magnificent enemy bombers, attacking from all directions. At one point he would almost have sworn he’d reached his final moment, when the plane heading for him seemed to halt in mid-air before exploding in a ball of fire. He had a searingly precise view of the pilot’s desperate eyes before the other plane dropped out of the sky.
When he landed he sat for a moment, arms folded across his body, feeling the little bump beneath the flying jacket that told him his tiny friend was there. To think that ‘Dee’ had protected him was sheer fanciful madness, and he wasn’t a fanciful man, yet the thought persisted. She had been there, not the woman herself, but her little furry representative. It was crazy. He was a fool, a stupid, naive, delusional idiot. Yet he was also mysteriously comforted.