‘LOOK AT YOU,’ said Elspeth. ‘You’re glowing. And you’re quite smug. Are you having an affair?
‘Is it that obvious?’ said Izzy.
‘Only to me. I know how apologetic you usually look. Is it your American friend?’
Izzy nodded.
‘God,’ said Elspeth. ‘You’re glowing more just remembering him.’
Izzy looked away, trying to hide her face. She felt it was glowing out of control.
‘You’re in love,’ said Elspeth. ‘About time, too. Your social life so far has been a disgrace.’
‘I love my job. I didn’t want a social life,’ said Izzy. ‘This affair just happened. It crept up on me when I wasn’t looking.’
Elspeth said that was how it was with love. She was sitting on the hotel bed wrapped in a towel after her first bath of the weekend. ‘What I resent is you abandoning me for your boyfriend. Women do that. They get all wrapped up in love, give themselves over to their boyfriends and forget about their friends.’
‘I haven’t forgotten you. It’s hard to get away when you only get two days off in every thirteen.’
‘How do you manage to see Jimmy?’
Izzy said that if she wasn’t working, and he was, she’d go to see him. ‘I stay at a bed and breakfast. Then if I’m working and he isn’t, he stays at the cottage. I see him when I get home.’
Elspeth stood up, dropped the towel and started to dress. Izzy looked away. Naked bodies embarrassed her. Elspeth had been living, washing, sleeping in intensely close quarters to other women for so long she no longer had any inhibitions about being seen without her clothes. Well, that was her summertime routine. When winter rolled round, she behaved differently. It was cold. She even went to bed pretty much fully clothed, then undressed under the blankets.
‘I didn’t know it would be like this,’ said Izzy. ‘That I could find myself thinking about someone all of the time. Looking at the phone, willing it to ring. Hoping for a letter. Remembering things we’d done together. Planning what I’m going to say to him. I find myself sighing all the time. It’s driving me crazy.’
‘Does he feel the same?’ asked Elspeth.
Izzy shrugged. She didn’t know. ‘We don’t talk about how we feel. Mostly we just . . . you know. There isn’t a lot of time for chat.’
Elspeth said, ‘Careful, Izzy.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘I am going to get hurt. It’s inevitable. If I break with him now, I’ll get hurt. If I leave it till the war ends and he goes back to America, I’ll get hurt. So there’s no point in telling me to be careful.’
This was the third time she’d been told to be careful and she didn’t like it at all. All she wanted to do was fly and make love, what was wrong with that? One day the war would end, Jimmy would go home, she’d be out of a job, earthbound and loveless. Meantime she planned to enjoy herself and to hell with being careful. ‘Let’s go eat dinner,’ she said.
They didn’t talk much as they ate. Izzy was thinking about Jimmy. Elspeth was watching her and regretting the rough life she was living. She missed simple private things – making toast when she fancied a slice, lying alone in bed reading, soaking in a bath. She ate, washed, worked and slept in the company of other women. Sometimes, she just wanted to be alone. She ached. She thought she smelled of horses and pine resin. She cursed herself for getting ecstatic about an orange. How pathetic, she thought.
Izzy’s affair was being conducted in the softness of a bedroom. Hers was an outdoor fling. She made love in the forest or lying on the grass by the river. Pleasant enough, but wouldn’t it be lovely to slip into bed with a lover? Oh, the comfort of it. Izzy and her love ate at the local hotel. She ate trout with her fingers straight from a frying pan – though, it was tasty. It struck Elspeth that for the first time in their long friendship, she was jealous of Izzy. She hated herself for that, but couldn’t help it.
After dinner, they went for a walk. The place was busy as usual – thronging pub and the air vibrating with the thrum and skirl of the dance band in the village hall. Elspeth asked if Izzy wanted to go in. ‘A quick whirl round the floor, a waltz and a jive might be fun.’
Izzy shook her head. ‘I don’t really like dances. I can’t dance. And it’s too noisy in there.’
Elspeth shrugged and said, ‘Whatever. Just thought it would be a laugh.’
They strolled down to the river and sat on a bench beside the water. It was nine o’clock, still light, swallows skimmed overhead. Izzy watched them.
‘You wish you were up there, don’t you?’ said Elspeth.
‘I’m happy when I’m flying,’ said Izzy. ‘I feel anything is possible when I’m up there. I sing to myself and I sound fine, not out of tune at all. I do believe that if I took a piano up there, I could play it.’
Elspeth snorted. ‘Izzy, tone-deaf is tone-deaf, here on the ground or one mile up in the sky.’
Izzy said she supposed so, but somehow things seemed more possible when she was up among the clouds. ‘I owe you so much,’ she said. ‘You’re the one who got me flying in the first place.’
‘You owe me nothing,’ said Elspeth. ‘Even if you did, you’ve paid me back many times over with all the stuff you send me. How do you get all that, anyway? Don’t you need coupons?’
Last week Izzy had sent Elspeth a tin of pears, a bag of sweets and a jar of cold cream. ‘Well,’ said Izzy, ‘I don’t always need coupons.’ She was still riding high in local esteem and her ration book had been waved away. All that, and she was still Edith the ops officer’s darling. Edith had arranged for Izzy to hitch a lift on a plane going from Preston all the way to Lossiemouth. Tomorrow, she’d been promised a ride from Lossiemouth to Prestwick and, from there, a flight to Preston. Edith had arranged for the taxi Anson to bring her back to Skimpton. Izzy was wondering if she didn’t owe Jacob after all. He had, indeed, helped to make her a heroine.
She was about to confess to Elspeth, tell her why her coupons weren’t always taken by the local shop, but was distracted by rustlings in the bushes behind them. There were sounds of passion in progress.
Izzy sighed. ‘I’m glad I don’t have to sneak off into the undergrowth to satisfy my lust. I like my love in bed in comfort under the blankets.’
This was the wrong thing to say to Elspeth. ‘Some of us don’t have that option. You may find it coarse, but love under the stars can be wonderful.’ She got up and started back to the hotel. It was time for a second bath.
They didn’t speak much for the rest of Izzy’s visit. When, in the morning, they were standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus to take Izzy back to Inverness, Izzy asked Elspeth if she was speaking to her. ‘You seem distant.’
‘Of course I’m speaking to you. It’s just your remark about outdoor love touched a nerve. For some of us outdoors is the only place for love. I don’t have access to a private bed. I sleep in a dormitory with a lot of other women. If I had a man in my bed, they’d notice the squeaks of bedsprings and the grunts and moans of passion.’
Izzy apologised. ‘I didn’t think.’
Elspeth said, ‘I know.’ She was contemplating her day. Cycle back to the camp, sweep out hut, wash socks and underwear in the ablutions hut, eat disgusting food. Izzy would fly home, where Mrs Brent did her laundry, she’d have a proper bath, eat a decent meal, sit on a comfortable sofa, sleep in a decent soft bed. There’s no denying it, Elspeth thought, I’m really jealous.
On the flight south, Izzy sat behind the pilot. She looked down at the forest, miles and miles of treetops, miles and miles of green. Elspeth was down there somewhere. It occurred to Izzy that it should be the other way round. Elspeth should be up here, and she, who had succeeded at nothing before this, should be trudging the forest paths, axe over her shoulder, aching from all the physical labour, eating carrot sandwiches. It’s all I’m really good for, she thought.
Ten minutes later, she saw a small cluster of houses below, smoke drifting from chimneys, roofs glinting in the sunlight. ‘That’s the village where I grew up,’ said Izzy.
‘Want to go down and say hello?’ asked the pilot. He circled, swooped low.
‘Look,’ said Izzy. ‘There’s the manse where I lived. And, that’s my dad.’
They cruised lower. Buzzed over the garden. Izzy’s father, busy planting peas, stood up, put his palm in the small of his back to ease the pain of bending into the ground. The plane whooshed overhead, thundered, the roar deafening. He shook his fist at it. Izzy giggled.
As they cruised away, climbing back into the clouds, she looked back. She saw her mother emerge from the back door, shade her eyes with her hand and gaze after them.
‘They’ll be wondering what that was about,’ said the pilot. ‘You’ll have to let them know it was you.’
‘Yes,’ said Izzy. But she knew she couldn’t do that.