The Gunner Girl (44 page)

The woman officer sighed and smoothed her hands over the front of her skirt. ‘I'm terribly sorry you've come all this way for nothing, but your fiancée is on an AWOL
charge. There's to be a preliminary hearing this afternoon,' she said.

‘But—' he tried to interrupt, but in her soft, definite voice, she carried on. ‘It is a shame, but I have no record of your request for wedding leave for Bombardier
Tucker. You know, paperwork gets mislaid or destroyed all the time, in wartime, and although I sympathise with your situation, there it is,' she said. ‘Now, if you wouldn't mind,
Flight Sergeant—' she indicated to the door.

He shook his head. ‘You can't do this,' he said. ‘I don't know when I can come back. I don't know if there'll even be another opportunity. This is
it.' He turned to Joan, now. ‘This is it, Joanie, the last chance.' He took three quick steps towards the desk. He could see the piece of paper that Joan had been reading. It was
a death certificate, a death certificate for Joan Tucker. But it didn't matter that she wasn't Joan. It didn't matter who she was. He loved her anyway, despite everything, because
of everything.

‘Now, Flight Sergeant, don't make me call the RMPs again,' said the woman officer, reaching for the telephone. But then Joan suddenly did something that made the officer stop,
hand on the receiver.

Joan picked up the death certificate from the desk and ripped it, right across the middle, and then again and again, until all that was left were tiny shreds, which she let fall, like confetti,
into the metal waste-paper basket beside her. Then she stood up, turned to the officer. ‘You said it yourself, paperwork gets mislaid or destroyed all the time in wartime,' she said.
‘I'm still your Joan,' she said, turning to him, now. ‘I'll always be your Joanie.' And she began to walk out from behind the desk.

The woman officer dropped the hand that was reaching for the telephone and instead placed a restraining hand on Joan's shoulder. ‘I'm afraid I can't let you
just—' she began, as Joan shrugged her off, continuing to walk towards Rob.

‘It's about time,' said Edie. Rob had almost forgotten she was there. ‘I mean timing. When did you write requesting marital leave, Robin?'

Days ago, he replied, but they were a few men down, and he'd had to keep flying. Edie said that Joan had been AWOL since then, since the night he'd posted the form; that's why
she was on a charge.

‘But you can't be absent without leave, if you're actually on leave, can you, ma'am?' said Edie, looking across at the woman officer.

The officer looked back, her face slowly clearing. ‘Oh, I see what you're driving at,' she said. She let go of Joan and began to search around the desk, flinging open drawers
until she retrieved a blue slip of paper, which she began to write on.

‘Oh, yes, that ties in nicely,' said the officer. ‘Good thinking, Gunner Lightwater.'

In the meantime, Joan had come to stand right next to Rob; there was a line of static contiguity where the edge of her uniform brushed his. He could smell her hair. He ached for her, as they
both stood and watched Edie and the officer, heads bent over the desk, upper-class accents chinking into each other as they filled in a form.

‘Leave to get married, back dated by seventy-two hours,' said the officer at last, holding up a blue slip of paper. ‘Bombardier Tucker, it appears that you haven't been
AWOL; you have been on wedding leave. I expect to see you on parade first thing tomorrow, with a marriage certificate and a ring on your finger. Is that clear? Last I saw of the padre, he was
walking his dog by the Serpentine, so quick sticks, you might catch him before lunch,' she said.

Robin let Joan out of the hut first and held the door open for her friend Edie, but the officer called her back. ‘
Un moment, s'il vous plaît,
Gunner
Lightwater,' she said. ‘I haven't finished with you, yet.'

Outside was like coming up for air after a long spell under water. He felt in his pocket among the keys and small change. ‘Catch!' he tossed the ring, and the sunlight made it
sparkle as it flew towards her. She caught it and smiled at him.

The fat girl was coming the other way, this time with an armful of gas masks, trailing rubber straps like the tails of small animals. ‘Blimey, how many fiancés have you got, Gunner
Tucker?' she said.

‘Just the one,' said Joan, slipping the engagement ring onto her left hand. ‘And it'll be Mrs Nelson, from now on, thank you.'

Edie thought she'd be able to go back for her things. It didn't occur to her as she got into the staff car that she was turning her back on the ATS for ever. She
hadn't even had a chance to say goodbye to Joan. When Mary Churchill called her back in to the CO's office and explained that she wasn't on an AWOL charge either, because she was
still officially off sick with appendicitis, and when they'd had that hurried conversation in her rusty French, she'd still thought that there would be time to pack up, say
au
revoir
, at the very least. She'd wanted to see Joan and Rob get married. But the war machine had other plans, it seemed. The last time she'd been in a car was in Pop's
Bentley, back in the spring. How things had changed, in those few months since.

‘War Office, is it?' said the driver. She had some kind of northern accent, but Edie couldn't be certain quite where she was from. Her dun-coloured hair was tucked into a tidy
hair net at the nape of her neck.

‘Please,' said Edie. The driver was one of theirs. The car jolted into gear and they pulled away. Edie looked into the wing mirror, seeing the battery diminish in size behind them,
until the guns were just matchsticks and the soldiers nothing but scurrying beetles. Ahead, the cream and grey slabs of London buildings loomed. At Hyde Park Corner, they turned onto the Mall, and
the barracks finally disappeared from view, replaced by Buckingham Palace, flagless and severe.

Edie wondered where the Royal Family were today: Windsor or Sandringham maybe? Perhaps Princess Elizabeth was away with the ATS cadets, wiping her royal hands on grubby coveralls as she learnt
how to change the oil in an army truck on her vehicle maintenance course. Edie looked down at her own driver's capable-looking hands as they manhandled the gearstick. What was it Marjorie had
called it? Double de-clutching? Edie thought that if she'd taken driving lessons with Marjorie instead of having extra French tuition at Queen's, then maybe she'd have become a
driver too, instead of – instead of what? She really had no idea what was in store for her.

As they accelerated up the Mall, she looked past her driver's snub-nosed profile to the tree-lined pavement and beyond: streaming red buses, black cabs and cyclists interrupting her view
of St James' Park. Pop had told her once about some schoolfriend's uncle who'd spent the three days before the last war – ‘the Great War' he called it –
weeping by the lake in St James' Park. It was guilt, Pop said. The chap was something high up in the government and he'd seen what was coming and not been able to do a thing to stop it.
Edie thought she knew now how that man must have felt.

They were halfway towards Horse Guard's Parade when the driver suddenly slammed on the brakes. A funeral cortège was pulling out of the junction with Marlborough Road, on the left.
It was a proper old-fashioned funeral: blinkered black horses with oily haunches and plumes of black and purple ostrich feathers, quivering. As it turned in front of them, she could see through the
glass window of the carriage, see the coffin. It was very small, white, with a wreath of pale pink roses on the lid.

The driver misinterpreted Edie's stifled gasp. ‘I know, we'll be stuck for blooming ever behind this lot,' she muttered. But Edie wasn't thinking about the delay in
reaching the War Office; she was thinking about what happened in the Mount Royal Hotel, outside the 400 Club, and on the train tracks of a station in Kent. Three deaths, all down to her, and a mass
of guilt that pushed up against her ribcage and choked up her throat. Three deaths, and no forgiveness.
Dear God
, she began her reflexive internal prayer, but consciously stopped. You
cannot beg for pardon, she told herself.

The driver tutted, drumming her pudgy fingers on the steering wheel. The black carriages and dark-suited mourners poured out in front of them and Edie thought of how Bea's funeral had
been: the straggle of stunned siblings in that meagre, bombed-out church. Her mother was in hospital, by then. Her father, delayed travelling back from his unit, missing the service and only making
it just in time for the burial. He'd pumped their hands, sorrow hollowing out his face, as he thanked her for her support. How she'd hated that. Being thanked for something that was all
her fault.

The driver revved up behind the final mourners. Edie looked down at her hands, twisted together in her lap, bitten fingernails, skin red-raw from over-washing. She couldn't seem to stop
washing her hands these days. Lady Macbeth's got nothing on me, she thought, sadly.

‘I hope you're not in a rush,' said the driver, as the car began to inch forward. ‘I'd overtake, only I don't want to scare the horses.'

‘An extra minute or two won't hurt,' said Edie.

‘You won't get put on a charge or anything?'

‘I very much doubt it. Anyway, what's the worst they can do? Pack me off to the Continent to fight Jerry on my own?'

She remembered that comment, years later. She'd only said it to ease the tension, make the driver feel better about the situation. Still, many a true word spoken in jest, isn't that
what they say?

Outside on the pavement, a huge gust of wind whipped up the tree branches into swirling green dervishes and passers-by held onto their hats. Suddenly, Edie could bear it no longer.
‘It's just over there, isn't it?' she said, pointing right past the driver's face, towards the junction with Horse Guards Parade. ‘I'm sure I can find my
way from here.'

‘I'm supposed to take you all the way,' said the driver.

Edie looked at the slow sway of the funeral cortège and felt as if she couldn't breathe, as if the swathe of black and purple was reaching right back into the car and suffocating
her. ‘Oh, who's to know?' she said brightly. ‘I'll nip out and you can do a U-turn and give yourself an extra ten minutes' NAAFI break.'

‘You're sure?' said the driver, coming to a slow halt.

‘Absolutely,' said Edie, fixing her cap firmly on her head and reaching for the latch. ‘You don't need to worry about me, dear,' she said, opening the car door and
stepping out onto the kerb. ‘I know exactly where I'm going, now.'

‘It's not going to be much of a honeymoon for you,' said Rob, as they got out of the tube.

‘It's more than I deserve,' she replied.

‘Don't be daft. We'll do something proper when this is all over. Torquay, maybe – used to go there every summer when I was a nipper – there's some grand
hotels along the front.'

‘Torquay it is.'

‘And then we'll settle down. Dad wants me to take over the butcher's, but I've got other ideas.'

‘I don't get to make sausages, then?'

‘You get to do whatever you damn well please. You can spend the day filing your nails and shopping for frocks, as the wife of a successful motor manufacturer. Me and Harper, we made a
whole business plan – his old man's got a garage, so he knew a bit about the business. The engineering that makes planes fly faster will also work for cars. There'll be
opportunities once the war's over, you'll see,' he said.

‘Once the war's over,' Joan repeated. It sounded like the end of a fairy tale.

They were going up the steps now. Up-up-up, past the posters telling them
TO BE LIKE DAD, KEEP MUM AND THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY, FIGHT FOR IT
. The sunshine was waiting for
them on the top step.

Rob asked if she was all right and she said ‘fine', even though there was a shaky feeling deep inside as they stepped out of the darkness and into the smothering warmth of the late
afternoon sunlight. She tried to take a deep breath in, but it felt as if a fist were clenched around her lungs. She faltered, felt for Rob's hand.

‘You don't seem too chipper. Shall we get you a brew? There's a café over there.'

Joan shook her head, but the Red Lion was opposite the station, and Rob said maybe something stronger, to celebrate? She'd never been in the Red Lion before, what with Dad being a copper.
She couldn't risk pretending to be eighteen, like some of the other girls. She hadn't drunk alcohol at all, before joining the ATS.

Joan scuffed across the street. The wind had died down now, and this heat made her feet swell up. It felt like her army brogues were half a size too small. They chafed at her heels. The Red Lion
looked the same, with peeling black paint and the red-and-gold sign. There was a black A-board outside, proclaiming
Today's Special
in smudged chalk handwriting, and a hanging basket
beside the door, spilling bizzie-lizzies from the moss. Rob let go of her hand, stepped aside and held the door open for her to go in first.

The pub was empty, tomb-dark after the glare outside: crimson, brown and black, smelling of the sweet dank smell of old beer soaking into carpet and stale smoke. She sat down at the first table,
next to the window. There were little tablets of stained glass with the brewery name back-to-front in red and green and yellow. Outside, blue skies showed above the rooftops and the bizzie-lizzies
swayed.

‘Gin and lime?' Rob called from the bar. She nodded, smiled.

‘Large one?' she nodded again.

Joan looked at him there, the handsome airman at the bar. He'd taken his cap off and a lock of his dark Brylcreemed hair fell over one brow. He shared a joke with the puffy-faced barman
and smiled his lopsided smile. That's my husband, she thought. I'm going to spend the rest of my life with that man. It felt as if she'd taken off her usherette's tray and
stepped right into the cinema screen.