“Well, my brother, Phillip—my older brother—he’s, well, he hates water.”
“A hydrophobe.”
“Sorry, Miss, but doesn’t that mean he’s scared of water?”
“There’s no shame in fearing something, Susan.”
“Of course not, Miss.”
“When you fear something, you cede it its due respect.”
“Yes, Miss. Well, he hates water, Phillip does, and so when the war broke out he refused to join the navy and instead signed on with the RAF.”
“Does he fly Spitfires?” the boy sitting beside her blurted out.
“Stuart!” Miss Reddish snapped.
“Sorry,” the boy muttered.
“Proceed, Susan.”
“So, he hates water, shuns the Royal Navy, and signs on with the RAF—and here’s the irony—they’re supposed to assign him to fly Sunderlands.”
“Flying boats,” Miss Reddish said.
“Yes, Miss.”
Miss Reddish considered this. She wore very high heels and their noohk-noohk was the only sound as she walked from in front of the blackboard towards the open windows. There, she stopped and turned to the class. “So he hasn’t won his wings yet,” she said.
“Oh, yes. A few days since. And he’s earned leave.”
“You’ll get to see our heroic flier?”
“He arrives today, Miss.”
“Ahh.”
“And tomorrow he’ll take me to the bathing pool. For my birthday.”
“And how do you know he will?”
“He does every year, Miss.”
“Takes you swimming? This heroic and hydrophobic flier of ours?” Miss Reddish said. “He also has a grand sense of the ironic, doesn’t he, class?”
“Yes, Miss,” they all but Susan choired back.
“Then I should think he deserves a tribute.” She turned and gazed out the window, pensive. Through the distant cloud cover, like a once-withdrawing wave returning to the shore, the plane’s engine began to become audible again. A breeze shivered the leaves of the trees and more captured raindrops were released to fall and splatter on the pavement. Miss Reddish faced the class again.
“Yes, a tribute. Assuring each and every one of you completes his or her sums correctly, an early dismissal.”
The boys and girls all stared at their neighbors, disbelief widening all their eyes.
“Indeed, a tribute,” Miss Reddish announced. “Well, class, shut your Reader lesson books and get out your sums books. Apparently, one or two of you have a war to salvage and a birthday to celebrate.”
Five
It had to be Phillip’s, the motorbike—an Ariel—that was parked by the curb as she came up the walk from school. It was bullet-colored, that dull flat deathly gray, and it had a stubby sidecar and the other traffic on this side of the street that passed by—a black taxi, a tiny Morris Minor, a tilting bus—did so very closely and she was faster and faster walking up the front path now, the grass a deep green on either side. In those days the doors of English houses had neither door handles nor latches—only key-entry dead bolts—so she slipped the straps of her school satchel off her shoulders, and resting the satchel on the doorstep she unbuckled its front mini-pouch and wiggled out her door key, and as quietly as she could she inserted her key and unlocked and opened the door. As she did, within the door’s slender cut-glass panes she could see the many crystalline images of the front hall that she stepped inside of and into. She was almost out of breath but she could hear voices from the kitchen, some she didn’t recognize:
“Thanks, Mrs. McEwan, but I’m meeting a girl, I’m afraid.”
“There, Phillip, you see?”
“Mother!”
“Your son’s too picky, Mrs. McEwan, that’s the problem.”
“Oh, bugger off, Roger.”
Soundlessly she closed the door behind her back. She set her satchel on the floor by the brolly basket, hung her snouted gas mask on the coat tree, and continued to listen while slowly and quietly approaching the kitchen.
“No matter how good-looking they are, Mrs. McEwan,” yet another male voice told her mother, “he says they’re all U-S.”
“American?”
“RAF-speak, Mum,” Phillip explained. “As in unsuitable. Roger and Nial here may be on leave, but they never really leave.”
“Hello, then!” Roger announced, seeing Susan standing in the kitchen doorway.
She looked at them. Her mum over by the sink in a puffy-sleeved blouse and pleated skirt—both cream-colored—with a glass of sherry, holding its stem like a recently cut flower. And Phillip and Roger and Nial down by the window, each of them holding sherry glasses as well and leaning a free hand on the iron shoulder of the laundry mangle. Behind them through the window, the garden—as English gardens strangely are—was, in the overcast, a deeper green than even when the sun shone.
As for Phillip and Roger and Nial, they were in their pastel-gray RAF uniforms, each with the winged insignia on his left lapel like a white feather or flame.
“You didn’t tell me you’d an older sister, Phillip,” Roger said. He was tall and lank with a lion of blond hair and otherwise craggishly handsome and he straightened like a coil of rope brought to life. Sipping slowly from his sherry glass, he appraised her standing there in the doorway, never allowing his eyes—which were a soft Cadbury brown—to leave her body or her own eyes.
She looked down at the floor.
“Why, love,” her mother said, “you’re home early.”
“I—I told class about Phillip,” she said to her mother before finally looking at her brother.
Ah, her brother. He had thick wavy hair that he combed straight back, and his eyes, because of his dark brows, seemed almost locked if not in a frown then in puzzlement. The rest of his face was good-looking enough, so her girlfriends said, to overcome this shadow upon his features and he said to her, softly:
“Susan!” and blindly passed his sherry glass to Nial who took it, and he crossed the kitchen and took her hands and kissed her one cheek then the other.
She stood on her tiptoes while he did, though she’d no need.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“Not evacuated,” she said, “yet.” She nicked a quick glance at Phillip’s other mate: not quite as tall as Roger but less angular and with the rain-dark hair and flutter-giver smile of a potentially truant choirboy.
“If your dad’d let me,” her mother told Phillip, “I’d have her up in Godmanchester in a minute.”
“What?” Phillip said. “Uncle Cec’s?”
“His brother-in-law, Ben’s.”
“The smithy?”
Susan still held Phillip’s hands, and she said his name and asked:
“Can—can we go swimming?” She came down onto her heels and looked away, and her eyes met Roger’s once again.
“Swimming?” her brother repeated.
“Yes,”