‘Breakfast is at half past four,’ said Millie. ‘The bathhouse is downstairs next to the kitchen – you’re permitted one hot bath a week and you must book it in advance. If that doesn’t feel sufficient, and I have been told many times that it is not, well, there’s a sink’ – she pointed at the corner of the room – ‘cold water only, mind.’
Ivy nodded.
‘It goes without saying, but I shall say it anyway – no men, no lewd language, keep your squabbles to yourself, and if I ever catch you with black-market produce, that’s it for you. Dutch will assign you your jobs. Ask him after supper and you’ll find him in a good mood.’ Millie looked at Bettina. ‘You in here again on your day off?’
‘You make me sound like a hermit.’
‘Everyone else is at Shirley’s.’ Shirley’s was a café that sold, among other things, delicious leek and potato pasties.
‘Millie, I work and live with these women, and delightful as they are, I sometimes like my own company.’
‘Well, at least someone does,’ Millie said, laughing, then left.
Ivy crept further into the room.
‘She loves me really,’ said Bettina.
‘I’m sure,’ said Ivy, still not smiling, her pale eyes steadily taking in her surroundings. She was very composed, Bettina thought, possessing a self-assuredness, a staunch poise. And yet she had the air of someone about to be hanged.
She barely spoke to Ivy in the following weeks – she found her dull, humourless and difficult to engage with. Ivy was a very private person, and unlike the other girls who went around in their bras and slips at night, would insist on getting dressed and undressed under her bedclothes. She didn’t even like to eat in front of other people.
Ivy got on well with farm life, working hard and uncomplainingly, even during the week in which it rained non-stop and the swampy fields sucked boots off feet. She’d been a secretary to a lawyer’s office in Liverpool and had never married, which put paid to bed the idea that she was a grief-stricken widow. Like Bettina, she read avidly, often spending her free time at the public library in town. The only sounds in their otherwise silent bedroom were the papery fluttering of turned pages and the muted clearing of throats.
On Bettina’s thirty-ninth birthday, the girls arranged a viewing of The Mortician in the barn, which was rigged up as a temporary cinema once a month with bales of hay to sit on. Afterwards they drank watered-down cherry brandy and sang war songs. They talked about their husbands or fiancés, most of whom were abroad, fighting, and their children. Everyone at some point cried.
It was almost midnight when Bettina returned to her room. Ivy was awake in bed – Bettina had the sense she’d been waiting for her.
‘I didn’t know you were married to Bartholomew Dawes,’ she said, unravelling her plait with nimble fingers.
‘Oh? It never came up.’
‘He’s my favourite actor and The Mortician is my favourite picture. Though I much prefer the book it’s based on.’
Bettina let her dress drop to the ground and kicked it away.
‘I used to watch it with my best friend,’ said Ivy, averting her eyes. ‘It was her favourite film too. I think we watched it eight times together.’
‘I never had you down for a fan of the macabre,’ said Bettina.
‘I’m not. That’s not why I like the film, or the book.’
‘Then why? My husband?’
‘It’s the subtext I’m drawn to.’
Bettina pulled her nightdress over her head. ‘What subtext is that?’
Ivy’s fingers combed through her long wavy hair. ‘Well. I suppose… I suppose it’s about those who aren’t accepted by society. Who are punished for… I don’t know. Outsiders, in short. The book captures it better.’
Bettina put out her cigarette and climbed into bed. ‘My husband says the book has a homosexual subtext.’ She looked over at Ivy, coolly. ‘Is that what you mean?’
‘Of course not!’ Ivy turned off the lamp and Bettina smiled into the darkness.
The following week Ivy was put on the anti-vermin squad in order to temporarily replace a girl who’d inhaled cyanide through a faulty gas mask and was now being treated for respiratory problems at the hospital. Ivy claimed to have a strong stomach and Mags said, ‘Just as well, we’ve a bloody big bunch of moles to go after today.’
The team cycled to a farm six miles north. There were five of them – Bettina, Ivy, Mags and two uncouth young girls called Sadie and Joyce who had worked as maids before the war and were enjoying life much better now. They were on a winding country lane, lined with hedgerows and fat luscious oaks. Bettina liked the way the sunlight went through the trees, dappling the road ahead with hundreds of small diamonds. In moments of quiet she thought about Tabby and Monty. Last time they’d written, Monty had said he was getting ‘obsessed’ with cartoon strips, and was trying to create his own – he’d always been good at drawing. Tabby told her she was almost fluent in Welsh now, diolch yn fawr, and that she’d got so good at shearing that the farmer was paying her a liquorice strip per sheep. ‘How funny that we are both, mother and daughter, working the land. I just can’t imagine you in a pair of wellies!’
Bettina rode behind Ivy, watching how her long white plait thumped up and down on her back as she went over bumps. She was wearing the regulation blouse and her beige dungarees were belted high on the waist, making a plump upside-down love heart of her rear.
Overhead – a plane. They looked up and braked in unison and there was that terrible moment of feeling like the ground had turned to water. Friend or foe? The dot became a blob became a plane – Bettina could see the whirlpool of its propellers. Friend or foe?
‘Take cover!’ roared Mags, dropping her bike to the ground with a clatter, vaulting over the small stone wall and running for a cluster of trees – they were in a spot, thankfully, surrounded by woods. The others went off in different directions as they’d been taught. Except for Ivy – she followed Bettina. A great rat-a-tat as the plane unloaded its artillery; a brown explosion of turf appearing just to the left of Bettina, its dust coating her sweaty face – of course they were aiming at her, there were two of them, what did that silly bitch think she— Another eruption of mud to her right. The trees were close ahead – three large oaks. She sprinted, her boot catching in a dip and her ankle twisting – she didn’t feel it. Her heart was pounding, her ears were pounding, her bloody eyeballs were pounding and all that existed in the world was a tunnel of green and the god-like rush of adrenaline. She reached the first tree and dived into a sunken place at the base of the trunk. Ivy jumped in next to her. Another hail of bullets, directly overhead – small branches and twig dust and hundreds of leaves falling around them, on them. Then the slow fade as the plane retreated. Then silence.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Bettina, pulling her cigarettes from her trouser pocket and lighting up with a shuddering hand. Ivy was huddled down next to her, very still. ‘What were you thinking, coming after me like that?’ she said to her. ‘You as good as put a target sign over our heads.’
Ivy’s irises were perfect ice-blue ponds. ‘They tried to kill us,’ she said.
‘Yes, that’s what they do.’ Idiot.
‘They tried to kill us.’
‘Well. We’re alive, aren’t we?’
‘Everyone all right?’ called Mags, from a few trees over.
‘Yes!’ called Bettina, and there were three answering cries.
Bettina helped Ivy up, cigarette wedged between her lips. They came out from their trees and met on the road, looking up at the sky.