Page 29 of Never Tear Us Apart

Chapter Twenty-Seven

When the wave of impossible fear hits me, I have a sudden pressing need for fresh air.

Excusing myself, I get up from the table and head towards the staircase.

Both men rise from their seats as I do, and Sal offers to follow me, but I wave him away.

All I know is that I need to find a place where I can feel the weight of this reality and try to place myself within it.

A cool breeze beckons me to the central marble staircase, and I follow it up until I find myself on a verdant roof terrace, full of night-scented plants that must need a great deal of care to remain so green in this heat.

From another building somewhere nearby, I hear young men singing a song I don’t recognise.

Walking over to the balustrade, I lean against the stone and tip my face up to the moon.

Is it the same moon I have seen all my life or some other satellite?

Perhaps, like Sal, I will always be eighty years late now.

And what does that mean for the people I have left behind?

Would Dad care or notice? What about Kathryn, who gave me so much care from the moment she met me?

It hurts that I can’t think of anyone else who would truly notice my absence.

Is there a body – my body – prone and empty, waiting to be found?

When they find it, will it show all my scars.

Not only the physical ones, but the scars of the harm I did.

There is a burden of guilt that I carry.

The name of a seven-year-old girl that is etched on my ribs.

If I were delivered to that moment and given a chance to turn a different corner and make another choice, then this would make perfect sense.

But here? This time and place makes no sense – not for me or for Sal. And yet this is all the sense that I have.

‘Hey there!’ a familiar voice shouts up to me from below. ‘Stitches? Still following me?’

‘Danny?’ I call out, leaning over the railing as far as I can. I see his face in late-evening purple, gazing up at me from a balcony below.

‘Damn, there you are, just like Juliet,’ he says. ‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?’

‘Bit old for Juliet,’ I tell him, as surprised and pleased to see his face as he seems to be to see me. ‘Sal and I are having dinner with a count.’

‘Oh, the count,’ Danny says. I sense a hint of dislike in his voice. ‘He’s a handsome fellow, I suppose.’

‘Is he? I hadn’t noticed.’ In the dark, I can just make out the pale shape of his uniform, the glint of his eyes, reflecting the moon. ‘You’re billeted here?’

‘Yeah.’ Danny looks over his shoulder into an orange-lit room. I can just make out a group of young men standing shoulder to shoulder around a piano. ‘We’re raising a glass to the guys who didn’t make it today. We lost four.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Even as I say it, I know it sounds empty, meaningless.

Several still and silent seconds pass, and then I hear him say in a soft, low voice, ‘Can’t help but think if I’d been in the sky . . . then things might have gone different.’ And then, ‘Wait there. Don’t move, OK?’

‘Why? I should probably go back to . . . oh!’

Before I can finish my sentence, Danny has leapt up onto the low wall surrounding his balcony and climbed up on the flat rooftop of the building next door.

‘ Bog ? od mieg ? ek, xitan! ’ A nun in full habit happens to appear from inside at that very moment and takes after him with a broom.

Danny escapes her assault by bounding, climbing and swinging up onto the roof next door with terrifying fearlessness.

She shakes her fist at him until she spots me, waiting for him either to arrive or die.

Finally, after a suspense-filled second, in which he balances precariously on the low rooftop wall, he jumps down lightly to meet me, and she claps her hands in delight.

‘That was very silly,’ I tell him, smiling all the same. In all the madness and confusion, this man seems to bring a sense of calm and peace with him in every breath.

‘Not dashing, exciting and impressive?’ he asks, a little hurt.

‘What if you’d broken your neck? Then what?’

‘Oh, I wasn’t going to break my neck,’ he says. ‘I know how I die, and it’s not falling off a building while trying to impress a girl.’

‘What do you mean?’

He’s being glib, but there’s a dark undertone to his words, one no doubt coloured by the death of his comrades.

‘Oh, it’s no big deal,’ he says lightly, with a throwaway gesture. ‘It’s just that we pilots . . . we know that when our number’s up, it’s up. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a way of getting through it, I guess, accepting fate.’

‘I’m having kind of a hard time accepting fate, right now,’ I say.

‘What – dinner with a handsome count not good enough for you?’ he asks, taking a step closer to me. ‘A man risking his neck to come and say hello not satisfactory?’

There’s no way to explain to him that I am lost in time. My fear of fate is incredible; his is made of brutal reality.

‘You must feel awful about your friends.’ I turn away from him, looking towards the pale gold light of the moon.

‘I do, and I don’t.’ I feel the brush of his arm against mine as he shrugs. ‘They were hardly around long enough for me to get to know ’em. And if I’m honest . . .’

We turn our heads to face one another. One side of his face is cast in gold, glowing and full of deep sorrow.

‘Can I be honest with you, Maia?’

‘You can,’ I tell him, somehow knowing it’s true.

‘I saw them on their first day, green and fresh out of training, and I didn’t try to get to know them. There wasn’t any point. Those kids weren’t gonna last, and I knew it.’

Neither of us speaks. We hold each other’s gaze for one long heartbeat before turning back to look at the island, her golden skirts spread out around us in all directions.

Slowly, slowly, she is falling into darkness.

There are no twinkling lights in the villages and towns that I know stretch below us.

Instead, thousands of fragile lives go on behind tightly closed shutters.

Families hold one another close and hope to see the dawn.

‘You are doing your best to protect yourself,’ I say into the soft night. ‘Maybe it’s the only way you really can.’

‘And don’t that make me the coward?’ Danny’s voice is laced with quiet anger. ‘So damn keen on keeping my head on straight that I don’t even take the trouble to ask a kid about his ma or if he has a sweetheart back home? Make him feel like he’s not alone in this whole show?’

‘Not a coward,’ I say. ‘Careful.’

‘That’s me, Stitches. Captain Careful.’ He laughs, short and wry. ‘Begging your pardon, I didn’t risk my neck to come over just to make it all about me. I can’t be all that careful. If I was, I would have stayed over there, safe and sound.’

I smile. ‘I told you it was dangerous.’

‘Oh, it’s not the fall that’s dangerous,’ he says.

I feel his gaze on my cheek. I keep looking at the moon. ‘Christina told me that you had sworn off women for the duration of the war,’ I say, ‘which is weird, because if I didn’t know better, I would swear you were flirting with me.’

Danny laughs, perhaps taken aback by my boldness. ‘Maybe I am,’ he admits. ‘Best to ignore me. You listen to this silver tongue of mine, and before you know it, you’ll be all moon-eyed and in love with me, and I’ll be forced to break your heart.’

‘Oh, you are in no danger of me falling in love with you,’ I tell him, allowing myself to look at him at last. It makes me smile to see his mouth fall open.

‘Not even after I just Errol-Flynned it up here to impress you?’

‘I think you did that to take your mind off the four colleagues you lost today,’ I say softly.

‘I think that you try hard not to care and that you think you don’t.

But a man who doesn’t care doesn’t beat himself up the way you have.

And I think that taking a stupid risk to see a virtual stranger was a way of inviting fate to even the score. ’

‘I never met another woman like you, Stitches,’ Danny tells the moon. ‘I mean that – you are fresh out the box, one-of-a-kind – an original.’

‘That’s because I come from eighty years in the future,’ I tell him. He’s been so honest with me, I feel compelled to be the same, even though I know he will laugh it off. ‘I’m not meant to be here. I just fell through time and landed right now.’

Danny thinks I’m joking. ‘Funny,’ he says, ‘cos, I get the feeling you were never meant to be anywhere else but right here, right now.’

‘Maia?’

I look around, and Nicco is standing at the stop of the staircase.

‘Signor Conte,’ I say, repeating what I heard Sal say earlier. ‘I’m so sorry. I came up here to get some air and happened on an acquaintance. Do you know . . . ?’

‘Flight Lieutenant Beauchamp? Of course,’ Nicco says coolly. ‘The whole island knows him. I do not know how he landed on my roof terrace, though.’

‘Forgive me, sir.’ Danny offers him a hand. ‘Just letting off a little steam.’

‘I see.’ Nicco is smiling, his voice warm, but even so, his irritation is clear. He does not accept Danny’s hand.

‘Well, I guess I’ll be going then.’ Danny hops up onto the railing.

‘I would prefer you go out the front door,’ Nicco tells him. ‘If you don’t mind. One has certain standards.’

‘Of course.’ Danny comes off the wall. ‘Goodnight, Stitches,’ he says as he jogs down the staircase, calling as he goes, ‘I’ll see you around.’

For a moment, Nicco and I listen to the sound of Danny’s steps receding. I expect to be admonished or asked to leave, but neither happens.

‘You are close to the flight officer?’ Nicco asks, with a kind of curiosity I can’t exactly place.

‘Not really,’ I say.

‘But you could be,’ he observes.

‘Unlikely.’ I’m guarded.

He nods and changes the subject. ‘Well, it seems like there will be no raid tonight,’ Nicco says, reminding me for the first time that the raid Sal mentioned earlier never came. ‘One can’t help but wonder if it’s not the calm before the storm. One hears rumours, doesn’t one?’

‘I don’t,’ I tell him. ‘I’m so sorry – it was rude to leave the table early after you’ve been so kind. I think perhaps the wine went to my head. I had no idea that Danny would . . . well, do what he did.’

‘Please.’ Nicco offers me his arm to escort me back to Sal. ‘No need to apologise for the Canadian. I find North Americans always think they own whatever part of the world they are in.’

‘And yet here he is, risking his life for us,’ I say.

‘Of course,’ he concedes.

When we reach the entrance courtyard, the door to the street stands open, and there is a sleek-looking black car outside.

Nicco inclines his head. ‘The professor is waiting for you in the car.’

‘Thank you again,’ I say. ‘I know petrol is short . . .’

‘I have my ways,’ Nicco replies. He takes my hand and kisses it. ‘I think we all do, don’t we, Maia?’

‘I suppose we do,’ I say, knowing that he is referring to seeing us in the catacombs.

‘I hope you won’t mind if I seek out your company again,’ Nicco says finally. ‘I feel that we have much to talk about.’

‘Of course,’ I say politely, intrigued but instinctively wary.

‘I will see you again,’ he says.

There’s something about the way he says it that feels like a threat.