The bomber jacket, p.12
The Bomber Jacket, page 12
What was it she’d said? He looked at me. Her words echoing in his head made him go suddenly cold. Pacing more rapidly, he reminded himself that she was, after all, just a girl, in spite of being older than the typical college student, and seemingly more mature. But if he really thought about it, in many ways she was really an innocent abroad, so little exposed to life. And then there was the fact that she was a student, and he was a faculty member.
Robbie contemplated Andrew’s words as he watched Beth walk slowly down the hill, her hands tucked in her jacket, her eyes on the ground. He liked her. A lot. But Andrew was right. Dating a student, or even giving the appearance of doing so, could be a fatal blow to his newly-launched academic career. Plus he didn’t know how she felt about him. If she felt anything at all.
And then she slaps me upside the head with her comment about ‘doing this alone.’ Pretty well put me in my place, he brooded.
When she reached the car, his manners overcame his anger, and he opened the door for her, ignoring her confused look. He suddenly recalled the young guy they encountered on the way out of the bar last night, the kid who looked mightily upset that Beth was with Robbie. Same kid she was talking to in the hall earlier in the week. Maybe that’s what this is all about, he thought, his ire up again.
Robbie threw himself into his seat, pulling the door closed with a bang and started the car with a jerky motion. He shoved the gearshift into reverse and thrust the car backward out of the parking space. With a push of his palm, he slammed the gearshift into first and pressed on the gas pedal. As the car leaped forward, he heard Beth gasp but refused to look in her direction. Instead, he focused on maneuvering this vehicle made for curves through the narrow, twisting streets of the old section of Stirling at a ridiculously reckless speed.
The town vanished in a blur as they hit the open road, racing north. Though the roar of the engine filled the car, Robbie wouldn’t have been surprised if Beth could also hear his molars grinding and the artery pulsing at the side of his neck.
“Where are we going?” Beth finally asked after the speedometer had clicked off kilometer after kilometer.
“I don’t know,” he muttered truthfully. He was driving only to feel a sense of motion.
“You don’t know.” Her statement was filled with resignation. Then she spoke, facing the window so her voice was muffled, and he had to strain to hear her over the whine of the engine.
“You think I’m out of my mind.”
He didn’t jump in and offer a soothing contradiction.
She tried again. “You think I’m some sort of crazy American college student on a romantic adventure to find some Scottish bomber pilot.”
This time he did reply. “Well, some of those statements seem to be accurate.”
“Which ones?” she asked.
He began to ease up on the gas pedal, getting his anger under control. A picture of himself in the passenger seat of this father’s car roaring down the A9 toward St. Andrews flashed uncomfortably in his mind.
“Well, you are an American college student.”
“Yes.”
“You are on an adventure, it seems.”
“Yes.”
“You are trying to find out who this Scots pilot was.”
“Yes.”
“And obviously the pilot is...” Robbie stopped abruptly, his logic giving out. “Dead” was the word he was going to use. But that wasn’t obvious. Many pilots survived the war. Some were still living, though now into their eighties.
“A figment of my imagination.” She finished his sentence as a statement, not a question.
“No, that wasn’t what I was going to say. Someone wore that bomber jacket, so he was, is, well, a real person.”
“But you think I’m crazy for looking.”
His words were more carefully chosen. “No… I think you are… maybe… a bit obsessed.”
“Obsessed?”
“Aye. I mean, you seem to think you can see him in places, and that’s just…” Was she clairvoyant? His logical mind rebelled at that thought, though his Celtic blood was stirred by the idea. “I’m a historian, not a ghost hunter,” he insisted.
“You think I’m imagining it?”
Robbie struggled to convey his meaning without belittling or insulting. He thought about the way she talked of poets and writers. The writers were real to her. She didn’t just study their words; she was endlessly curious about the times in which they lived and who they loved. They weren’t just names on a page in a literature course or in a lecture by some doddering professor. She seemed genuinely affected by their thoughts and words. History, to her, was a collection of passions for which the famous, infamous, and the unknown had lived and died.
She, this young chit of a girl from a country with barely two centuries of existence, seemed to think she could somehow touch the past, a past that happened in his own ancient country, although a mere sixty years ago. And he, the history professor, looked at history as though it were a collection of facts and figures, not flesh and bones.
With a growing realization, Robbie began to acknowledge that he lacked her passion. Her ability to transcend time and be there in spirit made ashes of his pretense of being enmeshed in the past. Only twice in his life had he experienced that transcendence, that sense of being in the presence of those who had made the history he studied in books: once at the chilly, foggy fields of Culloden and the other time in the shimmering July countryside of Gettysburg.
With an irrefutable logic that would have made his father proud, he realized he had been proclaiming that history was his passion, but he had been approaching it just as coldly and logically as his father approached engineering. It was a problem to be solved, a theory to be proven, a story to be told.
The revelation was so unexpected and so blindingly true that he nearly ran off the road. Only Beth’s gasped, “Robbie,” alerted him to the stone wall precariously near the left front bumper. With years of experience driving over the twisting, winding, single-track back roads of the Highlands, Robbie effortlessly steered the car back onto the roadway and around the next few bends and curves.
Spotting a sign, he said, “Let’s stop for coffee. There’s a café up ahead.”
He saw Beth’s nod and blanched face from the corner of his eye. He had given her a fright. Well, he thought, now we’re even.
eight
Robbie said little during their lunch and even less on the drive home. When he did talk, it was to tell her more about the history of Scotland in the late twelfth century and the impact of William Wallace on the Scottish psyche. He avoided any mention of Colin.
They were back in Edinburgh by midafternoon. When Robbie pulled up in front of her dorm, he put the car in park and sat, looking at her impassively. She was at a loss for words, not knowing what he expected, so she said, “Thanks for the day, the tour… for everything.”
It sounded like a goodbye and she flinched, adding in a rush, “It’s meant a lot… your help, and… everything.” Unwilling to cry in front of him, Beth scurried from the car without looking back. She heard him roar out of the car park but didn’t watch his departure. Nor did she return to her dorm. She simply started walking.
She wandered aimlessly through the campus, into town, down streets, looking at nothing, seeing nothing. Simply walking. Finally, hours later, exhausted and too disoriented to find her way back by bus, she hailed a taxi and spent the last cash she had in her wallet to get to her empty dorm room. As usual, Anja was with her boyfriend
Despite being drop-dead tired, she sat up well past one, wrapped in Anja’s comforter, detailing the day in her journal as she mulled it over. He saw me. I swear he saw me. He knew I was sitting there. The statement seemed unreal, freakish. Beth poised her pen over the page and waited for the courage to write her next words. With a deep breath, she penned the thought that had been haunting her since that moment.
He wants something.
She stared at the sentence for a long time, her hand trembling slightly, her breath quick and shallow, her head woozy, as if she had just finished climbing those two hundred and forty-six steps. Then she finished the thought.
He needs something.
Sunday came and went in a blur. At lunchtime she nibbled on an apple and crackers in her room, unwilling to be distracted from her thoughts and not wanting to run into Iain in the dining hall. The thought of idle evening chatter with a college boy at a bar was almost revolting.
She had intended to write her grandfather in the afternoon but couldn’t concentrate. Instead she took a nap which smelled richly of a dew-drenched grass airstrip at dawn.
To her complete surprise, her date with Iain was delightful.
His lighthearted and slightly sarcastic banter was distracting and amusing. He took her to a sports bar where he introduced her to a small group of friends watching an American pro hockey game. The guys, another Canadian, two Scots, and a Dane, were all fellow members of the university ice hockey club. The girls were Scottish.
They asked her friendly questions about life in the States and what she thought of their country. She answered simply and politely and cheered for whichever team was winning, which Iain thought was hilarious. He bought her a beer, which she sipped all evening. By midnight, far later than she usually stayed up on a Sunday, he had her back at the dorm and said, “Well, cheerio. Do you want to come see me play Tuesday night?”
It didn’t occur to her to say no.
And so, her life fell into a pattern: lunch several days a week with Iain at the Student Union center, attending his scrimmages on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, out with his friends on Friday and Saturday evenings to a pub or the movies or some sports event.
He began helping her with her “research project” on World War II, walking her to the library after their history class. Most of his help consisted of watching documentaries with her in the media center or looking at magazines and newspapers from the era and pointing out facts he thought relevant or interesting, while she took notes or organized her research.
At first, he held her hand when they walked and sat with his arm around her at the movies. Then one evening he kissed her goodbye—a simple, straightforward kiss. It startled her, but she liked it. Slowly the kisses at her dorm room door were growing more intense, with more pressing of bodies and entwining of arms, and she sensed that if she invited him in, he’d be more than happy to see what happened next.
She supposed they were “a thing.” This was the pleasant, fun romance she wanted two years ago, it seemed.
Knowing she was to meet him at class or lunch got her out of bed on the many days she longed to linger and recapture her latest dream. She now knew some of Colin’s crew members by their nicknames: Fitz, the bomb aimer; Tack, the navigator; and Ox, the rear gunner. But she still hadn’t learned Colin’s last name. Robbie’s list of twenty-seven names seemed too overwhelming to research without his help. She counted on the dreams to reveal more about who Colin was.
She didn’t tell Iain she was worried about her grandfather, who assured her in their twice-monthly phone calls that he was fit as a fiddle, but whose health her grandmother harped on in her weekly postscripts to Henry’s letters.
P.S. I should take your grandfather to the doctor. He’s so short of breath.
P.S. He stumbled today walking out front. Thought he was going to hit the sidewalk.
P.S. I wonder if he should be driving. He seems so distracted.
And at the tail end of each postscript, Naomi always added something like, Don’t tell your grandfather I said this. He’d have my neck. He doesn’t want to worry you. After all, how you could do anything being so far away is beyond me.
She caught occasional glimpses of Robbie on campus, not sure if he saw her. She was surprised by how much she missed his company, his laughter, his warmth. She wondered if she had begun to fall in love with him. It was useless to speculate; their relationship was clearly over.
Since the trip to Stirling, there had been no more “sightings” of Colin. Iain kept her free time occupied, and she never suggested visiting other places on her grandfather’s list, another thing she didn’t share with Iain.
Colin needs something.
Those words frequently surfaced in her mind and on her journal pages, commanding her attention and pulling her back to that sunlit tower in Stirling. But just as quickly, the image and sensations would fade.
There were moments when Beth wondered if she should give up this search. It was so exhausting and slightly terrifying to be so pulled by… what? What was Colin? A spirit? A ghost? No, he wasn’t dead! It must be her, with this disorienting ability to see into the past. Yes, Colin needed something. But still, she owed him nothing. And this obsession, as Robbie called it, had already alienated him. Anyone else would walk away, thinking she was mad. What was this worth?
But no matter how she argued with herself, she couldn’t stop now.
After some weeks, Beth decided she needed to revisit Drem. A history department field trip in mid-March provided the perfect opportunity. Iain’s commitment to a weekend ice hockey tournament at Aberdeen University offered her an excuse to go to Drem alone. Though he asked her to go to Aberdeen, like some of the other girlfriends, she pleaded a backlog of school work.
“Iain, you’ve kept me busy every weekend since we started dating,” she protested. “I’m way behind in all my reading.”
“Yeah, cool, right?” he had responded triumphantly.
She frowned. “Which part is cool?”
“The fact that you’ve been too busy to read, because of me!” He laughed, adding, “Well, you are a scholar, so I guess I can let you be scholarly this one weekend.”
She formulated a plan to remain at the airfield when the other students left. In her research, she had discovered that the nearby village of Gullane was practically taken over by the RAF during the war and that the Greywalls Hotel had been requisitioned for pilots on rotation from the airfields of southern England for R&R—rest and relaxation.
With the help of a friendly staff member at the Edinburgh tourist center, Beth made a reservation at Greywalls and learned which bus would get her back to Edinburgh on Sunday afternoon. She cringed at the stunning cost of one night’s stay, even off-season, at a well-appointed country hotel.
Six weeks after her Stirling trip with Robbie, Beth was on her way to Drem with a van of students, her backpack doubling as an overnight case. She brought her nice outfit should she opt for dinner in the hotel. The graduate assistant leading the day’s tour just shrugged when she said she was skipping the bus trip back to meet a friend.
The field trip stopped first at the Museum of Flight. While the other students toured the museum, she lingered in the gift shop, purchasing three books on World War II. On the ride to Drem, she listened while the other students chatted about impossible professors, last night’s pub crawl, tonight’s party choices, or which Mediterranean beach they were going to on spring break.
Surrounded by such babble, similar to Iain and his friends, Beth longed for Robbie’s intelligent and witty repartee. That was a bit unfair, she told herself gruffly. Iain has his own charms, actually quite similar to Jason, who was polite, funny, and talkative. He had been a big hit with Henry and even managed to charm Naomi with his flattering comments about the desserts she always had ready for them when they returned from their dates. Her grandparents would like Iain too, she was certain. Like they would ever meet.
To distract her thoughts, she opened her recently purchased history of the aerodrome. She learned that at the beginning of the war in September of 1939, Drem was ideally situated on the east coast to defend the Scottish Lowlands and that in October 1939 three squadrons of fighter pilots with their Spitfires were stationed there. One of the Squadrons, the 602 from Edinburgh, was posted further south in 1940 to help defend southern Britain.
Beth frowned. Robbie had said Drem wasn’t a bomber station. It was always a fighter station or coastal defense site. Why was a bomber pilot there? Yet, she had sensed his presence.
The van drove to a cluster of buildings at the edge of the field she had seen on her brief visit with Robbie. Everyone assembled around the graduate assistant, who explained what she already knew, that most of the buildings had been barracks and airplane hangars during the war, but now housed retail shops, a café, and other commercial enterprises, along with some modern housing.
Beth stood slightly apart, shivering in spite of her bomber jacket, boots, and scarf, not because of the March chill, but in anticipation of being alone on the flat, deserted aerodrome. She tried to picture what it would have been like in the war, with planes coming and going next to a small farming community. Closing her eyes, she tuned out the drone of the tour guide, listening for the hum of incoming planes. But the only hint of air traffic was a twentieth-century jet far overhead, barely perceptible over the voices of shoppers entering the buildings. No sense of Colin, not like the time she and Robbie were here.
There were too many distractions.
When everyone headed for the café, Beth studied a 1939 map of the aerodrome. Picking up her backpack, she headed out onto the grassy field. Several hundred feet away from the converted barracks and hangars, filled with shops making and selling jellies and jams, woolen goods, furniture, and other tourist goods, she stopped in the midst of the former grass airstrip, now a farm field, lying fallow in the late winter sun.
She stood, with her eyes closed, and waited.
And waited.
Skirting the clouds, the sun caressed her face with warmth when it peeked out. She could hear her breath, feel the rise and fall of her chest. After a while, she used her backpack as a seat, stretching her legs out in front of her, her arms crossed.
And waited again. But there was no hint, no sense of Colin’s presence.
At last, opening her eyes, she noticed the sun had moved westward on its journey toward the horizon. That’s when it occurred to her. She’d need to be here at sunrise, not a late afternoon. The dreams always ended at sunrise on a grassy runway. Yet, Colin couldn’t have been landing his Lancaster here; the bombers were stationed at airbases in southern England.
