Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(97)

‘There is a medical school at the University in Edinburgh which they teach entirely in Polish,’ I said. ‘They started it in the middle of the war. I could take you to meet my tutor and we could ask about it. You could do your high school exams in Edinburgh and maybe try the university course next fall –’

‘We could share an apartment?’

‘Of course! And Ró?a –’ I choked a little, because it felt like we were making up another rescue fantasy. It felt like we couldn’t possibly be planning something that would really happen. ‘Ró?a, we can write our book.’

And honestly, why not?

Why not? We were free and independent. We were grown-ups. Even if she wasn’t working to begin with, little Ró?yczka wouldn’t be very expensive to feed. We might need more space than my bed-sitting room offered. But not much. We wouldn’t need much. We’d shared a lot less.

Now she didn’t even say anything. She just came over to share my window with me and took my hand and squeezed it hard. And I knew it wasn’t just another Nick Story, another impossible rescue fantasy. We were really going to do it. She’d come with me to Scotland on Monday.

She’d probably come with me to Hamburg in January.

We could see the coast as we landed, green flat fields arching lazily towards Yugoslavia, the docks of Monfalcone crowded with US Navy ships, the narrow strip of sand at the edge of the marsh across the bay. That was where we were going. It wasn’t a resort – it wasn’t the Lido. But it was a beach on the Adriatic. It really was.

Ró?a let go of my hand as we landed. She watched out the window, unflinching, the whole way down. She’d made up her mind she wasn’t scared. I could believe she’d delivered plastic explosive for the Polish Resistance on her bicycle when she was in ninth grade. I could believe she’d told the SS camp commander she’d rather be executed than be experimented on again.

She climbed out of the plane without letting anybody help her.

Ronchi dei Legionari wasn’t exactly tropical. That part of the Adriatic Sea is actually the most northern coast of anything connected to the Mediterranean. You can still see the Alps, blue in the near distance. The sun was shining, but the stiff breeze was chilly. It smelled like the ocean. It felt like spring.

I caught my breath in panic all of a sudden. If only we had something to do, I thought. I don’t want to stand on a strange beach feeling blue about Karolina. We need sand pails and shovels to distract us. Something to collect shells in. Fishing nets –

Ró?a turned to me and said, ‘Remember Irina’s paper planes? Remember the glider? My sister and I used to make kites out of newspaper. You think they’d let us have some paper and string?’

*



They did better than that. They gave us silk maps. The airfield had been a materiel supply depot since Italy’s surrender to the Allies in 1943 and, among other things, they still had a big box of unused aircrew escape maps of all of southern Europe sitting in a corner of their radio room. Everybody on the airfield got involved – actually, I think everyone fell a little in love with Ró?a, swamped in her enormous flight suit with its rolled-up cuffs, with her fluffy caramel hair shining in the dusty sunlight streaming through windows still crossed with peeling tape so they wouldn’t shatter in an air raid. Someone found a reel of fishing line and balsam strips to make a frame with. The gum-cracking receptionist cut us a strip of the silver tinsel Christmas garland she’d draped round the door for us to use as a tail. She made us pose with her for a snapshot.

‘You gals are nuts,’ she said approvingly. ‘Gosh, I wish I could come with you. It’s mighty boring sitting here waiting for phone calls and watching the planes come and go. I don’t speak Italian so I’m too scared to go out by myself when I’m done – gotta wait for one of the boys to come along and escort me! Have fun!’

Sitting in the back of an American military jeep next to Ró?a, as one of the mechanics drove us along a muddy track through a pine swamp and we struggled to keep our silk kite from taking off on its own before we got anywhere, I felt very smug and lucky.

It is nice to feel that way.

‘What does “nuts” mean?’

‘She meant we’re crazy.’

‘We are.’

We’d walked right up to the water’s edge, knee-high rippling waves that were a colour I’d never imagined – an opaque, pale green, like mint sugar wafers. You could see the big steamers and Navy ships across the bay, the way you could from the little village of Hamble, just outside Southampton, where I’d been stationed when I was an ATA pilot. The sky was a pure, piercing blue, utterly without any cloud in it anywhere.

‘Remember the sky at Ravensbrück?’ Ró?a said.

‘Yes, always beautiful, even when it was snowing.’

‘Remember the sunset the night you and Karolina spilled half a drum of soup on the kitchen steps?’

‘Oh, I wrote a poem about that – clouds like flaming rubies and fireworks, and all of us sobbing over the horrible soup. The irony! What about the shooting stars that night in November, in the early-morning roll call!’

‘The Leonids!’ Ró?a remembered. ‘And what about the rainbow? The full double rainbow? Lisette started to cry!’

‘I longed to be in the sky,’ I said. ‘When it was windy like this, I just watched the clouds or leaves or birds racing overhead and I longed to be up there with them. It hurt.’