The Light Over London(30)

“No, I won’t have you flying without it.” She closed his hand around it and brushed her lips against his cheek. “If you really want me to have it, give it to me the next time we meet.”

He shuddered, as though he was trying to hold back a wave of emotion too powerful to name, but he nodded nonetheless. “I should leave. I just might stand a chance of making it back to base before anyone notices I’m gone.”

She nodded, no longer trusting herself to speak.

He pocketed the compass and then pressed a piece of paper into her hand. “This is my service number. Write to me, Louise. Promise me you will.”

“You’ll write to me too?”

“Every day I’m able,” he said.

They stood together, looping their arms around each other’s waists as they crossed the ivory carpet that was her mother’s pride and joy. At the door, he kissed her again, with a soft brush of his lips, and then smoothed her hair out of her face.

“Be happy, Louise Keene,” he said. And then he was gone.

In the hall, she swept away her tears and swallowed hard. She placed one hand on the banister, ready to climb the stairs to her room when the dining room door swung open so hard it hit the wall.

“You irresponsible, uncaring girl,” her mother hissed. “What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mum,” she said, her voice unnaturally calm despite her shaking hands.

“Carrying on with that pilot when Gary is actually fighting.”

Enough. What had started as dropped hints and sighing wishes had become a strange, twisted idea of her future. She’d indulged her mother too much, believing it was easier to simply nod and smile than to risk a spiraling rant.

“There is nothing between Gary and me except for your hopes,” she said.

Her mother crossed her arms. “He’s the only boy in Haybourne suitable for you.”

“And what if I don’t want to stay in Haybourne?” she snapped. “What if I don’t want to spend my days keeping Gary’s house and arranging flowers for the altar at All Souls and seeing the same people I’ve seen every day of my life?”

“You ungrateful child. Gary will give you a good life, which is more than you deserve.”

“I don’t care about any of that!”

Her mother rushed forward, grabbing her by the back of her neck. Louise yelped, new tears springing to her eyes at the tug of the hair caught between her mother’s pulling fingers.

Drawing Louise’s face close, her mother dropped her voice to a dangerous whisper. “I’ve done everything for you, and I will not see you give it all up for a pilot who will forget you as soon as he leaves Cornwall.”

“Mum!”

“Nineteen years. Nineteen years of cooking and cleaning and laundering for a child I hardly wanted, and this is how you repay me? You were supposed to be worth all of this.”

“You’re hurting me,” Louise whimpered, her hands clasped around her mother’s wrist as tears flowed freely down her face.

“What is this?” Her father’s voice boomed through the entryway. In an instant, her mother’s grip loosened, and Louise stumbled back. She pressed a hand to her scalp, trying to dull the throb of pain at her roots.

Her mother threw out a hand in Louise’s direction. “She’s going to ruin everything, Arthur.”

Her father’s gaze sliced over to Louise. “Go upstairs to your room.”

It had been years since her father had sent her to her room as punishment for some childhood transgression, but she didn’t protest. Instead, she lunged for the banister and scrambled, half falling, up the stairs. But at the top, she stopped when she heard her mother say, “You coddle that girl.”

“And that’s worse than what you do to her?” her father shot back.

“I am trying to give her a better life.”

“The life you wanted to have? You’ve made it clear from the day we married that you weren’t happy with me, but these airs, Rose? They stop now.”

“It’s not putting on airs to want to not be the postmaster’s wife and have a house barely big enough to entertain.”

“This is our home,” her father said. “This is our life.”

“I was supposed to have more than this,” her mother hissed. “That was the plan, but if you’d taken more precautions—”

“Then you wouldn’t have fallen pregnant and had to marry me and stay in Haybourne? It’s been nineteen years. Just say it.”

Louise squeezed her eyes shut, her breath coming fast and ragged. She had to leave. This house. This village. In her mother she saw what her life would be if she stayed.

Creeping down the carpeted hall, Louise let herself into her room. She’d been silent and still for her whole life. Paul had been the first real risk she’d ever taken. The first time she’d ever dared step out from within the tight confines of the box her mother had kept her in for all these years. And what was worse, she could see now that she’d let her mother do it. But her mother would not be the one to blame if Louise allowed this to go on.

She pulled out her old school bag, a battered leather satchel with a soft brown patina, and set it on her bed. Moving methodically, she began to pack. In went underthings, stockings, a sweater, two shirts, her green tweed skirt, and a brown dress with fluted sleeves. Her mac was hanging on a hook downstairs by the door, but her good wool coat was still in her wardrobe. She grabbed it and the soft cherry-red muffler she’d knitted for herself last Christmas out of wool unwound from an old sweater.