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1.
The summer before war is declared, Peggy goes on holiday with her family to a small seaside town on the south coast. They stay for a week, although with the speed and rapidity of the rumours circling around the country it feels like it could be longer. Tommy is away with his family the week after, and by the time he gets back it’s been months since Peggy has seen him. He works away – the money is in London, he tells her, and he rents a room in a small boarding house with five other men and is back for the summer.
“I might not go back at all though,” he confides, his voice low as they talk in deck chairs in Peggy’s small back garden. “It all depends on what’s happening in Europe.” He gives her a significant look. It’s all he needs to say. Just a year ago, they were sneaking into her father’s study to listen to the wireless, whispering of the possibility of another war, this one in their future. She knows as much as he does, that’s for sure. With her new position working with her father, perhaps more.
“Well, that’s something I can’t imagine,” she says. “Little Tommy going off to be a soldier.” It’s not entirely true. The boy she used to know, sticky-fingered and giggling on the other side of the garden fence, is long gone – in front of her is a man now, a head taller than her and facing the future front on. The uniform will suit him, she thinks, and her stomach drops. She reaches out to touch his arm. “All grown up.” His skin is warm under her palm.
“It’s Tom now.” He pulls a face. “The lads, you know, they… Tommy sounds too young.”
“You are young though,” Peggy says. He is – she’s heard things, things they won’t report on the wireless yet. He’s her Tommy, next door neighbour for all of her life. He’s too young for all the talk she’s heard.
“Peggy,” he says. His fingers brush over her hand before she pulls it away. “I’m older than you.”
“Hardly!”
“We’re not kids anymore.”
They’re not, though Peggy doesn’t know what it is that has changed, exactly, in these past few months. They learnt to dance together as kids, practised it as friends at the local dance hall; they rush there again to escape the worried frets of their parents and the stifling heat closing in around the end of summer. He’s been taller than her for a while now, but she wonders if he’s grown even more as he holds her and her eyes are level with his sharp collarbones. His hand is large as it closes around hers, warm in a way that’s not clammy or sweaty like she’s dreading. For the whole dance, she feels flushed even though they’re near an open window and a gentle breeze. She’s grateful when he suggests stepping outside for some air. She stands closer to him than she means to as they come to a halt around the back of the building.
“I’m going to go, you know.” Tom is looking down as he speaks, but when he meets her gaze, he looks sure, determined. In his blue eyes, there’s still a shadow of the boy who refused to let her play first just because she was a girl because that wasn’t fair, it shouldn’t have made a difference. “When they start enlisting again.”
On impulse, she touches his hand again. She watches his fingers curl around hers in something close to slow motion. “I know. You will be careful, won’t you?”
He laughs. “Of course,” he says, and when in the next moment he kisses her, somehow, it feels like something inevitable. Before his talk of leaving, before he went away and they both had to grow up and get used to threats, the idea would have been laughable – but he wraps her in close to him and she goes up on her tiptoes to ease the stretch on her neck, clings on tight to his broad, wide shoulders.
“Tommy,” she whispers as they break apart. Her lips feel odd. She’s never been kissed before, or at least she's never been kissed like that. He laughs again; it comes out breathless as he shakes his head. “Tommy,” she repeats, and rubs her thumb over his bottom lip and smiles at him, and this time she kisses him first.
She feels dizzy, later, walking along with him hand and hand in a daze of hot, wet mouths and trembling fingertips. “It’s not just because I’m leaving,” he tells her, although she knows, for both of them in their own ways, that it is.
“Well, I don’t expect you to be gone for long, of course,” she says. She squeezes his hand, just on the edge of painful. “And because if you do anything stupid, you know I’ll bloody kill you.”
“Oh, I know that.”
(In the end, she never gets the chance.)
2.
“Never fall in love during a war,” her mother warns her, and it’s solid advice, but Peggy still scoffs. That’s not why she’s leaving England. She knows some girls who are motivated by it, the thought of a romance amongst danger with a man in a smart uniform, a chance to escape the everyday life of suburban England. She doesn’t blame them, but Peggy is going because she is good at her job. She’s going because after fights, they’re letting her; they need her, she’s helping her country.
She doesn’t count on falling in love, on some level, with everyone she meets.
They’re briefed in London, of course, of the conditions on the frontline. The filth and fear she expects, but there’s a sense of something else in the air that takes her by surprise. The atmosphere is thick with it: not a longing to escape the threat of the trenches and go back home, but ways of coping with the distance and the danger. A lot of her time is spent in meeting rooms with the Colonel and his men, pressing pins into maps and making notes, taking over when one of the girls is sick and typing up letters that make her feel nauseous when she thinks about the words her fingertips are picking out. She can feel the difference when she steps out of the rooms and into the barracks. In meetings, the silence of uncertainty and the weight of choices hang heavy in the air, but out here, there’s constant sound, a low buzz of chatter, rumours and gossip and mindless, comforting chatter.
Peggy watches the men laugh together in the canteen, the way they nudge each other as she passes the long benches and steal each other’s food when someone is distracted by the clicking of her heels. She can roll her eyes at that. She’s a rare sight here, a young woman, and she doesn’t work directly with the troops. It doesn’t matter. It’s easy to let it go. She watches them standing outside and waiting for news, three boys huddled around a match to shield it from the wind.
She sees them share their cigarettes, their rations, the crumpled, handwritten news they get sent from home. A few of the older men rally themselves around a boy who looks younger than Peggy, who must surely have lied on his forms, pink-eyed and homesick. They play poker for chunks of chocolate and handfuls of copper coins. She keeps her distance, but seeing friendship and makeshift families coming together in such a foreign place helps her settle.
It’s her first time away from home as well, after all. She knows it’s just empathy, but with each warm surge of feeling she gets from observing her men, her mother’s words ring hollow in her ears. Peggy doesn’t know how anyone could face the war without love.
3.
They’re on the outskirts of the French countryside, surrounded by mud and an ever-present, suspicious silence, when Peggy finally gets paired up with her first female colleague since London. Eva speaks almost perfect English in a thick, Parisian accent, and even without make up, in her drab civilian clothes designed not to stand out, something about her strikes Peggy as effortlessly glamorous.
It’s a relief, this chance to finally work with another woman in close quarters. By now, Peggy is tired of the men who cast her doubtful sideways glances, or the distant girls typing letters and gossiping about her as though they have no idea that their words can be weapons too. Peggy greets her with a firm handshake and a polite smile and gets a startling wink in return. She feels her smile relax into something more real.
They’re put to work poring over maps in a tiny box of a room. Colonel Philips leaves them there with a stack of notepads to record the safe routes they plan out and a mindless comment for them not to spend all their time gossiping.
Peggy’s lips thin into a narrow line, but she’s learnt by now which battles to pick. From the roll of her eyes, she guesses Eva has as well. It’s an unspoken task; it’s one that’s sometimes harder than any other mission Peggy has worked on. As Colonel Philips walks out of the room, Eva lets out a heavy gust of air, a sigh that ruffles her sandy hair, and the two of them share a quick, companionable smile before they bend their heads over the faded map uncurled across the table in front of them.
Peggy never did get into the habit of smoking before rationing came into effect, but she likes the way the smell stays curled in the air of the room as Eva does. At the end of particularly long days, more and more of them as time goes on, Eva blows smoke rings. They both watch them float off and fade away, ash crumbling to the floor.
They’re both efficient and ruthless with their work and with their jokes, and so when Eva says, “We’ll go to the bar, yes?” Peggy agrees one night, even though she tends to avoid the bars. It’s nothing to do with the feeling of superiority that keeps the Colonel and his men drinking in their quarters away from the rest of the boys. In the smoky gloom of a bar, though, more than ever she becomes nothing more than her body. With Eva, it’s easier. Peggy has an ally in her. They tuck their chairs close together, ankles brushing under the table, and don’t pay for a single drink the whole night. Eva relaxes in a way that feels contagious, the slouch of her shoulders loosening the tight line of Peggy’s spine. Peggy has never met anyone quite like this woman. She wonders if it’s a cultural thing, or if Eva is simply one of those people who brings out the best of themselves to tackle the horror around them.
“Thank you, for that,” Peggy says, back out in the cold air. The sky is clear enough to give her the shivers. She rests her hand on Eva’s arm briefly, notes that her nail polish has chipped. “I had fun. It’s easy to forget how to sometimes, isn’t it?”
Eva’s laugh is almost lyrical. “Oh, we must never forget. Don’t you worry, I won’t let you.”
Peggy believes her, which is why when her meeting with Colonel Philips is interrupted with the news of another fallen unit, men Peggy spoke with and laughed with and accepted drinks from just a few nights ago, Peggy goes to find her. It’s a rare afternoon off for Eva, a chance to relax or correspond with the family she has on the other side of France. Peggy pauses at the door, an internal reluctance to risk interrupting someone dragging her back for a few seconds, but she pulls herself together with a stern nod and knocks. Eva is here permanently. The cottage she lives in with her sister and cousin a little rural and rundown, riddled with charm.
Peggy has never been here before, although for security reasons she’s always been aware of where Eva resides. “Your home is lovely,” she says, an automatic follow up to the password that gets Eva opening the door, and Eva takes one look at her face and lets her inside.
Eva brings the good back into the world with her smile and hands and her low, throaty laugh, taking Peggy away to a world where it’s just the two of them, allies together on the mattress in Eva’s white-washed bedroom. Afterwards, Eva blows smoke rings again, and Peggy smokes her first (not last) cigarette. She doesn’t try to fix her hair until she has to leave. Eva watches her reflection in the mirror from just behind her when she does, declares her trés chic with a smoky kiss to her cheek, and a week later Peggy and the Colonel move on to Italy and spends the journey with a hand to her cheek, tracing invisible lipstick stains.
(She never learns the fate of this French girl, and in some ways, that’s how Peggy likes it. She’s heard all the stories; she knows the odds. This way she can imagine Eva stretching on into old age, surrounded by an adoring family, or smoking sophisticated cigarettes in a café in Paris in the company of a beautiful woman, and on the odd occasion she smokes in the future, Peggy buys herself French cigarettes.)
4.
She’s not counting on Steve Rogers, either. Then again, no one is.
He’s just another boy at first, short and skinny, standing out in line with his unit for the one reason no soldier ever wants to. She notices him because he looks like he belongs anywhere but here.
She remembers him because of his cunning, the way he looks climbing up into the car next to her, and because of the way his thin limbs look curled defensively around a grenade, and because when he talks to her, he always looks at her face and his cheeks flush faintly sometimes when she makes deliberate eye contact with him. In the back if a New York taxi she teases him about not being able to talk to women, but it’s charming, in a way, in a way only Steve Rogers seems to be. When he talks about dancing, it’s herself she pictures him with, her taller than him and her hands wrapped around his and all. It would be interesting, she thinks, to take the lead on the dance floor as well. She’s seen his fingers flying across his sketchpads. She already knows how delicate and nimble they are.
Peggy should know what’s happening then. A part of her does, but it’s not until her cool, collected calm breaks completely and she shouts across the room for Howard to turn his machine off, until her insides seize up and she thinks she’ll hear Steve’s shouts in her nightmares, that she admits to herself how fond she is of this reckless, stupid man.
The best man she’ll ever meet.
When she kisses him – and later, when she realises she won’t again – she’s angry at the world for taking away someone like him so soon. Selfishly, she’s angry at him for crashing the plane in the first place (noble, self-sacrificing bastard), hot tears spilling over her eyelashes as her treacherous brain imagines what might have happened in Howard had been able to find somewhere for him to land after all. Mostly, though, Peggy is angry at herself. She should have kissed Steve Rogers the very first time she met him, protocol and professionalism be damned.
Eight o’ clock passes with a shadow across her heart.
5.
There is nothing to New York but cloudy skies and memories that make her chest hurt, each breath catching at her lungs and twisting around her heart. She’s filed her reports, signed across all the lines. Peggy no longer has a duty to be here and she no longer has a real friend to stick around for. Howard is still away conducting business, the Doctor never got to leave, and Steve – Peggy’s hands slip deep into her pockets, fingertips curling into her coat to stop them brushing the cold, empty air.
She takes a boat back to England. It’s a long journey, but now the war is over there’s no reason to rush, and she doesn’t want to listen to another engine of another plane.
There are memories waiting for as her train finally brings her from Southampton into London, the dirty grey skyline more familiar than anything else she’ll ever set eyes on. It’s broken up now, though, in ways the headlines had never prepared her for. Her breath sticks in her throat. She hadn’t been in London for long before she’d crossed the channel, but between her time stationed here and childhood visits into the city, she knew the main streets like the back of her hand. So much is gone now, broken up and burnt down to rubble. For what feels like the first time since she left home, she takes her time walking down the roads she remembers best, dragging her feet past the shells of parks and burnt out buildings. Her shoes scrape over the pavement. She stumbles. A man in a suit strides past her, and it’s jarring – it’s the walk of a man intent on getting to work on time, incongruous in front of the damage and scars surrounding them.
After a second, it nearly makes her smile. Of course the man is hurrying to work. The war is over and the world hasn’t stopped.
She keeps walking, and despite the setting, the way her stomach sinks each time she sees the wreck of a once familiar old haunt, a smile begins to wrestle its way onto her face. It’s the first in a long time, stretching tired muscles, an expression she oddly hasn’t worn since witnessing first-hand the true price of peace and victory. It seems improper, and she takes a deep breath and smooths it out. The clouds give way to a drizzle, barely visible but soaking her in a matter of moments, and Peggy is seized with the strange urge to laugh.
Instead, she changes course, heads away from the business side of the city and towards the lines of terraced houses that wouldn’t look glaringly out of place in her suburban childhood street. She walks until she finds a group of people, kids mostly, teenagers putting aside their claim to churlishness in favour of rebuilding, gathered around what looks like the remains of a school. It looks as though it suffered from a direct hit, and Peggy faced her own difficulties, but she can’t begin to imagine living through the Blitz.
They’re searching for what they can save, she supposes, now that they’re allowed back on the streets. Sentimental items. Photos and memories. She can understand that. “Hey,” she calls on impulse. “You don’t need a hand, do you?”
The kids turn to face her, squint suspiciously through the rain at the strange woman who sounds like she’s from these parts but doesn’t quite look it anymore. “You wanna help us?”
Peggy lets herself smile properly, at last. “Love to.”