Beauty Chorus, The by Kate Lord Brown

see the place we’re billeted …’
    ‘It’s not that bad.’ Megan smiled apologetically at Beau.
    Evie laughed. ‘Well it’s not what I’m used to.’
    When she turned to Beau, he was studying her closely. ‘You remind me of someone.’
    ‘Really? People do say I’m the spitting image of Vivien Leigh.’
    ‘Indeed, Miss Chase?’ He tapped a cigarette on his battered silver case and lit it. ‘Do you see yourself as the Scarlett O’Hara of Maidenhead?’
    ‘This is the part where you say you don’t give a damn.’
    Beau smiled, plucked a strand of tobacco from his lip. ‘That would be a little predictable. I was talking about my ex-fiancée.’
    ‘Is that a compliment, sir?’
    ‘No. Clearly you’ve never met Olivia.’ He swung his parachute onto his shoulder and walked on.
    ‘Ex?’ Evie said curiously as Stella joined her.
    ‘Be careful,’ she said as they walked towards the offices. ‘You don’t want to be too familiar. These RAF chaps can be a bit prickly with civilian pilots – I should
know, I was married to one. Show him some respect.’
    ‘Nonsense. What does he want me to do? Curtsey every time he comes onto the airfield?’ Evie pulled off her gloves as they went in. Instantly they noticed the atmosphere in the place.
They joined the silent group of pilots in the mess, and watched as Miss Gold pinned a notice on the board.
    ‘What’s going on, Margie?’ Stella whispered to the woman next to her.
    ‘There’s a bit of a flap. An aircraft’s gone down,’ she replied. ‘Amy is missing.’

 
    Squires Gate, 11.47 a.m.
    There are things I miss of course. I would love to hold, and be held, smell the tomatoes in the greenhouse at home, taste a glass of cold champagne, feel the rain on my
face. But I remember these things with dazzling clarity, and we are everywhere, that’s what you realise as you take your last breath. Time is meaningless here. I can go back whenever I want,
to my childhood, to the desert, to the arms of the men I have loved. All I have to do is think of my last days, and I am there again.
    ‘The weather’s closing in, Amy,’ Pauline said to me on the telephone when she called me at Prestwick the day before I died. ‘Come back by train.’ The clipped
head-girl tone got my dander up.
    ‘No, I can do it. I shall stop at Squires Gate tonight on the way down. It will be a better day tomorrow.’
    ‘Very well, but send Jennie on the train now. I have a Priority 1 and need her back sharpish.’ Lucky for Jennie as it turned out. She was going to catch a lift south with
me.
    ‘What are you dicing with, Johnnie?’ she asked as we left the Ops Room.
    ‘Not much.’ I shrugged on my flying jacket. I wish they had let me keep my astrakhan coat, but I was in uniform just like every other girl. It gets so cold when you’re in
the air. ‘Ferry an Oxford to Kidlington, short stop in Blackpool. I’m seeing my sister Molly.’
    It’s Molly’s belated Christmas present that they fished out of the drink after I went down. I had to laugh when the sailors on the Berkeley solemnly hung my new monogrammed
silk knickers out to dry in the boiler room after my demise.
    ‘I’ll be glad to get going.’ Jennie shivered.
    ‘Me too. I was stuck up here over Christmas,’ I said as she waved me off.
    Each time I return to my last day, I kick myself now of course, what an unforgivable fool I feel. It is madness to fly this morning – the whole country is blanketed in
freezing fog, but I shall ‘press on regardless’, as they say in the RAF. We pilots are all the same – we know every time we take off that this could be our last trip. Every flight
is a gamble. If we don’t smash into a cloud-bound hillside, we might be picked off like a defenceless lamb by a lone-wolf Messerschmidt with a gaping maw painted on its fuselage. But, after a
while, when you have had a few scrapes and have seen friends not make it back, death loses its fear, its mystique. It becomes part of