"You look so young," Betty gushed, sitting on the floor at the end of Charlie's bed. "I wish I was old enough to be a nurse in the war. I bet you had all kinds of adventures."
Charlie let out a quiet laugh, half amused and half regretful, but didn't look up from where she was attempting to fold one of her finer dresses in such a way as it wouldn't crease. It was pale pink silk and she'd never worn it, but she hoped that one day she would. It was one she'd picked out herself, a rare occurrence, and her mother had relented and bought it only because Charlie had let her buy whatever dresses she'd wanted for the rest of the day. Though she'd used the fact as leverage, Charlie didn't actually care what she wore these days. Nothing felt right anyway. It was all too fussy, too tight, too frilly - so different from the uniform she'd once been used to wearing everyday. But the pink dress... there had just been something about it. It was too beautiful to leave behind.
"Oh, that didn't come out right," Betty went on, flicking through the pages of the photo album slowly, almost reverently. "I didn't mean to make it sound, you know, fun or anything. I just mean that I bet it was such a fascinating time."
Still not looking up - the dress just didn't want to lie straight; the silky material scrunched itself up however she tried to fold it - Charlie laughed once more, but the sound was hollow. "I'm not sure I'd say 'fascinating'," she replied. She was aware of Betty turning to look back at her. "Traumatising, more like. But it seems like a lifetime ago now."
"Was it completely awful?" Betty wondered. For the moment the photo album lay forgotten in her lap, but Charlie knew it wouldn't be long before it captivated all of her attention again. She'd been utterly enamoured by it since she'd first discovered its existence ten minutes ago.
Frustrated to her wit's end with trying to fold the dress nicely, Charlie placed it into her trunk and smoothed the topmost layer of fabric, hoping that Helen would be able to salvage it once she got back home. She had managed to salvage all of the dresses Charlie had destroyed throughout her childhood, after all, so if anyone was up to the challenge it was her.
"Not always," Charlie replied to Betty at length. She turned to her, crossing her hands demurely in front of her, a habit she had finally seemed to pick back up again after much berating from her mother about her loss of etiquette. "The times when we were off the line were the best of my entire life. We went to Paris," she said, smiling slightly as Betty's eyes lit up. "There are pictures from the trip in there," Charlie went on, gesturing to the photo album. "And those photographs you're looking at right now are from Aldbourne, in England, where we stayed before D-Day and then again before Operation Market Garden, if you've heard of that."
It was clear that Betty hadn't heard of Market Garden but she smiled all the same. "Did you go to dances? I bet you went on a whole lot of dates."
"We had one dance," Charlie recalled. She came to sit on the edge of her bed, facing Betty. She had enough time on her side to resume her packing in a little while. "It was back in Aldbourne, before D-Day, and I got very drunk. Just don't tell my mother that."
Betty giggled, pleased to be let in on a secret. "What else?"
"We spent a lot of nights in the local pub - they didn't have any bars in Aldbourne, so when the men weren't off on weekend passes in Swindon or London everyone would be at the pub." Charlie laughed at her next memory. "One day, the other nurses and I had a party in the backyard of our house, and it rained but we stayed outside anyway. That's my favourite memory from Aldbourne."
Betty threw her head back and groaned wistfully. "I wish I was there."
"It wasn't always good," Charlie reminded her gently. "The highs were high but the lows, when we were on the line, were lower than anything I ever could have imagined."
"How so?"
Charlie opened her mouth, meaning to explain Bastogne as her example, but the words stuck in her throat. She couldn't do it. Those memories... Well, it had been three years and yet they were still as fresh as if they'd happened yesterday. How cold it was, how hungry they were, how she'd had to try to stick men back together with nothing but morphine and bandages. The bombing on Christmas Eve, all of the many barrages, losing Skip and Alex... After all this time, Charlie's eyes still stung even at the thought of their names.
"It was just bad," Charlie said, giving Betty a forced smile before rising to her feet again. She turned her attention back on packing, a newfound vigour in her movements now that she was running from her thoughts again. This was always what helped her the most, she found - keeping busy.
By now, Betty knew what Charlie's determined organising meant. She'd been woken up by it in the middle of the night enough times to understand without ever having to ask. So she abandoned that line of questioning and turned back to the photo album.
Charlie hazarded a glance in the younger girl's direction and saw only the back of her blonde hair as Betty pored over the pictures in the book. For a moment, Charlie was thrown back into the past, into a room she'd shared with Mabs while they'd waited to be sent back out on the line. But the ache of seeing and not really believing, of knowing that what she thought she saw wasn't actually the truth, was so intense, as was her longing for the woman she thought she'd seen, that Charlie had to turn away again.
"What's his name?" Betty asked after a while of silence. She held up the photo album, open on a spread of photographs from Austria after the war in Europe had ended.
Charlie glanced up only long enough to gauge who Betty meant before she turned her eyes back down to the trunk on her mattress, continuing to push the mountain of her clothes down. "Floyd."
"Floyd," Betty repeated. "Floyd what?"
"Talbert."
Betty sighed, disappointed. "I don't recognise the name."
Charlie fought a grin. "You expected to?"
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Betty shrug. "I have a few male friends who might have known him."
Charlie laughed but didn't reply.
Charlie's trunk was fully packed before Betty spoke again. It was full to bursting with dresses and gloves and hats and makeup and books, its hard brown leather casing held precariously together by strong golden clasps. Charlie had had to sit on it to get it to shut. For once, she was glad of her mother's micromanaging, for there was no way she would have been able to carry it downstairs without the help of the driver she was due to answer the door to in a little under half an hour.
"Charlie," was all Betty said, in a breath of awed wonder.
"Yes?"
Betty stood up from the floor, the skirt of her dress all folded up on itself, and skirted around the bed. She held the photo album out to Charlie once she was standing opposite her, open on the final page.
Charlie smiled at her handwriting and the words she'd once written there.
"You wrote that," Betty said.
"Yes," Charlie agreed.
"About him," Betty continued. "Floyd - the one in all the photos."
"Yes."
"You must have loved him so much," Betty said, but there was no starry-eyed gushing in her tone anymore. Instead, there was surprise. "He had no money but you wanted to marry him anyway."
Charlie laughed at this. She remembered how she'd seen the world when she'd left home for the first time - when she'd first headed to Aldbourne she hadn't been so different from how Betty was now. Marrying rich was the final chapter and everything that led to that was filler. The moment she got home she thought she'd secure an advantageous marriage and start having children. She wouldn't have been able to fathom marrying someone who didn't fit into the perfect upper-class family portrait.
But there was so much more to life than money. And now, after everything she'd experienced, she couldn't fathom marrying a man she didn't love. Her parents had taken a while to come around to that idea but they'd settled into it eventually. Well, they'd settled into a compromise, but that was far better than Charlie had ever expected of them.
"I loved him," Charlie said simply in reply to Betty. There was no other explanation she needed to give. She'd loved him and had been willing to do anything for him - would have followed him anywhere - and, though they weren't together anymore, she remembered that feeling and couldn't have faulted her younger self for it if she tried.
"Why'd you break up?" Betty asked. Empathetic soul as she was, her lips were pulled down into a frown, her eyes unspeakably sad. She looked like she felt it exactly as Charlie had, that loss she'd been overwhelmed by when she'd had to leave Floyd behind. There was no doubt in Charlie's mind that Betty would come to understand love soon enough - she gave out too much of her heart to people to not find someone who wanted to have all of it, and keep it forever.
"Well," answered Charlie, "the war in the Pacific was still on, and Floyd's company was being sent over there. But the other nurses and I were being sent to Germany, to take care of the people in one of the camps."
"You could've stayed together," Betty argued.
It made Charlie smile to think that, to Betty, this all seemed like some grand love story. Betty was pleading with Charlie to change the ending, the way Charlie read Romeo and Juliet and hoped every time that Juliet would wake up sooner.
"We didn't know how long the war would last," Charlie tried to explain. "He might have died, or met someone else. I might have gone home and wanted to marry one of the men my parents had lined up for me. We just..." Charlie's eyes were distant, her heart right back on that dock in Austria when she and Floyd had decided what they'd thought was for the best. "All we ever wanted was to be good to one another. We always wanted the best for each other, never wanted to hold each other back. He wanted me to go and meet a man who could give me the life my parents wanted me to have, and I wanted him to feel like he could still choose how his life went. I didn't want to chain him to me, or make him force his way into a job he hated just because he felt he had to provide for me." Charlie smiled ruefully. "We just wanted the other to be happy."
"But you're not married," Betty objected. "You didn't marry a rich man. So why didn't you go find him?"
"He never replied to my letters." And that was all. That was where the story ended. Not quite as tragic as Shakespeare's ending but its own kind of sad all the same. "He never replied to anyone he met during the war," Charlie went on. "Not his best friends or his old CO or anyone. No one's heard from him since he got home."
"What happened to him?"
"It's hard to explain," Charlie said, and left it at that. She didn't know for sure, of course - he could be dead, for all she knew, but she didn't really believe that. But she knew that Joe Liebgott had broken off all communication with everyone after he got home, too. Autumn had arrived back in the States and written to him, and gotten a letter from his father in reply telling her to lose the address. Some of the men just didn't want to hold onto any of it, and who could blame them for that?
"The truth is," Charlie explained, "I don't blame him for not replying." She sat down on the edge of the bed, atop pristine white sheets ready for when she returned, and Betty joined her. "He might have decided he wanted a new life, wanted to pretend that none of it ever happened. And I understand that perfectly." But it still made her heart ache so badly she felt she could throw up. She had weighed up the good and the bad of the war herself upon coming home, but she'd decided that the good was worth the bad. Still, that didn't mean Floyd had to make the same decision. For him, the bad had outweighed the good. It hurt, but she understood.
"Do you still talk to any of the others?" Betty asked. "I know about Mabs, obviously -" Betty had heard Charlie on the dorm telephone to Mabs so many times she had somewhat of a friendship with her herself, now. "- but what about the others?"
"I speak with the other nurses," Charlie said. "Most often with Henry, because she's married to Don, who's my closest friend of all of the men. But I see Autumn the most in person, since she lives in New York and she's always travelling."
"What about the other girl?"
"Boo's got her hands pretty full - she has a one year old son and she's got another baby on the way - but we write to each other a lot."
Betty started to say something else but she was interrupted by a loud banging on the door. "Charlie, your driver's on his way up!"
"Well, that's my cue," Charlie told Betty with a smile. She got to her feet and called back to Marguerite that she was coming, then started to pull on her coat.
"Don't forget this," Betty said, offering the photo album to Charlie. She waited for Charlie to finish doing up her coat and then handed it over.
Charlie spared a rueful glance back at her trunk on the bed and sighed. "I'll just hold it," she said, tucking the photo album under her arm.
"I'll see you after the break," Betty said, wrapping Charlie up in a hug. "Don't have too much fun without me."
"I wouldn't dream of it," Charlie promised with a laugh as they pulled back.
Betty held Charlie at arm's length for a moment, considering her, and then smiled a very tiny smile, full of equal parts affection and mischief. "Will you do something for me?"
"What's that?" Charlie humoured her.
"Write to your Floyd Talbert one last time," Betty said. Charlie began to object but Betty cut across her. "Just one letter, as short as you want, and that can be it. The final one. Just - for me?" She did her best impression of puppy dog eyes. "As a Christmas gift from you to me."
"I already got you a Christmas gift," Charlie pointed out.
Betty shrugged. "Well, as another Christmas gift. Please?"
"Maybe."
"Charlie, please?" Betty dragged out the vowel sound, clasping her hands together and pleading. "Please, please, please?"
"Fine!" Charlie exclaimed with a laugh. "One final letter. But it'll be short."
"I don't care," Betty said, grinning. "As long as you send it."
"You're trouble," Charlie accused, heading to answer the door to her driver.
"I'm the best thing that ever happened to you," Betty argued with a wild laugh.
Charlie rolled her eyes jovially. "We'll see," she said.
"Yes," Betty agreed. "We certainly will."