Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [128]
And then: “Wait a minute.” She bent over a small snapshot showing a group of laughing women in greasy overalls and cloth caps, then put the book onto my knees and went to fetch a magnifying glass even Holmes would have been proud to own. She took back the book and leant over it again. “Yes, I remember her. We only met a handful of times, when we were transferring wounded; she must have worked farther down the line than I did. But she certainly had green eyes, green as an emerald. How could I have forgotten her? She was as tall as I am, taller even, and she used to wear this fur-lined aviator’s jacket under her standard coat—not regulation, but by that time who bothered? I remember admiring it one freezing day, and she told me her brother had given it her; it was what the Canadian fly-boys wore.”
Gabriel’s diary had made reference to a sheepskin collar. “Do you remember her name?”
“Her name, her name, what was her name?” she mused, staring into the magnified features. “A boy’s name. Not Charlie, and not Tom—she was in Italy by then. Phil—that’s it! Phil, they called her. A nick-name, of course; everyone went by nick-names out there. Made a person feel like a schoolgirl again, instead of an old hag who hadn’t washed her hair in a fortnight and who walked around with unspeakable things on her boots. They called me Gigi. From my surname, you know? Cobb—horse—geegee. Some nick-names were better than others,” she added apologetically. I had silently to agree.
“But what might Phil’s name have been?” I asked.
“I somehow think that in her case it was more of a shortening of her proper name.”
Philomena? I wondered. Phillida—Oh, surely not the same name as his aunt; that would be too odd.
“Perhaps Philippa?” she suggested after a moment. “That seems right somehow.”
As a coincidence, it was not as sharp as Phillida would have been. However, even that close a similarity to the name of a young aunt might explain Gabriel’s preference for “Hélène,” whether it was invented as a romantic paean to her beauty (Is this the face that launched a thousand ambulances?) or the girl’s middle name.
I now had a first name to attach to Gabriel’s green-eyed driver. But “Gigi,” it seemed, was not through with her.
“Philippa, yes, and an Irish last name to go with those eyes. O’something. O’Hanlan, O’Flannigan, O’Neill . . .”
I hoped she did not plan on working through the Dublin telephone directory, and reined in my impatience.
“Mary,” she said. I thought she was addressing me, but: “O’Meary. That was her name. I’ve always been good with names—I knew hers was in there somewhere. Philippa O’Meary, although she was no more Irish-looking than I am, other than her eyes. And I do remember, she once slung a man over her back all the way through the communications trenches to get him out. Big girl. Slim, but big bones. What you might call farm stock. Not English, though.”
“What, French?” I couldn’t picture that.
“American, I think. No, I’m a liar—she was from Canada. Now why do I think that? That aviator’s jacket?” She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “It’s gone. May come back, but I picture her as Canadian. She was based near Reims. Had a couple of sisters, I think—lots younger, like mine; we agreed that we hoped it would be over before they could join up. Black hair, she had, shiny and with a little curl to it. She wore it short. Had dimples when she laughed. Good boots—Now why should that come back to me? Someone in her family was a shoemaker. What else can I drag out of this grab-bag of a mind of mine? Fearless driver, had bullet holes—actual bullet holes, not just shrapnel—in her ambulance. Lent me a pair of gloves once—she had two and my hands were ice; I returned them through a friend.
“And do you know, I think she had a ring? We weren’t supposed to fraternise, and of course you couldn’t be married, but by that time things were too desperate for anyone to pay much attention, so long as you were careful. But I remember the ring