The Darkest Hour. Barbara Erskine

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СКАЧАТЬ houses, each one different, some two storey, some three. Hers was three, with a small attic floor under a roof of ancient tiles. From the kitchen, on the first floor, she could look down at the pocket handkerchief back garden she and Laurence had created together from the builders’ rubble which had filled the small yard when they first took over the gallery four years before. The short paved path was lined with flowers now, the small lilac tree they had planted had blossomed. There were butterflies everywhere; she could see them hanging from her pots of lavender and from the clinging roses on the fence.

      It was months since she had applied for the grant. She and Laurence had discussed the project endlessly, wondering how she could take time out from the gallery to research a book. It was their part-time assistant, Robin, who had suggested applying for some sort of bursary; Robin who had turned up the obscure organisation which had now come up trumps. Robin who had made it all seem possible. Then, before Larry died.

      Now it was too late.

      She glanced round. On one side of the first-floor kitchen was their living room, and on the far side behind a closed door was the studio where Laurence had worked. It was somewhere she could hardly bear to go, even now. It was in there they had discussed Evelyn Lucas with so much excitement when they had realised that for all her fame there were no books about her, very little research, hardly any information at all; it was there they stood together in front of Evelyn’s self-portrait and it was there, in front of the painting, that Laurence had bent to take Lucy in his arms and kiss her hard on the mouth before running down the stairs and going out to the car.

      It was the last time she had seen him. Taking a deep breath she walked across to the studio door and opened it. The portrait of Evelyn still stood on the easel where it had been on the day Laurence died. He had been about to start restoring it when he had had the notion, he hadn’t told her why, that he would like a second opinion on its authenticity. He had contacted Professor David Solomon at the Royal Academy and arranged to take the picture up to London on that fateful day at the end of March. Two hours before he was due to leave the professor’s secretary had phoned to say David Solomon had flu and they had postponed the meeting.

      So why had he gone out anyway? She remembered his smile, his mysterious wink as he tapped his nose, his last words ‘I won’t be long’. He hadn’t taken the painting with him after all, and obviously he wasn’t going to meet David Solomon, so where was he going? The question had circled endlessly round in her head. For a while she had wondered if he had gone to buy her birthday present. That might have explained the wink. But that would have meant he had died on a trip to do something for her and she couldn’t live with that thought. Her birthday had come and gone only days after the crash and she had tried to put the idea out of her head. She would never know now.

      The professor had written to her several weeks later with his condolences and had suggested that one day, when she was ready, perhaps he could come down and view the portrait here at the gallery. She had not replied, though she suspected Robin had.

      Dear Robin. She must start taking control of her life again. It had to go on. And she had to face the fact that almost certainly she could no longer afford him; probably no longer afford to go on running the gallery even with the bursary to back up her income. Glancing into the mirror on the wall by the door she sighed. She had lost a lot of weight over the last three months. Her face, always thin with high angular cheekbones, was positively haggard, her dark eyes enormous in contrast to her pale skin. She had raked her long straight dark brown hair back into an unflattering ponytail which Larry would have hated.

      The studio was in darkness, the blinds pulled down over the north-facing skylight windows. The room ran the full depth of the house front to back and the front windows looked out over the street below. She pulled the blinds up allowing the clear north light to flood in at the back, and resolutely she faced the easel. Evelyn Lucas, if it was indeed her, had painted herself sitting perched on a farm gate. She was young, perhaps in her early twenties, and dressed in fawn jodhpurs with a blue sweater knotted round her shoulders over a blue and white gingham shirt, her honey-blond hair loose and wild in the wind. She had dark blue eyes which looked straight out of the portrait, eyes which were engaging, challenging even, daring the viewer to do, what?

      At the corner of the painting, a patch of sky with torn grey clouds and fragments of blue behind her shoulder, there was a clean area where Laurence had started to remove some of the grime which covered the surface. Lucy moved closer and stared at the corner. There had to be something there he had spotted which had caught his attention and made him doubt the picture’s provenance. But what?

      ‘You OK?’ Robin’s voice behind her made her jump. He was standing in the doorway. She hadn’t heard him let himself into the gallery below.

      She nodded. ‘Do you know what it was Larry saw here which made him think it wasn’t an Evelyn Lucas after all?’

      Robin came to stand beside her. ‘No idea.’

      They gazed at the painting in silence for several seconds. That it was of Evelyn had been almost beyond doubt. There were photos of her on the record and she certainly looked extraordinarily like them. Lawrence had picked up the painting at an auction only a few weeks before his death. It had been catalogued as ‘Portrait of Unknown Woman’, but when he brought it home in triumph he told Lucy that he suspected that it might be a missing Lucas from the early 1940s. It was being sold by the executors of an old lady who had died without close heirs and its past was, as far as he knew, a mystery. In Larry speak, he took a punt and bought it for a song.

      Robin folded his arms and squinted at it. ‘Whoever painted it, I think it’s lovely.’

      She smiled. ‘So do I.’

      Robin glanced at her. ‘Sure you’re OK?’

       ‘Why go out if the professor has cancelled?’ she had begged. She hated it when he went away on his own. But he had insisted he had to go out. And he had refused to let her go with him.

       When the police knocked on the door a few hours after he had left she didn’t believe them. What was he doing on a remote lane on the way to Petersfield? Why had he turned off the main road? Where had he been going?

      They never found out exactly what had happened. He had skidded, that much was clear from the tyre tracks, and there was evidence that another car had been in collision with his, but the fire damage had been too great to discover much more. He had probably been killed by the impact with the first tree. No other vehicle had shown up on the database with damage which would correlate to the paint marks which had survived. It was black, and probably a Ford. How many black Fords were there in the south of England? Lucy did not care. No amount of forensic evidence would bring Larry back, her perfect, adored, talented husband.

      She turned away from the painting and looked at Robin. Short, plump, slightly balding and with the biggest and best smile of anyone she had ever known, Robin Cassell had been her mainstay and her rock for the last three months. When Larry was alive he had come in to run the gallery two or three mornings a week to allow them some time in the studio and the freedom to go to auctions and on buying trips around the country. When the gallery reopened three weeks after Larry’s funeral it had been at Robin’s suggestion, and he had started coming in every day. ‘Just until you are back on your feet,’ he had said, giving her a hug.

      Guessing at her cash flow problem – neither her parents, nor Larry’s were in a position to help her financially – and knowing Larry had made no will, he had refused to let her pay him. But that situation could not go on. However much he wanted to help her she could not let him continue to work for nothing. He didn’t need the money; he was, as he mockingly put it, a trust fund kid, which meant he had inherited a large house from his parents which had been sold for development. Besides that, he worked СКАЧАТЬ