The Darkest Hour. Barbara Erskine

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СКАЧАТЬ All temporary leave had been stopped. Ralph telephoned home once or twice to reassure his mother, but patrols were constant and the pilots were becoming increasingly exhausted. There was no word from Tony.

      Since she was a child Evie had kept her diary under her mattress. She did not think her mother would snoop in her bedroom but she was not taking any chances, and especially not now with the new glorious secret which had overwhelmed her every waking second. She was in love, deeply and overwhelmingly in love. She could not get the thought of Tony out of her head. Everything she did on the farm, every moment she was awake she was thinking about him and at night she dreamed of him as well. And now, overwhelmed with worry, she hadn’t seen him to speak to for three days even though she had biked down to Westhampnett early and spent the whole day loitering round the airfield under the pretence of making sketches. No, not pretence. She was sketching but she had been distracted every few minutes by the possibility that he would appear. He had been declared fit to fly by the local doctor and was once again on operational standby. The squadrons were in constant action, flying out on sortie after sortie. Their lunchbreak never happened and tea was being made for them out in the dispersal huts with the WVS ladies taking their van over to them as they waited for refuelling. She saw Tony in the distance twice and each time he grinned at her and waved, but he was with the other pilots and she knew better than to interrupt or draw attention to herself.

      It was nearly six o’clock when Eddie drove down to the airfield, left his car by the gate and strolled in past the guard.

      ‘Evie?’ He stood beside her and looked over her shoulder at her sketch. It was rudimentary, concentrating on Tony, one face standing out amongst several others who were mere outlines. He made no comment. ‘Your mother asked me to come and fetch you,’ he said after a moment. She had not looked up to greet him ‘You are late for milking and she said you hadn’t done any of your chores today. She is worried.’

      Evie scowled. ‘I’ll come back when I’ve finished this.’

      ‘No, now, Evie. It’s late.’ Eddie saw the guard from the perimeter gate heading his way and groaned. ‘Now they are going to tell me off for coming in here. The security is appalling on this airfield. I should make a complaint to higher authorities. Only that would stop you coming down here too.’

      Evie looked up at the implied threat. ‘You wouldn’t.’

      ‘I don’t want to.’ He sighed. There was no point in putting her back up even further by mentioning his feelings about her visits down here to sketch Tony. ‘Come on, Evie.’

      ‘I didn’t realise the time. I’ll collect my bike.’

      ‘Leave it. It will be perfectly safe. I’ll run you back to save time.’

      ‘No!’ Evie snapped. ‘I’ll come when I’ve finished.’ She didn’t want to speak to Eddie. She didn’t want to see Eddie. She wished she had never made love to him. If it wasn’t for his role in furthering her career, she would tell him to go away and never come back. Whatever she had felt for him in the past was nothing compared to what she felt for Tony. Her whole body yearned for the young airman in a way she had never experienced before. She was overwhelmed with longing. In contrast the thought of getting into the car with Eddie was suddenly repugnant to her.

      Eddie leaned across her and took the sketchbook and pencil out of her hand. ‘You will come now, Evie. I promised your mother.’ He frowned at her as she rounded on him.

      ‘No!’

      He held up his hand before she could protest, his temper barely in check. ‘Have you any idea just how worried she gets when you are down here? You are in danger every second you are here. The Germans aim for the airfields, you know. I am amazed the CO lets you come here at all. Your mother is frantic about your safety. She doesn’t say anything because she knows you want to do your bit for the war effort, but you owe it to her to come home when you say you will. It is bad enough for her to have to worry about Ralph all day every day, up there.’ He gestured towards the clouds where a dozen or so planes were circling ever higher, small black dots heading suddenly towards the horizon as a message from ground control sent them on the right vector to encounter the enemy.

      She slumped back onto her seat on the old oil drum which had become her favoured perch. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’

      He smiled at her ‘No, well, you have now. So let’s get back and put her out of her misery at least as far as you are concerned, OK?’

      Wednesday 17th July

      Dolly had given Lucy the address of the Lucas farm and the following afternoon Lucy drove the half dozen or so miles to the village of Chilverly, taut with anticipation. Pausing in the village to squint at her road map she turned the car up a narrow lane on the far side of the village and drove the few hundred yards to the gate at the end. There she parked and climbed out. Box Wood Farm. Evie’s parents’ farm, the home Evie had known for so much of the early years of her life. And Ralph’s home too. She shivered. She stood for a moment on the gravelled driveway studying the front of the building, aware of a sudden lump in her throat. It was a lovely traditional farmhouse, lying in the golden sunshine in a gentle basin in the Downs, the upper storeys white-painted and timber-framed, the ground floor a soft terracotta, built with ancient lichen-stained bricks. It had been separated from its land many years earlier, Mike had mentioned, and now boasted only an acre of beautiful gardens and an orchard, but, beyond the gardens, the downland fields were still populated with sheep as they must have been in Evie’s day, the short-cropped grasses interspersed here and there with patches of woodland. The front of the house was curtained with wisteria and the door decorated with urns full of geraniums and variegated ivies. Overhead swallows were threading the air with high-pitched twitterings as they swooped overhead much as they had done in Evie’s day.

      The door opened and a tall, thin woman appeared on the steps. ‘Lucy Standish?’

      Lucy took a deep breath and smiled. She walked forward, hand outstretched. ‘Mrs Chappell? Thank you so much for agreeing to let me come.’

      Elizabeth Chappell was older than she had first appeared, nearer seventy than fifty, Lucy guessed, but her fine bones and English rose complexion gave her a glow of youth which Lucy doubted she would lose even in her eighties or nineties. She followed her through into a large elegant kitchen and stared round.

      Elizabeth smiled. ‘A farmhouse kitchen, which it really was when we bought the house. The place was a tip. We didn’t buy it from Evelyn Lucas of course. There had been at least two other owners in the intervening years, but I like to think she would recognise it again now.‘

      Lucy looked round at the butler’s sink, the dark green, four-oven Aga, the handmade cabinets, and secretly doubted if Evie would have recognised it at all. She knew Evie’s kitchen at Rosebank Cottage and she didn’t think this elegance was Evie’s thing. But then it would have been Evie’s mother’s kitchen in those days and she didn’t know anything about Rachel. Not yet. There was no mention of her in the letters so far, no clues as to what Rachel was like at all. She had only discovered Evie’s parents’ names from an offhand remark of Mike’s and then in Dolly’s helpful little list.

      It was rather like being shown round by a house agent. Elizabeth Chappell gave her the whole tour, room by room, finishing at last in the attic.

      ‘I understand this was Evelyn’s studio,’ she said as they went in. It had been laid out as a children’s playroom, complete with a model railway on the floor. ‘The grandchildren,’ Elizabeth said over her shoulder. ‘They live in London but they love coming down here. It keeps СКАЧАТЬ