The Darkest Hour. Barbara Erskine

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the cottage, were left to my cousin.’

      Charlotte found herself wandering round the room fingering the furnishings and picking up ornaments, deliberately putting them down in different places, well aware that next time Dolly came in she would return them to their original arrangements, exactly as Evie had left them years before. Bloody Evie! This could be such a pretty cottage without her malign influence hanging over everything. Ideally they should take everything out into the garden and burn it. Mike would never agree, of course.

      She looked at the various bits of furniture. Perhaps instead she could persuade Mike to store it in the studio, to allow them to go and buy some really beautiful modern bits, choosing them together, changing the whole feel of the place. That would be a start. Who knew? Maybe that would be enough. He would begin to see the place as theirs rather than Evie’s. She smiled. Maybe it was time to begin dropping hints that dusty chintz and threadbare rugs were not the way they wanted to start life together.

      ‘Mike!’ she called now. ‘Mike, I’ve had an idea.’ She went through to the bathroom and perched on the edge of the old chipped roll-top bath. Part of her made a mental note to find out about re-enamelling as she bent to drop a kiss on Mike’s forehead as he lay, knees bent almost to his chin, eyes closed.

      ‘I’ve had a wonderful idea. Why don’t we do some sorting out? I’ll help you. Go through the house and put all Evie’s stuff out in the studio. Then you can get your widow woman to sort through it all. It will give her whatever it is she wants and give you some space to call your own. This is such a small house!’

      She paused, holding her breath, trailing a finger through the foam on the bath water, then as the silence became intolerable she bent to kiss him on the mouth. With a shout of laughter he grabbed her and pulled her into the bath on top of him, slopping water all over the floor.

      It was a long time later as they lay naked on the bed, watching the light leach out of the evening that he answered her question.

      ‘You know, that might be a good idea. I do feel a bit overpowered by Evie when I’m here. It is still so much her house,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘She can keep the studio. That seems fair. But you are right. She is swamping me. Why don’t I ring Lucy Standish next weekend and tell her she can start as soon as she likes. If she is here during the week when we are in town we needn’t see her or get in each other’s hair.’

      It was only later he wondered what Dolly Davis would think of the plan.

       August 10th 1940

      Enemy planes had been attacking since dawn. As Ralph’s squadron scrambled for the third time in quick succession he felt his head throbbing with the strain. His stomach lurched as it always did with a lethal cocktail of excitement, adrenaline and good old-fashioned nerves. The ground crews had prepared the aircraft in record time, checking for damage, refuelling, rearming, restarting the engines ready to go. His own rigger and fitter were there, the men who kept his Spitfire flying. He acknowledged their smiles, their thumbs up; there was nothing for him to do but grab his Mae West and helmet, hop up onto the wing, slide into the seat, buckle up, and thrust the throttle forward as the planes swiftly taxied out, turned one after the other into wind, thundering across the airfield and up into the sky. He adored this moment, the feel of the joystick in his hands, the exhilaration of flying the small, fast, single-seater fighter, hearing the throaty roar of the powerful Rolls Royce Merlin engine. As always he felt a sudden expansive rush of joy as the wheels folded neatly into place and locked and the thrill as one after another the planes climbed swiftly up and away.

      He heard the squadron leader’s voice crackle in his ear. ‘Squadron airborne.’

      Concentrating on his place in the formation, he gently corrected his position every now and then, relaxing slightly, allowing himself to enjoy the skill and the plane. Another crackle and this time it was Control. ‘One hundred and fifty plus bandits approaching at angels twelve, vector one twenty. Over.’

      Angels. Ralph gave a grim smile. Every thousand feet an angel. Who thought that one up? He hoped he would not one day find out. He felt his stomach tighten. Higher and higher still. Time to turn on the oxygen. Ahead he could see them now, a cloud of black dots, getting ever larger, rank on rank of them, fighter aircraft escorting the serried lines of bombers. Mainly Dornier with Messerschmitt in attendance by the look of things and here was he, one of a squadron of only twelve planes. But they could do it. They would be joined by other squadrons from other airfields and they would chase the bastards away.

      They would.

      He was feeling cold now, and icily calm.

      And then they were amongst the enemy.

      ‘Break! Break!’ The shouted order came over the RT. None of them needed telling. Forget the careful formation. From now on it was every man for himself. His thumb on the gun button, Ralph soared in pursuit of an enemy plane, aware only of his target as he threaded his way through the hundreds of speeding dodging spiralling aircraft, watching forward, port, starboard, above, below, behind.

      Far below in the farmyard Rachel Lucas paused, as she pegged out her line of washing, gazing up into the distance. She could hear the bombs exploding over towards Southampton; the ack ack guns on the ground. Watching the sky she was aware of the scream of engines, the stuttering roar of machine guns, seeing tracer bullets streak across the sky, plumes of smoke. Men were dying up there. Boys, most of them. She saw a plane peel away from the action, trailing black smoke as it plummeted down, spinning out of control. Was it one of ours or one of theirs? Too far away to see. Either way she breathed a quiet prayer for a life snuffed out as the plane buried itself in a field somewhere in the Downs.

      Please God, keep Rafie safe; don’t let him die.

      Her brother had died in another war twenty-three years before. He had died far away in France; now they were having to watch their young men die here, in the sky, over their heads. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

      The airmen soon became used to the sight of the slim fair-haired girl in her slacks and linen shirt, a sweater hung around her neck or knotted round her waist. She had appeared two or three times now, leaving her old bicycle near one of the Nissen huts on the airfield which were used as crew rooms, or leaning against the wall of the old farmhouse, now the Officers’ Mess. Leaving her gas mask dangling from the handlebars, she carried no more than a sketchbook and soft pencils and charcoal or coloured crayons to work with. She drew the planes, the ground crew, the pilots. She was friendly and exchanged some repartee with the men, but always she was drawing, not allowing herself to be distracted. The War Artists Advisory Committee was very strict about who it chose for its official team of war artists, and stricter still about women. She knew that to win her place on that coveted programme she should be painting in factories or depicting the brave men and women of the town streets and the people getting on with life under the threat of invasion; but it was the planes that fascinated her and to compete with the male artists, to get herself on the commission’s list, she had to be twice as good as they were.

      Since Ralph had got her permission to sketch at the airfield, she would repair to the farmhouse attic which she and Rafie and her father had turned into a studio for her when she had returned from art school. It gave her somewhere to paint; somewhere to be on her own and now somewhere to concentrate on her work away from the bustle of the farm. They had made a skylight which was blacked out now in the evening, but rigged up with electric lights hanging from the rafters, fed by the generator in the shed, there was just about enough light to transform her sketches into paint.

      Her canvasses from college were stacked against the wall. Portraits mainly, though some were country СКАЧАТЬ