The Darkest Hour. Barbara Erskine

field almost in front of her. Evie jumped to her feet, heart in mouth, watching as the medics ran out with a stretcher, only to see the pilot extricate himself from his straps without help. He staggered from the plane, clutching at his arm, which hung uselessly at his side. He ran several steps, then stopped, swaying slightly, obviously disorientated, as the men with the stretcher reached him.

      It was several seconds before, automatically, she reached again for her sketchbook. But her hand was shaking too much to draw.

      She was still sitting there, stunned, when the promised new squadron appeared, circling the airfield in formation, their engines thundering deafeningly overhead. Fifteen Spitfires landed one after the other, coming to rest at last under the trees near the Nissen huts. The engines cut out, leaving the airfield eerily silent but for the distant song of a skylark.

      Friday 5th July

      The nights after her strange experience were hard for Lucy. Robin suggested he and Phil come and stay with her again but she refused. ‘I have to learn to be here on my own,’ she said stubbornly. ‘If you come again I will want you here every night. I have to face it. I was scared, but nothing happened. He was just a shadow. He wasn’t threatening. He was probably a dream or just my imagination.’ She looked straight at Robin and gave a faint smile.

      Noticing the defiant challenge in her eyes he said nothing to contradict her. ‘Brave girl!’ he said.

      What she hadn’t told him was that she couldn’t get the man’s face out of her head. His shadowy presence was in a way more real to her than the solid cheery figure in the painting. He had appeared for a reason. He was a link to Evelyn and he must have been trying to tell her something. Surely, if he had failed to get his message across wasn’t he likely to come again?

      The gallery had been busy but she used the occasional pauses between customers to rough out the outline of the book she was going to write about Evelyn, filling in the very few details she had been able to scrounge from the information that was out there in catalogues and on the Net. A whole week had gone by since she had seen Michael Marston and still she had heard nothing from him. At first optimistic that he would get in touch she wondered now if he ever would. Had he promised to help just to get her out of the door? It increasingly felt as though that was exactly what he had done. But if he didn’t intend to help her, where did she go from here?

      Putting her ghostly visitor firmly out of her mind she went over her meeting with Michael one more time in her head.

      Had he given her any material she could work with, at least as a start? She went into the studio and stood in front of the picture. Michael had mentioned a farm where Evelyn had spent her childhood and he had implied that he would give her the address. There had to be some way of finding that out herself, but in the meantime, was there some way that she could identify it from the painting?

      She dragged her eyes away from the faces in the portrait and this time concentrated instead on the landscape. The gate, the sky, the skyline. Was there a clue there which she could unravel, assuming it been painted on Evelyn’s parents’ farm? There was nothing to distinguish the gate. It was a five-barred wooden farm gate shaded with grey lichen and a mound of soft pale moss. No clue there. Nothing special. But the skyline? The silhouette of the Downs. Would she be able to find someone who recognised that? If it was a favourite place, a real place, then possibly; if it was imaginary then obviously it would mean nothing. But Evelyn painted real places. She painted the Downs she loved and the landscape around her home, that much one could tell from the paintings Lucy had seen in the catalogues, so there was a possibility that the place was identifiable.

      What else had Michael said? He had mentioned Evelyn’s brother, Ralph, who was a fighter pilot.

      She looked back at the face of the young man behind Evelyn in the portrait. She was sure her initial impression must be right, that this young man was a lover. The touch of his hand on the shoulder, the expression in his eyes, both were too tender, too intimate to be the love of a brother and sister. She squinted at the painting again. It was strange how the expressions of the two faces seemed to change from one moment to the next. Perhaps that was the sign of a great portrait. Or was it just the change of light?

      Whoever it was, at least she had one name. Ralph Lucas. So she would start with Ralph.

       August 13th 1940

      Tony Anderson had finished training in June. After the fall of France, Churchill had ordered that all trainee pilots be sent straight to squadrons and Tony found himself heading back to Edinburgh where until very recently he had been a law student in his third year. His first posting was, to his great delight, a Spitfire squadron based at Drem, some dozen or so miles from the city, and there he spent another two months training on active duty and getting to know the men who soon became his friends. On August 12th, the squadron discovered that it had been posted. They were to go to Sussex where the Battle of Britain was under way.

      There was heavy cloud over most of the country and they flew well above it, stopping only once to refuel. As they neared the south coast the cloud began to break up at last and sunlight illuminated the landscape beneath them. Tony felt his heart lift. The most surreal moment had come as they approached London, seeing nothing of the city but an enormous number of barrage balloons poking up out of the heavy cloud.

      ‘Something going on over to our left, chaps.’ Tony heard the CO’s voice crackle in his ear as they began to lose height. Tony squinted round and saw the planes in the distance. Dozens of them all over the place, criss-crossing the sky. ‘No chance for us to have a crack at them this time. We’re too low on fuel. Let’s just get there safely for now; we’ll soon get our chance.’

      From the air he could see the Sector Airbase at Tangmere and then Westhampnett, so close it was almost next door. The latter seemed to be no more than a large field, without any runways. He could see a couple of Nissen huts, a windsock, a bowser and a few concrete hard standings around the perimeter and a line of trees. In the middle of the airfield a Hurricane lay on its back; behind the hedge he could see the wreckage of another plane amidst a heavy pall of black smoke. He felt a little kick of excitement under his ribs. This was it. They were now in the thick of the action.

      He took his turn to land, taxiing in towards the trees and came to a standstill. As he pulled off his helmet and slid back the cockpit’s canopy the last thing he had expected to see was a beautiful girl standing in front of him, sketchbook in one hand, pencil in the other, and a ferocious scowl on her face.

      Friday 5th July, late

      Downstairs in the gallery Lucy made her way to the back of the long narrow ground floor room which was their exhibition space. The gallery area had two windows, at the rear a tall narrow casement overlooking the small garden and at the front a bowed picture window onto the street which at present was lit by two spotlights focused on a bronze heron standing on a black dais. There was still light in the sky outside, late though it was, but the room itself was dark. She turned the lamp on in the small office area at the back, where an antique desk sat on an oriental rug between two comfortable leather armchairs. Sitting down at the desk she fired up the computer.

      Threading her way through the usual entries offering to find Ralph Lucas on Facebook, to contact Ralph Lucases on several different continents, to establish their position in a dozen Lucas family trees, none of them relevant, to sell to them and to buy from them and even to provide their phone number, she found the right one at last. The entry was pitifully short.

       Ralph James Lucas, Fighter Pilot (260 squadron, Spitfires) born 1919, died 1940

      Lucy sat back. Twenty-one. Evelyn’s brother had only been twenty-one when he died.

      There was no other information that she could find.

      Taking a deep breath she turned off the computer and the light and went slowly upstairs.

      Pushing the studio door open, she stood there, staring at the painting once more.

      ‘Ralph?’