The Darkest Hour. Barbara Erskine

since Ralph was not the fair-haired young man in the painting, was he her dream, her ghost, the shadowed, enigmatic figure she had seen in her bedroom, not a part of this composition at all, but still around, off stage, an éminence grise, a restless spirit? The man in the shadows? And if that was true, why had he appeared now? What was it he wanted to say? And was he haunting her, or was he haunting Evelyn?

      She found herself wishing desperately yet again that Larry was there, that she could talk to him, discuss the painting with him, share her compulsion to find out who this man was and how he fitted into Evelyn’s life, and above all to feel safe, nestled in her husband’s strong arms. She glanced back at the painting one last time, then, shivering, she turned off the lights and closed the door on the studio. That night she slept on the sofa in the living room, wrapped in Larry’s old red dressing gown.

       August 13th 1940

      ‘But why are you so cross?’ Eddie seemed to find Evie’s fury funny. ‘There’s no harm done. You were going to work up the picture on canvas anyway. It was only a bit of dust.’

      ‘He headed towards me deliberately. Nobody else came near me.’

      ‘Maybe he was just the last one in and had to leave his plane at the end of the line.’ He laughed again, putting his arm round her shoulder and giving her a quick hug. ‘You said he apologised.’

      ‘He thought it was a joke. Some of these boys are so arrogant!’ She almost stamped her foot.

      ‘They are fighting a war, Evie,’ he said gently. ‘I think they are entitled to be a little arrogant sometimes. Maybe he just didn’t see you sitting there on your little oil drum.’

      ‘That’s what he said.’

      ‘Well then.’

      She wriggled free of his arm and went over to the table, studying her sketchbook with a concentrated frown. ‘I saw a plane crash today. It went down in flames right there on the edge of the airfield. The pilot was killed. He had no chance to bail out.’

      Eddie sighed. ‘It’s happening everywhere, Evie. You know that.’

      ‘But there, right in front of me.’ She looked up at him. ‘It was an enemy plane. I should be pleased.’

      He pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘He’s still a human being. You wouldn’t be you, Evie, if you were dancing with glee. But if it hadn’t been him, he would have shot down one of our boys, we both know that. Maybe more than one. Your young friend from this afternoon perhaps.’

      She glared at him. ‘I suppose so.’ She looked back at her sketchbook. ‘You’d better go, Eddie. I’ve got to help Mummy downstairs and then if I’ve got time I’ll come up and do some more work here.’

      ‘If?’ he said, with not altogether mock indignation. ‘You’d better find some time. I’ve got an investment in these pictures, don’t forget.’

      It was dark outside by the time she returned to her makeshift studio. She made sure the blackout was secure then switched on the lights, flooding the table with cold white light.

      She reached for her pencil. Since the incident on the airfield with the young pilot she had been itching to draw him, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she had even noticed his golden good looks. The sketchbook lay open at her drawings of the crashed Hurricane in the middle of the airfield, the smoking shell of the Messerschmitt beyond the hedge. She folded the page back and looked down at the clean new sheet in front of her. They had started limiting the size of newspapers the year before, but so far there had been no more mention of paper rationing. Even so, she was going to have to be careful not to waste a single piece.

      His insolence, that was what she remembered most clearly, his cheeky smile, the sparkling blue eyes, the wild hair springing up as he pulled off his helmet and goggles.

      ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ he had said and she had let fly. Instead of smiling and welcoming him to Sussex she had called him a selfish inconsiderate clod and probably more besides. She couldn’t remember.

      Her hand hesitated over the paper as she ran through in her head the things she had said and she blushed; here alone in the empty studio, she blushed at the memory. Why? Why had she been so angry and why so rude when for all she knew, as Eddie had just reminded her so sanctimoniously, the young man was quite possibly about to die for his country.

      Tony. She remembered his name too. ‘Hi, I’m Tony.’ And he had held out his hand.

      ‘Thanks a lot, Tony. You’ve ruined a day’s work, Tony. Why did you have to taxi up here instead of down to the other end of the line, Tony?’

      She had seen his face fall. He had been the one to blush. Then mercifully for them both someone had yelled his name from the Nissen hut behind them and he had raised his shoulders, then his hands, in a gesture of surrender. ‘Sorry,’ he had said and he had turned away.

      And now she could picture every detail of his face in her mind, every freckle, every stray corkscrew spring of his curly hair, every quirk of his mouth.

      With an exclamation of impatience she leaned forward over the table, her elbow on the page itself as if to hold it in place and she began to draw with swift sure strokes of the soft pencil.

      Sunday 7th July

      ‘I can’t find her card.’ Mike Marston was rummaging through the pile of post and papers on the kitchen table at Rosebank Cottage.

      ‘Whose?’ Charlotte was arranging some flowers in a blue pottery vase.

      ‘The woman who wants to write about Evie. She gave me her card. God, what was her name? Why do I keep forgetting it?’ He lifted a pile of magazines off a chair and looked under it. ‘I hope Dolly hasn’t thrown it out.’

      ‘Dolly never throws anything out,’ Charlotte commented tartly. ‘If she did we might have a bit more room.’ She rammed a vivid blue stem of delphinium into the vase.

      Mike stood up and watched her for a moment, amused. ‘You don’t have to attack the poor flowers. You’ll find they surrender quite easily if you push them in gently.’

      She swore under her breath. ‘They might surrender to you. They are out to get me! I am not the domesticated type, or hadn’t you noticed?’

      ‘I’d noticed.’ He laughed.

      She glanced up at him suspiciously. ‘You sounded as though you meant that.’

      ‘I did.’

      There was a split second’s silence. He reached over and touched her hand. ‘I don’t go out with you for your domestic skills, Charley, and you know it!’ He caught her fingers as she reached for a rose and swore. ‘You can snip off the thorns, you know. Then you won’t get pricked.’

      She sighed. ‘So, who taught you that? I know. Don’t tell me. Evie. Right?’

      He gave a rueful nod. ‘She loved flowers.’

      She found the card on the dresser propped against a jar of peppercorns and for a moment she held it in her hand, staring down at it, studying the small sketch of the shop front, the elegant italic script, the name The Standish Gallery, and on the back the name, hand-scrawled in ballpoint. Lucy Standish. Her brow was furrowed in thought. He was looking the other way. She could drop it down the back of the line of old cookery books and it would be gone forever. She pictured the woman’s shadowed, melancholy face and straight dark hair and gave a small satisfied smile. Was there any danger? None at all.

      ‘Mike.’

      He looked up and she held out her hand. He grinned and took the card. ‘Glad one of us is organised.’ He reached for the phone. She watched as he waited for the call to connect and registered by the slight slump of