The Darkest Hour. Barbara Erskine

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 them amused all day.’

      Lucy smiled. ‘I can imagine. It looks very inviting.’

      Where was Evie? Where were the echoes, the memories, the hints of the room’s artistic past? The beams were still there but the walls between the stud framing of the roof were a pale blue, the floor had been sanded and sealed to a golden tan and the windows and skylights had new wooden frames with locks on their elegant ironwork latches.

      ‘I don’t suppose Evie haunts this house?’ Lucy asked tentatively. Or Ralph, she added silently. Why was it she felt compelled to ask that wherever she went? She softened the question with a rueful smile, implying that she was joking.

      To her astonishment Elizabeth nodded, her face suddenly taut with anxiety. ‘It is strange you should ask. We have often wondered. There are footsteps sometimes, you know, and Georgie, that’s my eldest grandson, who was about seven at the time, said he could smell paint up here. Can you smell paint?’ She held Lucy’s gaze for a moment. ‘No. Neither can I, but occasionally Georgie says it was very strong and oily. We took him to an art shop and he identified the smell as oil paint. None of us is artistic so he wouldn’t have smelled it here, and the house itself was redecorated a while ago and anyway house paint smells nothing like oil paint.’

      Lucy felt a jolt of unease deep in the pit of her stomach. ‘No one is afraid, though?’ she asked cautiously.

      There was a moment’s silence. ‘Not of the smell, no.’ Elizabeth put her hand up to the necklace she was wearing over her cotton sweater and twisted it nervously. She had moved away from her visitor and was standing by the train track staring down at it as if lost in thought. I’m often alone here,’ Elizabeth went on at last. ‘My husband travels a lot.’ She paused, as if regretting that she had said too much.

      Lucy hesitated. ‘My husband died a few months ago,’ she said at last. ‘I know how it feels, being alone.’

      ‘My dear, I’m sorry.’ Elizabeth looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. ‘So you understand. He’s supposed to have retired but he runs a consultancy, advising people on buying overseas properties, and,’ she hesitated for a moment, then continued softly, ‘when I am here by myself, at night, sometimes I think I can hear people in the house. It is a big house for one person.’ She gave an awkward smile. ‘When it is full of family and children and my daughter’s dogs it comes alive, then it belongs to us. But when I am by myself I am sure it still belongs to the Lucases. They were here for generations, you know.’

      For a moment Lucy was stunned. ‘But you said there were other families here in between,’ she said at last.

      ‘Yes. And of course it could have been them.’ Elizabeth shook her head. ‘But it isn’t. Evie’s brother was killed, you know, in the Battle of Britain. There’s a memorial to him in the village church. I think his mother went mad with grief.’

      Lucy held her breath, staring at her in horror, intensely aware of the silence around them.

      ‘I hear her crying,’ Elizabeth went on almost under her breath. ‘I tell myself it’s the wind in the chimneys, perhaps an owl screaming into the night, but it isn’t. It’s Rachel. I sometimes think I can’t bear it.’ She gave a small wistful smile. ‘I’m sorry, my dear. You must think I’m ga-ga.’

      ‘How do you know it’s Rachel?’ Lucy asked at last. Her voice was husky.

      ‘I just know.’ It was a whisper. She shuddered. ‘Let’s go downstairs. Do you mind? I’ll make us some tea. Then you must see the outbuildings.’ Suddenly her voice was stronger. ‘They were all farm buildings in Evie’s day and I think you’ll see they have probably changed much less than the house has. In fact I doubt if they have changed in hundreds of years. The land itself is all owned by a huge company now. There is a farm manager who lives on an estate the other side of Chichester.’

      Lucy followed Elizabeth down the two flights of stairs back into the kitchen. While they waited for the kettle to boil on the Aga Elizabeth disappeared into the old-style