The Darkest Hour

by Barbara Erskine

  Evie stared at her. ‘Mummy, it’s Tony’s baby.’

  ‘No.’ Rachel shook her head. ‘No, it isn’t. It’s Eddie’s. You’ve always loved Eddie. You‘ll have to marry him before your father finds out. It would kill him, Evie, if he thought you were going to have a baby out of wedlock. You know it would!’ Her mother’s voice was bordering on the hysterical.

  Evie stared at her. ‘But it’s Tony’s. Eddie and I haven’t been together for months.’

  ‘Then you had better put that right.’ Rachel stood up. She was almost spitting now. ‘Your father must not find out about this, do you hear me? It would kill him. You cannot do this to him, Evie. Not after Rafie –’ As always after the mention of Ralph’s name she dissolved into tears. She took a deep breath. ‘You cannot inflict a bastard child on this family, Evie. You can’t. Tony has gone. He abandoned you. He didn’t care what happened to you, did he? He couldn’t even pick up the phone to say goodbye.’ She was sobbing loudly. ‘You must marry Eddie. Then everything will be all right. I will not have you bring this family’s name into disrepute.’

  ‘But I could still marry Tony. I could contact him somehow, I’m sure I could.’ Even as she protested Evie knew it was no use. He had flown back to Scotland without a word. She had been nothing but a passing amusement just as Eddie had said.

  Christmas came and went almost unnoticed.

  Friday 30th August

  ‘Don’t you see, she sent someone to steal the painting.’ Christopher was standing in Mike’s London flat. Mike had only returned from Rosebank a few hours before. ‘It all fits. Someone was there by invitation. My father let them in, then at some point there was a struggle. The police believe the painting was damaged in a fight. Dad had opened the door normally when he came back from the opera and switched off the alarm. The records show that, and exactly when he did it. It was very late, but still he let whoever it was in. He must have been expecting them. The police think someone brought the painting down on Dad’s head. Perhaps he tried to snatch it back from them.’

  ‘That is completely illogical,’ Mike said. ‘Why destroy the thing you have come to steal?’

  ‘Because he fought back, because he changed his mind. Who knows? Lucy Standish had been to see my father that afternoon. She knew he had more paintings. She knew they were worth a fortune.’

  ‘Have the police confirmed the cause of death?’ Mike was leaning with one shoulder against the wall of the hallway. He had not asked Christopher to come into the sitting room. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He was exhausted and fed up, sick at the mess he had found at Rosebank, furious that he had to return to London for a meeting which could not be missed, and above all cross that he had opened the door to Christopher.

  ‘They think it was a heart attack.’

  ‘But what about head injuries if someone smashed a painting over his head?’

  ‘There appear to be no signs of a head injury. But he was hit by the canvas. That would not necessarily have left a mark.’

  ‘If the impact was hard enough to tear the canvas surely the stretchers would have injured him? What about fingerprints?’

  ‘He wore gloves.’

  ‘You mean there were no prints?’

  ‘No.’ Christopher glared at him. ‘I’m not suggesting this woman did it herself. She must have employed someone professional and it all went wrong.’

  ‘Obviously.’ Mike let his scepticism show.

  ‘Have you seen her since this happened?’

  ‘Lucy? Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what? She didn’t say, “Oh, Mike, I tried to steal some of your uncle’s paintings and it all went wrong and I killed him,” if that is what you are waiting to hear. Far from it. She was gutted when she heard George was dead. He had promised her stories, anecdotes about his mother, family information about growing up with a great artist.’ Mike scowled. ‘Information that was vital and wonderful and unique to your father and she has lost that opportunity now. There is no way it can ever be recovered. She would have been mad to put all that in jeopardy. And he had promised her photos of all his paintings. He was proud of Evie and he wanted to share her with the world, unlike his son who appears to want to squirrel everything away forever like some Dickensian miser.’

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you!’

  ‘No, frankly I don’t.’

  Christopher heaved a deep sigh and, realising he was not going to be asked in any further, moved back towards the front door. ‘There is no more to be said then. I have told the police that they should treat Lucy as a suspect. No doubt they will be calling on her.’

  ‘They called on her the day after your father died,’ Mike said calmly. ‘You had already fingered her, I gather. Luckily she had an alibi.’

  Christopher sneered sarcastically. ‘For herself, maybe. For every contact she has in the shadier side of the art world? I doubt it.’ He pulled open the door. ‘I leave that to the police. Take care, Mike. Don’t be any more fooled by her than you have already. She is after everything she can get her hands on by whatever means.’

  Mike gave a cold smile. ‘Then I am in no danger, Chris, as you took everything of any value in the cottage. Maybe you are the one who should be careful.’

  It was only after he had watched Christopher walk away and cross the street that he wished he hadn’t made that last remark. It would make things, if anything, even more tricky for Lucy.

  23

  December 27th 1940

  It was easy to manoeuvre Eddie into taking her out to dinner. The house was a sea of misery, her mother barely able to drag herself to the kitchen to put on a kettle for the girls’ breakfasts. Eddie came and collected her and drove her to eat at The Spread Eagle in Midhurst. There was a roaring fire and they finished with plum pudding, which Evie found herself consuming ravenously. Eddie went out of his way to be charming and she relaxed in the warmth and the gentle background noise of conversation. For once he didn’t push her on the subject of her paintings and she found herself eyeing him thoughtfully. Would it be so bad to marry this man? After all, she had fancied him once. She sat back in her chair and sighed. But that had been before Tony. She frowned, unaware that he was studying her face. Tony had gone. He hadn’t cared. He hadn’t meant it when he had asked her to marry him. His gestures of everlasting love had meant nothing. She had loved him to distraction and she would, she knew, love him forever, but she had to forget him.

  ‘Evie?’ She realised Eddie was talking to her. ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded. ‘Just thinking.’

  He smiled sympathetically. ‘I know. It’s hard.’

  She bit her lip, suddenly afraid she would cry.

  When they returned to the farm the place was in darkness. From the direction of the tentative bark from Jez she guessed her father had locked the dogs in the stables. Evie pushed open the kitchen door and looked in.

  ‘Mummy and Daddy must have gone to bed.’ She pulled Eddie in and closed the door before switching on the light. Outside the generator rumbled into life. ‘Shall I make us some tea?’ She smiled at him.

  ‘I’ll get some more tea for your mother,’ he said as he sat down at the table. ‘I know it won’t help but running out would be the last straw.’

  Evie set the kettle on the stove. It was still hot. She reached for the coal bucket and filled it as the kettle began to hiss on the hotplate. ‘Will you stay tonight, Eddie,’ she said without looking at him. ‘It is so lonely here.’ The sob in her throat was genuine.

  He pushed back his chair and came to put his arm round her. ‘You know I will.’

  Monday 2nd September

  There was more damage in the studio at Rosebank than Lucy had suspected. When she returned she looked around in horror. In places the wall was blackened and scorched, a portfolio, luckily empty, had been badly burned and one of the chairs had been broken. ‘I couldn’t believe she would do such a thing,’ she said over her shoulder to Dolly.

  ‘It l
ooks as if she made several attempts to light it,’ Dolly said through pursed lips. ‘The woman is an evil witch.’

  Lucy glanced at her in surprise. ‘That’s strong language,’ she said with a gentle smile.

  ‘Oh, yes. And warranted.’ Dolly stooped to pick up a cushion which had fallen from one of the chairs. ‘The firemen came back to check everything was safe. They asked Mr Mike again if he wanted to prosecute but he said no. I think he told them she was a little bit unstable and maybe a bit drunk, which I gather was true.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘He had a call about some meeting in London and he had to go but he said I wasn’t to touch anything until you had had a look just in case, then I will clean it up once you say what you want to keep.’

  ‘But didn’t he want to check himself?’

  Dolly shook her head. ‘When he rang to ask me to come in today he said to leave it to you. He was very angry about what happened. I pity that Charlotte Thingy when he gets his hands on her.’

  Lucy hid a smile. ‘So do I,’ she murmured.

  She spent a long time in the studio after Dolly had opened the windows to try and get rid of the sour smell of burned wood and paper. The fire had somehow concentrated her mind. She had been working slowly, imagining she had as long as she liked to go through the archive but now, she realised, time might be short. There were too many people intent on stopping her telling Evie’s story and the story itself was becoming more and more convoluted and urgent. Over the last two days she had sat at the vicarage kitchen table and written down every single thing she could remember of her visit to George’s gallery. It was sad that so much of the precious time she had spent there had been taken up with telling him what she knew rather than her asking him for his story. But then neither of them had known that time had run out. Of course she didn’t know then either that Dolly had such a strong recollection of George as a boy. As they sat over some soup at lunchtime in the cottage kitchen she wrote down all Dolly’s memories of the young George and cross-checked them with the few snippets George had told her himself.

  One thing had stuck in her mind. ‘George told me that when he was little his brother John had told him he was adopted,’ she said cautiously. ‘The thought had always haunted him. Do you think that was true?’

  Dolly looked shocked. ‘No. No, Evie would have told me. He was born at Box Wood, like Johnny.’

  ‘And when she moved here you said she left George with his father.’

  ‘I doubt she had any choice. Her husband was a complete so-and-so.’

  ‘And George ran away from him?’

  Dolly nodded. ‘I do remember that. He arrived by himself one night, poor lamb. He had come on the train to Chichester and then made his way five miles across country with nothing but a haversack. Mr Edward came after him, of course, and he and Evie had a terrible quarrel.’

  Lucy waited a few seconds. ‘Which you overheard?’ she prompted.

  Dolly coloured slightly. ‘One could not have failed to.’

  ‘Can you tell me what they said?’

  Dolly shook her head vehemently. ‘There is nothing that you need to know. Just nastiness. On his part. He was a mean-spirited man and a bully. He left in the end and though I think he threatened to come back and to go to the courts and to drag George away by force, he never did. I believe he came back a few times to try and force her to give him some paintings but I’m sure she wouldn’t have done it. I don’t think she was frightened of him any more. George stayed here until he left school, and he still came back during the holidays when he was at college in Italy. He lived abroad a lot when he was younger. He met his wife in Rome. She was a sculptress, a lovely lady. They moved back to London quite near his father, in Hampstead, and Christopher was born in 1972. She died when Christopher was fifteen. Cancer.’ Dolly shuddered.

  Lucy was making notes. ‘And George stayed in London?’

  Dolly nodded. ‘He went to Italy a lot, with Christopher, then Christopher decided to study economics. I think that confused George. It wasn’t something he understood, but he supported him and encouraged him and then slowly they became estranged, I never quite understood why.’

  ‘He said it was because they inhabited different worlds,’ Lucy said thoughtfully, ‘which I suppose would be true, though it is sad if it came between them.’

  ‘I think Johnny had something to do with that,’ Dolly said after a long silence. She stood up and removed their plates, switching on the electric kettle before she sat down again. ‘Johnny resented his mother being so close to George. He didn’t like it that he had already left home when she bought this place. He was very angry when he heard George had run away from London and come here and Evie was going to let him live with her.’ She stood up again and began to make the coffee. ‘There was something very sad about Johnny. He loved his grandfather – both his grandfathers – and I think he would have loved to have been a farmer. He didn’t enjoy London. In some ways he was a lost soul.’ She sighed. ‘I liked Johnny very much. I liked them both. It broke Evie’s heart that they didn’t get on. And then there was Ralph.’

  ‘Ralph?’ Lucy echoed sharply.

  Dolly nodded. ‘Johnny was obsessed by him, the heroic uncle who had died before he was born. He used to say Ralph haunted him. He appeared to the boy in his dreams and talked to him.’ She shivered. ‘That used to give me the heebie-jeebies. And it terrified Evie. She couldn’t bear it when Johnny told her about it. She got so angry. She forbade him to mention it.’ She was pouring Lucy’s coffee and stopped suddenly. ‘What is it? What have I said?’

  January 6th 1941

  Evie wore a cream suit to her wedding, altered from a dress of her mother’s, and she carried a posy of snowdrops and winter aconite interspersed with small spikes of sweet box from the farm. There were some two dozen guests at the service in St Margaret’s, where such a short time before they had attended the memorial service for her brother. Her father took her up the aisle on his arm and handed her over to Eddie before walking back to stand beside his wife, his face like carved stone. On the other side of the church sat Eddie’s parents and his two sisters.

  As she repeated the age-old words of the marriage service Evie felt as if she were in a dream, but it wasn’t the dream of a blissful bride, it was a nightmare from which she would never wake up. This was all wrong. She should be standing beside Tony. Ralph should be the best man, not this stranger, smirking at her round Eddie’s shoulder, and her husband, standing at her side and placing the gold band on her finger, should be a laughing, blue-eyed pilot, not Eddie …

  She managed the responses somehow, her voice husky, her excuse of a heavy cold by now a reality as she clutched her handkerchief and dabbed at streaming eyes and reddened nose. She saw Eddie look at her and for a moment thought she saw disgust in his glance, but then he grinned and gave her hand a squeeze. She did her best to smile back.

  As they signed the register an air raid warning sounded in the far distance and the congregation exchanged uneasy glances as they listened to the wheezy notes of the organ, played, in the absence of the regular organist in the Navy, by the grandmother of Sally who ran the shop; Sally who had at the last moment rushed round some gardens in the village to collect several vases of honeysuckle and witch hazel, winter jasmine and hazel catkins to cheer the gloom of the grey stone church. No one could have expected Rachel to do it, not after losing her son, and Evie hadn’t been well, the whole village knew that. Sorry for the Lucases, and guessing something of their despair, Sally had determined that the church at least would look pretty. She succeeded. The sun had disappeared behind banks of cloud and raindrops were beginning to fall on the churchyard as Evie and Eddie made their way back down the aisle as husband and wife, and stood in the porch for photos, the scent of daphne from the rector’s garden filling the air around them. There were no rose petals for confetti, so two little girls from the village showered them with dried dead leaves.

  Afterwards the two families and their guests went back to Box Wood Farm and
ate the wedding cake, which Rachel, managing to shake off her apathy, had conjured from a recipe in one of her magazines. She smiled at her daughter as Evie and Eddie cut into it and everyone cheered. Evie, meeting her eye at last, managed to smile back. Dudley, for whom this ultimate sacrifice had been concocted, scowled once again at his new son-in-law and took himself outside to check on the cows.

  January 29th 1941

  The call came three weeks after the wedding. Rachel answered the phone and spoke to someone who announced themselves as ‘Tony Anderson’s friend, Jim, up in Prestwick’.

  ‘Eddie Marston’s mother gave me your number. I’m one of his ground crew, but Tony was a mate as well, and I know he would have wanted Eddie to know if anything happened.’

  Rachel froze. ‘If anything happened?’ she echoed

  ‘I’m sorry. He flew out yesterday testing a Mark Two. He didn’t return.’

  Rachel’s hand tightened round the receiver. She couldn’t speak.

  ‘Will you tell Eddie?’ the voice went on.

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ she whispered.

  She was still sitting in the hall when Dudley came in, stamping snow off his boots in the kitchen. ‘Rachel?’ He could see her through the door and stopped in his tracks, struck by her stillness. He went to her, his face tight with anxiety. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Tony.’ She said. ‘He’s missing.’

  ‘Tony?’ Dudley stood, his hands in his pockets. ‘And why did they feel they had to tell us?’ He was furious suddenly. They had no business upsetting Evie again, bringing it all back, reminding her of Ralph so soon.

  ‘I expect they thought it was a kindness,’ she stammered. ‘Evie loved him so much.’

  Dudley frowned. ‘Not enough, obviously. Anyway, Tony is in the past. Don’t even mention it to her.’