Читать книгу The Darkest Hour - Barbara Erskine - Страница 17

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?’

Her voice sounded hollow and hesitant. It held no conviction.

There was no reply.

So, 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.