My Heart Has Wings (13 page)

Listening to the rolling periods, Jan stifled a lurking feeling of uneasiness. Was it one of these mysterious windfalls” that had enabled him to
take Gerda to that ex
pensive night-club the other
night? Was he still
spending money on her?
S
he thrust the unworthy suspicion away from her. Surely, with the family finances in such a shaky state, he would not be
so ...
irresponsible. She
had trusted her father and looked up to him as long as she could remember. It was a habit t
h
at not even Gerda could seriously shake.

The weather broke completely that week, and Daker, recalled from the West Country aerodrome, mooned about the office, nervous and difficult, for ever studying meteorological reports. Mike remained at Merecombe with his team of mechanics. Daker had long telephone conversations with him daily, discussing minor adjustments to the E.106a. The cooling of the engines, Jan gathered, was not yet a hundred per cent satisfactory, and a slight alteration was being made in the structure of the airframe.

“This damned English climate,” Daker stormed at her one pouring wet afternoon. “It looks as though our so-called summer is over. If this adverse weather system doesn’t soon blow itself out it may be spring before we can launch the poor old E.106a.”

After their week of tense expectancy such an anti-climax would be unbearable. Jan racked her brains for words of comfort, and remarked soothingly that September was often the most perfect month for flying.

“There’s
no guarantee that it will be
this
year,” Daker growled at her, and stalked off to his own office,
s
lamming
the door behind him. Like a spoiled child. Were all geniuses inclined to be childish, Jan wondered, and for some reason found herself thinking of Erica. Brilliant, temperamental, unpredictable
...
very like Daker
.
That silly affair with Paleski. Quite forgotten now, apparently. She was forever rushing off to Merecombe in her small sports plane, her whole interest centred on Mike once more
...
working with him on the technical problems that beset him, Jan gathered; sharing with him in a very practical way the difficulties of these days of waiting. It was hard not to feel a little envious. To be able to do so many useful things for the person you loved
must be pretty wonderful! “Love is not enough.” Who was it that had said that? But Erica had so much besides love to give
...
wealth, beauty, charm
...
and a brilliance of brain that enabled her to share all Mike’s most vital interests.

Taking a sheaf of manuscript from a drawer in her desk, Jan gazed at it in awe. “A Survey of Aeronautics,” ran the heading. A thesis Erica had been working on for yet another degree. She’d brought it into the office a few mornings ago, wondering, with charming diffidence—and steely purpose—if she might have a couple of typed copies made. “Subsonic, Supersonic and Hypersonic Eras.” Reading the abstruse sub-titles Jan’s spirits sank to zero. The sort of stuff Mike would adore, she thought bitterly. No doubt Erica had already discussed it with him. Somehow this possibility was the last straw to Jan’s growing load of indefinable depression. It’s this everlasting rain, she told herself, looking mournfully out of the window at the empty windswept perimeter.

Gerda appeared at Regency Terrace that evening. Arriving home wet through and weary, Jan found her installed by a bright fire in the living room, listening to a new long-playing record.

“The Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s A Major Symphony,” Gerda announced, after the brief formalities of greeting. “I bought it for you as a small peace offering, Jan dear.”

The heavenly harmonies filled the room. Jan felt as if she were drowning deliciously in a warm golden sea; it was hard to go on harbouring resentment listening to the noble symphony, but she didn’t really want peace offerings from Gerda. A continued state of war would have been far more to her liking. Especially if Gerda imagined that her gift of an expensive record would entitle her to have once more the run of the house. She looked so absolutely “dug in” sitting in her comfortable armchair by the fire.

“Are you staying much longer in London?” Jan asked when the music ended.

Gerda laughed good-naturedly. “You were always so tactful, dear Jan!”

“I was merely thinking I had never known dress shows to go on for such a long time,” Jan returned coolly.

“Oh, I’m not doing dress shows now,” Gerda said. “I’m working on something far more interesting
...
nothing to do with fashions, and infinitely more profitable. But don’t worry, it’s a temporary assignment. As soon as I’m through with it I shall be off to Paris again. Meanwhile,
I hope you’ll put up with me if I turn up now and then. The work I’m doing is a little out of my line, and Hart is helping me with
it ...
on a fifty fifty basis, of course.

“Newspaper work?” Jan asked.

“Uh-huh,” Gerda nodded uncommunicatively. Quite clearly she didn’t want to answer any more questions about her work, but if her manner was a little odd, Jan didn’t notice it. She didn’t like the thought of her father being involved with Gerda, even professionally, but at least it wasn’t so bad as the more personal entanglement she and Carole had dreaded for him. Perhaps this work had been the reason for their association all along. It could even account for that visit to the night-club ... and for Hart’s mildly reviving bank balance. In spite of all these comforting possibilities, a faint uneasiness still lingered in Jan’s mind. She didn’t really trust Gerda. It would be a relief when she was once more the other side of the English Channel, safely tucked away in her Paris job.

The next day it was still raining. Daker, mortally offended at the weather and suffering from a cold in the head, shut himself up with his blueprints, leaving Jan free to finish the thesis on aeronautics. Round about tea-time Erica came in to collect it.

“I'm just about ready for you,” Jan told her, banging away at the keys of her typewriter, finishing the last few lines. When the telephone rang, she ignored it, and it was Erica who picked up the receiver.

“Oh, hullo, Mike!” Jan heard her exclaim joyfully. “You’re in London. How splendid!” There was a short pause while Mike apparently talked, and Erica listened.

“You want to speak to Jan?” she said then. “Yes, she’s right here.” Her tone had changed most markedly, sounding puzzled now and rather cool.

“For you, Jan.” she said, handing the instrument over.

Jan took it, feeling slightly awkward
...
and conscious of the foolish tendency to breathlessness which always afflicted her at any unexpected contact with Mike.

“That you, Jan?” she heard him say. His deep, vibrant voice seemed to bring his breezy masculine presence right into the room. The weather had washed out any possibility of tests for a day or two, he was explaining unnecessarily, so he had nipped up to London for a breather. “If you aren’t doing anything better would you like to have that long-delayed dinner with me this evening?” he asked.

If she wasn’t doing anything better! “Oh, Mike,
I’d
love to have dinner with you,” Jan cried impulsively, completely forgetting Erica at her side.

“Can you meet me at L
e
s Trois Soeurs around eight, then?” He directed her how to find the restaurant. “I’d come out to Chiswick to fetch you,
”
he apologized, “only that I’ve conference at the Aero Club and I’m not sure when I’ll be through with it.”

“It’s quite all right, Mike. I’ll be at Les Trois Soeurs
a
t e
ig
ht o’clock.” Jan assured
him.

“That’ll be grand!” he declared with a heartiness which made her feel warm all through. She hung up the receiver in a glow that quickly evaporated when she met Erica’s frosty glance. “So Mike is taking you out this evening?” she
said.

This is going to be a bit tricky, Jan thought, regretting the unguarded delight with which she had accepted Mike’s invitation. “It’s a date we made
...
and broke
...
several times,” she offered in expiation.

“I know,” Erica said. “Mike has been out to your place once or twice recently, hasn’t he? He told me all about it ... he has been helping your father with a new play that has a test pilot hero
...
which amuses Mike immensely!” Her tone was insufferably condescending.

Jan coloured hotly, though it was, she told herself, foolish to be annoyed. Naturally Mike would have told Erica about his visits to Regency Terrace. Now that Paleski had been disposed of and they were as good as engaged they would have no secrets from one another. How idiotic of her to have forgotten, even for that one unguarded moment on the telephone, their loverlike status! It was Erica who ought to be annoyed
...
and no doubt she
was
...
with good reason. Mike, with a few hours to spare, asking another girl out to dinner. It was a little difficult to understand why he should have done so. Stumbling for an explanation—for her own satisfaction as much as for Erica’s—Jan said: “He has been most awfully helpful about my father’s play. We are most indebted to him. But it looks as though he has an idea he owes
us
a return of hospitality because he has had a meal once or twice recently at our home. There’s really no need for him to feel under obligation to us. The boot is on the other foot.”

“Mike is a conscientious type,” Erica dismissed it. She began to leaf through the typed pages of
her thesis, her lovely face glowing with an author’s pride in work achieved. “And of course, he like you,” she murmured absently, though still condescendingly. “Also he likes your father. He enjoyed helping with the play, once he had disposed of the wild possibility that it might be
in
some way mixed up with the recent security scare.” She laughed lightly. “It was so silly, wasn’t it; all that flap about the publicity leakage in
Ariel?
Daker told you about it at the time, I expect?”

“Yes, he did,” Jan confirmed, remembering the foreign aviation magazine with its untimely paragraphs about the E.106a. But where did her father’s play come into it? What on earth was Erica talking about?

“The conquest of heat is a vital prerequisite to the conquest of space,” Erica read to herself, entranced. Dragging her thoughts reluctantly from the fascinating problems of insulation, she became aware of the blank bewilderment on Jan’s face. Didn’t she guess why Mike had been cultivating her society recently? Surely she hadn’t been deluding herself that his visits to Regency Terrace had any romantic implications! If so, the sooner she had a hint of the truth, the better. And it
was
rather foolish of Mike to have asked her to dinner tonight. But he was such a stickler for keeping his word. Apparently he’d promised Jan a night out—in
the course of his Ferraby investigations—and now he felt he couldn’t disappoint her. It would never occur to him how she might misinterpret his easy good nature.

“I don’t know if I’m being specially dumb,” Jan was saying, “but I didn’t realize Mike was in any way concerned with the
Ariel
bother ... nor can I see what my father’
s
play has to do with it at all.

Erica laid aside her thesis with a lingering glance at its brilliantly conceived opening lines.
It was good all through. She knew it was good.
The examining board would be impressed. Maybe if her mind hadn’t been so full of her own affairs she might have realized that her motives at this moment were extremely questionable. She was more angry over the dinner engagement than she cared to admit. Mike was
very
silly to have suggested it
...
and Jan’s illuminated face as she accepted the invitation had betrayed her all too revealingly. A dose of the unvarnished truth would do her good!

With a curiously savage gleam in her dark blue eyes, Erica smiled. “Maybe you don’t know the whole story,” she said sweetly. “It was rather comical actually, but there was quite a storm in a teacup over that slip-up in security. My father lashing himself into a high old rage, summoning an emergency conference, where he third-degreed all the heads of departments. In the end he fancied he traced the leakage to this office, and of course, Daker and Mike being above suspicion
...
that left you!” She paused, letting the effect of her words sink in. Jan’s face had gone wooden. She was holding on to herself desperately, fighting back the sickening sense of shock.

“But I expect you gathered something was amiss when Daker took you off the security
f
iling
?”
Erica said.

Jan nodded in a dazed way, playing for time, her whole instinct now bent on concealing her horror, as in one terrible flash the whole picture began to be clear to her.

“Not that S.M. believed you had been deliberately treacherous,” Erica went on soothingly. “He thought you had probably been talking off the record at home
...
quite unwittingly. He’d got it out of Parker that your father was a free-lance newspaper man specializing in aviation
...
and that, adding to your dropping the odd snippet of gossip about E.106a, didn’t look so good. In fact it seemed to present a pretty obvious solution to the little mystery of the leakage. But Pa, keeping
an open mind, wanted more definite evidence. He and Daker between them seem to have decided to brief Mike to do a bit of amateur detecting—as he was on visiting terms in your home—find out what sort of a man your parent really was, and so on. For heaven’s sake,” she broke off sharply, “don’t look so tragic about it!”