My Heart Has Wings (5 page)

Mike said quietly, “There were a good many hand-to-hand combats in the last war, if you admit fighter planes into your argument.”

Hart gave him a quick, sharp look. “The knights of the sky, tilting their lances against the sun ... do you know, I hadn’t thought of them
...
” He
dropped his knife and fork, gazed absently out
of
the window at the shining river.

For a moment or two there was silence at the table and then Peter, seizing his chance, choking a little with nervousness, “Could they now ... if there was a war, Mr. Carliss? I mean, with these supersonic jet fighters, how would it work out? Are they
manoeuverable
enough to go in for the kind of plane-to-plane dogfights there were in the last war?”

Mike’s lean face kindled “Oh, yes, indeed. But it’s a jolly good question. There would be certain problems, of
course...” He
began to outline them, work them out, Peter listening with an almost painful intensity, asking now and then for some point to be made clearer, but in apt and knowledgeable way that made Jan marvel. How had he come to know so much about
modern
flying and its possible developments? But boys did nowadays
;
they read every book or article they could get hold of on the subject.

For the remainder of the meal the conversation was almost entirely technical, and Hart took little part in it. It wasn’t until after the birthday cake had been cut, and the birthday toast drunk in the last of the Burgundy that he emerged from a long silence, to say in a musing tone: “You know, Carliss, you’ve given me an idea for a play—as
modern
as Scott-Manly’s latest prototype, and as old as the songs of chivalry. The last gleam of man’s lonely courage
...
and maybe the greatest. The knights of the infinite sky. ‘
Born
of the sun’,” he quoted softly, “ ‘they travelled a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with their honour’. The contemporary poet who wrote that dedicated it to ‘Those who are Truly Great’, and I believe that, borrowing his lines, I could build up on them a tribute in drama to the pioneers of the new air age. Men like yourself ..
.
and Jock Stanford
...
who tilt their very lives against the dark i
m
ponderables of
p
rogress.”

Mike went a dull red under his tan. “That
’
s putting a bit largely, sir. We’re just chaps doing a job of work
...”

“You’re something a good deal more than that,
”
Hart Ferraby interrupted, and went on enlarging his theme, his dark eyes flashing, his imagination fired. He’d got the inspiration of his life for this new play, he was obviously feeling, and Jan was glad that tonight of all nights, with the rejected Electra perhaps in ashes, he should have found a ' new life-line to cling to, fresh vistas of hope. But Mike, she could see, was becoming more and more embarrassed, hating to be involved in all this rhetoric,

“I’ll rough out a synopsis tomorrow,” Hart ended excitedly. “Maybe I could ask you to put me right on any technical details that crop up, Carliss? Though
I’ll
keep off technicalities as much as possible, of course.”

“I’m sorry,” Mike said shortly, “but verse plays aren’t exactly my wicket, and I can’t see aerodynamics in terms of heroics. I’d rather have nothing to do with it.”

Hart looked, dashed at this direct snub and Jan squirmed inwardly, sharing both her father’s discomfiture and Mike’s.

“Heroics,” Hart said, “and heroism are entirely
different matters.”

“And Mike,” Jan put in, coming to his rescue, “being strictly a practical person, loathes being regarded as a hero. Besides,” she added with a small pleading smile, “though I don’t know a great deal about the creative urge I should have thought that an idea scarcely
born
ought to be kept quiet
...
like a very new baby
.
”

Everyone laughed at this, and the air cleared. She was perfectly right, her father agreed. He had talked too much about his new play. Talking about a thing before you’d written a line of it was notoriously unlucky. “And heaven knows,” he
en
ded sadly, I don’t want to do anything just
now to offend the gods of luck!” Leaving the table he went over to the radio gramophone, and they drank their coffee in peace in the deep armchairs, to the strains of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto.

Later, when Hart had abruptly left them—to ponder his new play perhaps, Jan thought resentfully—and Peter had retired to the kitchen and homework, Mike roamed the long room, tall and restless, a lighted cigarette unheeded in his hand.

The evening was disintegrating, Jan felt, dismayed, leaving the table where she had been gathering glasses and silver together for Carole, who was clearing. It was too bad of Hart to have deserted them. There ought to have been liqueurs after the coffee, to keep the conversation going. Or another concerto. She went over to the hearth where Mike had halted, meaning to ask him if he would like to choose something from the very adequate collection of records—relic of a vanished prosperity when there was money for such luxuries—but he was looking with interest at a painting of Carole’s hung over the mantelpiece. The identical view of the river which had confronted him all through dinner. “I don’t know very much about painting,” he said to Jan at his elbow, “but this seems to be extraordinarily good.”

“It is,” Jan agreed loyally. “One of Carole’s best. She is very clever at her work—and might be much more than that, if she had the chance. But I don’t suppose she will, it’s a long expensive training.”

Mike didn’t pursue the implications of this remark. His glance was fixed on Jan, tall and slim by his side in her maize-gold frock, her hazel eyes shadowed with fatigue from the strain of this rather difficult evening. A becoming fatigue, giving her in the fading light a remote and gentle air. He said in a low tone that seemed to enclose them in its warm hint of intimacy: “It was good
of you to ask me here this evening. I can
’
t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed it. I live in a hotel, you know
...
” He broke off, once again, ignoring implications; the loneliness, the rootlessness of living in an hotel, Of having indeed nowhere else to live. “It isn’t often I have such a delicious home-cooked meal as the one you’ve just given me. Even Lady Scott-Manly’s chef couldn’t have bettered the stuffing of that cold chicken.” A whimsical eyebrow shot up. “For a spare-time ‘cook and bottle-washer’ you do pretty well!
Or
wasn’t tonight’s dinner your own unaided effort?”

“Oh, it was.” Jan coloured with pleasure at his appreciation.
“
I cooked the chicken last night when I got back from the office. And the birthday cake I’d made over the week-end; to give it time to set and be ready for the frosting.”

“So that’s the sort of thing that fills up your weekends
?
” He sounded as though it really interested him.

Jan laughed and shrugged. “It isn’t always birthday cakes, of course, but there is plenty to do in a house this size, and we only have a morning woman
...
”
She broke off, wondering if she was boring him with these domestic details, but his eyes were intently looking down at her, a hint of half amused tenderness in their blue-grey depths.

“It’s a good show,” he pronounced, running a house this size, to say nothing of a family, as well as our exacting friend Daker
...
and doing it all so effic
i
ently. You’re a wonderful child, aren’t you, young Jan?”

“No,” Jan said firmly, “I’m not. It’s just something I’ve grown used to doing
...
since Mother died” Her hazel eyes went involuntarily to the calm, gentle face in the big silver frame on the mantelpiece, beneath Carole’s painting. Following her glance; Mike said, “That’s your mother, isn’t
it?”

J
an nodded wordlessly.

Mike picked up the photograph and studied it a moment in silence. “She has a wise and beautiful
f
ace, he said gently. “You know, one day, when you are older, you are going to look rather like her.”

Jan’s sensitive mouth quivered. “You
...
couldn’t have said anything more marvellous to me, Mike! Thank you.”

He replaced the photograph with a contemplative air. “You had her with you until three years ago, didn’t you? That must have been good. My mother died when I was very young. I don’t remember her
...
there is nothing to remember. It’s an odd blank in one’s life, when one stops to realize it. I never think of her, and I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken of her to anyone before.” There was sudden bleakness in his tone and his blue
-
grey eyes darkened. For a timeless instant Jan looked into them in silence and felt her heart waver before their moving, indecipherable message. Then the door opened and Carole and her father came in—and the movement with its strange illusion of things unspoken was shattered.

“I was looking for cigars,” Hart announced cheerfully, “but there aren’t any.”

“I don’t smoke them, thanks,” Mike assured him tactfully.

“Just as well in the circumstances,” Hart laughed. “I can offer you some fairly decent tobacco if you’d like a pipe ... or perhaps
...”
he glanced towards the window with its glimpse of twilit water, “you’d rather have a turn on the river in the family tub which we keep moored just beyond the tow-path. That is, if the girls approve?”

“We’d love it,” they declared in chorus, and Jan, seeing the renewed animation of Mike’s glance, felt thankfully that the threatening hiatus in the evening’s entertainment had been safely by-passed. A turn on the river would be delightful, he was agreeing.

If they’d left it at that, gone out on the impulse, sweeping Peter along with them, leaving the house untenanted, inhospitably closed, the evening might have had a very different ending. But Peter, Jan reported after a hurried consultation in the kitchen, hadn’t quite finished his homework, and begged for ten minutes’ grace.

So they settled down to wait for him, to the strains of another concerto, and the ten
minu
t
es stretched to half an hour. Jan, listening to the music with a concealed impatience that surely must have held in it something of foreboding, heard the garden gate slam and a taxi drive away. Simultaneously their heads, all turned towards the window, and in silence they watched the tall
slim
woman who walked up the paved path. Even in that brief moment before she passed out of sight to be hidden by the pillars of the miniature portico, her air of elegance had been established. The flat black toreador hat tilted over the cool, lovely face, the willowy lines of the cream coat and skirt, striped thinly and precisely in black to match hat and shoes and gloves, and the bizarre black flower that bloomed in one lapel; a Paris original design in every detail. Balmain
o
r Lanvin, Jan hazarded. How did Gerda manage it on her reporter’s salary? But her clothes were always superb
...
making every garment you possessed look as if it came out of the ark!

“Gerda Byrrsen!” Carole gasped. “What on earth is she doing, here? I thought she was working in Paris now.”

“She is,” Hart confirmed, his tone bemused, disturbed.

The front door bell pealed. Jan went to answer it, her heart dismayed: What a hideous interruption! And what now of their river trip? Gerda Byrrsen. One of the last people she would have chosen to introduce to Mike Carliss
...
though she couldn’t quite have said why. Only that she and Carole instinctively distrusted Gerda
...
and indeed heartily disliked her. Half Swedish, half French, wholly sophisticated, she had worked with their father on the Morning News, doing in those days general reporting. And just after their mother’s death she had haunted the riverside house, persuading Hart to take her out to dinner, saying he needed cheering up, taking out of himself. Young, bewildered, grief-stricken, the Ferraby girls had loathed and resented her pushful friendliness, inarticulately feeling it to be self
-
seeking rather than generous. They had even suspected with horror that she was more than a little in love with their father, pretending to be interested in his play-writing, clinging like a limpet to him through the brief weeks of his success, contriving to be at his side in the foyer for all the flashlight photographs on the night
Hungry Harvest
opened in the
West End. Then when success had fizzled out she had characteristically lost interest. Or it might have been that Hart had deliberately shaken her off
...
They would never know
.
At all events, she had, about a year ago, vanished to Paris to take on a job as fashion correspondent, and they had breathed sighs of relief. What had brought her back now? Jan wondered as she opened the door. What did she want?

She wanted a bed. And made no bones about asking for it. Hating her facile kiss, her smooth empty smile, Jan held herself rigid listening to the flow of explanations and apologies. She had flown to London this afternoon, Gerda said, all in a hurry, to cover a fashion preview, and had forgotten that it was the height of the tourist season. “The entire West End,” she laughed, “seething with expensive looking Americans and not a room to be had in any of the more possible hotels for love or money. I’ve gone the rounds till I’m footsore
...
and then I thought of you. Jan darling. One of the few sensible people who live in a house with spare rooms, instead of in a cramped apartment. Besides, I was longing to see you all! You have got a corner for me, haven’t you? Just for a night or two, I don’t mind what it is ... a shake-down in the attic with Carole’s canvases will do.”

Completely taken off her guard, unable to think of any valid excuse for being inhospitable, Jan murmured a reluctant, “But of course you must stay, Gerda. You can’t go around searching for rooms at this hour.”

She turned to find Hart at her elbow, genial and welcoming. For any of his old-time colleagues he had a warm spot, and he seemed genuinely glad to see Gerda, ushering her into the living-room, introducing her to Mike. She had had no evening meal, it emerged. Jan hurried away to make sandwiches of the last rags of chicken and slivers of ham; Peter putting his books away, received the news of the invasion with a groan. “That Swedish dame who always wore soppy hats,” he recalled Gerda. “Does that mean we can’t go on the river with Mike?”