My Heart Has Wings (8 page)

“It’s not likely, infatuated as she may be, that she’s be silly enough to leave him alone in S.M.’s office,” Daker countered huffily. “Or are you suggesting she is
...
his dupe?”

“Of course I’m not!” Mike laughed, suddenly-good-tempered at the very absurdity of the idea. “But honestly, old man, it’s no wilder a theory than blaming the E.106a leakage on poor innocent little Jan!”

“Nobody’s blaming her. We’re merely holding a watching brief.”

“Well, it’s a pretty dirty brief and I think you’re crazy to have anything to do with it,” Mike declared, and stalked out.

Crossing the outer office, he paused by Jan’s desk. In her crisp cotton frock she looked as cool as a hedge rose, and as tranquil. How did she manage it? A thundery, bickering day, poor old Helen a casualty, leaving extra work to be done, Daker driving her like, the devil
...
and she took it all with a patience and serenity that shamed the lot of them. She looked up at him and smiled. Peace slid into his heart. Daker at his most difficult; Erica and Paleski; E.106a and the snags that beset it
...
suddenly none of it mattered. He said, “How’s the play coming along? Would this be a good evening for me to drop in and have a chat about it with your father?”

CHAPTER SIX

If only Gerda
wasn’t still staying with them! Jan thought as they drove through the milling evening traffic. She’d hog the conversation at the supper table, flap her eyelashes at Mike and ask him fatuous questions about his flying, as she had done the night she arrived. He hadn’t liked it then and he wouldn’t, Jan guessed, like it any better this evening. He’d button up; go grim and silent—and that would be the end of his casual impulse to help her father with his play.

I’ll have to circumvent her somehow, Jan planned desperately, and silently thanked heaven she’d asked Mrs. Costello to make one of her family
-
sized veal, ham and egg pies for this evening. They could have it cold, with salad.

Mike said as they passed through Kingston, “Mind if we stop at a florist’s? I’ve got a conscience about snapping at poor old Helen today, and want to send her a peace offering.”’

Jan went with him into the shop and helped him to choose the generous bouquet of roses and smilax and long-stemmed carnations.

The rest of the way home they talked about Helen. It was all wrong for her to be at the works, Mike said—the job hadn’t “taken”. “I ought to have known it wouldn’t,” he reproached himself. “Office routine bores her, she hasn’t a scrap of organizing faculty; she ought to go back to her singi
n
g.”

She had been studying with Giulio Mantini before her marriage to Jock, Mike told Jan. “He thought the world of her
...
regarded her as
one of his most promising pupils. I think he was very disappointed that she gave up the idea of a musical career when she married. He wrote to her after Jock’s death, offering her free lessons if she would go back to him, but she told him she would never sing again.”

“Oh, what a pity!” Jan said, her voice warm with sympathy. Helen’s abandonment of her singing seemed to her both romantic and tragic. But surely it was a mistake to suppress her musical talent, bury it away forever. And if Giulio Mantini, the famous Italian operatic tenor, had praised it, it must be a pretty Considerable talent. Jan had heard him sing at a charity concert just after he had retired from the stage and come to London to open a school of singing. He taught voice production in a new way, known as the “Mantini Method”. And Helen, Mike was saying, had been his star pupil!

“She really loathes office work,” Jan said. “She told me so today when she was upset about those missing charts. She’ll never be happy at Scott-Manly’s. Couldn’t you persuade her to go back to Mantini, Mike? Surely it would be more of an outlet for her than office work
...
more comforting in the end,” she added softly.

“If she had t
he courage to
begin
,”
Mike said.
“
Maybe music and a newly broken heart aren’t good companions. But now as, the months go on and there isn’t even the numbness of shock to fill the emptiness of her life, her singing might well be her salvation. I’ll talk to Erica about it and see if we can’t think up some scheme. If we could devise some way of getting Helen and Mantini together I believe we might break down her resistance. Poor kid!” Mike sighed. “She says she hasn’t the heart for music any more. What she doesn’t realize is that she would pr
o
bably sing with more heart than ever before. Because she
’
s an artist to her fingertips, and no true artist was ever yet marred by suffering.”

Jan stifled an indefinable pain—an unbidden pang of jealousy perhaps for Helen who was too artistic and interesting for a dull office career. And how naturally Mike had spoken of talking her problem over with Erica! Generous, good-hearted, secure in her background of wealth and influence, she would not fail him, or Helen. It was no wonder he was in love with her—in spite of this silly Paleski business. Which would, Jan told herself, blow over. Erica and Mike were so fond o
f
one another, so made for one another, that it was impossible not to believe they would marry
in
the
end.

It was just as Jan had foreseen at supper time. Gerda, her hard Nordic blue
eyes
brilliant with vitality, turned on her most captivating charm for Mike’s benefit. Always dynamic, this evening she was overpowering, her attractively husky voice running on, pouring out stories of life in the great fashion houses of Paris. They were witty, lightly malicious, and both Hart and Mike seemed to enjoy them, egging Gerda on to reveal still wilder extravagances of her fabulous world. While the young Ferrabys sat grimly silent, resenting this loud-voiced cuckoo in their nest, hating her with baffled helplessness. All this stuff about fashions, Peter thought desperately, when they might have been talking about flying!

The meal seemed endless, and when at the coffee stage Gerda was still in full spate, Jan began to grow anxious. Hart seemed to have forgotten all about his play. It might be weeks before he would have another opportunity of discussing it with Mike, but Jan couldn’t tell him that without mentioning the hush-hush Merecombe
project.

“The low-down on the high couture; what perfect material for an amusing book!” Mike said, when Gerda paused for a moment to drink her coffee. “Or, indeed, for a p
lay.
” He turned to Hart: “Wouldn’t a comedy of manners as displayed in the fashion world have a better chance of success than your abstruse little offering on aerodynamics
?
”

“Oh, no, I don’t agree!” Hart’s lined face kindled, but before he could leap to the
d
efence of his brain-child, Jan said quickly: “Why don’t you and Mike walk down
to the Green Bottle and talk over your play in peace
...
while we girls wash up
?
”

The Green Bottle was a sixteenth-century inn with a terraced beer-garden on the banks of the river, where artists and writers of the neighbourhood foregathered. Gerda adored it and said it reminded her of the cafes on the Left Bank. She jumped up now, her face alight. “Let’s all go,” she enthused. “It’s so stuffy tonight; a drink by the river would be perfect!”

“Gerda, please!” Jan interposed, going hot all over with vexation. “Hart and Mike don’t want you to go along; they’ve got to get to work on this play
...
” She didn’t care how tactless she was being, and neither Hart nor Mike made any attempt to soften her pronouncement, in fact they seemed glad to escape, leaping from their armchairs with alacrity.

“You’ll like our ‘local’, Mike,” Hart was promising as they left the room.

Gerda, looking stranded and affronted, listened to the front door slamming behind them; then turned to Jan, her cold blue eyes glassy with rage. Curiously soulless eyes, they might have belonged to an expensive doll! “That was a pretty clumsy snub, Jan.” she said in a voice that shook with outrage.

“I’m sorry,” Jan murmured off-handed, “but honestly, Gerda, I
did
tell you Mike had come this evening to help Father with this awfully difficult technical play he wants to write
...
and there wasn’t a chance for them to as much as mention it at all during supper time..
.”

“Meaning ... I talked all the time about Paris,” Gerda said icily.

“Well, you did rather hold the floor,” Jan took a deep breath and quite suddenly and recklessly decided that here was her chance to let Gerda have a good strong hint that her presence at No. 4 Regency Terrace was becoming a bit redundant. “You were very witty and amusing,” she said, “and I’m sure Father was most diverted. But at the moment that’s just what he can’t afford to be. He
must
get on with this work—but he is easily distracted. If there is a guest ill the house it is bound to slow him up. I’m sure you mean well, making tea for him in the afternoons and sitting with him in his study and so on, but it
...
well, it doesn’t help. He’s the sort of writer who needs hours of uninterrupted solitude.”

Gerda went white with anger. “In other words, I’ve worn out my welcome and you want me to go!”

Jan, gathering up the used coffee cups, felt the familiar inward quaking that always afflicted her when threatened with the unpleasantness of a “scene”. But she refused to weaken. She said, “I’m sure it can’t be very amusing for you here, Gerda. It would surely be better use of your time in London if you were staying at some comfortable hotel in town, nearer to all the interesting fashion people and newspaper people you know.”

Gerda laughed mirthlessly.
“You’re even more offensive when you’re pretending to be tactful, my dear! But don’t worry, I get your meaning. A half-witted deaf mute couldn’t miss it
!
I’ll go and phone for a room at the Barchester right away. It’s frightfully expensive, but I can stay there while I look round.”

“I don’t think that’s a very kind way to take it,” Jan said gently. “You know I don’t want you to go rushing off at once. I was merely pointing out how important it is for Father to have quiet just now, and I’m sorry if I’ve done it tactlessly.
Do please be sensible about it, Gerda! Things aren’t being very easy for us these days
...
”

“I know exactly how things are,” Gerda interrupted. “Hart has talked to me very freely about his difficulties since I came and I’ve been trying to put some work in his way. Instead of hindering him, as you suggest, I’ve been doing my utmost to help him. Hart and I are old friends and I think he has enjoyed having me around this last week or two.” Gerda lowered her eyelashes and gave a little secret smile, “I think, too, he’ll be sorry for me to go, but after what you’ve said, it’s quite impossible for me to stay.”

She flounced out of the room and ran upstairs. Jan
c
ould hear her overhead banging about noisily, presumably p
a
cking. For a moment she wondered if she ought to go after her and try to make peace, but with a shrug decided against it. If
she
wanted to make a dramatic exit tonight, let her. It would be an immense relief to have her out of the house. The brutal truth was that they couldn’t afford to entertain house-guests, and Gerda ought to have realized it long ago. As for the story about putting work in Hart’s way—it was absolute nonsense, Jan decided. Gerda had merely invented it on the spur of the moment to save her face.

The storm which had been threatening all day broke with a barrage of thunder as darkness fell. Hart came back from the “Green Bottle” just after closing time, wet through. He found Jan in the kitchen stoking up the old-fashioned boiler stove for the night. Mike, he said, had gone straight home. Deposing Tiger-Boy from the shabby wicker chair which was the kitchen’s one concession to comfort, he sat down and stretched his wet feet out to the blaze of the fire. Tiger-Boy forgivingly jumped onto his lap, and began kneading hopefully at his bony knees.

“Did you have a useful talk with Mike?” Jan asked.

“Oh, very. He has been most helpful. He liked our pub—with its old clientele. Len and Cora were there. Duke Smithley turned up.”

Len was an art master at Carole’s school, Cora was his wife. Duke Smithley produced experimental plays in a small theatre on the river bank, known as The Water-Mill.

“It doesn’t sound as if you had much peace for your talk,” Jan commented.

“Oh, we managed all right. Len and Cora soon drifted off, and it was quite a good notion having Duke in on our confab. He’s rather taken with the idea of the play, wants to read it in the rough. We even got around to deciding a title: ‘Storm The Bright Barrier’. What do you think of it?”

“It’s
...
good,” Jan nodded.

Hart gazed into the small red heart of the stove. “Jock Stanford,” he said, “could have saved himself quite easily it seems, if he had used his ejection seat in time. But he chose to stay in his blazing plane, bringing it safely in over the houses surrounding the airfield. I stumbled upon that bit of heroism quite accidentally. Mike seemed astonished at my being particularly moved by it; says it’s what anyone would do.”

Jan, listening to the heavy rain hissing on the glass roof of the scullery, looked suddenly pinched and wan, “
‘And left the vivid air’,” she quoted softly, ‘ “signed with their honour
...
”
’

Hart absently fondled Tiger-Boy’s ears. “But to the man in the street,” he, said, “and the women in the little vulnerable houses, these chaps and their planes are so often just a noise in the sky. They write letters to the papers complaining about it. I suppose it’s understandable. They haven’t a notion of the real significance of these revolutionary machines—of the weapons of knowledge being forged in the research plants, the technological race being run
...
against time, against evil. They go on whimpering about greenhouse roofs being cracked by vibration
...
”

He stood up, spilling Tiger-Boy unceremoniously to the floor. “It’s time somebody told them about the unsung heroes,” he said. “It’s time the singing started! If only I can find the words for the song ... the reverberating harmonies to set them to!” He stretched his thin stooped shoulders and laughed unsteadily. “Don’t mind me, Jan; I’m drunk tonight... not with beer, but with dreams! If I can put this play across the way I
feel
it, I don’t mind being a hack journalist for the rest of my days!”

“Of course you’ll put it across!” Jan said staunchly. But her heart was filled suddenly with anxious, thronging little prayers—and they weren’t only for Hart and his play. Mike at Merecombe ..
.
Mike storming bright terrible barriers never before
essayed!

“Is there enough water for a really hot bath?” Hart asked, with a sudden descent to the banal discovery that he was cold and wet.

“Plenty,” Jan assured him. As he padded in stockinged feet across the tiled floor she called after him hurriedly and a little nervously; “Gerda has gone, Father. She left all in a hurry this evening. I’m afraid she took offence at something I said to her.”

Hart swung around sharply. “You quarrelled?”

“Not exactly. But she was frightfully annoyed because I said you ought not to have so many interruptions when you are working. You know it’s true—that it’s very distracting for you to have a guest in the house just now. And she only came for a night or two in the beginning
...
we’ve done all that can be expected of us, keeping her here almost a fortnight.”

“Did she leave her address?” Hart asked.

“No. But I expect she’ll be phoning you or writing. She was trying to get a room in the Barchester for tonight.”

Suddenly Hart looked desperately tired. “I hope to heaven she’ll keep in touch!” he murmured with an alarming fervency. “I’m sorry she rushed off like this, Jan. I wish you could have avoided it.”

There was reproach in his tone—and something deeper that troubled Jan. Was it possible that Gerda had been of some use to her father in his work after all
?
Making contacts for him, perhaps, with old Fleet Street connections
?
There couldn’t, she told herself fiercely, be any more personal reason for his obvious regret at her departure. But her heart was heavy with nameless foreboding as she moved through the silent house, locking doors and windows for the night, listening to the last sullen rumbling of the thunderstorm rolling away across the river.