Free My Heart Has Wings by Elizabeth Hoy Page A

moved to Merecombe, the remote airfield in the West Country where most “secret-list” machines were tested. Mike would be in Merecombe on and off for weeks, for test flights of this magnitude could not be hurried. He said no more about the new play, and Jan wondered if he had forgotten all about it. It would not be surprising if he had. The culmination of months of close experimental work was very near, and with it one of the most critical flights he had ever undertaken. When he took the E.106a into the air, aviation history would be made ... or marred. Though every possible contingency had been considered, every innovation subjected to the most stringent ground tests, the ultimate test remained. It was not possible to be a hundred per cent certain how the E.106a would behave when airborne. It was Mike’s job to find o ut. If there was an element of risk, nobody dreamed of mentioning it, but there was a growing tension in the atmosphere at the office those warm July days. Increasingly, Jan was aware of it.
    And at home things weren’t much easier. Limp from the long hours of work and travel, she would return to Regency Terrace to find Gerda rested and relaxed, exquisitely soignee to the last golden hair, waiting to be entertained ... and en tertaining. For she was always in for the evening meal—which meant that it had to be served with a little more ceremony than they would have bothered with if they had been alone.
    “How much longer is she going to stay here battening on us ? ” Jan burst out in exasperation to Carole one thundery evening, when in the basement kitchen she concocted a fish salad out of the cheapest ingredients she could find. Chilled cod that had been cleverly steamed with lemon juice and herbs, lettuce from the small neglected back garden, tomatoes picked up from a huckster’s barrow she had encountered on the way home. There was a huge dish of boiled potatoes to go with it—to fill Peter up, and a substantial dessert of brown bread and raspberries (also from the garden) in the shape of a summer pudding.
    Carole, washing the inevitable evening brushes at the scullery sink, offered a sympathetic groan. “If you ask me, she’s staying on from sheer meanness,” she said, coming into the kitchen, the dripping brushes in her hand. “I bet she’s charging her office with the most terrific hotel expenses all the time—and quietly pocketing the money to spend on more clothes. You know how she’s always moaning about not being able to make ends meet. With her extravagant tastes, it’s no wonder! All those gold-stoppered beauty aids on her dressing table and that fabulous neglige she floats round in in the morning ... ”
    “Maybe she gets her clothes at a discount because she’s a fashion writer,” Jan suggested.
    “Even so they still cost her a heck of a lot. That toreador hat set her back twenty-five guineas; she told me so. And living in Paris, she says, costs the earth. She’s paying the equivalent of ten pounds a week for her two- r oom apartment.”
    “ Gosh! Jan gasped. “She must have a terrific salary!”
    “ She hasn ’ t. She ekes out, it seems, by doing an odd spot of free-lancing! And there’s no sign of her doing anything like that here, in fact she seems to be having a jolly good rest-cure ... at our expense! I think it’s disgusting the way she lolls about the place. She’s always home before I am in the afternoons, pretending to be domesticated, making tea for Pa, taking it into him in his study. She was shut up there with him for ages today. It’s all most odd; he doesn’t usually put up with people barging in and interrupting him when he’s working. And just now when he’s so keen on this new play you’d think he’d be furious... ”
    They looked at one another bleakly, hardly daring to put into words, even in their private minds, the disturbing implications of Hart’s unusual patience.
    “Have you told him Mike is going to help him after all?” Carole