Some Day I'll Find You Read Online Free

predicted, was electrified by the news that Flight Commander James Blackwell would shortly be arriving with her brother.
    ‘He’s bound to be a dish,’ she said confidently as she ran upstairs to reapply her make-up. ‘All Spitfire pilots are impossibly glamorous. It’s practically one of
the qualifications for the job. What time do him and John get here?’
    ‘
He
, dear,
he
,’ her father called after her. ‘So much for the Girton girl. I thought language and politics were your passions, not Brylcreem Boys. In fact, I
thought . . .’
    Diana’s muffled answer drifted down from above, but he could only make out two words – ‘
absurd,
Daddy’ – before her bedroom door slammed shut.
    ‘It’s absurd, all right,’ said James Blackwell, as coffee was served in the Arnolds’ dining room that evening. ‘Everyone else racing back to
barracks at maximum speed, and our lot gets sent home. Hardly the most martial start to a war for us, is it? The whole squadron’s furious. It’s a total waste of resources. I don’t
know what Mr Chamberlain would make of it.’
    I wonder what Mr Chamberlain would make of
you
, thought Mr Arnold as he passed their guest sugar cubes and silver tongs. James Blackwell was pin-up material; a gift for the RAF’s
propaganda unit. As Diana had predicted, based more on hope than intuition, he was impossibly glamorous. Indeed, all three of the young people sitting at his table were, in Mr Arnold’s view,
excessively attractive.
    His daughter’s dark brown hair and green eyes were a source of initial surprise (and continuing private discussion) between her parents. These features – and her olive skin –
owed nothing to their own fairer colouring. Gwen’s blonde hair and blue eyes, and Oliver’s light brown hair and pale grey irises, had been bypassed in Diana by some genetic resurgence
from the past. She looked, her parents agreed, more Irish than English and sometimes even Spanish, especially when the long Kentish summers turned her already burnished skin a glowing brown, a
setting from which her eyes glittered with emerald intensity.
    ‘She’s a Changeling,’ Mr Arnold told his wife at Diana’s tenth birthday party, as their daughter raced, screaming with laughter, along the ha-ha with her friends in
blazing August sunshine. ‘Nothing to do with us. Our real daughter is in Faerie. This? This is a cuckoo-creature from the Underworld. She’ll disappear on her twenty-first birthday when
they come to reclaim her, you’ll see.’
    John, though, was a Janus. Tall and slim, fair-haired and blue-eyed, he could be, depending on his mood, the reflection of either of his parents. At his most thoughtful, his expression was
identical to Gwen’s when she hesitated before one of her unfinished paintings. But when relaxed and amused, he became a young Oliver, suppressed humour dancing behind his eyes. He had
inherited his father’s smile, but was more conventionally good-looking, with a straight nose and high cheekbones. From his middle teens, John had fascinated the opposite sex. He was entirely
unaware of it.
    James Blackwell, thought Mr Arnold as he sipped his coffee, was, at a casual glance, not dissimilar in looks to his own son. Like John he was blond, although his eyes were a brighter, almost
glittering blue. He radiated a sense of self-possession, speaking in clear, confident tones. But there was something a little odd about his accent. It was public-school, certainly, but tinged with
something else.
    Mr Arnold tried to place the inflection as James told a wide-eyed Diana about a recent crash-landing at the squadron airfield. Was that a colonial twang he could hear? The boy’s parents
were in Canada, apparently; maybe the family was originally from there. But he didn’t think that was it. James Blackwell’s vowels were slightly clipped, rather than drawled. South
Africa, perhaps?
    Oliver gave it up for now and looked from his son to their guest. Both men were a