Fallen Skies

by Philippa Gregory

  He drove past the corner shop every day. He did not care whether Helen Pears was well or ill. But if she were to be taken sick then someone would have to contact Lily and fetch her home. Stephen wanted to snatch her from the music hall tour. Stephen wanted to draw up in his big car and take her away from the noisy, reckless crowd of them. He wanted to take her away from the chorus line, from the men who would drink at the bar and watch the girls’ legs, from Charlie Smith. But every day the sign on the door was turned to “Open” at seven thirty promptly, and Helen did not turn it around to “Closed” until seven or eight o’clock at night.

  Stephen’s work continued around him in its slow routine. Women seeking to escape husbands married in a hurry in the excitement of the war came to his office and wept, registered their complaint and left thinking Stephen sympathetic and kindly. An officer who had married a nurse in a spasm of wounded despair, and then learned that she was the hospital cleaner, an unmarried woman with three children at home, found Stephen worldly and understanding. A woman charged with theft, a man charged with violence, a drunkard, a wartime profiteer making his will, an officer whose estate had to be managed by a trust now that he vomited in crowds and screamed at night, all these victims of the war traipsed through Stephen’s office and told their stories, and thought him compassionate.

  Not one of them touched him. Muriel Winters, watching her son who had gone to the war in despair and come back stricken, thought that her firstborn was mouldering to Flanders clay, and her second was calcifying to stone. Stephen’s head would nod, and his hand would move slowly, accurately across the page, but he was as distant from the pain of the people who came to him for help as Muriel had been from the battle when she had heard the rumble of guns like a faraway thunderstorm one still sunny day in Kent and said innocently, “Listen! What’s that noise?” and then been unable to imagine what it must be like to be under shellfire in Belgium so savage that the noise of it could be heard in an English garden.

  Muriel gave a dinner party. She knew the house was too quiet. The silent man upstairs, Stephen walled inside himself, Coventry neurasthenic and mute. Muriel wanted noise in the house which was not the thin hidden cry of a woman who has lost both sons. She invited the Dents and Sarah. It was another failure. Sarah was huge-eyed and trembling with sensitivity. Stephen’s work, his father’s health, even the weather drew from Sarah a little shiver of compassion and an earnest nod. She put her hand on Stephen’s hand and whispered to him that she knew the war had been awful—too dreadfully awful. Muriel saw Stephen hold his hand still under the insult of the woman’s pity. But after dinner, when the guests had gone, Muriel saw Stephen slip through the baize door to the kitchen and knew that he would sit late with Coventry that night in the silence which was their last and most secure refuge.

  Stephen’s best moment in the week was when he went into the corner shop on Thursday to buy his cigarettes and ask after Lily. Helen Pears seemed pleased to see him. The second time he came she made tea for them both and they perched on stools on either side of the counter in the empty shop and Helen read to him from Lily’s letter. She had written from Bournemouth of the grandness of the hotels and the wonderful long sandy beach. They were playing at a music hall near the Winter Gardens and Lily went out in the afternoons and sat in a deck-chair by the bandstand to listen to the band play and watch the people walking by. She never mentioned a man’s name. She never asked her mother to send her good wishes to Stephen, though she knew he was calling. Her letters were full of the summer gardens, and hats, the lengths of skirts which were being worn and the fun they had on their day off when the entire cast went down to the beach and paddled. Lily had bought a swimming costume and was teaching some of the other girls to swim. Stephen thought of Lily’s long pale legs stretched out on the sand and felt his throat contract with a feeling as potent as fear, which he had come to know as desire.

  Once a week he spoke to Lily. He timed his call so that she would be off stage at the end of the performance. He telephoned the numbers she had sent to him, ticking each stage door off the list as she moved steadily away from him: from Southampton to Bournemouth, to Poole, further and further away, travelling westwards down the coast. Behind her voice, on the crackly line, he could hear doors banging and people calling to each other. He knew she was only ever half-attentive. Once he found himself talking to one of the other girls as they teased Lily about his phone call. All day Stephen would plan what to say when he spoke with her, but then he would find Lily morose and quiet after a bad performance, or bubbling with joy after a good evening and a delivery of flowers. She was out of his control. Stephen hated her being beyond his control.

  “Is Ma well?” was the only question Lily would always ask. And after he had told her that Helen was well and busy he knew that he would lose her attention, and that however long he tried to spin out their talk Lily’s mind was no longer with him. She was, he thought, too frivolous, too light and above all too young to be trusted far from home. If he had not loved her so much Stephen thought he would have hated her.

  On the fourth Thursday of Lily’s absence there was a change. The shop was shuttered and dark when Stephen called at seven o’clock in the evening. He knocked on the door for some moments and stepped back to look up at the little flat. The windows were all in darkness, and no light came on at his knock.

  “She’s poorly,” a woman volunteered from the red-brick doorway beside the shop. “She’s got the flu and they’ve taken her to the Royal. Proper poorly she is.”

  Stephen stepped forward eagerly. “Very bad? Should her daughter be sent for?”

  The woman nodded. “Yes, but none of us know where she is. She’s on tour with one of the music halls. And Helen’s mind was wandering with the fever. She kept asking for her but we didn’t know where to send.”

  “I know.” Stephen found his hands were shaking. “I know where she is. Should I fetch her?”

  The woman nodded. “The doctor said she’d best come home. But none of us knew where to send. We didn’t even know which town she was in. And Helen couldn’t tell us. It’s the Spanish flu, you know, she’ll be lucky if she pulls through.”

  Stephen turned away and strode to the Argyll. “The Royal Hospital,” he said shortly to Coventry. “My luck’s turned at last.”

  He was not allowed to see Helen. The ward sister spoke to him in the corridor outside the ward. She said that the daughter should certainly be sent for. The mother was sick, but not in immediate danger. She was asking for her daughter and the girl should be there.

  Stephen drove home and found Muriel while Coventry packed for them both.

  “I have to go to Sidmouth, I’ll take the car and Coventry.”

  Muriel dropped her sewing into her lap. “Sidmouth? But why, Stephen? What has happened?”

  “The girl I was seeing, Lily Pears, her mother is ill and asking for her. I’m going to fetch her. I should be back late tomorrow night, or early Saturday. Depends on the roads.”

  Muriel followed Stephen out into the hall. Coventry was holding his coat out for him. “Stephen . . .”

  He turned and she saw his face was alight with a kind of wild excitement. Coventry too had the same keen expression, as if something at last was about to happen. As if all the long months of the peace had been wasted time. As if they were both only half-alive during the peace, as if sudden action were the only joy they could feel.

  “She’s not the sort of girl you want to get involved with,” Muriel said rapidly and softly. She put her hand on Stephen’s arm to draw him back to the sitting room. “Send her a telegram, my dear, that’s all you need to do. You shouldn’t go and fetch her. It’s not right.”

  Stephen brushed her hand off his arm. He hardly even saw her. “I love her,” he said simply. “I hope she’ll marry me. Of course I’m going to fetch her.”

  He turned abruptly away from her and ran up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. His father’s room was in half-darkness, lit only by the light fr
om the dying fire, but his father was still awake. He looked towards the door as Stephen burst in and his dark gaze focused on Stephen’s sudden vitality.

  Stephen stepped up to the bed. “I’m going away for a couple of days. I’m going to fetch a girl I know. Her mother’s sick and she should come home.” Stephen’s smile was radiant. “I like her awfully, Father. I’ll bring her to see you. I think you’d like her too.”

  He moved towards the door. “I’ve got to go now,” he said. Then he suddenly checked himself and came back into the room. He picked up his father’s limp hand from its place on the counterpane. He held it and looked into his father’s immobile face. “I’ve been a bastard. I’ve been a bastard to you. If Lily will have me, it’ll all be different. I’ll be different.”

  Stephen swung from the room. His mother, waiting at the foot of the stairs, watched him run down and thought, for the first time since he had come home, that he moved with the grace of a young man, that he was still a young man, one who could fall in love and flirt and chatter and laugh. He kissed her on the check as he went past, hardly checking his stride, and then he and Coventry were down the front steps and out through the garden gate. Coventry slung the suitcases into the boot of the car and Stephen got into the front passenger seat beside him. As the car moved away she caught a glimpse of their faces, as excited as boys.

  “Coast road,” Stephen said, consulting the map book. “D’you know it? Southampton, Bournemouth, Weymouth, Sidmouth. Quite a run.”

  Coventry nodded.

  “We’ll do it in watches,” Stephen decided. “You drive for four hours now, wake me at midnight. I’ll take twelve till four and then wake you. What about petrol? Are there cans in the boot?”

  Coventry nodded again, watching the road as they drove along the front, careful of summer visitors in their best clothes returning to their hotels after admiring the sunset over the sea.

  “Provisions?”

  Coventry jerked his head to the rear seat. There was a picnic basket half-shut on a loaf of bread and a ham, a flask for a hot drink and some apples. Coventry had raided the kitchen as casually as an invading army.

  “Should get there around midday, maybe earlier,” Stephen said, scanning the map. “Catch her before she goes to the theatre anyway. Pack her bags, bring her home. Home by midnight or so.”

  He stretched luxuriously in his seat and shut his eyes. “Wake me at midnight,” he ordered, and he fell instantly asleep.

  9

  LILY LOVED WEYMOUTH even more than Bournemouth. The town was smaller and the audiences less smart but the countryside around the little resort was spectacularly beautiful with wide sheep-grazed fields inter-linked with winding hedged country lanes and scatterings of prosperous grey stonebuilt villages. Charlie borrowed a motorbike and sidecar from one of the stage crew and on their day off, Sunday in the first week of June, drove Lily out along the coast. Lily, very daring, wore a pair of slacks lent to her by Madge.

  “Keep your legs in the sidecar, you’ll cause a riot, you hussy,” Charlie said tolerantly.

  Lily had hesitated. “D’you like them? I’m not sure if they’re all right to wear out of doors.”

  “We’ll go down secluded lanes, all you will frighten is cows.”

  They took a picnic with them. Lily, remembering the Argyll and the grand picnic set, laughed when she saw Charlie’s doorstep sandwiches of cheese and pickle in brown paper bags, and a bottle of lemonade for them to drink.

  “You’re a good deal too choosy.” Charlie spread his feast on Lily’s outspread head scarf. They had stopped at the crest of a cliff, looking out to sea. Below them a little white chalk path wound down to a bay. The waters were a clear light-filled blue, so clean that Lily could see the shadows of seaweed shifting in the currents and sometimes the flicker of a school of dark fish.

  “The trouble is you’ve been spoiled,” Charlie pronounced.

  “I have not! I like cheese and pickle. I can like posh things and ordinary things. I can like both.”

  Lily took a sandwich and bit into it. Beside them, at clifftop level, a kittiwake gull riding the thermals from the beach below them wheeled inland, its bright black eyes on Lily and her sandwich. Lily took a piece of crust and flung it upwards.

  “There you go, wasting good food!” Charlie said instantly.

  Lily chuckled easily. “I didn’t waste it, I gave it to a seagull. Seagulls have a right to be fed I suppose.”

  Charlie unstoppered the lemonade and took a swig from the bottle before wiping the mouth and handing it to Lily. “Forgot cups.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Lily drank and handed the bottle back to him. “D’you think Sylvia de Charmante is really good? I’ve watched and watched her and I can’t see what she does that is so much better than anyone else.”

  “Better than you, you mean?”

  Lily flushed and shot a shy look at Charlie. “Well yes, actually. I know I’ve got loads to learn and everything but . . .”

  He nodded. “She’s no better than you, in fact her voice is weaker and she’s much less musical. But she got herself a name during the war and she’ll trade on that for the rest of her life. I saw her once; she did one of those recruitment shows with a film of the Western Front and free beer at the bar, and some songs and a kiss for the lads who went up and signed on. Poor fools.”

  “Did many go?”

  Charlie shrugged. “A dozen or so, I suppose. It made little difference in the end. Once conscription came in everyone had to go. It just made the difference to what time you got there.”

  “I’m glad you weren’t there for long,” Lily said. “I don’t like to hear about it. It spoiled everything for me when I was a girl. The streets had to be kept dark, and it was always cold. Everyone’s dads and brothers went away. Everyone was short tempered and there was never enough money.”

  Charlie nodded. “Poor Lily,” he said mockingly.

  Lily threw the rest of the crust to the gull and lay back on the short springy turf. “I know,” she said. “I’m supposed to think I was lucky because I was a girl, and my dad died quickly and didn’t come home a cripple, and my ma had the shop. But she never thought there was any point to the war. Not from the very beginning. And so I never thought it was so wonderful either. And when the kids in the streets did pageants, or the girls did knitting, or collected newspapers or cloths or whatever, I always thought that it was a great big lie. And I thought Kitchener was a bully, I hated his face on the posters everywhere you went. He used to give me nightmares.”

  Charlie chuckled. “You’re preaching to a convert, Lily, I never liked the man either. I volunteered to go because I thought it was a good cause and that Germany had to be stopped. I bought it almost at once—”

  “Where were you hurt?”

  “Lungs.”

  “Did it hurt very bad?”

  “Ohhh.” Charlie flapped his hand at the memory. “Pretty bad. And then I came home and trained more poor fools in a dismal camp at the back of beyond in Wales for the rest of the war.” Charlie lay back and closed his eyes. “Rhyll. It feels like a long, long time ago now.”

  “And Sylvia de Charmante made her name out of it,” Lily pursued.

  Charlie chuckled. “Yes. You won’t have a chance like that, but I’ve got an idea for you, Lil. When we get back to Portsmouth I may have a new job. I may get the post of music director at the Kings.”

  Lily sat up at once. “Golly.”

  Charlie smiled. “Yes indeed. You may call me Mr. Smith. I’ll see if I can get you an audition as an act. They’ll put a show together, like this one, and then do a two- or three-theatre tour with it. It’s a different group of theatres and it’s Variety—not old-fashioned music hall. So you’ll have a chance to do a little bit more.”

  “Was that your idea? That you told Ma and me about?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Why are you so nice to me?” Lily burst out. “You picked me out of the chorus line and asked me to sin
g, and then you tried out your choir boy idea using me, so I’ve got an act of my own now and billing on the posters. And now you’re thinking about something new. Why are you so good to me?”

  Charlie’s arm was over his eyes, blocking out the overhead sun. He raised it slightly and squinted at her. “Because,” he said equably.

  “No, why?”

  He grinned. “Because I choose to.”

  Lily leaned over him and put her hand, tentatively, on his chest. “Because you like me?”

  Charlie took his arm from his face and put his hand on top of Lily’s.

  “Yes, I like you a lot.”

  There was a long silence. The gull, weaving back over them, cast a fleeting shadow and cried a short mournful cry.

  Lily dropped her fair head to Charlie’s upturned, passive face. The sleek bob of her hair fell forward and brushed both his cheeks. Lily hesitated, her lips an inch above his. Charlie made no gesture at all. Lily bent a little lower and kissed him.

  Charlie’s other hand came behind Lily’s waist and held her gently. Lily raised her head and sighed, scanning his dark face. Charlie smiled up at her, still unmoving.

  “Charlie . . .”

  He put his hand up and covered her lips. “Don’t chatter, Lil. You’ll only say things that you’ll regret.”

  Lily shot a puzzled look at him as he sat up. She leaned towards him, expecting him to put his arms around her, but he got to his feet and put out his hand and pulled her up.

  “Let’s go and have a paddle,” he said.

  He led the way down the little path, Lily slipping and breaking into a little run with an affected shriek of alarm behind him. She wanted him to turn to catch her and hold her in his arms but Charlie strode on, hands determinedly in his pockets, down the steep zigzag path to the sea. He reached the water’s edge while Lily was still hopping and limping over the stones in her little shoes. He picked up some flat stones from around his feet and skimmed them across the waves.