Fallen Skies

by Philippa Gregory

  Lily held her coffee cup on her lap and looked blankly at the dried flower arrangement in the fireplace. She did not even seem to hear him.

  “Lily, my dear,” Stephen said. She turned her pale face slowly towards him. “I have made arrangements for your mother’s funeral for the day after tomorrow. I thought you might need some clothes. A black dress perhaps, and shoes and a hat of course. We have an account at Handleys, which you may make use of. I wonder, Mother, if you would go with Lily and help her choose whatever is necessary and charge it to the account?”

  “I’m free all day tomorrow.”

  “In that case I shall send Coventry back with the car after he has driven me to the office. Perhaps you would both like to join me for lunch at the Dolphin? I generally lunch there.”

  Muriel waited for Lily to consent but the girl said nothing. There was an awkward silence. Muriel wondered if Lily had heard, and looked to Stephen for guidance, raising her eyebrows slightly.

  He put down his coffee and crossed the room to stand before the fireplace as if he were warming the seat of his trousers.

  “You would want to show proper respect for your mother’s funeral, wouldn’t you, Lily?” he said encouragingly. “You would want a black dress and a jacket or coat. Some new black shoes and a black hat. A proper hat! Not one of your little flowerpots!”

  Lily suddenly stood and put down her cup and saucer with such force that the coffee tray rattled. “No!”

  Muriel jumped. It was the first time she had heard Lily speak louder than a whisper.

  “My mother had no time for any of that nonsense. When my father died at sea she didn’t even chip in to a fund for a memorial for the men who were lost. She said life was for living and money was for spending on living people. She never wore black and she never put me in black either. And I don’t think it would be respectful to her—or to myself—to go to her funeral in clothes which a stranger had bought me.”

  “Lily!”

  Muriel slipped from her chair and stole from the room, the very model of maternal tact. She wanted Lily to feel no restraint. She wanted Stephen to hear every word of backstreet abuse which Lily must have at her tongue’s end. She closed the door behind her and was too much of a lady to listen. She walked quietly up the stairs to Rory Winters’s bedroom and drew up a chair beside his bed and held his hand in silence.

  In the drawing room Stephen was on his knees before Lily. “I asked you before, and you said no; but you’re all alone now, Lily, and you need someone to look after you. You wouldn’t be at her funeral in stranger’s clothes, Lily. You would be dressed as you should be, out of respect to your mother. And of course I would buy your clothes. Now and always. I want you to be my wife, Lily. I want to take care of you.”

  Lily let Stephen hold her hands, she looked down on him as if he were an importunate dog, pawing for attention. “Oh don’t. Don’t, Stephen. Not now.”

  “Yes, now,” Stephen said, getting up. “You have to accept things from me, Lily, you have no money of your own.”

  “There’s the shop, and Ma had some insurance.”

  “I’ve checked, and it is bad news, my dear.” Stephen spoke with concealed relish. “You must be brave. The shop was a tenancy and in fact the rent is owing from the last quarter. There are no buildings or assets to come to you, my dear. Your mother had cashed in her insurance policy during the war. I imagine she found it difficult to make ends meet. And her illness has left her estate with some bills which will have to be met. If I can sell the stock in the shop and the goodwill to an incoming tenant I imagine you will make some thirty or forty pounds. But you will have no more than that.”

  “I can go back to work. I can get a job.”

  “You can. But I doubt you feel much like getting up on a stage and doing the can-can now, do you, Lily? I really don’t think you could do it. And I don’t think your mother would want you going around the music halls, looking for work, having to take whatever was offered and mixing with all sorts of people without her caring for you. Why, I remember the very first time we went out to dinner you told me that she went everywhere with you. How could you cope in that world alone, Lily? I don’t think she’d want you out in that world on your own.”

  Lily’s face was wretched, her lower lip was red and sore where she had bitten at the skin. Her face was ugly with strain. “I don’t care what I do. I don’t care what becomes of me. I am lost without her. I’ve heard people say that and I never knew what they meant but I know now. I am lost without her.”

  Stephen let the silence go on. He could see Lily’s pain naked on her young face. He had seen that look before, on young children in Belgium and France, when they had lost both parents and their home in one night of shelling. They were blank-faced but in their eyes was deep terror and deep despair. Lily, robbed of the only person in the world who had ever cared for her, was as lost as a Belgian refugee.

  “Marry me. I’ll take care of you. Marry me and you’ll have no financial worries, you’ll be well looked after. She liked me. She knew I would care for you. She said you could come out to tea with me—d’you remember? She trusted me to care for you. I think if she could advise you now she would tell you to marry me.”

  Lily looked at him with that dark-eyed look of blank despair. “I don’t know.”

  Stephen took her hands again. “I know,” he said firmly. “You don’t have to think about it, Lily. I will take care of everything.”

  Lily sighed. She was too weary to care one way or another. “All right.”

  Stephen hesitated for a moment in his persuasive murmur.

  “What?”

  “I said, all right.”

  Stephen tightened his grip on her hands and leaped to his feet. He put his arms around Lily and felt her ungiving stiffness. “Lily, my darling—”

  “Don’t. I can’t hear it now. I’ve said all right.”

  “Of course, of course.” Stephen was placatory.

  “But I’m going to the funeral in my own dress.”

  “Whatever you say, Lily, whatever you say.”

  He released her and waited. He thought that she would turn to him for comfort. He expected some kind of reward for his proposal and for releasing her when she asked. But Lily walked past him, opened the drawing room door and went out of the room. He heard her going up the stairs to her bedroom and the door softly closing. He wanted to feel triumphant—a man who has won the woman he desires. Instead he felt a worm of irritation, as if Lily had given herself and yet retreated to an even more impenetrable place. It was like winning the first trench but then finding that there is another trench behind, and another behind that, and that you will never reach the end; you will never finish the struggle.

  Lily lay on her bed in the blue room, facing the ceiling. She was hardly aware that she had agreed to be Stephen’s wife. His voice came to her thickly, dully, like someone speaking through water. She lived in a bubble of pain and loss which nothing seemed to penetrate. She could not believe that her mother was not alive, she could not believe that her present life was real. Every morning on waking she would keep her eyes tight shut, willing the ceiling to be her old bedroom at home. Every morning she willed herself to hear her mother’s voice calling: “Time to get up, Lily.” But the voice never came.

  She blamed herself, in the guilty way of all survivors. She thought that if she had never left Portsmouth then her mother would never have taken ill. She thought her mother had been overworked, in the shop on her own. She imagined her skipping meals, she imagined her sliding into bed at night too weary to make a proper supper. She imagined her opening the shop at half past six prompt every morning while her flu got worse and worse, until she collapsed. Lily was sure that if she had been there she would have made her mother rest; she somehow believed that the flu germs would not even have taken hold if she had been there, encircling her mother with her young strong love. Lily was too young to bear tragedy. She had turned her face from the war and refused to be touched by it. She wa
s unprepared for a death which came so close to her that now she even wished that she had died too, rather than survive and feel this excessive pain.

  She was sick to her heart with grief. She could marry Stephen or throw herself under a tram—they were equally attractive options. Lily, lying on her bed, dozing in her cheap dress with her worn shoes on the silk coverlet, knew herself to be adrift in life. She had lost the mother who was her anchor and her harbour. Nothing else mattered.

  • • •

  That night, when the house was dark and asleep and it was quiet in every room, Stephen walked noiselessly through the baize door and down the back stairs to the kitchen.

  Coventry was making toasted cheese. The rich strong aroma floated up the kitchen stairs to Stephen as he came quietly down in his slippers and dressing-gown.

  “Good show,” he said.

  Coventry turned and gave him a slow comfortable smile. It was a recipe of his own invention. First he toasted a slice of white bread on one side and then folded it, toast side in, over a slice of cheese. With the folded side downwards so there were no drips he then toasted both sides. He put the toasting fork prongs down on to a cheap china plate and pushed the sandwich off the tines of the fork with his broad clean hand, and handed the plate to Stephen. Then he poured the tea and added four spoonfuls of sugar to each mug. Then, when Stephen had everything he needed, Coventry made his own sandwich.

  The men sat in silence, savouring the smoky crunch of the fire-toasted bread and the hot strong taste of the melted cheese.

  “Any more tea in the pot?” Stephen asked, knowing there would be.

  Coventry poured another two mugs. Stephen felt in his dressing-gown pocket for his cigarettes and said lazily, “Oh damn.” Coventry reached back to where his jacket was spread over his chair and took a packet from the pocket. He took two, lit them both, and handed one to Stephen.

  “Good,” Stephen said contentedly.

  There was a long silence.

  “She’s agreed to marry me. She said so tonight.”

  Coventry raised an eyebrow and nodded, examined the tip of his cigarette and then drew a deep breath of smoke.

  “I’ll hold her to it,” Stephen said coldly. “She’s in shock now—I should know, I’ve seen it often enough. D’you remember Tommy Patterson? Straight over the top and walking towards the Hun as if he was strolling down Palmy Road on a Saturday. Someone had died—I can’t remember. Was it his brother? It was nasty, I remember that. All his face was blown off.”

  Coventry shook his head firmly.

  Stephen sighed with contentment. “No. All right. Neither do I. I can’t remember a thing either. It’s all gone. I can’t remember any of it. But I do remember Tommy Patterson taking his walk. He was shocked. She’s like that now. Same eyes. A kind of blankness. She doesn’t care what happens to her right now. She even said so. She’ll marry me and by the time she wakes up, it’ll be all signed and sealed, and I’ll have her.”

  Coventry glanced sideways at Stephen as if he were only partly convinced.

  “No,” Stephen said certainly. “It’s the right thing to do. There’s no future for her except hanging around music halls until she becomes tarty and shop-soiled like the rest of the girls. I won’t let that happen to her. And I have to have her. I’ve known it for weeks. When she is my wife it will all be different for me. Everything about me will be different. This house, my work, my d . . . d . . . damn dreams. Everything will come right when she marries me—you’ll see.”

  Coventry hefted the teapot to judge its weight, topped it up with the water from the kettle and poured another two mugs. The brew had stewed and was darker and stronger. Stephen smacked his lips on it. “My God, it’s got a kick like rum,” he said. “But I never liked it when they put rum in the tea. You always knew you were for it when they put an extra tot of rum in the tea. The men didn’t like it either. They knew damn well what it meant. D’you remember?”

  Coventry smiled at the embers of the fire in the open grate and slowly shook his head. He looked like an old man casting his mind back years and finding everything mercifully forgotten.

  “No,” Stephen sighed. “I don’t remember it very well. It all seems such a long time ago now. And such a long way away. And anyway, it was a dirty war on both sides. W . . . w . . . whatever we did was no worse than them, eh?”

  Coventry shook his head again. He could remember nothing. He could see nothing in the grate but warm red embers and soft grey ashes and a little sizzling stalactite of dropped cheese dripping off one of the bars.

  “No.” Stephen rested himself on Coventry’s amnesiac serenity. “And when I have Lily I shall forget all of it, all of it, too.”

  • • •

  Lily wore her blue striped skirt and a white shirt to her mother’s funeral. She wore a little straw cloche hat trimmed with a blue ribbon. The funeral was first thing in the July morning and there was a cold wind blowing in from the sea. Muriel came to Lily’s room in her dressing-gown and offered to lend her a jacket. Lily looked into Muriel’s substantial wardrobe and rejected both a dark jacket and a very suitable black linen summer coat. She chose instead a little white blazer with bright blue piping at the edge and the cuffs. “It’s rather gay,” Muriel commented neutrally.

  Lily nodded. “I am sorry if I offend you,” she said in her careful voice. “But my ma hated funerals and people dressing in black. She never even wore a black armband during the war. Even though she lost my dad and her only brother. I don’t want to go against her today. And anyway, I’ve already said my goodbye to her. I can do my mourning inside, I don’t have to show it off.”

  Muriel suddenly felt a wave of pity for Lily. “As you wish. Who will see us, anyway?”

  Lily disengaged herself. “Are you coming?”

  “I assumed you would want me there.”

  Lily shook her head. “No. Not you, nor Stephen. Thank you for thinking of it. But Ma didn’t know you. I don’t think you would even have liked her very much. I’d rather it was just me and anyone from our street. People who really knew her. Not people who are there only for good manners.”

  Muriel had been taught as a child that nothing in the world was more important than good manners. “As you wish,” she said again. “But you must let Stephen take you to the church and go in with you.”

  Lily suddenly shrugged, the fight gone from her. “Yes. Yes. I am sorry to be so difficult.”

  “I understand.” Muriel did not understand at all.

  “The car’s ready,” Stephen called up the stairs. Muriel and Lily went down together.

  “I am not coming with you,” Muriel told Stephen. “Lily wishes to go alone.”

  Stephen scowled, his handsome face suddenly darkening. “I shall be with you, Lily,” he said. “You will need me there.”

  Lily made a little gesture with her hand as if the weight of their combined wills was too much for her. “Oh, all right.”

  The service was held in the small church opposite the depressing Highland Road cemetery. Stephen was surprised to see that it was full. Very few people were wearing black, he noted, but there were a number of stiff Sunday best suits and at least most of the women had hats. He glanced along the pew while others were praying and saw the calloused red hands clasped in prayer. These were working people, Helen Pears’s customers, residents of the small terraced houses of Highland Road, tenants of the rented rooms over the cheap shops. No wonder Lily had not wanted her future mother-in-law to see the sort of people she had grown up with, Stephen thought sympathetically. She would be ashamed of them, no doubt. Half of them probably had guilty consciences—Helen Pears had died with a week’s wages from each family on the slate. She’d been foolishly generous with credit. They’d never pay now.

  They shuffled to their feet and then sat while the vicar addressed them. He seemed to know Helen Pears personally. He spoke of her courage when she lost her husband and her struggle to bring up Lily and to run the little business. Stephen heard someone sob f
rom the back of the church and tried to look around to see who was crying without fully turning in his seat. Probably some woman getting over-emotional about nothing, he thought. Lily, at least, was dry-eyed and self-possessed. She still had that white blankness which Stephen remembered from men in shock from shellfire. Odd, he thought irrelevantly. When he had first met Lily he had liked her chatter and her easy spontaneous giggle. Now she was to be his wife and she was as silent as himself. “She’ll brighten up,” he told himself as they rose for the final hymn. “It’s not as if anything really bad has happened to her.”

  The coffin bearers were the skimpy undersized men typical of poor homes. They looked like conscripts—the last batch to come out when the recruiting sergeants were scraping the barrel and men were ordered to the Front when they were underweight, underheight, pallid with TB and murmuring hearts, limping on dropped arches and damaged feet. Stephen shook his head disapprovingly. One man had only one arm, another had the thick cough of a gas attack survivor. They all wore campaign medals and had the recognizable brittle nerviness of men who had been at the Front. Stephen turned his head away from them, he didn’t want to look like an inspecting officer—but my God, what a motley crew. Stephen took Lily’s little hand under his arm and led her out into the sunlight.

  It had become a hot brilliant morning. The sky was a bright July blue, with not a cloud in sight. A little breeze flapped the vicar’s white surplice as he read the words of the burial service at the graveside. Lily’s face was as pale as his linen. He paused and nodded to her after the coffin was lowered into the ground and Lily took a handful of earth and threw it in. Stephen had expected tears but Lily’s face was set and still. Someone at the back of the crowd sobbed.

  Stephen, used to the brisk rolling of canvas-shrouded corpses into mass graves and a quick gabble over the bundles in lots of twenties or forties, or after an especially bad night, hundreds of bodies, found the service tediously long for just one woman. The headstone, which he had ordered and paid for from his own pocket, seemed expensive and ostentatious compared with the hastily nailed wooden crosses made from packing cases. God alone knew how many men were buried as they dropped, in a shower of mud, to be resurrected in gruesome glimpses by the next trench-digging party or by a hard shower of rain.