Fallen Skies

by Philippa Gregory

  There was a tap on the door. Lily called “Come in!” The door burst open and Madge Sweet flung herself into the room and into Lily’s arms.

  “Well, here’s a surprise!” she said. “And you number three on the bill, a married woman and looking as if butter wouldn’t!”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “ ‘Red Hot Baby’ of course! And chorus. So if you don’t want to talk to me, you needn’t.”

  “Of course I do! Who else will I know?”

  Madge threw herself into the broken armchair and cocked her legs over the side. “Not a soul, I don’t think. It’s an entirely new cast. I shouldn’t even be here. I had a falling-out with the Midsummer tour at Weymouth and I packed my bags and walked out.”

  Lily gasped. “You didn’t!”

  “I did! Mind you, I wouldn’t have been so quick if I hadn’t known there’d be work for me here! But Charlie said he’d get me a solo and the MD who took over from him on the Midsummer Madness tour was a brute! So I walked out night before last, and here I am with a solo spot!”

  “I’m to do ‘Burlington Bertie,’ and maybe ragtime as well.”

  Madge nodded. “Fast worker,” she said without heat. “I suppose that’s lover boy putting in a good word for you.”

  “D’you mean Charlie?” Lily queried.

  “How many lovers do you have?”

  Lily smiled and shrugged. “He got me the audition but Mr. Rice himself heard me sing.”

  “Oh, hell!” Madge said. “I suppose you do have a voice. But I thought that hubby would keep you home. What does he think about it all?”

  Lily glanced to see that the dressing room door was shut. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  Madge looked blankly at her. “Come again?”

  “He doesn’t know!” Lily said. There was a quaver of laughter in her voice. “I’m going to see him off to work in the morning and then come here, and I’ll be home by the time he gets home for tea.”

  “Not once the show starts you won’t.”

  “I’ll have told him by then. He can’t stop me once we’re into performance.”

  “The hell he can’t!” Madge exclaimed. “You must be mad, Lily Pears. You made your choice, girl, and you chose to be Mrs. Winters. You can’t have it both ways.”

  Lily hesitated. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I thought you’d be on my side.”

  “I am on your side. But I’m not blooming mad. You can’t live in that posh house and take tea with all the lords and ladies and then come out and sing on stage.”

  “Vesta Tilley did . . .” Lily started.

  “Vesta Tilley’s husband said she could! You can’t carry on like this without Stephen’s say-so. You can’t do it, Lily. You’d better tell Mr. Rice, here and now, that it’s no good and leave.”

  Lily turned her back to Madge and sat before the mirror. “I can’t,” she said. Her defiance collapsed and Madge saw her mouth quiver. “Honestly, Madge, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s like being buried alive in that house. Stephen’s out all day, every day. His ma has a hundred things to do, none of them worth doing. His dad lies upstairs like a dead man, and no-one goes to see him unless they have to. Nobody talks, nobody laughs. Nobody ever sings. Nobody ever has any fun. I can’t live there. I have to have something to do. I’m a singer. I have to sing. I have to be on stage. I can’t just die on my feet. I’m eighteen! What am I going to do for the rest of my life?”

  Madge shrugged. “You should be running the house.”

  “His ma does everything. I’m not allowed even to choose what I eat.”

  “You’ll have a baby.”

  “I don’t want a baby. Stephen doesn’t want a baby. He makes sure we don’t have one.”

  “You should visit your friends.”

  Lily simply shrugged her shoulders in reply.

  Madge thought of Lily’s mother dead before her daughter was a woman, of the corner shop and the noisy vulgar women who would not be welcome at number two, The Parade, of Lily’s hopeless loneliness. “Well, you surely can’t get away with not telling him,” she said pragmatically. “He’ll have to know.”

  “When we open,” Lily said. “That’s when I’ll tell him. When it’s too late for him to do anything about it. I’ll tell him then.”

  • • •

  Charlie was running rehearsals. The stage manager was miserable with summer flu and had handed everything over to him. Richard Rice was in an office tucked away high up in the dress circle and had left Charlie to organize things. Charlie decided to run through all the soloists and all the acts in the morning and early afternoon and leave the chorus till mid-afternoon, either side of the tea break. All morning the chorus worked in the circle bar with the choreographer.

  “So you get home on time,” Madge said spitefully to Lily as the dancers came into the theatre for their practice with the band. “Nice to have friends in high places.”

  “Oh, hush,” Lily said. “It makes sense to have the acts on stage first, and he won’t keep you late.”

  “The acts can go now,” Charlie said from the pit. “All except anyone who has a number which they have rehearsed with the chorus girls. We’ll do those now. The rest of you can go. Tomorrow, same time, eleven o’clock.”

  Lily smiled at him. It was just four. She would have plenty of time to get home before Stephen returned from the office. “Goodbye,” she called to Charlie. He barely looked up from his notes. “Goodbye, Lil,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

  Lily slipped out of the stage door and walked briskly around the building to the main road. The tram stopped outside the Kings. She had to wait only a few minutes before it came. It rattled down the Palmerston Road, then on down the Clarendon Road and terminated at East Southsea station. Lily walked the little way up Granada Road and tapped on the front door of her home at twenty past four. No-one had given her a door key.

  Browning let her in. Muriel came forward out of the drawing room. “Lily, my dear,” she said. “I was just going to have tea.”

  “Lovely,” Lily said easily. “I’ll go and take my hat off.”

  She washed her face and hands, rubbing the lipstick away with her flannel. She combed her hair. She beamed at herself in the mirror. The carpet men had come, as Muriel had promised they would, and there was a deep blue carpet on the bedroom floor which matched the blue trim of the curtains.

  “Lovely,” Lily said with satisfaction. She was on her way downstairs for tea when she heard the noise of Stephen’s key in the lock. She had timed it to perfection. Stephen was surprised, when he came into the hall, that Lily came down the stairs and kissed him. She had obviously forgotten the morning’s conflict over the bathroom. Stephen, receiving her into his arms, decided to forget about it too.

  • • •

  “I don’t know what to do,” Muriel confided on the telephone to Jane Dent. It was the second week of rehearsals. “The wretched girl goes out every day, dressed to the nines, and gets back minutes before Stephen is home, and she looks at me and smiles as if she knows that I daren’t say a thing.”

  “Why don’t you just tell him?” Jane asked.

  “How can I! They’ve been married less than a month. I can hardly say to him that his wife is having an affair with another man. I’ve no evidence. I know nothing for sure.”

  “Speak to her?” Jane suggested. She was filing her nails while she listened to Muriel. This was not the first telephone call on the subject. She was losing interest.

  “She just smiles at me, and she’s so pleasant, and Stephen is so happy. I hardly want to drop a bombshell into the middle of all that.”

  “Leave it alone then,” Jane advised. “If it is a bombshell it’ll go off anyway. Someone will plough it up and lose a leg. He’ll catch Lily out sooner or later. You need have nothing to do with it.”

  “But what will happen then?” Muriel wailed. “If it goes on so long and he catches her out too late?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Jane s
aid levelly. “If she’s ready to run off with the greengrocer then he’ll divorce her. Stephen won’t suffer. You shouldn’t worry.”

  “I just want him to be happy,” Muriel said miserably.

  Jane shrugged and put her nail file back in the little box. “I think they forgot,” she said. “I think they forgot how to be happy in France. All the young men Sarah sees now, they know how to drink and they know how to smoke and they can dance like dervishes, Charleston, ragtime, the shimmy, all sorts. But I don’t see any one of them who knows how to be happy. They’re all jumpy. They all know they’re lucky to be alive and none of them know how to deserve it. We lost the happy ones in France, Muriel.”

  “My Christopher.”

  “And all the other boys.”

  • • •

  It was at the end of the second week of rehearsals that Charlie took Lily out for coffee break. His favourite café for this theatre was little more than a private house opposite the stage door, with the front door open to customers and a hatch knocked through from the kitchen to the sitting room and a handful of plywood chairs and tables.

  “Have you told your husband you’re working?” Charlie asked abruptly.

  Lily was wearing a peach coat and dress with a large picture hat and gloves to match. Her skin under the shadow of the peach hat was glowing with warmth. She was almost edible. Charlie stirred his tea to avoid looking at her. “Have you told him?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “Well, you have to. We open next Monday, Lil, he’s going to notice you’re not at home. God knows how you’ve covered up so far.”

  “Rehearsals seemed to finish on time,” Lily said mischievously.

  “Well, I’m an idiot to help you,” Charlie said frankly. “God knows why I did. Because now we’re going to open, and now’s the time that he tells you not to work, and we’ll be an act down and all the posters will have to be reprinted. I should have made you tell him at the start. I did tell you that you could manage him if you handled him right. I didn’t want to interfere.”

  “I listened to what you said. I’ve been sweet as pie.”

  Charlie grunted, wrapped his hands around the mug and sipped his tea.

  “It’ll be all right,” Lily reassured him. “Now I’ve had a fortnight in rehearsal I can show him that it’ll be all right. He can see that it works. It was a good idea to leave it a while before telling him. He didn’t like the idea, but he can see that it fits in well to our lives. I’ll talk him round.”

  “I hope to God you do,” Charlie said. “Richard is going to go mad if you drop out at this late stage.”

  “I won’t drop out,” Lily said.

  “If you drop out, you’ll never work here again,” Charlie warned.

  “I won’t drop out.”

  Charlie nodded. “All right then,” he said.

  They sat for a while in silence, Lily sipping her tea, Charlie scowling into the middle distance.

  “D’you remember that day when we went out on the motorcycle?” Lily asked suddenly. “It was so sunny, and we swam, and we had a picnic, and then we had tea in that little village shop on the way home. Just outside Bournemouth, wasn’t it? In Dorset? D’you remember?”

  Charlie looked up at her and his eyes were very dark. “I remember,” he said tightly.

  “Were you in love with me?” Lily asked gravely. “I was in love with you. I was—oh—madly in love with you.”

  “I expect so,” Charlie said. He could feel a hard hot compression in his chest which later on, probably tonight, he would know as pain. Pain from a war wound, he thought.

  “Were you?” Lily insisted. “Were you in love with me then?”

  Charlie scanned her face; if she were seeking flattery she could go elsewhere. But there was no vanity there. She was as innocent as the girl he had taken to the country that day. The girl who had wanted to be kissed, and had thrown her sandwich to the seagull, and had come to his bed like an innocent desirous animal.

  “Yes,” he said unwillingly. “I was in love with you that day. I was in love with you for the whole tour. And I am in love with you now. As far as I know, I will be in love with you for ever. But for all the difference it is going to make to your life and to mine I might as well not bother. I cannot be your lover, I cannot be your husband. I do love you—but it hardly matters. I love you, but there is nothing I can do with that love. It’s just there.”

  Lily said nothing but her face under the wide peach brim glowed. “It matters to me,” she said with dignity. “It matters to me that the first man that I ever loved—loved me back.”

  They sat in silence for a little while, then Charlie glanced at his watch. “Time we were getting back,” he said.

  Lily nodded and picked up her bag and her gloves. Charlie held the door for her as they went out into the bright street. “If you have a quarrel,” he said tightly, “don’t let him hurt you, Lil. I can’t bear the thought of you being hurt.”

  She turned back to face him. “He can’t hurt me,” she said with certainty. “Only the people that you love can hurt you. Stephen can’t hurt me at all.”

  20

  LILY MEANT TO TELL STEPHEN that she was in the new show at the Kings Theatre on Friday evening. But Muriel had invited the Dents around for dinner and there was no time. In the night, Stephen moved towards her and Lily pushed his hand away.

  “I cannot, I am unwell,” she said.

  Stephen moved back to his side of the bed without speaking, and lay still, without touching her.

  Lily listened to the sea and thought that she should have let him do what he wanted and then he would have felt obliged to her on Saturday. She thought she would leave it until Saturday evening, when they might be happy again, and tell him then.

  On Saturday morning, Rory’s wheelchair arrived. Lily had suggested to Muriel that they buy a wheelchair and take Rory out, and the family doctor had been enthusiastic. Muriel had said nothing more, hoping that Lily would forget. But on one of her trips along the Palmerston Road she had stopped in a shop and ordered, on account, one of the new lightweight wheelchairs that were so popular with crippled officers.

  “I will not have that thing in the drawing room,” Muriel said to Stephen in a passionate whisper at the foot of the stairs. Coventry and Nurse Bells were manhandling Rory Winters’s slack body from bed to wheelchair and then Coventry was going to bump it gently down the stairs. “I know Lily is thinking of Rory’s good and I know her intentions are the best; but I will not have that chair in my drawing room.”

  “Good God, no!” Stephen said. “He can be walked by Nurse Bells and then come in the back door and Coventry can take him upstairs again. I don’t want to walk with him, I don’t see why you should walk with him. Do we want all our friends to see him? All his old colleagues? You should have stopped Lily ordering the chair, Mother. She’s been much too interested in him from the start, it’s morbid and unhealthy.”

  “She thought it would be good for him, and when I asked Dr. Mobey he said it would be an excellent idea. I couldn’t really say no. How could I say that I didn’t want him downstairs? How could I say that I didn’t want him taken out?”

  Stephen made a muffled exclamation and turned away. At the top of the stairs he heard the wheelchair bump gently down the first step.

  “Careful!” Lily exclaimed from the first floor landing, behind Coventry. “Do hold on tight, Coventry! Can you manage? Stephen! Come up!”

  Unwillingly Stephen went up the stairs to help. His father was dressed. Stephen had not seen him properly dressed in six years, not since Christopher’s death. He was wearing a pale summer suit. Someone had cut his hair and he had been properly shaved, the little unattractive tufts of hair that the nurse usually missed had been smoothly shaved away. His skin was pink and healthy. He had a white panama hat with the colours of the Southsea cricket club on the hat band. He looked distinguished, he looked alive.

  “You look very smart, Father,” Stephen said in surprise.

/>   His father’s dark eyes looked at him. Stephen thought they held some inner twinkle, as if his father had heard him, had understood.

  “I bought him a new cravat to celebrate the day out,” Lily said. “And a new carriage rug so he’ll be warm. Isn’t this a lark?”

  With Coventry holding the handles and Stephen holding the bottom of the chair, they carried it carefully downstairs and set it on its wheels in the hall. Muriel, rather pale, was standing by the front door, watching.

  “Isn’t this a lark?” Lily demanded of the old man. She leaned forward and straightened his hat and kissed his cheek.

  Stephen recoiled and looked at his mother. They exchanged one swift look like conspirators.

  “Get your hat then, Stephen!” Lily exclaimed. She turned to Muriel. “Are you ready, Mrs. Winters?”

  Muriel, with neither hat nor gloves, was clearly not ready. She hesitated. “I’m not coming,” she said baldly. She looked at Stephen.

  “Neither of us is coming. None of us is going,” he corrected himself. “Nurse Bells can manage the chair perfectly well on her own. Coventry can help her up and down the steps.”

  Lily looked from her husband to her mother-in-law in surprise. “But why not?” she asked. “I thought we would all go with him. I thought it would be fun.”

  “Hardly!” Stephen said. He turned and went into the drawing room and shut the door behind him. Muriel and Lily faced each other in the shadowed hall.

  “Don’t you want to come for a walk with Mr. Winters?” Lily asked, genuinely surprised. Muriel could see her looking from the firmly shut door, to Muriel’s flushed face, and then to Rory. “Don’t you want to come?”

  Muriel shook her head, speechless, turned and pushed past Lily, past Nurse Bells and Coventry and went up the stairs without speaking. Her bedroom door slammed shut.

  There was a silence in the hall. Lily turned to Nurse Bells and to Coventry. “I don’t understand,” she said simply.

  Coventry said nothing.

  “I’ll go on my own,” Nurse Bells said briskly. “Do me good to get out in the fresh air. I’ve always been a one for my own company.”