“What is he like?” Jane demanded.
“I don’t know,” Muriel confessed. “I haven’t spoken except to say good afternoon.”
“Well, speak to him then,” Jane said simply. “This is the 1920s. Noone seems to care about gentlemen at all any more.”
“Because there are so few left,” Muriel said bitterly. But she took Jane’s advice and within a few days was able to report back that at least Charlie had been commissioned during the war, that he spoke with no trace of an accent and seemed to know how to behave. Stephen at any rate was perfectly happy that he should come three times a week to teach Lily to play the piano and sing, and though there was a good deal of chatter and the lessons lasted from early afternoon until the evening when Charlie had to go to work, Muriel was certain there was no hint of impropriety, even though both the man and her daughter-in-law were stage people. Lily’s condition must be chaperone enough, and also there was a warmth and a comfort between Lily and Charlie that was nothing like flirtation but more like a deep fraternal affection.
When Muriel mentioned lightly to Stephen that Charlie was coming to tea even on the days when a piano lesson had not been booked, Stephen smiled and patted her hand. “If it keeps Lily out of that damned theatre we have to be glad,” he said. “And he’s a good chap. He knows how to keep the line. He’s got a string of girls of his own, he’s just keeping Lily company.” Besides, Stephen thought but did not say aloud, why should any man be interested in the rapidly fattening Lily when he could have his pick of the chorus girls of Portsmouth, and a choice of many society girls too?
During the season of classical plays at the Kings Charlie used his freedom from the theatre to play solo twice a night in a new nightclub, the Trocadero, off Palmerston Road. Marjorie Philmore, Sarah Dent, Constance, Alma, Violet, Diana, a whole crowd of young, single girls, thought him quite divine. Stephen, dropping into the club late one night, was very glad to be called over to Charlie’s table to join half a dozen girls and Charlie, lazily smiling, in their midst.
“I say, old boy, you do spoil yourself,” Stephen said in an undertone.
Charlie waved a drunken hand. “Les Girls,” he said idly. “All these women hanging around me, and I can’t do a damn thing.”
“Drink?” Stephen said understandingly.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Charlie replied equably. He was drunk but not so drunk that he could not see the play Marjorie made for Stephen and Stephen’s responsiveness.
“Your husband’s a bit of a lad,” he said the next day to Lily at tea time. “Marjorie again.”
Lily was respectably engaged in sewing a nightdress for the baby. “Doesn’t worry me,” she said, biting off a thread.
“Haven’t you got any scissors? It sets my teeth on edge when you do that!”
“They’re around somewhere,” Lily said idly. “You’re probably sitting on them.”
Charlie exclaimed and cautiously felt in the sofa cushions. He came up with Lily’s small embroidery scissors. “You are a useless girl,” he said. “You could have mortally injured me.”
“A small loss,” Lily said cheerfully, tossing aside the nightshirt, and pouring them both a cup of tea. “So where do these assignations take place?”
“At the Troc,” Charlie said. “It’s nothing too serious yet, Lily, but she’s a lady, not a chorus girl.”
Lily passed him a cup with a steady hand. “So?” she said easily. “I won’t break my heart over it. Anyway, what’s a man to do?”
Charlie gave her a sharp unsympathetic look. “Are you suggesting that Stephen’s appetites are so irresistible that if you are not available he has to be permitted to make love elsewhere?”
Lily took a large bite of chocolate cake and nodded with her mouth full.
“Bloody slavish, you are,” Charlie said irritably.
Lily shook her head and swallowed. “Indifferent,” she said shortly.
Charlie sighed. “I won’t queer his pitch then,” he said. “I thought perhaps you wanted him home.”
Lily shook her fair head. “Not really.”
Charlie nodded. “Does having the baby make no difference?” He was thinking of how he would have prized Lily if she were his pregnant wife.
“It makes a difference to me,” Lily said. She was smiling a small inward smile. “At last I’ve got something to love. I can’t tell you what it’s like—knowing that there’s a baby growing and growing and getting ready to be born. I think I can feel it moving sometimes, just a little. I lie awake at night and whisper to it. It doesn’t really matter about Stephen and me. The baby is much more important.”
Charlie nodded.
“And Stephen will never be better, I don’t think,” she said. “There’s a part of him which was made sick in the war and it will always be there. He’ll never forget it. It waits for him in dreams or in sudden smells or moonlit nights.” She laughed shortly. “And of course, the war was the time when he was most happy.”
“Happy?” Charlie exclaimed. He was remembering the terror that had gripped him. The way the ground itself had shaken under the gunfire. How horrible the trees had seemed with their bark hanging in strips and the boughs clawing with broken fingers at dark skies. He could not imagine what it would be to endure that desolate landscape year after year as Stephen had done. “You must have got it wrong, Lil, he can’t have been happy.”
“In a way he was. He wasn’t the second-rate son like at home. He was a first-rate officer. He knew where he belonged and what he had to do. Coventry, his batman, was always beside him and they trusted each other. They would have died for each other. There were no women to bother him, there was no boring work, there were no money problems, or demanding parents, or being a gentleman in Portsmouth. There was just the line of the trench, and his men.
“And he had time off. There was a farm where he used to go and work. There was an old farmer there and his wife and a couple of daughters. He said it was like a little haven, just behind the lines but in a fold of ground so it had never been shelled. A sanctuary. He and Coventry used to go there and help plough and harvest.”
“What happened to the farm?”
Lily shrugged. “I don’t know. Shelled, I suppose. What happened to everything over there in the end?”
They were quiet for a few moments. “He could see a doctor,” Charlie suggested. “There are an awful lot of good men dealing with neurasthenia. He could get some help with his nightmares.”
Lily put down her cup and smiled. “Not Stephen!” she said. “He employs a chauffeur so shellshocked that he cannot speak and he still says there is no such thing! He deals with it in his own way. He thought I would solve it for him but I can’t, I don’t know how to.” She shrugged. “I’d be sorry for him if he wasn’t my husband.”
“But they are kind to you here?” Charlie pressed. “He doesn’t hurt you? Your mother-in-law is reasonable?”
“We are so polite,” Lily said. “You don’t need love in a house which is as polite as this. We never know what we are all thinking, we never know what we care about. We are so polite that there is no room for anything else.”
Charlie put his hand over hers. “Oh, Lily,” he said sorrowfully.
She put her other hand on top, holding him, and she looked into his face. “I’m not lonely now,” she said quietly. “I thought I would die here when I was first married. My mother gone and the house so silent. But now I’ve got the baby I don’t mind so much. The baby and me—we can live here, we can make our own place here. It doesn’t matter that everyone else is silent. We’ll have each other.”
Charlie’s face was full of pain. “I wish it were different for you,” he said softly. “I love you so much, Lily.”
Lily bent her head and took her hand away. He thought he heard her whisper “I love you too” but it was so faint he might have imagined it. Then Browning came in to clear the tea things and he played for Lily to sing until six o’clock, when Stephen came home and poured them both cocktails b
efore Charlie left to change for the club.
• • •
Stephen’s driving lessons for Lily had stopped as soon as the weather turned cold in September and they no longer went out into the Hampshire countryside on Sunday afternoons. But Lily had asked if Coventry might teach her and Stephen had agreed. So on the afternoons when Charlie did not come, or in the morning if Coventry was free, Lily would put on her special learner-driver costume, a severely cut blue suit with a little blue felt hat.
Coventry, holding the passenger door open for her, could not wipe the smile off his face before Lily saw it.
“Shut your face,” she said equably. “I want to look serious.”
Coventry bowed, closed the door, went around to the driver’s side and got in himself. Ignoring the drives she had taken with Stephen, Coventry had decided that Lily should be taught from scratch. To Lily’s silent seething frustration, Coventry began at the beginning. He made a great pantomime of showing her the retard spark lever and indicating where it should be before she started the engine. He showed her the black ebony start switch, and how to select the gear, and then, gently pressing the accelerator, he eased in the clutch. She could hardly wait until they reached a wide and deserted stretch of the seafront road with a wind whipping in over the mudflats, where Coventry pulled the car over to the side, switched off the engine and changed places with her.
Lily set her hat a little tighter on her head and glowered over the top of the steering wheel at the seagulls riding the autumn winds over the water in the estuary and then gliding down to the mudbanks. The split in the windscreen which enabled the driver to open the top half came directly across her line of sight. Coventry, with a little smile, took off his jacket and indicated to Lily that she should sit on it so that she was higher on the seat. He took her hand gently and unclasped it so that she held the wheel lightly. Then he pointed to the starter switch and nodded.
Lily started the car. Coventry nodded towards the clutch and the accelerator. Lily put her foot on the clutch, revved the engine. She suddenly lifted her left foot from the clutch. The tortured Argyll leaped forward like a released tiger, throwing both of them back in their seats. Lily screamed, the car stalled and stopped.
There was a little silence. Lily looked at Coventry; he was smiling slightly and seemed quite unshaken. He nodded at the starter again. Four times Lily let the car leap forward, each time Coventry let her start again, gesturing with his hand that her foot should come up slowly and steadily. On the fourth try the car moved forward and Lily gave a yell of delight. Coventry let her move a yard down the road, then he gestured to her to stop the car again.
Even though Lily grew mutinous and impatient, he made her stop and start ten times until he was satisfied that she had learned the coordination of the movements.
“Now can we drive?” Lily demanded.
Coventry shook his head. He pointed to the wing mirror mounted on the driver’s side. Lily glanced into it quickly. “The road’s clear,” she said. “Can I go now?”
Coventry tapped it, indicating that she should keep watching, and then got out and stood behind the car. Lily watched him in the mirror. Slowly Coventry moved from the centre of the road to walk behind the car until its broad back hid him completely. Lily watched the mirror; he was walking steadily towards her and still she did not see him. When he emerged and was visible in the mirror, he was perilously close. She nodded at him. “I see,” she said. “I see what you’re saying. You could have been a great big fire engine galloping down the road directly behind me, and I wouldn’t have seen you until wallop!”
Coventry nodded emphatically.
“So can I drive now?” Lily demanded.
Coventry got back into the car and made a generous expansive gesture with his hand, indicating that he had taught her all she would ever need to know.
Lily started the car, checked the wing mirror, checked over her shoulder, and then moved smoothly forward. Coventry smiled with the quiet satisfaction of a job well done.
Subsequent lessons showed Lily to be a quick learner and Coventry to be a meticulous and critical teacher. He brought a long skewer from the kitchen and he leaned across and tapped the mirror every minute or so to remind Lily to keep checking behind her. She learned how to change gear smoothly in one lesson when he made her drive up and down the deserted autumn coast road, changing up and then down again, up and then down again. It was a four-geared car. Coventry did not attempt to explain the principles of gears, but he would tweak Lily’s earlobe to make her listen when the engine noise grew shrill and tortured and it was time for her to change gear.
They nearly came to blows over parking the car. Coventry made her reverse and park at the nearside curb and then reverse and park on the offside too. Then he took her home and built an obstacle course for her with the dustbins in the back yard and made her reverse and park all around them until she could put the Argyll into the tightest of places.
While Lily grew more and more impatient, Coventry moved the dustbins around and set her more and more difficult tasks until she had an instinctive awareness of the length and width of the big car. Coventry remained utterly calm and pleasant throughout, despite Lily’s rising irritation. But when she misjudged the gatepost and scraped the wing, Lily was aghast. She turned to him like a naughty child caught in some misdemeanour.
“Oh, Coventry, will it have to go to the garage to be repaired?”
He shook his head.
“Stephen will be furious.”
Coventry said nothing.
“I don’t think he was wildly keen about me learning to drive. If he thinks I’m going to damage the car he’ll never let me have another go.”
Coventry shook his head and mimed a polishing hand.
“You can paint it and polish it so it doesn’t show?”
Coventry nodded, smiling.
Lily leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders and gave him a smacker of a kiss. “You’re an angel, Coventry,” she said. “A proper angel. And thank you for teaching me to drive.”
The man flushed red, he shook his head at her.
“Sweetie,” Lily said. “Now I must go in. Will you be able to hide the scratch before you fetch Stephen this evening?”
Coventry nodded.
“And you won’t tell him?”
Coventry shook his head.
Lily beamed at him. “You’re a real sweetie,” she said. “A double sweetie.”
Coventry watched her run in at the back door and smiled after her as the door shut.
• • •
Stephen had a bed made up in his little dressing room in November, the fourth month of Lily’s pregnancy. He said that there was not room for him as well as Lily’s growing belly in their bed. Muriel tightened her lips but said nothing. It meant that Stephen was free to come and go as a bachelor. Lily was tired by her pregnancy and never waited up for him. She was always asleep whether he came home at eleven after a show and a dinner, or whether he came home at five in the morning when the milk horse and cart were clopping quietly along The Parade.
Muriel, lying wakeful, would hear the quiet purr of the Argyll as it slipped up the drive at the back of the house and parked. She would hear the two doors slam. Sometimes Stephen and Coventry went to the kitchen together. Cook complained that they had expanded their activities. She now found dirty plates and cutlery as well as stewed tea in the pot and mugs and cigarette ends in the range. When Stephen and Coventry came in at dawn they made cheese on toast and drank a tot of rum with their teas.
“You were very late last night, dear,” Muriel said, driven beyond discretion one morning. Stephen smiled at her over the top of his newspaper. His face was pale and there were dark shadows under his eyes.
“I’m a dreadful dog,” he said frankly. “I’m in terror of my wife.”
Lily was wearing a white dressing-gown to breakfast, an innovation which Muriel regarded with horror as being un-English and morally unsound. Lily smiled lazily over her te
a cup. “Did you have fun?” she asked.
“I was at the Troc with Charlie,” Stephen said. “There’s a new band, a nigger band. They’re quite something. Charlie was sitting in with them and playing jazz. All the girls were practically lying down on the dance floor.”
“American?” Lily asked.
“Nig-wigs anyway. Yes, I think Charlie said they were Yank nig-wigs. They certainly liked Charlie. They would have played all night, I think. David Sweeting had to practically throw them out at the end of the evening.”
“They’re going to London, Charlie told me,” Lily said.
“That’s right, I remember now, they asked him to go with them.” Stephen nodded. “Their pianist is sick. We were laughing about whether Charlie would have to black up. They’ve been hired as a nigger band. They can’t have a white man in the middle.”
Lily made an impatient little gesture. “But he’s not going?”
“I think he said he would, actually,” Stephen said vaguely. “Go with them to London and then a few other places, Europe, I think. Maybe he’ll commandeer a trip back to New York with them!”
Lily had gone a little pale, Muriel noticed. “He has never agreed to go with them?” she demanded.
Stephen folded his paper and glanced at the clock. “Yes, I think he did,” he said. “I’ll be home early this afternoon, Lily. I’ll take you out for a spin if you like. See how you’ve mastered the driving game. About four?”
He rose from his seat and nodded goodbye to his mother. Lily followed him out into the hall and watched while Browning handed him his hat, his coat and his scarf, and then offered him his umbrella. “No, it should be fine,” he said decidedly. “Grand weather for the time of year.”
He suddenly noticed Lily’s pallor. “Are you all right, Lily?” he asked. “Not squiffy or anything, are you?”
Lily shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. “Fine. Hurry along, you’ll be late.” She almost pushed him out of the front door and then when he had gone down the steps and Browning had gone back down to the kitchen, she stood alone and silent in the hall.
Fallen Skies Page 33