Fallen Skies

by Philippa Gregory

  “It’s cavalry country,” MacDonald said cheerfully in his dream. “Can’t wait for the cavalry to come galloping through, can you, Winters?”

  But as Stephen turned to reply he saw MacDonald’s head fly from his body and felt himself thrown from his feet and coated with warm wetness which he hoped was mud but knew that it was not.

  Stephen rolled in his bed, flinging out an arm in protest, but he could not throw off the dream.

  Now he was in a trench. It was in an awful state. His men had just been ordered into it and Stephen was in a rage with the regiment that had left it. The firesteps were exposed, the duckboards had sunk deep into the mud. The men had to wade knee-deep to get from one point to another, there were no adequate dug-outs and they would have to sleep on little shelves scraped out of the side of the trench, with no protection from weather or shellfire. Worst of all, the Huns opposite had the range and location of all the sniper posts and lobbed occasional, totally accurate, shells.

  To order any man to keep watch and to put his head up to fire a rifle was to condemn him to death—and yet an officer must order sentries posted. All Stephen wanted to know was the name of the commanding officer who had left the trench in this state. The only man he hated in the whole world was the commanding officer of the previous regiment. He cared nothing for the Germans, he cared nothing for the hard-faced men at home. But the man he wanted dead was back at St. Omer on leave. One after another his men were shot or torn to pieces by shells and Stephen strode up and down the trench, his anger transporting him beyond fear, screaming the name of the officer who had left him to do all the work.

  He shouted aloud “Johnson!” and the shout shook him from his dream. Half-awake, he remembered the dream and the day it drew on. The trench had been perilous, the regiment before him had been slack and demoralized. Stephen and his men worked all day digging the trench deeper, widening the sides, laying duckboards. Then at night, when they were weary and wet through and cold and afraid, they had to climb out of the trench, which seemed suddenly desirable and friendly. They had to leave it, their only shelter, and go over the top into no-man’s-land on scouting trips for headquarters. Stephen grimaced as he rolled over and dozed, remembering the terror of putting his head slowly, slowly above the parapet, and then easing inch by inch upwards. As each part of his body emerged from the shelter of the trench he imagined a German sniper sighting first on his head, then on his pale frightened face (“Oh please, don’t shoot my eyes, don’t shoot my eyes!”), then on his throat (“Oh God! Not a bullet in my throat!”), then his chest (“Not my chest!”), then his quivering belly (“Please God, don’t let them shoot me in the stomach!”), then his pelvis (an unspeakable prayer this one, Stephen could not even pray for his penis, his horror of castration was too urgent for words), then his legs (a nice clean flesh wound in the thigh, or the foot—“Yes! yes! yes!”). Stephen grunted with longing and slid back into sleep. A Blighty wound to take him safely home and away from this unending miserable horror.

  His final dream was the one that roused him. It started sweetly with the farm, the little farm, and old Perot in his blues, and old Mrs .Perot with an enamel basin under her arm feeding the hens. They had two daughters: Nicole, the bad girl who went into St. Omer at night and worked in a bar and whored on the side; and Juliette—Juliette, like an English girl, with a pale rose complexion like apple blossom, and pale green eyes like apple skins, and pale long hair like wheat straw.

  And the farm was such a miracle. Sheltered by a hill, such a tiny precious hill, just east of St. Omer. A tiny fold of ground but just enough to hide the building from the Hun gunners. And far enough behind British lines for them to be safe; safe and grateful. So when Stephen found his way to the farm on a borrowed horse, riding for the fun of it, Juliette came out with a mug of cider and a smile like an English girl in peacetime. He told Madame Perot that he called the farm “Little England” and she laughed and nodded as if she understood.

  It was fertile land. They kept sheep, a few cows, a pig which lived off scraps to be killed for bacon in autumn, and hens. But mostly they grew crops in fields that were broad and scantily fenced: beets and vegetables and clay-loving crops. Perot would curse the soil when he was ploughing and his one skinny horse pulled against the bogged-down weight of the plough. The army had requisitioned his team of plough-horses, even the old pony which Juliette used to ride. All they had left was the old mare who could barely shift the plough along. He was glad when Stephen came with Coventry, and the two men got before the plough and dragged it for him, like a pair of eager geldings. Stephen and Coventry were glad to do the work. It was like a holiday, like a holiday in the old days at home, when you might go and work on a farm for fun and come home and talk all about it, and josh and say you were a farmer’s lad at heart.

  Stephen smiled in his sleep. The farm—Little England—had a wood where the trees were still sound. The lower branches swept to the ground and grass and small flowers grew in the shade. When he lay back on the grass and looked through the intersecting branches at the sky above he could hear the ground shake with the impact of shells and he could hear the guns like thunder, but know he was far from danger. It was a lovely sound, distant gunfire. Gunfire far, far away, and someone else having to bear it. He loved the branches of the trees, those blessed low branches. Every tree on the Flanders plain within range had been twisted into a corkscrew by shells and fire; but Juliette’s trees grew as if there was no war. Juliette would sometimes come and sit beside him and let him take down her hair and hold her hand. One afternoon Stephen fell asleep with his head in her lap and when he opened his eyes and saw her face he thought that the war was over and he was safely home asleep in an English orchard.

  His dream shifted; Stephen, in his little bed in his dressing room, gave a muffled groan. His dream pulsed like a heartbeat, thudded like a drum beat. He saw Coventry’s intense angry face and his own. He heard himself say—“God damn them to hell! If they have harmed one hair of her head . . .” He felt the mad joy coming, the mad joy that meant he was unafraid, like being drunk, like being lustful. He pulled his revolver from the holster and secretly, in his other hand, Coventry slipped to him his knife. He was running, running down the road to Little England, running silently as if his boots were light. He was through the German lines, behind their lines in absolute peril as the German advance swept forwards to Paris and the Allies withdrew and then withdrew again.

  Stephen did not care; alone of all the English army he was going forward, defying the logic of retreat. And behind him, five of his battalion ran too, from shadow into shade, ran down the road to Little England, already burning for vengeance for what they expected to see. They were losing the war, they knew it. There was nothing to do but to pull back to the coast and hope that the damned Navy did its job and got them off quick. But suddenly, in the middle of ignominious retreat, someone had told Stephen that Germans had gone through to Little England.

  If Juliette were hurt, if she were dead—Stephen felt his heart beat quicker and his feet thudded faster on the mud road. His fear, his constant wartime terror was burned up by his rage. He wanted to rescue Juliette, he wanted her to be safe. But more than anything he wanted to kill the man who had harmed her. His breath was coming in gasps as they reached the bolted front door. No-one ever went in that way. He motioned his men to crouch down, to wait. Coldly and reasonably he told himself that when he had his breath, when his heart had stopped its hammering, he would be ready. And then the animals would be sorry they had crawled in here. Then he would cut them down in his righteous anger. And Juliette and her mother and father would be avenged. They were, in the end, the one thing worth fighting for. At last, after two years of war, Stephen could see why he was there. He was there to protect Juliette. He was there to protect her mother, her father, her sheltered lovely farm. And if he were too late to save her, then the man who had hurt her should die.

  He gestured to the men to follow him around to the back door. The yard was we
t with slurry and they made no noise. The yellow light spilled in bars from the shuttered kitchen window. Stephen paused at the door.

  He heard a man’s voice, speaking German, and he felt the heat suddenly rush through him in anger, and then he heard a woman laugh. At that sound, as he realized that Juliette and the Perots must be dead and the Germans in occupation with their whores, he kicked in the kitchen door and stood with his revolver pointing into the room.

  Stephen kicked at his bedclothes and then flung himself upright and awake at last, awash with hot sweat. “Juliette!” he shouted.

  “Wake up, wake up.” Lily was standing beside his little bed, shaking his shoulder.

  Stephen clawed at her hands and then grabbed on to her. Lily pulled herself away. “Wake up, Stephen. You are dreaming.”

  “Oh God,” Stephen said. “Oh God, Lily.”

  She stepped away from his outreaching hands. “You were dreaming,” she said severely. “And screaming. You woke me up through two closed doors.”

  Stephen wiped his face and neck with the sheet. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly. “I am sorry.” He looked at her hard irritated face. “Oh God, Lily,” he said miserably. “Dear God, it is an awful dream.”

  Lily moved her hands helplessly. “Well, it’s over now,” she said. “You’re awake.”

  “I dreamed I was there again,” Stephen said. “There.”

  He did not need to say where.

  He got out of bed and pulled his dressing-gown on. “I’m glad you woke me,” he said shakily. “It’s a dreadful dream.”

  Lily nodded. “I’m going back to bed,” she said. “You shouldn’t eat cheese after dinner. It’s cheese that gives people bad dreams.”

  “Cheese?”

  Lily nodded. “If you really want to stop dreaming you should stop eating cheese late at night,” she said.

  Stephen gave a trembling laugh. “You don’t even begin to understand,” he said. “You don’t even glimpse what it was like.”

  Lily looked at him with no trace of sympathy in her face. “It was three years ago, whatever it was like. And I am tired. I’m going to bed.”

  Stephen put a hand on her arm. “Don’t go,” he said. “I don’t want to sleep again. I’m going down to make myself a brew. I’ll have a little brew of tea. Come down with me, Lily.” He saw the refusal in her face and changed his request. “Or I’ll bring you up a cup. I’ll bring you up a nice cup of tea in bed. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to sleep again. I don’t want to sleep alone.”

  Lily looked at him coldly. “You chose to sleep in here, you can stay here,” she said. “It’s three in the morning. I’m going to bed. I don’t want tea in the middle of the night.”

  “Lily . . .” he said.

  Stephen’s young wife turned her pale lovely face to him. Her fair hair gleamed in the moonlight filtering through the curtains, the curve of her belly, rounded with their child, showing clearly in silhouette. “What?”

  “Nothing.” He let her go to the door and then his loneliness called out to her again. “Lily!”

  She turned. “What?”

  “I want to buy a farm,” he said. He was wide awake now, his hair standing up around his head, his eyes alert. “Lily, I don’t want to live here any more, and I don’t want to work in the office any more. Let’s buy a place of our own in the country, you and me and the baby. Let’s buy a lovely little farm in Sussex or Kent and go and live there, you and me. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Wouldn’t you like it, Lily?”

  She paused with her hand on the light switch. “I think you’re still dreaming,” she said coldly. “Go to sleep, Stephen.”

  She switched off the light and left him in darkness. Stephen put both arms over his head and held his ears and eyes so that he could neither see nor hear anything. “We’ll buy a farm,” he said into his pyjama sleeve. “I can make it come right for me, I can make it right for us. We’ll buy a farm and get away from here, from the office, from the Troc, from the house. We’ll start again. I’ll buy a farm and call it Little England.”

  25

  AS LILY GREW LARGE WITH HER PREGNANCY in the first months of 1921 she found herself surprisingly frustrated by Muriel’s management of the house. She wanted to nestbuild herself, she wanted to plan and decorate a nursery. For the first time in her life Lily was acutely aware of her surroundings. She wanted a place of her own, a place that she could use and furnish as she wished. She was tired of living in another woman’s house. Her discontent focused on the nursery that would soon be needed. Even its location in the large empty house was a difficulty. Apparently the only place for the baby was the old nursery, Stephen’s old room, a fine sunny room on the first floor overlooking the garden. But then the baby would be within earshot of Muriel and Rory while Lily and Stephen slept on the floor above.

  An alternative was that Stephen should move back in with Lily, sharing her bed and her room again, and the baby should have Stephen’s dressing room opposite their bedroom as a night nursery. Lily did not want that suggestion to be raised. She could offer no reason why Stephen should not share her bed, except the simple one which must remain unsaid: that she preferred to sleep alone. Stephen had not crossed the divide of the little landing to come to her bed in the long six months of her pregnancy. Lily thought that even when the baby was born, the creaking boards of the landing and her closed bedroom door might still offer obstacles to Stephen’s unpredictable desires. She would rather anything than have him sleeping at her side, choking awake on nightmares and spitting imaginary blood from his mouth, or the sudden night-time rising of his lust.

  Lily’s solution was that Stephen should go back to his bachelor room—the old day nursery—and that she and the baby should live upstairs. This too could not be spoken. It would have exposed the alienation of Lily from Stephen too clearly. He and both his parents would then have been sleeping in the big rooms on the first floor, Lily and the baby above them in a separate suite of rooms. Only the servants slept higher, in the attics.

  As with everything in number two, The Parade, the silence had a power of its own, and in that silence nothing that needed words, nor will, nor passion, could take place. The question of where the baby was to sleep was too provocative for speech, and they were accustomed to silences. But Lily longed to buy things—a cot, a white-painted dresser, a nursing chair, a baby bath. One sunny spring morning she asked Coventry to drive her to Palmerston Road.

  He came into the department store with her, his cap in his hand, very quick to hold open doors and very quick with a hand under her arm. Lily was carrying the baby high under her ribs and she leaned back against the weight. To Coventry she looked dangerously overbalanced, he found he was always standing behind her as if he feared she would topple backwards. Lily would throw him a smile over her shoulder as she waited at a counter. “Ready to catch me, Coventry?” The man would smile sheepishly and look around for a chair for her to sit, while she waited.

  Lily bought a great number of baby clothes, sitting at the counter while fleecy shawls and fine linen nightshirts were spread before her on the glass top. After she had made her choice, Coventry tapped at a notice which said that the baby’s name could be embroidered on the linen at a small extra charge. Lily looked doubtfully at Coventry. “Isn’t it dreadfully expensive?” she whispered while the sales lady was packing the goods.

  Coventry beamed at her and shrugged.

  “It would be lovely,” Lily said thoughtfully. “Dead posh!”

  Coventry jiggled her chair a little, like a school boy hinting for a treat.

  “Oh, what the hell!” Lily sang out, startling the shop woman. “Keep them, all except two sets, and send them to be embroidered,” she said. “I’ll tell you the initials in May. You can send them round when they are ready.”

  Beaming with mutual approval, Coventry and Lily went on to the cots, to the prams, to the baths, to the thick towels and soft fleecy nappies. Lily signed and signed and signed her name to one account after anothe
r; never adding the sums in her head, never looking at the prices, drifting in a delightful daze of spending money and saying, “Please deliver it to me: Mrs. Stephen Winters,” as if her own mother had never wrapped half a pound of cheese and popped it in Lily’s bike basket for her to take around to a customer while the lad was out.

  A river of white cotton, white silk and white lambswool flowed before her. Lily touched and smelled the little clothes in an orgy of innocent sensuality. There was white smocking and white embroidery on every little gown. Someone’s hand-stitching was spread before Lily’s satisfied stare for approval. There was hand hemming on the little soft white cot sheets. Every little shawl, every little gown, was dense with labour. Lily admired the textures, sniffed at the clean dry smell of perfectly new white goods and revelled in the arduous labour of other women which had brought these dainty perfect things before her.

  “I love being rich,” she said to Coventry softly while the saleswoman searched beneath the counter for something especially fine. “I love it. D’you think that’s very bad?”

  They shopped until midday. Coventry checked his watch and then showed it to Lily. She nodded. “Bring the car round to the front, there’s a darling. I just want to look at the hats and then I’ll come straight away.”

  Coventry scowled at her with mock seriousness and tapped the face of his watch with emphasis.