Fallen Skies

  “Go on slowly,” Lily said. “I’ll catch you up. I promised I’d walk with him.”

  The nurse nodded and opened the door for Coventry to manhandle the chair down the front steps. Lily opened the door to the drawing room and went in.

  “Stephen?” she said.

  He was standing by the fireplace. As she came in he turned to her and she saw his face was crumpled with distress.

  “Oh, Stephen!” she said and went towards him.

  He flung himself on her and she staggered under his weight. He held her breathlessly tight and she felt his body shake with deep sobs. Lily put her arms around him and patted his back with her little hands. “It’s all right,” she said helplessly. “It’s all right.”

  The weight of him was bearing her down, she felt smothered by his need. “Do stop it,” she said gently. “Stephen, do stop.” She felt a half-disgusted pity for him, but she did not understand. “Shush,” she said gently. He was leaning heavily on her. “Do stop,” Lily said.

  Slowly he recovered, pushed her away and pulled out his handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his face. “I don’t want to see you with a bath chair!” he said, speaking very low. “I don’t want to see you with a half-dead man. I don’t want to see him myself. He’s one of the war dead! Can’t you see? Can’t you see how obscene it is to get him dressed up and wheel him around like a big rag doll? I don’t want you near him! I married you because you were young and alive and not like any part of the war. I don’t want you wheeling a wheelchair!”

  “He’s your dad,” Lily said simply. “And the doctor said it would do him good.”

  “He’s nothing to me!” Stephen said passionately. “No-one is anything to me except Coventry and you. You two. Everyone else is part of the war. Mother who sent me off to it. John Pascoe who sent his son. The Dents who did very well out of it, thank you. All the women who stayed at home in comfort and let us do the fighting for them. They’re all part of it. I look around and everyone I see has been part of it.” He broke off on a racking sob, and then drew a deep breath, rubbing his face. “Except you,” he said. “You, because you were too young to know anything, and because you hate it as much as I do. And Coventry, who has forgotten it all.”

  Lily went closer to Stephen and took his hand. She was frightened by his earnestness. She didn’t know what to say to reassure him, she did not know what to do with the power he thrust on her when he wept in her arms. “I don’t like you like this,” she said uneasily. “Don’t be like this, Stephen. Come out for a walk. We can walk in front of him if you like, or behind him. I won’t push the chair. But I promised him, I’ve been promising him for weeks that I’d take him out for a walk by the sea.”

  “He can’t hear you!” Stephen shouted in frustration. “It doesn’t matter what you say to him, what you promise him. He can’t hear a thing and he can’t feel a thing. He’s dead. He’s dead except that he eats and breathes. You want to walk out with a corpse, Lily. You’ve been talking to a dead man. You should leave him alone, Lily, leave him to the nurse. You should be thinking about me—about the promises you made to me.”

  “He’s not dead . . .” Lily started.

  “I married you so that I could forget about pain,” Stephen interrupted. “I married you so that I could be free of the war. And now you want me to push a wheelchair, and my dreams are worse than ever before.”

  “Your dreams?”

  Stephen put his face close to her and spoke as if he hated her, as if he blamed her for his nights. “Dreams,” he said quietly. “Dreams that you would rather die than see. Bodies bobbing up out of the mud, friends blown away in a storm of red and wet. A whore spread out against the kitchen wall with bullets stitched through her. A baby . . . a baby . . .”

  His arm held Lily’s waist. He thrust his face so close to hers that she could smell his warm breath. She leaned away from him as far as she could go. “Why don’t you see a doctor?” she asked.

  Stephen abruptly released her and Lily staggered back and nearly fell.

  “See a doctor! See a doctor!” Stephen mimicked. “What for? Can he make it so the war never happened? That’s all I need. Can he make it so I was never there, so I never saw, so I never did?”

  Lily shook her head, saying nothing.

  They were silent.

  “I was counting on you to make things better here,” Stephen said. His voice was businesslike, as if he had a legitimate complaint. “I married you to make things better.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I do try.”

  Stephen gave a hard little laugh and turned towards the window. “Now she can’t manage the steps up to the promenade,” he said irritably, watching the nurse and Coventry helping her. “They’ve got themselves stuck.”

  “I’ll go,” Lily said. “I promised him.”

  Stephen rounded on her. “I’ll fetch my hat,” he said savagely. “I suppose I’ll have to go or see my father tipped out like a guy on the road.”

  He slammed out of the door and fetched his hat from the cloakroom. Lily waited for him by the front door and then took his arm in silence as they went down the white scoured steps.

  On the skyline of the promenade they could see Nurse Bells, her cape blown back by the sea breeze, pushing the wheelchair. She had managed the steps with Coventry’s help and she was strolling along, pushing the lightweight chair. Lily and Stephen crossed the road, walked around the Canoe Lake and then on to the promenade. They caught up with the wheelchair in a few moments. They walked ahead of it, Stephen eyeing people carefully, hoping that they would meet no-one they knew. Lily’s hand was tucked into his arm and he held her tight without affection.

  “This will bring the colour to our cheeks,” Nurse Bells said cheerfully. “And give us a good appetite for our dinner! What a nice change of scene! How thoughtful of Mrs. Winters to buy us a wheelchair! What a lovely treat for us all this is!”

  • • •

  Muriel did not come down at tea time, though she must have heard the bumping of the wheelchair going up the stairs to Rory’s bedroom. When she came down to dinner she said nothing about the walk and the atmosphere was silent and strained.

  “I have to see Pascoe about a case,” Stephen announced when they were drinking coffee in the drawing room. “I’ll pop over now and be back late. Don’t wait up for me.”

  Muriel looked at Lily to see if she had registered the lie. Lily was sitting in the window seat, looking at a magazine, not reading the words, just looking at the pictures, flicking forwards and back and then examining very carefully the detail on a skirt or a dress.

  “At this time of night?” Muriel asked, trying to alert Lily to the fact that Stephen was going out alone, and that it was extremely unlikely that his destination was the Pascoes’ quiet house.

  “Yes,” Stephen said. “Is nine o’clock so very awful? Coventry can drive me.”

  Lily looked up from her magazine and smiled at her husband. “Good night then,” she said pleasantly.

  Stephen kissed her on the top of her head and left the room. Coventry came up the back stairs without being called—so they had arranged to go out, Muriel thought. The women heard the front door slam, and then the car doors. They heard the engine start. Lily opened the curtains a crack and looked out. Stephen was sitting in the front seat of the car, one arm along the back of Coventry’s seat, the other hand holding two cigarettes in his mouth. As she watched, he passed one over to Coventry. Coventry let in the clutch and they drove off.

  Muriel opened her mouth to speak to Lily, to tell her that she doubted very much that John Pascoe was working at nine o’clock on a Saturday night. Lily smiled her untroubled smile. Muriel said nothing.

  • • •

  Stephen and Coventry drove around the darker streets of Portsea and then parked the car under a gaslight. They walked to a cheap music hall which played behind a pub near the docks. The hall was full of sailors on shore leave drinking heavily and looking for a fight. The show was just end
ing; the chorus girls came off the stage and drank with the men at the bar.

  Stephen and Coventry sat in a dark corner, drinking their favourite beer with a whisky chaser, watching the rumbling irritability of the drunk group. It was only a little while and then someone spilled another man’s drink and trouble flared. With a sigh like a man moving towards his lover, Stephen downed his whisky and put the table to one side. He stepped towards the half a dozen jostling men and tapped one on the shoulder and when he turned, threw a punch precisely and pleasurably behind his ear.

  Behind Stephen, Coventry tripped another man, and when the fight became general they were active on the fringes, a punch thrown at a man’s head, a knee in his groin. They fought without passion, their faces showed the same detached venom. When Stephen landed a fist smack in the centre of a youth’s face and felt the cartilage of the boy’s nose collapse beneath his knuckles he smiled very slightly and stepped back as the boy howled and fell to the floor, his nose gushing blood. Coventry and Stephen stayed near to each other, almost back-to-back, never getting deep into the centre of the fight where men were clubbing wildly around them with chair legs and there was the dangerous sound of smashing glass. They cruised the periphery of the fight, sometimes working together, picking on an individual and flooring him with a trip and then kicking together in smooth balletic unison with their hard feet into his belly, into his back, at the delicate point of the kidneys. The man groaned and tried to roll away and Stephen snatched up a bottle of beer from one of the tables, knocked the end off it with one swift movement and grabbed the man’s hair, dragging his head back and baring his throat. The bottle’s jagged edge was seconds away from the thin white neck when Coventry stepped forward and gently put his hand on Stephen’s arm. They looked at each other for a moment, a deep blank gaze, and then Stephen smiled and tossed the bottle aside and let the man go. A few minutes after it had started, but before the police arrived, Stephen and Coventry slid quietly away and walked, arms around each other’s shoulders, to where the car was parked, under the gas lamp, some streets away.

  “A good fight,” Stephen sighed with satisfaction. His face was flushed, all the petulance and disappointment smoothed away. He was rosy. His arm on Coventry’s shoulder was heavy.

  Coventry nodded, his face impassive.

  “Let’s go somewhere and have another drink. Let’s have a lot of drink.”

  Coventry unlocked the driver’s door and leaned over and let Stephen into the front seat. “D’you think that’s all we can do now?” Stephen demanded suddenly. “Do you? Break heads? Cut throats? Cause pain?”

  Coventry turned and looked at him, a long dark sorrowful stare.

  “Yes,” Stephen whispered. “So do I.”

  • • •

  Stephen woke late on Sunday morning, his head thick and his mouth sour. He could not remember where he had been drinking. He had one clear memory of a fight in some dive, a broken nose, a throat ready for cutting. No-one had hurt him. Stephen smiled at the memory. He did not go down to breakfast, but he was washed and shaved and in his best suit by quarter past nine, in time for the cathedral service at ten.

  Muriel said nothing about his absent place at breakfast. She kept her mouth buttoned tightly on her disapproval. Lily, who was not familiar with ordinary life at number two, The Parade, did not know that for Stephen to go drinking on a Saturday night and not to come home till dawn was unknown before his marriage. Muriel, of course, could not tell her.

  The service lasted until half past eleven and then Muriel, Stephen and Lily walked from the cathedral down the High Street to the sea walls of the old town. It was a sunny day and already there were holidaymakers settling rugs and sunshades on the little patch of pebbly beach before the town walls. Stephen laughed shortly. “The tide comes up there,” he said. “They’ll get wet.”

  Many of Muriel’s friends were also walking around the ramparts, watching the warships in the harbour and the yachts tacking skilfully between them. Muriel stopped often and introduced Lily to people who had not yet met Stephen’s wife.

  Lily was at her best at these times, Muriel thought. She might be only acting the part of a young lady newly married, but she did it superbly well. She was wearing the peach coat and dress with the peach broad-brimmed hat. Stephen, with his head clearing in the fresh air, looked debonair and handsome, and Lily held his arm and kept her other hand on her hat. They were an attractive couple. Muriel took pride in their appearance and tried to forget Stephen’s late night and Lily’s missing days.

  Lunch was pea soup, roast beef, roast potatoes, sprouts and peas, with apple snow for dessert. Cook had been distracted by the Sunday paper when she was cooking the vegetables and they had boiled over. The sprouts were drenched and soft as rotting rosebuds. Lily picked at her food.

  “I can’t eat a roast dinner when it’s so hot,” she said. “Couldn’t we have salad sometimes?”

  Muriel looked astounded. “On a Sunday?”

  “We always have a roast for Sunday lunch,” Stephen said. “We have something cold in the evening.”

  “Oh,” Lily said mutinously. “I didn’t know it had to be that way.”

  There was an awkward silence. “Perhaps you would like to discuss menus with me when Cook and I next meet,” Muriel offered. “We plan the menus for a month at a time. Then you could tell me if there are any things you particularly like.”

  “Thank you,” Lily said. “But I don’t want to interfere . . .”

  “It’s not an interference, I should like you to be there. Monday morning at eleven o’clock. Unless you are going out as usual?”

  Lily met the challenge without wavering. “I’m not going out in the morning.”

  Muriel took her knitting and went upstairs to sit with Rory after lunch. Stephen took the local paper with him into his study. Lily idled on the window seat. She hated Sundays even worse than other days in this house. There was a weight to them that no other day had. Freighted by over-large meals, the hours dragged from breakfast to lunch to tea time to dinner. Lily had nothing to do but wait for Stephen, and see if he would take her out for a drive again. She pulled at the fringe of the curtain. Stephen might read his newspaper and then doze until tea time and then she would not have been out all day except to go to church. She thought of her mother and how Sunday in the little flat above the shop was a special day for them, the only day when they did not have to rise at six for the deliveries, a glorious lazy morning when they did not wake until ten. They would cook breakfast in their dressing-gowns, using up the ends of bacon and bruised tomatoes. Supper would be a delicious picnic of everything that needed eating up—cakes, fruit, jam, cheeses, chocolate.

  She thought of Sundays on the Midsummer Madness tour when she had slept like a diver going into deep water until noon, and then picnicked and played with the others. She thought of the noise of the lodging houses with the chorus girls shrieking at each other and larking in the corridors. She thought of the Sundays when they had gone to the beach at Bournemouth and danced in the little waves on the wrinkled sand beach and people had pointed to them and known that they were the chorus girls from the Midsummer Madness tour. One time they had linked arms and done a can-can and a photographer from the local paper had taken their picture. She thought of that sunny quiet day when Charlie had borrowed the motorbike and taken her out into the country.

  She picked idly at the curtain fringe. She did not want to sleep, she was irritable with restlessness, bloated with roast dinner, headachey with the Sunday lunch wine. And she knew that either this afternoon or this evening, she would have to tell Stephen that she was working at the Kings Theatre.

  Muriel, knitting upstairs at Rory’s bedside, thought that he was looking better. There was a faint flush on his cheeks from yesterday’s sunshine. Nurse Bells had propped him upright and he looked alert and interested. He could not turn his head but Muriel was sure he was watching her and listening to her.

  “She is a lovely girl,” she said. She glanced o
ver her shoulder to check that the door was shut and Nurse Bells had gone downstairs to the kitchen for her Sunday lunch. “Pretty, of course. And she has a pleasant nature. She’s never said one word to me that was out of turn.”

  Muriel broke off and consulted the pattern. She counted stitches. She was knitting the back of the matinée jacket in the delicate soft wool.

  “But she’s up to something,” she said grimly. “She has been out all day, every day for a fortnight. She scuttles into the house at twenty past four, and then she floats down the stairs as Stephen comes in the door. I’m longing to ask her—but I don’t dare. What if she’s seeing someone? What if she’s having an affair?”

  A look of horror suddenly crossed Muriel’s face and she dropped the knitting and put her hand to her neck to hold her pearls. “Oh my God, Rory!” she said. “What if she’s gone back to the shop? What if she’s serving in the shop?”

  Rory’s dark eyes never moved.

  “No,” Muriel said. “She can’t have done that. She wouldn’t do anything as bad as that.” She nodded, remembering Lily’s smart clothes. “She wouldn’t dress up like that for the shop,” she said. “And besides, it’s been sold. Someone else has it. She wouldn’t go to work for anyone else. It must be something else.”

  She took a deep breath of relief, and waved her hand before her face. The room was stuffy, the hot August sunshine beating against the drawn curtains. Muriel picked up her knitting and started another row. “I can’t ask,” she said finally. “I can’t ask. And I can’t tip the wink to Stephen. They’ll have to resolve their differences in their own way. I can’t interfere.”

  Suddenly, from the floor below they heard the study door slam and Stephen’s quick step towards the sitting room.

  They heard him shout, “What the hell does this mean?” but Lily’s reply was too faint for them to catch.

  Muriel dropped her knitting to her lap. “Oh dear.”

  There was silence from the sitting room. Muriel’s hand crept to her neck to hold her pearls. “Oh dear.”