Fallen Skies

She looked up at him in surprise. She was putting Christopher’s towelling nappy on him and securing it with a large pin in the middle. He could see that although she was looking towards him and apparently attending, her whole concentration was on the placing of the pin, and the shielding of the delicate skin of Christopher’s stomach with her other hand.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” he said irritably.

  She sat the baby on her lap and gently pulled the nightgown over his head. At the hem, white on white, was embroidered CCW. “For God’s sake!” Stephen said again.

  Lily looked at him in genuine surprise. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “There’s nothing the matter with me! It’s not me who is hysterical about the baby,” he exclaimed. “It’s got to stop, Lily. My son must be brought up in a normal household.”

  She was fastening the buttons at the back of the nightgown with enormous care.

  “This is normal,” she said reasonably. Her voice was softened by her child’s proximity. “He’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about. He’s fine—aren’t you?”

  “It is not normal to have him on your knee at tea time. It is not normal to have him on your knee at dinner. It is not normal to go up to bed at damned half past nine because once it’s his bedtime you might as well go too!”

  “I get tired,” Lily said defensively.

  “Because you’re doing too much for him,” Stephen said instantly. “We need a nanny.”

  “No, we don’t,” Lily said quickly. “I’m tired today because I was singing a lot. Usually I’m not tired. And I won’t bring him down to dinner if you don’t want, Stephen. It just seemed so silly. Him upstairs, and us down. And you don’t see him during the day at all. The evening is the only time you can be with him. I brought him down so you could see him.”

  “We need a nanny,” Stephen said, sticking to his one point. “And I have found one.”

  There was silence. Lily turned a shocked face to him. “A nanny?”

  “Nanny Janes. She starts tomorrow at nine.”

  “Stephen, I . . .”

  “She’s on a month’s trial. She has wonderful references. She’s just what we need. She will have my old room, downstairs, the nursery. Christopher will sleep down there with her. And I shall move back in here with you.”

  “No,” Lily said simply.

  Stephen got up from the bed and crossed to the window and looked out. It was a cold night. There was a rush of clouds going across a pale distant moon. The sea was uneasy, pitted with scuds of rain.

  “I won’t argue with you about this,” he said determinedly. “I will not have my home turned into a bear garden by you and this baby. Nanny Janes starts tomorrow. Christopher will sleep with her in the nursery. That is all.”

  “Your mother . . .” Lily started.

  “Mother knows. She suggested a nanny. We are none of us happy at the way you have been behaving. You have brought this on yourself, Lily.” He moved to the door. Not since the earliest days of their courtship had he felt so powerful. He felt utterly determined to keep Christopher and Lily in their place, subservient, separated, controlled.

  He opened the door, ready to leave.

  “Stephen, please . . .”

  “No,” he said simply. It was a great pleasure to deny her, before even hearing her request. He could not help smiling. He went out through the door and he shut it quietly behind him. He stood on the landing, silently enjoying his triumph. Lily had defeated him over the theatre, she had taken her beating and then gone on stage. But the balance of power was different now. She had Christopher. She could not even raise her voice with Christopher in her arms.

  Stephen ran lightly down the stairs, across the hall and out into the rain without even a coat. The Argyll was waiting for him. Coventry had the engine running. Stephen flung himself into the passenger seat, slammed the door and laughed aloud.

  Coventry let in the gear and moved off. “Let’s get drunk!” Stephen said happily. “Let’s go out and find a couple of whores, and get hugely drunk!”

  28

  STEPHEN AND COVENTRY STAGGERED DOWN THE STREET, their arms around each other’s shoulders. A prostitute by a lamp post lounged forward, and then stepped back again into the shadows. She had worked the hard streets of Portsmouth long enough to know men who were too dangerous in drink for safe business. There were plenty of men like that. Sailors hardened out of their humanity on Atlantic convoy work, soldiers who had spent long years in the trenches and would never risk a direct glance at anything again. And men like these two: outwardly well, but sick inside from a cancer of anger or despair. She stayed still and silent in the doorway and let them pass.

  They walked until they found the car, parked as usual some distance from the pub where they had been drinking.

  “Let’s go home,” Stephen said. “Your home.”

  Coventry opened the door for him and then went around to the driver’s side. The moon was clear, illuminating the dark terrace streets around them with an eerie unforgiving light. Coventry drove with the headlights turned off, as if a gunner dug in on the Portsdown hills above the city might be watching for a telltale beam.

  It was a cold night for June. Stephen had come out without a coat and the air rushing through the half-open cab of the car was cool and damp, blowing in off the sea. Stephen shivered, bunched up in the passenger seat and blew whisky breath on his clenched hands with relish.

  “Chilly,” he said. “But we’ve known cold that’ll never be matched by any weather in this country. D’you remember the winter of 1917? D’you remember the snow? God! I do! Woke up one morning and the place was white. There were damn great drifts over the tops of the trenches. You couldn’t even see them. And chaps wanting to throw snowballs as if we were at some damn kids’ party.”

  He shook his head. “That was the morning we lost James Dilke. He just stepped off the road. The mud on either side had frozen on top but it was just a crust covered with snow. He went down like a stone before anyone could get to him. His pack dragged him down on his back and the mud closed over his face while he was screaming.” Stephen paused at the memory of the eighteen-year-old boy, and his face rosy against the whiteness of the snow as he went down. “Stupid not to make the road wider. Stupid not to mark it out before the snow fell. Stupid to step off.”

  Coventry drove with serene concentration as if Stephen was speaking of a time before his birth, before history.

  “I . . . I . . .” Stephen stopped to take a breath. “I . . . I . . . I liked him,” he said. And suddenly his voice was that of a child who cannot understand loss. “We called him Lucky Dilke. L . . . Lucky Dilke because he took a bullet clean through his helmet and it just parted his hair. And then he st . . . st . . . stepped off the road and drowned before we even knew what was happening. All of us running around and shouting for a rope while he went down.”

  Coventry nodded, as if he had never been there. As if this were all news to him.

  They had been driving along the line of the coast, and now they turned south down the road to Hayling Island. The tide was in, the waves sucked and pushed against the piles of the little bridge. The moon was silver on the black water. Stephen scanned the sleeping landscape all around them for a flicker of light from a match, or a giveaway reflection of moonlight on polished metal. There was nothing. The island was asleep and the country was at peace.

  “Too bright,” Stephen said.

  The westbound track along the coast had deteriorated after the winter storms. It was deeply rutted and silted with sand blown in from the dunes at the beach. Coventry eased the Argyll in and out of sand drift and ditch with practised skill.

  “I used to like driving to headquarters with you,” Stephen said, watching Coventry’s ease with the car. “Get away from the noise for a bit. The little roads, and even some trees which were still growing. I used to like that.” He sighed.

  “It lasted so long,” he said softly. “So damned long. I think I could have borne a few months of i
t . . . b . . . b . . . but not years. No-one could have borne years of it.”

  The car pulled up at the edge of the creek. Ahead of them the Ferryboat Inn was quiet; the squat ferry waited at its moorings, bobbing up and down. Coventry shut off the engine and the two men got out of the car and went, a little unsteadily, up the rickety ladder at the side of the houseboat.

  Inside it was dank and chill. Coventry closed the door and then felt along the shelf for the matches and the lamp. Stephen stood still, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, feeling again that rush of pure pleasure at being in an enclosed dark place, and not out on the revealing horizon. He had loved the dug-outs in the trenches. They smelled of urine and sweat and fear. But if they were deep, well dug and thickly piled with sandbags then they would withstand anything but a direct hit. Stephen used to creep into the officers’ dug-out after an attack, his face grey with terror, shaking as if he had a fever. He used to thrust his face into the dirty blanket and cry silent sobs of relief to be back in the little hole in the ground while the shells still screamed and the flares still exposed the landscape, white as death outside the dark hole.

  Stephen never had any notion of a battle plan, rarely hoped that an advance would succeed. From his first day in the trenches he knew it was just a matter of driving himself and forcing the men forward, into the easy swathe of enemy fire, forbidding himself to drop and hide, forbidding himself to crawl. The orders were to march forward, keeping step, firing as you went. Only when he received orders or completed the task could he fumble for the whistle and blow it with a screaming breath and wave the men back, back to the safe little pit in the little trench. And after a while, Coventry would bring tea and rum, and sometimes some biscuits or bread and jam.

  Coventry never commented on Stephen’s tearstained face. By then, he had lost his voice. They were none of them in very good shape. Stephen’s anguished sobbing went virtually unnoticed among men who trembled or winked or drank. The new recruits, underweight and anxious, would stare at them in horror; but within a few weeks those that survived would be shaking too. Coventry would wrap Stephen’s hands around his mug and hold them until they were still, and then he would nod gently and leave.

  The lamp glowed and the shadows slid back to the corners of the room. Coventry put a match to the newspaper and driftwood in the grate and he and Stephen watched the flames eat along the line of paper, curl around, and then engulf the wood. Coventry lifted the scuttle of coal and shook it on to the flames. Then he took the kettle and went outside to the standpipe.

  When he came back he put the kettle on the range and sat in the chair. He and Stephen together slid off their shoes and put them carefully to warm, hung their socks companionably side by side over the rail of the range.

  “I don’t hate it,” Stephen said suddenly. “That baby. I hate its goddamned name. But I don’t hate it. I’m not trying to separate them for spite. I’m not trying to spite Lily for her damned happiness.”

  He broke off. “In that house,” he said wonderingly, “with Father upstairs half-dead and half-alive, and Mother with her heart in the grave, Lily can find a way to be happy. And then she brings Christopher back.” He shook his head disbelievingly. “I married her to make me happy. I wanted her to take away the dreams, to put an end to the war.

  “But the dreams come worse. Worse and worse. And she just goes on singing, and playing with the baby, and living as if it were all easy. As if she had nothing to fear. As if no-one had anything to fear.”

  Stephen leaned forward and felt his perfectly dry socks. “I thought she would make it as if the war had never been.” He shook his head. “She has,” he said. “She’s done it for everyone else. She’s made the whole house happy; she’s brought Christopher back. She’s restored him to them. It’s as if they never lost him. It’s as if they never grieved. And now it’s just me. Just me alone, carrying the whole horror of it by myself.”

  The kettle boiled. Coventry made fresh tea in a stale pot, as he always did, sugared Stephen’s mug with four sugars, stirred it five times clockwise and passed it to him.

  “I’ll sleep here tonight,” Stephen said suddenly. “I don’t want to be there when that woman arrives and takes Christopher away from Lily. I suppose I shouldn’t have done it.”

  Coventry gave him a long level look. Stephen met his gaze without fear. They had seen too much together. There was nothing that Stephen could not confess to Coventry. There was nothing that they would not do for each other.

  “Had to be done,” Stephen said.

  • • •

  Nanny Janes was prompt. Browning opened the door to her at three minutes to nine and showed her into the drawing room as the ornate clock on the mantelpiece chimed nine. Muriel rose to greet her.

  “I am Mrs. Winters,” she said. “I am afraid my son was away on business last night and is not yet home. You must be . . . ?”

  “Nanny Janes,” the woman said briskly, removing her gloves and taking Muriel’s limp hand. “I take it that I am to start my duties today?”

  Muriel rang the bell. “I don’t precisely know,” she said uncomfortably. “My daughter-in-law . . .”

  The door opened but instead of Browning, Lily came into the room, holding Christopher in her arms.

  “I heard the doorbell,” she said. “Stephen told me he had engaged a nanny. But I don’t want . . .”

  “Is this the child?” Nanny Janes stepped forward.

  Lily tightened her grip on Christopher.

  “A handsome boy,” Nanny Janes said, making no effort to take him. “Does he suffer much from wind?”

  “Only after the night feed,” Lily said, lured into confidences. “But I walk him rather than use gripe water. I don’t like to use it.”

  Nanny Janes nodded. “Have you tried him with a bottle of plain warm water?” she asked. “It can be very soothing.”

  Lily shook her head. “I didn’t know,” she said.

  Nanny Janes smiled. “There are so many little tricks,” she said. “I’ve been a nanny all my life! I should know most of them by now.”

  “I think he may be teething,” Lily said tentatively. “I know it would be awfully early but at the back of his mouth there’s quite a pale patch on the gum. And sometimes his cheeks are very flushed.”

  “The front teeth come first,” Nanny Janes said. “Always do. The back teeth come later. You’ll know when he’s teething all right, Mrs. Winters! But we’ll get through it without difficulty. Are you feeding him yourself?”

  Lily nodded.

  “And is he gaining well?” The woman held out her arms as if to weigh him. Lily reluctantly relinquished the baby to her, pride overcoming her resentment. Nanny Janes hefted the baby carefully. “A grand baby boy,” she said approvingly. “And where is his nursery? Will you show me to it, Mrs. Winters?”

  “He doesn’t have one,” Lily said. “He sleeps in my room.”

  “The old day nursery,” Muriel prompted Lily. “Show Nanny Janes to Stephen’s old room.”

  Lily led the way upstairs. “It’s not been prepared,” she said. “He sleeps in my room. That way I can care for him in the night.”

  Nanny Janes, holding Christopher, followed Lily up the stairs. “Now, now,” she said equably. “We can’t have him being a cry-baby. He needs to sleep through the night. We’ll soon have him in a proper routine.”

  Lily opened the door to the day nursery. Muriel, looking up from the foot of the stairs, thought that Lily looked younger and powerless already. She looked again like the girl Stephen had brought back from the west country, with no-one to turn to and no-one to trust.

  “But I like him being with me,” she said.

  The door closed behind the two women. Muriel could hear Nanny Janes’s soothing monologue but she could not make out the words. She went back into the drawing room and shut the door.

  The car drew up outside and she heard Stephen’s footstep and his key in the lock. He put his head around the drawing room door, and, se
eing his mother alone, he came into the room.

  “Is the nanny here?”

  “Really, Stephen! She had no-one to introduce her. I had to go completely by guess. Yes, she’s here and upstairs in the day nursery with Lily.”

  “No ructions?”

  Muriel frowned. “How should I know? I am only the grandmother. Your wife and your nanny are in the nursery together. Certainly Lily didn’t greet her with open arms.”

  “I must change my shirt and go to the office.”

  Muriel hesitated. She wanted to ask him where he had been last night, and why he had not come home. But those were the recriminations of a wife. Lily had showed no curiosity. She had come down to breakfast and drank a cup of tea with Christopher gurgling on her knee and then gone back upstairs again to dress him. She never even expressed surprise that Stephen was not at home.

  “I am surprised at you being late for the office,” Muriel said obliquely.

  Stephen nodded. The silence between himself and the household was still holding powerfully even though there was a baby laughing and crying and Lily singing up and down the stairs. The old rules of distance and coldness still held between him and his mother, between him and his father, between him and the servants. Between Stephen and Lily there was opening daily an unbridgeable gulf.

  “Well, I shan’t be more than an hour late if I go now,” he said lightly and went from the room. He went past the day nursery soft-footed, but he could hear Lily’s voice and Nanny Janes’s. Christopher’s juicy amused gurgle interrupted the two women occasionally. Stephen smiled grimly as he went up the stairs to his little bedroom opposite Lily’s room. Christopher’s relaxed joy would end very soon. He would learn, as every man had to learn, that pleasure is hardly won and peace exists nowhere. He would not be dandled on his mother’s knee for much longer. He would learn loneliness and discomfort—as he should.

  Stephen washed himself thoroughly in ice-cold water and shaved uncomfortably in the same basinful as if he were still in the dug-out and scarce clean water brought to him a bucket at a time. He put on a clean shirt and tie and then took his suit from the wardrobe. When he was dressed he stepped back and looked at himself in the pier glass. He was getting plumper, the waistcoat was tight across his chest and belly, but the broadness of his shoulders could carry the extra weight. His face was square and handsome, a typical Englishman of the middle classes, exuding an air of self-righteous confidence, his brown gaze direct. If you took away the fair glossy moustache and the broadness, he could be a public school prefect, head of games, a hero to the younger boys. “That’s what I am,” Stephen said softly to his reflection. “A hero. A bloody hero. They can’t take it away from me, they can’t deny it. Nobody can deny it. It’s the truth because I said it was the truth. And now everyone believes it.”