Fallen Skies

  John was openly delighted that his old friend was well again, and pointed to the easing of the office work now they had their partner back. He was full of plans again, speaking of the possibility of opening a free legal clinic. Once a day he rang Rory and once a week he came round to the Winters’s home and had lunch with him. Stephen could say nothing.

  He could not complain aloud, but he felt that his father’s return to work had reduced him once more to the status of the junior partner. He was once again the young Mr. Winters. He could not say that with his father in touch with office affairs he felt constantly on the defensive, as if his father might catch him out in some error. He feared the comparison between his own begrudging pedestrian style and his father’s bright sympathetic grasp of facts. He could not say that it was a misery to him that his father was recovering and growing in strength, and that he could foresee the day when Coventry would drive them both to work every morning, home at lunchtime and then home again in the evening; and the quiet easy journeys alone with Coventry would be lost. His privacy in the back of the big Argyll car would be gone. His silent comradeship with Coventry would be destroyed. It would no longer be his car and his driver. They would both belong to his father, paid by him and commanded by him and Stephen would once again have nothing more than the mean status of the younger son.

  The office would once again be his father’s domain, Stephen would fall from being the bright leading light of the place to the least favoured son of a talented man. Rory’s easy charm would win the clerks and the receptionist to his side as it had already won Smedley. His disability would earn their pity, his courage would earn their admiration. Watching his fight back from paralysis and his return to life they would forget Stephen’s battle to come home from the deathly trap of the Ypres salient. They would forget that Stephen, not Rory, was the hero.

  It was worse at home. Nanny Janes complained that Christopher’s routine was repeatedly interrupted by Mr. Winters, who would send for the baby whenever he heard him crying. Nanny Janes could not blame Lily, who was generally out of sight when the order was delivered by Browning, or Sally, or Nurse Bells. But privately she believed that the mother and the old man were working together to undermine her authority in the household and that the baby was sent for by the old man to reunite him with his mother, against the proper disciplinary system. The chauffeur, Coventry, was undoubtedly on their side. He was always there to fetch in the pram when Christopher should have been left outside. He was always quick to run up the stairs and carry old Mr. Winters down to the drawing room for tea with Charlie and Lily, and then Mr. Winters would send for the baby and Nanny Janes dared not refuse him. Lily she could intimidate by will power and the threat of a complaint to Stephen. But Mr. Winters was the senior male in the household, he was its head. Now he was well again she supposed that he was her employer. Her well-learned habits of deference meant that she dared to bully Lily, but she was helpless against a gentleman.

  Stephen planned what he would say to his father, planned to request icily that the older man leave the nursery alone. He knew how to hurt, he thought he could imply that Rory was an old maid, meddling where he was not wanted. But Rory’s sharp intelligent look at him when he spoke of Christopher silenced him at once. Rory knew that Stephen did not love his baby and Stephen thought guiltily that Rory knew why. He feared that his father knew that Stephen had always been jealous of his brother, and that jealousy was alive all over again, even though his rival was nothing more than a blond-headed moppet of three months, gurgling and smiling in his pram. Stephen knew what he could say to put his father in his proper place: back to silence and loneliness. But he feared his father’s acute response. He feared him too much to speak.

  Muriel was as silent as her son over the changes in their lives. If she resented her husband’s presence opposite her at the lunch and dinner table she never said. She shuddered once when Rory’s hand misjudged the distance to his mouth and he spilled his food. She shot a swift pained look at Stephen, but she made no complaint. Muriel was too obedient a wife to voice her distaste and her fear at her husband’s recovery. Her training as a lady had been too thorough for her ever to speak disagreeable truths aloud. If it had been left to her and Stephen, Rory would have died in that stuffy room, attended by the best of nurses, supervised by the finest specialists and surrounded by the most expensive goods that money could provide. They would have spared no expense or trouble to make his last days comfortable. They would have prepared for him an impressive funeral with carriages of mourners, principal and secondary, and a heap of flowers later delivered to the hospitals. Both Stephen and Muriel would have been sincerely grieved at their loss and consoled only by the orderly charm of the funeral, the repast and the will.

  What neither of them could bear was his slow repellent crawl back to health. Neither of them could bear his half-state of part-paralysis. Sometimes his hands shook and he could not control them. At every meal time Lily tucked his napkin under his chin like a baby. Privately and only to themselves Muriel and Stephen saw him as a cripple. He disgusted them.

  But Lily was happier than she had been since her marriage. She sang: in the drawing room as practice; on the stairs unconsciously; and in the bath for joy. Rory was getting better, Muriel had ceased to criticize, Stephen was reduced to a silent uneasy presence and Nanny Janes had lost her iron control over Lily and her son. Lily could have Christopher with her whenever she wished. She simply had to pretend that she was fetching him for Rory, and Nanny Janes had to do as she was bid. As the days grew sunny and hot in mid-July, Rory asked to be wheeled out in the afternoons at the same time as Christopher and Nanny Janes took their walk. After a couple of afternoons a new routine was established. Charlie would arrive after lunch as Coventry returned from taking Stephen to the office for the afternoon. Coventry would lift Rory into the wheelchair and push him along the seafront while Charlie pushed Christopher’s pram and Lily strolled between pram and wheelchair, holding her son’s little hand and chatting to her father-in-law. The utter vulgarity of Charlie Smith strolling down the promenade, pushing a pram, was glaringly apparent only to Muriel. The distaste she felt at seeing Lily blithely strolling beside her son’s pram and chatting to Rory in his wheelchair was shared only by Stephen. But they could not speak of it.

  At tea time they all returned and then the doorbell would start ringing. Lily’s friends from the show at the Kings would call in for tea to fill the slack time between the afternoon matinée and the evening show. One afternoon the chorus girls descended in a chattering noisy bunch, another time Madge Sweet and her boyfriend, a saxophonist from the Trocadero Club, called. Often Charlie would play, Lily would sing, Teddy would play tenor sax and the haunting seductive summons of the saxophone would drift up the silent stairs of number two, The Parade and out through the open windows to the street.

  “It’s nigger music,” Muriel said in an angry whisper to Stephen before dinner one day. “I half expected a crowd to gather and throw pennies through the window.”

  “I’ll speak to her,” Stephen promised. But that evening at dinner Rory had said he enjoyed the music that afternoon and would Lily make sure to ask Teddy again.

  Muriel and Stephen exchanged a look of silent resentment, and said nothing.

  Muriel had thought that Lily’s stage friends would clash with the ladies and gentlemen of the charity concert set who had started to visit Lily at home. She had maliciously anticipated a social freeze from Lily’s new circle, and had gone so far as to caution Lily that she could not mix her theatre friends with the social world. Lily’s look of blank incomprehension had whetted Muriel’s appetite for social disaster. The girl had refused to be warned, but if she tried to put Lady Drew next to Madge Sweet at the tea table there would be serious social consequences and Lily would never sing at a charity concert again. Smugly, Muriel waited for the steady flow of callers in good cars to stop.

  But she was wrong. The rigid divide of her girlhood between gentry and the rest had bee
n eroded by the war, and the ladies and gentlemen of Hampshire society were delighted and amused by the company they met at Lily’s tea table. The chorus girls made them feel daring and Bohemian, Lily’s unaffected charm smoothed over any social solecisms, and number two, The Parade was fun in a city where the cost of the war was not yet forgotten and where the future—uncertain in Europe, uneasy at home—was widely feared.

  Charlie was a relaxed and charming host, passing plates and sometimes even pouring tea. He would play the piano if anyone asked, he was invaluable with contacts and friends spread across the city and even to London. If you wanted to rent a hall, or throw a party, Charlie knew the best place, the most fashionable band. If you wanted to dine somewhere quite different then Charlie knew of a new place just opened and would scrawl a message on his visiting card which would get you the best table. If you wanted to see a show in London Charlie knew which were on the crest of fashion and which were closing. The ladies who organized garden fetes and concerts for the war-wounded found Charlie invaluable when a wretched man let them down over the marquee, or when a grand piano could not be found for hire.

  His behaviour to Lily was that of an affectionate brother. When she sang at the piano she would rest her hand on his shoulder, when the tea tray went out and cocktails came in he would stand behind her chair. If Lily had been less popular there would have been ill-natured gossip, but none of the ladies ever did any more than whisper behind a gloved hand in the privacy of their car on the way home: “I’m sure he’s in love with her, he never takes his eyes off her.” To which the reply would always be: “Oh! Bound to be! But she’s very much the wife and mother.” And the ladies, going home to their elegant manor houses in the Hampshire countryside, would allow themselves a little sigh of regret that they did not have a man like Charlie, handsome, slightly dangerous, single, to come to tea with them.

  Charlie said nothing. He watched Lily blooming under the warmth of new friendships with a smile. They had their private times together: walking on the promenade they would sometimes drop behind the wheelchair and talk of the Midsummer Madness tour, or of Lily’s singing engagements. Lily would tell him whether Christopher had spent a good night, and they would speculate about the possibility of him teething. Lily would rest her hand on the pram handle beside Charlie’s hand and they would gently touch. She missed her mother still and it was only to Charlie that she ever spoke of her.

  “She was a fine woman,” Charlie would agree. “How proud she would be now! And how she would have loved Christopher!”

  He would tell Lily about his work, about the hundred daily clashes and crises of a flourishing theatre. He found that she was an astute advisor; often she thought of a solution to a problem which had been worrying him for days. They worked together on increasingly difficult pieces of music and Charlie realized that Lily’s career as a concert hall singer could extend further than the charity-concert circuit of Hampshire if she wished. He kept an eye open for classical events and he mentioned to Lily that she should study church music and oratorios.

  When they were preparing for a concert Charlie would come in the morning and again in the afternoon. Best for him was the day of the concert when they would perform and often stay out for dinner together. Once or twice Stephen joined them but the third time he refused. He was bored by the music and dozed in the church. He trusted Charlie to bring Lily home on time and he did not care if they stayed out for dinner after the performance. Coventry drove them, a silent chaperone, and sometimes would leave his cap in the car and join them for the meal. At the end of the evening they would occasionally tell Coventry to drop them at the seafront and they would walk home watching the waves breaking gently on the shingle, as the long white line of the moon on the water followed them to the quiet shuttered house and their silent parting.

  Lily and Charlie’s love affair, never closer than the touch of a fingertip, never discussed between them except for a soft “I love you” from Charlie when he left in the evening, deepened and widened into a familiar joy that summer. They were comfortable together with the ease of old friends, and they kept their mutual desire locked safely away. Only once during the months of loving Lily and watching her did Charlie wake one night with a burning pain in his groin as if he could love her like a man. He threw on some clothes and walked all night and all the rest of the day until the pain in his body was gone. That night he drank at the Trocadero, steady concentrated drinking, until the pain in his mind was gone too. The steady twinge of heartache—sometimes delight in her, sometimes grief that he could not have her—he lived with; as other ex-soldiers lived with the absence of a limb or with the loss of sight or hearing or taste.

  Lily never complained of Stephen, and though Charlie watched with the anxious attention of a man in love, he never saw any sign that Stephen felt anything more than indifference to Lily. He had been afraid of Stephen’s temper, and he knew himself to be in a state of continual readiness to take Lily away if Stephen ever struck her again.

  “I couldn’t go,” Lily said simply once. “What about Christopher?”

  “I’d kidnap you both,” Charlie said grimly. “I couldn’t tolerate him hurting you.”

  “He won’t,” Lily said certainly; and over the months of the summer Charlie saw that it was true. Stephen had sunk from rage into passivity as everything in his life conspired to reduce him, to weaken him, to make him into a nothing. In sour silence he watched the conversion of his house from a place of silence and disappointment to one of the brightest, most entertaining homes in Portsmouth. By the time he came home from the office they were drinking cocktails and he always had the feeling of a gatecrasher at an elegant private party. The ladies were disposed to be very charming but Stephen could never flirt with women of his own class, he felt ill at ease with anything warmer than the icy frigidity of his mother. The chorus girls were more to his taste but as the summer wore on and the unseasonal darkness of Stephen’s mood deepened, he did not want to play and flirt with them. They were nothing more than whores; he might have bought their time but he would never have courted them.

  Stephen felt the small gains he had made when he had come home from the war to a darkened house, steeped in mourning, were steadily eroded by the illumination of Lily’s easy joy. The hall table became crowded with good-quality visiting cards engraved with names and titles of people Stephen did not know. Lily borrowed the car more and more often to visit people neither Stephen nor Muriel visited, who lived out of town, in the manor houses of Hampshire. Divided between resentment and snobbish ambition, Stephen ordered a little Morris car for Lily so that Coventry and the Argyll would remain free to take him to and from the office. He did not acknowledge, even to himself, that he disliked the thought of Coventry driving Lily around, while Lily called and took tea, and gossiped and had fun. Stephen wanted Coventry to stay with him, like him: in silence and darkness, looking back to the flat lands around the Somme.

  He felt himself cuckolded. Cuckolded by his wife’s blameless happiness. Stephen had done nothing to make her happy. He had done much to frighten and grieve her. But Lily was young and buoyant, she quite failed to recognize the silence redolent with unhappiness of number two, The Parade. She opened windows, she summoned guests, she broke the rules of raising a child into loneliness and indifference. She left the running of the house entirely to Muriel—as she had agreed to do. But despite the inedible food, despite the sour wine, despite the poor wages, despite the sombre furniture and the dark curtains and wallpaper, in that midsummer of 1921 a sweet sea breeze ran through the whole house and infected everyone with groundless optimism. Everyone but Stephen.

  He went on long drinking bouts with Coventry, as if he might find in the depths of drink some way back into the sunlight which shone so easily on his wife. Coventry, uncritical, unspeaking, would drive the two of them to the hard streets of the town, around the dockyard gates. They would park the car beneath a streetlight and leave it there while they wove their way through the dark maze of the ba
ckstreets. Under the arches of the railway bridge there were tattooists, drawing designs for drunk sailors. There were all-night cafés where you could buy coffee or tea as strong and sour as they used to have in the trenches, with a tot of secret rum poured on top for an extra threepence. There were makeshift refuges where homeless, pensionless survivors of the war huddled together for warmth and tried to sleep. Stephen used to stare into the darkness of the shelter, smelling the familiar smell of men huddled close, wondering if they had found in their animal companionable warmth an escape from the loneliness and despair that gripped him.

  Stephen and Coventry would find their way to ill-lit bars where working men, sweaty from the nightshift at the dockyard, or frowsy from all-night drinking, would gather and drink beer with spirit chasers. Tense as a prize-fighter, Stephen would order beers and single whiskies and sit quietly at their table and scan the room for trouble. If the landlord was burly, and the customers quiet, the two men would drink up and move on. There was a shabby pub in every street and sooner or later, when Stephen was so drunk that his irritability could not be contained, they would find what they were looking for and a fight would start. Often Stephen and Coventry were on the periphery, first as bystanders and then as guerrilla fighters, sliding into the centre of the crowd for a punch, a kick to an unprotected belly, and then sliding back out, unscathed. But more and more often in those hot summer nights, it would be Stephen at the very centre of the fight. He would brush someone at the bar, knocking the drink from his hand, and refuse to apologize. He would interrupt another man’s conversation and sneer at him in his lah-di-dah officer’s voice. He would refuse to pay for his drink and spit in the glass so the landlord would lift the flap of the counter and surge around, fists swinging. Or more and more often he would taunt men with sound bodies that they had found some coward’s way of escaping the trenches. He would call them girls and conchies. He would call them yellow and communist. He would tell them that better men than them had died in France so that they could keep their noses in the trough at home. He would shout at them that they were swine and that he was a hero, a bloody hero.