Fallen Skies

  “Poor bloody infantry as usual,” Stephen had said, leaning on the gate and looking westward across the flat fields, where the sun was setting in a dusty haze of scarlet.

  It gave him a sense of distance from his fear of the war to know that although this soil had claimed thousands, even millions of lives, it had always been farming country. The Perots could trace their ownership of the farm back to the eighteenth century and beyond. A Perot had been working the land when Marlborough had come riding in—and then ridden home again. Stephen felt that he could be a part of the land, one of the peasantry who watched the armies ebb and then flow. He felt free of his uniform and free of his allegiance and free of his fear. A Perot had been watching this horizon throughout all the battles and they had meant little in the end but temporary disruption. Stephen, watching the sun go down over his Juliette’s fields, felt himself at one with the men who stayed at home and let the armies do their bloody business and then disband.

  He toyed with the idea of staying at the farm after his marriage to Juliette. The Perots were old, they had no sons. They would welcome Juliette’s husband as a worker. They would welcome him as the son they had never had. Stephen, starved of affection from babyhood, thought of the way Madame Perot rested her hand on his shoulder when she served him his dinner, and how old Perot would slap his shoulder when they had completed a task. Stephen smiled at the thought of telling his parents that although they had sent him to his death he had found a life so rich and so contented that he would never come home again. Not only would he never fight again for King and Country, he was prepared to lose his King and Country for the greater joys of a few acres of arable land, a small trout river and a little wood of sound trees.

  He loved the skies over the Flanders plains. The land was so flat that the horizon stretched forever, he could even see the gentle curve of the earth. Storms would darken the horizon and roll slowly with great towers of clouds towards the farm. There was always time to pack up the tools and get under cover before the first drops of rain began to fall. And then, sheltering in the barn, there would be Juliette, smiling and warm, and splashed with raindrops which she would let Stephen kiss away from her face and neck.

  Every hour he could spend away from the trenches or from the camp behind the lines he would ride over to Little England to see Juliette and to work as her father ordered. His fellow officers stopped teasing him about his Belgian bint after Stephen had sharply told them that he and Juliette were planning to marry. There had been a shocked silence, for the Belgian girls encountered by the officers were generally working whores in brothels. But Stephen’s look had been so fierce, and his temper was known to be so uncertain, that no-one ventured another comment.

  After a while, it was regarded as rather romantic that when the rest of them took a day’s leave lying on their cramped camp beds or getting angrily drunk in the estaminet, Stephen and his batman would hitch a lift, or borrow a couple of horses, or commandeer transport, to get themselves out to the farm they called Little England. Stephen never invited anyone to go with him, and for those left behind it became a place of mystery—a place where there was peace. A place where the world had not changed, where plants and crops still grew, where the land beneath your boots was green and fertile and not a slough of mud.

  Stephen stirred in his sleep beside Lily and sighed. His dream changed and shifted. Half a dozen half-seen, dreaded images slid into his dream. He saw again the surreal picture of the dead horse blasted by an explosion so it hung, like some demented fruit, from the branches of a tree. A mangled chest, a rolling head. Stephen moaned and Lily half-woke, and put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently.

  Stephen turned on his side and went deeper into sleep. He suddenly heard someone shout, shout loudly at him.

  “Winters! I’ve just heard. They’ve broken through. They’re past your place, Little England. The 4th fell back a day ago. The line is this side of the farm now, and they’re still retreating. The Germans will have gone through Little England.”

  Stephen’s breath came faster as he remembered the cleansing leap of rage, and at the same time his deep longing for Juliette. The whole of the Allied army was in chaos. Brigades were split from their communications, platoons were lost in the withdrawal. The big push had come not from the English and the French but from the Germans, who were suddenly rolling forward in an unstoppable advance. The stalemate of the trenches was smashed and the armies were moving rapidly. The English were falling back to the coast in a desperate retreat to get home, the French frantically grouping and regrouping in an attempt—which anyone could see would fail—to save Paris. Unbelievably, after the years of stuck warfare and the fields sown so liberally with bodies of the dead, the British were losing, and were in rapid retreat.

  Not Stephen. There was nothing for him in England, least of all as a returning reluctant soldier in an army that had lost. There were nightmares and a dull office job. There was the cold silent house and a crippled father. There was his mother’s unbearable grieving for Christopher and her scant joy in his survival. Stephen rejected that future for himself and swore that he would rescue Juliette or kill her murderers. He did not wait to report to his CO; he simply started running, back down the road, in the darkness, and then down the little lanes towards Little England.

  It was a while before he even realized he was not alone. Four men had come with him, and Coventry. He led them at a rapid pace—running and then walking to catch their breaths, and then running again. He was reckless of scouting parties; he did not even fear the main German advance. He was too angry to think of his own safety or of anything except getting to the farm and protecting it with his life.

  They ran down the lane and Stephen felt the cold haft of his knife slipped into his hand by Coventry. The lights were on in the little farmhouse. He halted his men and gestured them to be silent. He crept around the back, moving like a shadow in the darkness. He meant to steal up to the window and peep in, to see if the place was occupied by Germans, and how many there were, and what the odds would be. But when he heard the rich delightful laugh of a woman’s voice his anger suddenly overtook him and he kicked in the door, knowing that Juliette was already dead and the Germans and their whores were defiling her home, the home he had thought would be his.

  He was firing as the door flew open, and the men behind him were firing too in a great explosion of bullets which stormed into the room as they rushed in behind them.

  He saw Juliette as she rose from the German’s lap, her face a mask of surprise and terror. She turned towards him as a bullet thudded into her belly and her chest and flung her, arms outstretched like a thrown doll, into the wall at the side of the range. As she fell her head lolled into the open range and her hair frizzed and sizzled and her face burned red and then black and the kitchen was filled with the smell of cooking meat. Perot’s wife had been at the sink; a bullet took her in the back. She was crawling across the floor towards Juliette when Stephen bent down and put a bullet behind her ear. The German seated at the table with his jacket undone and Juliette on his lap was killed outright. His body was a mess of red blood and red wine from the smashed bottle on the table.

  Old Perot stumbled up the stairs from the cellar and Coventry whirled and put a bullet neatly between his eyes, a real marksman’s point. They could hear a scream from the other Perot girl upstairs, and the stumbling sound of a man half-falling in haste down the wooden stairs. Two of Stephen’s men sent a hail of bullets up the stairs and they heard a scream and then his falling body.

  They ranged through the house then, like avenging tyrants. There were three other German officers, who had been quartered at the farmhouse for three days. There were two other women with them. They were shot where they lay, one young boy so exhausted by the rapid advance over the last few days that he barely woke as Stephen raged into the room and shot him and the woman in his arms.

  When they had finished, and come back to the kitchen, Stephen found he was trembling with a deep sexu
al joy at releasing his anger against the war itself, in the house where he had dreamed, like a cuckold, of peace. He pulled Juliette by the feet away from the fire where she lay and he longed to unbutton his flies and violate her dead body, as a final humiliation. She had kissed him and let him touch her, and he could have had her as the dead German had probably had her, but he had treated her according to his code as an English gentleman and held back.

  He laughed and his laughter was like the sharpened edge of a bayonet at the thought of the fool he had been, riding out to see his love, slaving on her father’s farm, like some knight in a storybook, while all along he could have had her for the asking because she liked him, and because she had no interest in his plans, or England, or his house in Portsmouth. When the German officer had arrived and spoken to them kindly and paid in advance for requisitioning the farm, she had liked him too.

  It was then that he heard the baby.

  It was a sleepy little cry, from the parlour at the front of the house. It belonged to Juliette’s sister, Nicole, whose husband had disappeared quietly when conscription came in. Stephen felt the cool satisfying haft of the knife in his hand and went quietly, softly, as if he did not want to frighten it, into the parlour.

  The baby was in a hand-carved crib, the edges of the wood rounded and polished with generations of use. It was a boy baby. Stephen had been wrong there too. Perot did have an heir. He would never have set aside his legitimate Belgian grandson for an incoming foreigner. Stephen looked at the little boy, whose blue eyes stared up at the strange face hanging over the crib. The baby reached out two little hands, his toothless smile beamed out and his feet kicked in welcome.

  Stephen leaned over the crib and put the knife with gentle care in the baby’s yielding belly. The baby’s face changed and a gurgle of blood came from its mouth. It died almost silently. It was as if Stephen had put it quietly to sleep.

  He went back into the kitchen possessed of a deep peace. The exhilaration of the revenge had passed. Not even the sight of Juliette with her fair hair and her pretty face all burned away could arouse him to either anger or grief.

  “Now then,” he said to the men. “Line up.”

  He smiled at them, as if promising some kind of treat. They had been all over the house, they had seen the food and the good pieces of linen and the little pieces of silver. They were expecting permission to tear the place apart, to take whatever they wished as a souvenir of the night’s work. They lined up obediently. They had been obeying orders without question for years. The sudden plunge into savagery was not enough to break the pattern.

  Stephen reached behind him. One of the Germans had left an automatic rifle propped against the sink. Stephen had it at his shoulder in one smooth gesture and then he gunned down his four men and they fell almost all at once. One groaned, and tried to scrabble forwards, and Coventry stepped up and shot him neatly in the back.

  Stephen and Coventry dragged the bodies of the English soldiers out of line and scattered them around the ground floor: two in the kitchen, one in the parlour, one in the hall. It would have fooled noone in search of the truth of what happened that night. But there was no-one to ask questions. Stephen’s uncorroborated account of what had taken place became exaggerated in the telling and retelling and then became one of the few stories of courage and initiative that could be issued by the retreating army to boost their status at home. Stephen’s CO reported it, journalists embroidered it. The atrocity details fired the anger of civilians safe at home. Stephen and Coventry’s defence of Belgian women and children made a good story. They were decorated for courage. Within a few days the Germans had become bogged down in their advance and the war was on the turn.

  Stephen whimpered in his sleep and turned over. “Juliette,” he said quietly, longingly. “Juliette.”

  35

  THE NEXT DAY JOHN PASCOE, without saying a word to Stephen, went out to the farm and spoke with the farmer. He came back with Stephen’s note of hand for four hundred pounds and left it on Stephen’s desk while he was out at lunch, without a word of explanation. The older man was embarrassed at his role in the business, but Rory and he had agreed, after that difficult dinner, that Stephen’s note of hand would have to be recovered and the deal broken. They could not spare Stephen from the office, they could not afford to buy him out of the partnership. They could not pay him a bonus that would cover the purchase cost of the farm and they were certain that the tired salt-stained land would never earn enough under Stephen’s ignorant management to repay a heavy mortgage. In any case, Hardwick had refused to lend Stephen the money and Stephen had no other resources.

  They knew that Stephen was in the grip of some foolishness over the farm. Both of them had seen symptoms of neurasthenia or shellshock in the boy. Both of them had watched his drinking, his late nights and his dark unexplained bruises with silent concern. They had thought that the marriage would be the making of him but for some reason the pretty little wife he had chosen was not able to keep him at home. She was blooming, and the child was a credit to her. But young Stephen seemed to be growing more morose and more difficult every day. Rory did not want Lily to be taken away from the town and away from her friends. He did not trust his son to be alone with her. He had not forgotten her screams that Sunday afternoon. He did not know what marks the war had left on his son, and he did not trust him.

  None of this was spoken. John and Rory were old friends; the partnership went back to their earliest days. Rory was finding speech difficult, and it was, between them, quite unnecessary. On parting, after that tense dinner party, Rory grasped John’s hand and said slowly, “Sort out this damn business,” and John replied: “Leave it with me.” Nothing else was said.

  John handled the farmer with weary competence. He summed up the value of the farm as something like two-thirds of the asking price. He knew little about stock—but enough to identify sick animals when the cows limped into the dirty milking parlour. He did his business at the kitchen table and saw, as Lily had seen, the slop pail under the sink filled to the brim with mouldering scraps, and the greasy cobwebs looped in strings above the range. He told the man, briskly, that Stephen had been shellshocked since the war and that the man must have taken advantage of him to close a sale without letting Stephen take legal advice. He told him firmly that there was no money of that amount available to Stephen. And he opened a briefcase full of imposing documents and offered some small compensation in return for the note of hand and the breaking of the deal.

  The farmer, who had in any case woken in the morning thinking that the whole visit had been an agreeable dream, took ten guineas for his trouble and considered himself well-paid. John Pascoe took the note and motored back to Portsmouth with an enjoyable sense of a difficult job well done.

  He expected no thanks from Stephen. He expected the silence to hold, so he was surprised when Stephen tapped on his office door and put his head into the room on his way home in the afternoon.

  “Was the chap all right?” Stephen asked casually.

  “Oh yes,” John Pascoe replied. “I gave him ten guineas. I think he knew he was taking advantage, I think he knew it wouldn’t be allowed.”

  Stephen’s broad smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Oh, really? What did you tell him? That my father wouldn’t allow it?”

  John shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat. “Oh, not exactly,” he said. “I may have laid it on a little thick. I told him you were a war hero and all of that. I said that you’d got carried away at the sight of the farm, and that he shouldn’t hold you to it.”

  “Told him I was dotty, did you?” Stephen’s mirthless grin grew wider. “I’ll say one thing for you, John, you don’t do things by halves.”

  “Not dotty,” John said uncomfortably. “Of course not.”

  “No,” Stephen said. “What would you want with a dotty partner?”

  “Well, it’s over now, anyway,” John said. “But I do see what you saw in the place. It was a charming idea. Perhaps later on
—perhaps a weekend cottage somewhere.”

  Stephen frowned slightly. “D’you know,” he said, “I never thought of that. That would be an excellent thing to do. No farming, I don’t leave here, I stay living at home with my mother and father and my wife and my son. But at the weekend, if I’m not needed for anything, I could be allowed to go to a little cottage in the country and pretend that I was in Belgium again, at the farm which meant everything to me.”

  “Some fellows get on very well,” John said hesitantly. He was unsure of Stephen’s mood. “A nice little place in the country.”

  Stephen shot him a glittering smile. “I think it would be the very thing!” he said. “And so good for Christopher!”

  John nodded. “Lovely for him,” he said.

  “And that’s the main thing, after all,” Stephen said. “As long as Christopher gets the very best of everything. As long as Christopher is happy. As long as we all remember to put Christopher first. Well. I must be off home! See you tomorrow. I’m in court all morning with the Priestley case. I’ll go straight there. I’ll be in my office in the afternoon.”

  “Certainly, and good luck with the Priestleys!”

  Stephen smiled again and waved and closed John Pascoe’s door. John sat for a long time saying nothing, his mind quite blank. Somewhere at the back of his consciousness was the thought, which he had never had before, that perhaps it was easier for those—like his own son—who had never come home, who had never had to make a life in a country that was changed beyond all recognition and that had cost them so very dear.

  He sighed and picked up the telephone and dialled the Winters’s home number. Lily, walking through the hall on her way to the drawing room, picked up the phone.