Fallen Skies

  Stephen said nothing. Coventry drew the Argyll up at the edge of Southsea Common and the seafront promenade. Coventry got out of the car and stood by the bonnet. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, looking out to sea.

  The silence went on.

  “D’you think I’m selfish?” Lily asked suddenly.

  “I think you’re wonderful,” Stephen burst out. He felt a great wave of relief. “I’ve never heard anyone talk like that before. It wasn’t my war either, you know. I felt as if I never knew why I was there. But I just had to stay and stay and stay there. Whatever it was like. My brother, Ch . . . Ch . . . Christopher—he wanted to go. He volunteered.” He took a breath. “But I l . . . left it to the very l . . . last moment. They’d have con . . . conscripted me if I hadn’t gone. They called me a c . . . a c . . . a coward. Someone sent me a f . . . a f . . . a feather.” His stammer had escaped his control. He bared his lips, straining to make the words come. Lily watched him with wide scared eyes. Stephen struggled and then shrugged. “I can’t talk about it,” he said.

  Lily shook her little head. “Well, I don’t want to know. I don’t know whether it should have happened. I don’t know whether you should have been there. I don’t care. It’s over now, Stephen. You don’t have to think about it any more.”

  Stephen reached into his pocket and lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking slightly.

  “You d . . . don’t want to know about it?”

  Lily shook her head. “Why should I?” she asked coldly. “It’s past. It’s long gone. I want to live my life now. I don’t care about the past.”

  Stephen exhaled a long cloud of smoke. The tension was draining away from his face. He was staring at Lily as if she had said something of extraordinary importance. As if she had the key to some freedom for him.

  “It’s over,” he repeated as if he were learning a lesson from her.

  Lily smiled. “It doesn’t matter any more,” she said. “It’s finished and gone. You’ll never have to go back there. You don’t have to even think about it. I never want to hear about it from you or anybody else.”

  Stephen drew a deep breath. “Let’s have a look at the sea.” He opened the door and got out. Coventry dropped his cigarette and opened the door for Lily.

  “We’ll just walk for a little,” Stephen said.

  Lily’s hat lifted off her head precariously with the offshore breeze. They walked along the promenade and then stepped off the low wall on to the shingle of the beach. Ahead of them was the short white fist of the pier extending out into the sea. The little theatre and amusement parlour at the end of the pier were being repainted white for the summer season of Vaudeville shows. They could see the ladders and the workmen. Lily pulled off her hat and held it in her hand as they walked. Stephen slid his arm around her waist, Lily leaned against his shoulder, comfortable with his closeness.

  “I shall miss you,” she said as if it were a new thought. “I shall miss you while I am away.”

  Stephen paused, turned her towards him, leaned down and kissed her on her smiling lips, held her body close to his for the first time and sensed her slightness, the roundness of her breasts against his chest, the warmth of her face against his. He smelled the warm clean female smell of her, the scent of her hair. He kissed her, pressing his lips on hers and then licking the corner of her mouth, tasting that little provocative smudge of chocolate. He was excited by her rejection of the war; he felt elated as if she could set him free from his nightmares, free from his sense that the war could never end while he, and all the men scarred like him, fought it and re-fought it in their dreams. And she was warm like that other girl had been, and soft, like that other girl had been. And her skin smelled of desire.

  Lily stayed still, her feet shifting slightly on the shingle for a few moments, struggling with her discomfort. She felt stifled and claimed and overpowered. She let him hold her for a little while with a sense of confused courtesy, as if she should not rebuff him, not after their sudden slide into intimacy. He had trusted her with a confidence; she could not pull her body away roughly. So she let him hold her, resenting the weight of his body against hers, tense against the insistent closing of his arms. Then she felt the disgusting touch of his tongue on the corner of her lips, and the smooth scented brush of his moustache, and she shuddered with instinctive revulsion, and stepped back, her gloved hand up at her mouth rubbing her lips. “Don’t!” she said breathlessly. “You shouldn’t . . .”

  Stephen smiled. He felt very much older and more experienced than Lily, who had been a little girl at school when other women had forced him to war. “Was that your first kiss?” he asked.

  “Yes!”

  He chuckled. “I will give you very many more than that, Lily, my lovely Lily.” He drew a breath. He felt daring. He saw himself through Lily’s eyes, handsome, wealthy, powerful. He gave a little excited laugh, freed by Lily’s rejection of the past, by Lily’s hatred of the war. “I will give you many more kisses,” he promised recklessly. “Many, many more. I will marry you. I am prepared to marry you, Lily. So what d’you say to that?”

  Lily’s face was blank with surprise. Her hand fell to her side and the little smudge of chocolate was very dark against the whiteness of her skin. “Oh no,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly. I never thought of you like that. I’m very sorry. I must have been very silly. But I’m much too young. And you’re much too old, Captain Winters. I am sorry.”

  They said nothing, staring at each other in mutual incomprehension. Stephen flushed slowly, a deep dark red. He felt deeply, horribly snubbed by Lily. All of their days together and their treats together were shaken and remade into a new, offensive pattern. He had been a sugar daddy, a patron—while he had thought himself an acknowledged lover.

  “Lily,” he said and he reached out his hand to draw her back from her sudden enmity, from her sudden girlish rejection.

  Wobbly on the shingle in her little shoes, Lily stepped quickly back, out of his reach. The sea, a few yards away, washed in and out, sucking at the pebbles of the foreshore, a nagging ominous sound, like distant gunfire. Lily looked frightened, ready for flight. Stephen was filled with a bullying desire to smack her. She had led him on with her prettiness and her provocative respectability and now she shrank like some virgin child from his touch. She did not understand that she was compromised by his dinners, that she had been bought by his little treats. She was cheating on the sale. He wanted to grab her and pinch her. He wanted to hold her with one arm and rummage inside her pretty jacket. He wanted to rub her breasts and pinch her nipples. He wanted to strip away Lily’s delicacy and thrust his hand up her skirt. She was not a lady, whatever she might like to pretend, she was a chorus girl. If it had been dark he would have grabbed her and slapped her face. Frustrated by daylight and chaperoned by the people walking on the promenade, Stephen stared at Lily with a desire very near to hatred.

  “I should like to go back to the theatre now, please,” Lily said in a very small voice. “I should like to go.”

  6

  STEPHEN WAS NOT WAITING at the stage door to drive Lily home after the last show that night. Helen Pears, accustomed to the silver gleam of the Argyll under the lights at the end of the alley, hesitated and glanced around for it.

  “I don’t think he’ll be here,” Lily said quietly.

  Helen tucked her daughter’s hand under her arm and they walked to the tram stop. Charlie Smith loped up behind them, droplets of water from the sea mist like sequins in his black curly hair. “Lost your beau, Lily?”

  “Looks like it,” she said.

  Charlie cocked an eyebrow at Helen to see how she was taking the news. “Small loss,” he offered.

  “He asked me . . .” Lily was driven to speech by sheer indignation. “You’ll never believe what he asked me! You’ll never believe what he thought I would do!”

  Helen and Charlie exchanged a shocked glance.

  “Don’t look at me, I had him down as a gentleman,” Helen said def
ensively. “They were only ever alone at tea. I was always with them in the evening. I would have sworn he knew the line.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Belgium,” he said shortly. “The gentlemen died first.”

  “He asked me to marry him!” Lily said angrily. “Actually, he didn’t even ask me! He said: ‘I am prepared to marry you,’ as if he was doing me a favour. As if I should be grateful! And he kissed me too, and it was horrid. And if it’s going to be like that I shan’t ever spoon with anyone. I think it’s quite beastly!”

  They had reached the empty tram shelter. Helen put her arm around Lily’s shoulders but Lily shook her off. “You’d have thought he’d know better at his age!” Lily said, still indignant. “You’d have thought he’d know I didn’t think of him like that! He’s old enough to be my father!”

  Charlie chuckled. “He’s about the same age as me, Lily,” he said. “Not quite old enough to be your father.”

  Lily flushed scarlet from the collar of her coat to the brim of her hat. “You’re different,” she said, muffled. “You don’t seem old. You weren’t a soldier like him.”

  Charlie shrugged his shoulders. “I was actually. I went over in the first wave. It was my luck that I took a bullet in the first week. I was invalided out for the rest of the war. It didn’t damage me like those men that were there for all that long time.”

  Lily turned her face away. “You’re different from him,” she insisted. “You understand me. He should have known that I didn’t think of him like that.”

  Charlie glanced at Helen. She was watching Lily’s rosy face.

  “Men don’t always see things that clearly, Lil,” he said gently. “A man sees someone who takes his fancy, and he tries it on. And a lot of girls would have thought themselves lucky to catch your Captain.”

  “Charlie’s right,” Helen said. “When you said that he’d upset you, I thought he’d asked you to be his girl—to set you up in little rooms somewhere. I didn’t think he’d propose marriage. I never thought he was that serious. I’d never have dreamed his family would allow it.”

  Lily said nothing.

  “It’s a compliment,” Charlie pursued. “He’s a big name in this town, Winters. Good family, plenty of money, handsome house by the Canoe Lake. A lot of girls would be glad to catch him, Lil.”

  Lily shook her head, crossly. “He’s miles too old,” she said. “And he’s funny. He stammers when he talks about the war. And his driver never speaks at all. He’s nicknamed Coventry because he’s silent. He and Stephen just look at each other as if they can tell what the other is thinking. It’s creepy. I never liked him like that. I never gave him reason to think I liked him like that.” Her voice quavered slightly. “I didn’t lead him on. He’s too old. How was I to know that he didn’t know that he was miles too old?”

  Helen tucked Lily’s little hand under her arm. “Now that’s enough,” she said firmly. “You’re getting yourself all upset over nothing. As you say, he’s old enough to look after himself. He’s made you an offer. You’ve said ‘no.’ That’s an end to it.”

  The wires above them hummed and the tram clattered around the corner and stopped beside them. It rocked as they clambered on and sat on the scratchy seats.

  “You wouldn’t have wanted me to say yes?” Lily turned to her mother. “You don’t think he’s a catch?”

  Helen Pears hesitated. Charlie smiled knowingly at her, enjoying her dilemma before Lily’s open-faced honesty.

  “He is a good catch,” she said cautiously. “If you were a girl without talent then you couldn’t do better, Lily, and that’s the truth. If you didn’t have me behind you, and the shop, and Charlie here to help you with your work, then you’d have done well to have him. He’s not a bad sort. He’s a gentleman and his wife would be a lady wherever she came from.

  “But you don’t need to marry, not while you’ve got me.” She took Lily’s gloved hand in her own and squeezed it. “Why, you’re just starting out,” she said. “Who knows how far you’ll go?”

  “We’re off to Southampton next week anyway,” Charlie said. “And I want you to try a new song. Not in the show, but I want you to rehearse it with me while we’re on tour. There might be an opening in Portsmouth when we get back and I’ve got an idea.”

  “What do I have to do now?” Lily demanded. “Go bald? Scalped?”

  “Worse than that!” Charlie winked at Helen. The conductor came towards them and chinked the large brown pennies in his dirty hand.

  “Fares please!”

  Charlie paid for them all. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “This is my stop. I’ll see you at the matinée, Lil. Sleep well, and don’t bother about it.”

  He leaned forward and patted her face. Lily looked up at him and smiled like a trusting child. On impulse Charlie bent and gently kissed her forehead. “Little Lil,” he said tenderly.

  The tram stopped and he jumped down to the pavement. Lily raised her hand to him in farewell. Her face was scarlet.

  • • •

  Neither woman saw the car parked in the shadows at the end of the street. It had followed the tram on its short journey.

  Coventry turned to Stephen sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

  Stephen shrugged as if in answer to a question.

  “I just wanted to see her safe home, I suppose,” he said. “I’m a damn fool, I know.”

  Coventry went back to his silent contemplation of the dark street.

  “Can we go to your place?” Stephen asked suddenly. “Go and have a brew? It’s early yet.”

  Coventry nodded and started the engine. They took the eastern road out of town, past the lounging heap of Eastney Barracks, an ominous pile of heavy red brick with two marines guarding the gates. Stephen’s hand went up to the salute out of habit, and then he checked himself with a laugh.

  Beyond the town the car picked up speed. They drove on a low flat road alongside the harbour. The tide was out, and over the mudflats the reflection of the moon chased alongside them. There was a mist rolling in from the sea and somewhere out in the Solent a foghorn called into the lonely darkness. The road raced over a low wood bridge built on piles driven into the chocolate-coloured mud. Stephen glanced inland and saw the black outline of the roofs of Portsmouth houses against the dark sky. There were concrete gun emplacements all along the coast road, and ugly tangles of barbed wire still despoiling the beach. Stephen looked at the mat of wire with a hard face.

  “She’s like water,” he said suddenly. “She’s like a cold glass of clean water. She’d take the taste of mud out of my mouth.”

  They turned right on the main coast road, driving east towards the rising moon. It was nearly full, a blue-silver moon, very close to the earth, the craters and pocks on the asymmetric face very clear. The light was so bright that the yellow lamps of the Argyll barely showed on the road ahead. On the right of the road were the flat marshes of Farlington running down towards the sea, and a pale barn owl quartering the sedges and rough grass. On the left was a patchwork of little fields growing vegetables and salty hay.

  “Very bright,” Stephen said uneasily. “Very bright tonight.” Then he shook his head. “Doesn’t matter now,” he reminded himself.

  They drove a little way, and then turned right, south to the sea. There was a small village and then a darkened water mill. Coventry slowed the Argyll and drove past an old toll-gate pub. The inn sign creaked in the wind, the paint all blistered away from the picture of a sailing ship. The mist was coming inshore, rolling in from the sea. Ahead of them was a low narrow bridge joining the island to the mainland. Beneath the mist, the sea, closing from both sides, washed and sucked at the wooden piles of the bridge. Coventry slowed and drove carefully over. Stephen watched the wet mudflats on either side of the car where they gave way to sedge and shrubs and reeds. A sea bird, disturbed in its sleep, called once, a lingering liquid call, and then fell silent. The mist batted against the headlights, fluttered in ribbons on the windscreen.

&nb
sp; “Can you see?” Stephen asked.

  Coventry nodded. He had lived on Hayling Island all his life. He had known this road before the summer visitors came, when it was a mud track for the fishermen and there was no bridge to the mainland, only a ferry. He drove unerringly through the flickering mist to the south of the island where it jutted out into the sea and the waves broke all day and all night on the ceaselessly shifting shingle beaches. They turned right along the seashore. Only one road, a sand track, ran west. At the westernmost point of the island was a solitary inn where you could take the ferryboat which plied across the narrow harbour from Southsea. In summer, people took pleasure trips to Hayling Island for the day, to picnic on the wide beaches and play in the sandy dunes. In the evenings the ferries crossed from one side to another in a constant stream, the women’s sunshades and pretty dresses reflected in the harbour water and in the quiet evening air you could hear people laughing.

  The foghorn moaned. Sand from the high dunes on their left had drifted over the road and Coventry leaned forward to see his way in the mist. The road was pot-holed and the Argyll lurched when one wheel dropped into a rut. Stephen and Coventry were smiling, enjoying the darkness and mist, the bad road, the discomfort.

  On the right of the road was an inlet of still water, a little harbour off the main tidal reach. Dimly in the mist loomed the outlines of houseboats—three of them—pinned in the shallows by little white-painted staircases stretching from the shore. One was a pretty holiday home: there were empty pots waiting for geraniums on the steps. Furthest out, and the most ramshackle, was a grounded houseboat stained black with marine varnish and with no lights showing. It was Coventry’s. He had gone from it in a dull rage when he had been conscripted, knowing that his father could not survive without his earnings, knowing that the houseboat was icily cold in winter and damp all the year round. His father had died in the winter of 1917 and they had not allowed Coventry home in time to be with him. The old man had died alone, wheezing with pneumonia. Coventry had arrived for the funeral and then returned to the Front to serve as Stephen’s batman.