Stephen closed the door behind him and leaned back against it. “Lily,” he whispered.
7
MIKE, THE SM AT THE PALAIS MUSIC HALL, was quieter and more morose than ever at the close of the second week in Southsea. He would work all night loading the scenery, the props and all the costumes into the big lorry which would drive to Southampton and unload at the Southampton Palais, ready for the show to open on Monday night, and then he would be responsible for the whole company on tour.
Lily watched the girls packing their make-up and their bags, their lucky charms and their dried flowers with a sense of excitement. “What’s Southampton Palais like?” she asked Madge, who was the only one who had worked the tour before.
“Same as this one. Except there are sinks in the dressing rooms which is nice. And sometimes if they forget and leave the boiler on, there’s hot water to wash in. Digs are all right too, if we go to the same ones. The landlady is a good sort. Bit of a sport. She used to be an actress in her younger days, there are pictures of her all over the house. She’ll turn a blind eye if you’re late in. And if she takes a fancy to you, she’ll let you sit in her front room and you can have visitors.”
“No-one’s going to visit me at Southampton,” Lily said unwarily.
“What’s happened to the Captain in his big car then?” Madge demanded. “Did he try it on?”
The entire dressing room fell silent and everyone looked at Lily. “No, he didn’t!” she said indignantly. “He wouldn’t do such a thing.” She felt the need to defend Stephen against mass female suspicion. “He’s just . . . busy,” she said lamely. “He’s a lawyer, you know. He works in his family’s law firm. They’ve been lawyers for four generations. And he’s very busy right now.”
Susie said something under her breath and the girl next to her laughed.
Helena put her arm around Lily’s shoulder and gave her a hug. “Plenty more fish in the sea,” she said. “And the big ones are always the hardest to catch.”
“I didn’t try and catch him!” Lily said indignantly. “And if I’d wanted to catch him . . .”
“You what?” Susie asked. “If you’d wanted him—what then?”
“I could have had him,” Lily said lamely.
There was a ripple of sceptical amusement.
“Never mind,” Helena said again. “Better luck next time, eh, Lil?”
Lily nodded; there was no point trying to convince them that Stephen had proposed and been rebuffed. But as she packed her comb and the little pot of hair cream which Charlie had given her into her vanity bag, she could not resist imagining the uproar it would have caused if she had strolled into the dressing room with a large diamond on her finger and the news that she was to be Mrs. Stephen Winters. Lily smiled at the thought. They would have screamed the place down and Sylvia de Charmante would have died of envy.
It would have been fun to be engaged to Stephen. Not married of course; but it would have been fun to be engaged. He would certainly have bought her a large diamond ring. It would have been nice to have been taken out to dinner from the Southampton lodging house in the big grey car and see the curtains twitch as the girls watched her drive away. It was tiring to walk to the tram stop at the end of the day. The Argyll had been comfortable, and the dinners had been fun, and Stephen had been very pleasant when he had held her hand in the darkness and smiled at her.
But the kiss on the beach had been shocking. And Lily’s pride as well as her youth had recoiled from Stephen’s declaration that he was prepared to make her his wife. She threw in her flannel and her towel and slammed the dressing case shut.
“I’m packed,” she said.
“See you Monday!” Madge called. “Town station, ten o’clock, Monday morning. Don’t be late!”
“I won’t! See you then!” Lily called.
Stephen was at the stage door with a bouquet of creamy golden roses. Helen Pears was waiting discreetly halfway down the alley.
“I couldn’t let you go away like that,” Stephen said. His face was anxious, he looked like a boy in trouble, not an experienced older man.
Lily took the flowers automatically and said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Stephen said. “I startled you. I startled myself actually! I like you awfully, Lily, and I’d like you to consider being my wife. I’d do my best to make you very happy. I’d give you everything you want, you know. I’d like you just to give it a thought. Don’t say ‘no’ outright.”
Lily started walking towards her mother, her arms full of roses. “I don’t think I can,” she said.
“Leave it for a while then. Put it out of your mind. It was an idea of mine but you’re probably right, you’re too young to be thinking of marriage. We’ll be friends, shall we, Lily? Like we were before?”
Helen Pears was beside them, glancing from her daughter’s face to Stephen’s anxious expression.
“Captain Winters?” she said coolly.
Stephen glanced at her. “I’ve made a bit of a fool of myself, Mrs. Pears,” he said. “I asked Lily to marry me and of course, she’s too young to be thinking of such things yet. I like her awfully, you see, and I just thought I’d ask. But if she wants, and if you permit, we’ll consider ourselves friends again. Just friends.”
“It’s up to Lily,” Mrs. Pears said gently. “She’s much too young to marry and she’s got her career to think of as well.”
“Oh yes, her career,” Stephen said dismissively. “But can we be friends again, Lily?”
Lily’s good nature was too strong to withstand Stephen’s anxious look. And besides, the Argyll was waiting, and the roses were nice. The girls would be coming out of the stage door at any moment and then they would see who had failed to land a big catch. It would be fun if Stephen drove over to Southampton and took her out for dinner and anyway, Coventry was holding open the door and smiling at her, as if he was pleased to see her again. And there was nothing creepy about Coventry at all—she had imagined that. Charlie Smith had said that Stephen was no older than him; and Charlie Smith was certainly not too old.
“All right!” Lily said. “I’d like that.” She freed one hand from holding the roses and held it out to Stephen. “We’ll be friends again.”
Stephen shook her hand firmly, as if she were a young clerk at his office. “That’s grand,” he said. “And now—would you like a farewell dinner, Mrs. Pears? Lily? To say goodbye to the Queens Hotel before you conquer the south of England?”
Lily glanced at her mother and then nodded. “Divine!” she said, using Sylvia de Charmante’s favourite word of praise. “Too, too divine!”
• • •
Stephen called for her at the grocery shop on Sunday morning. Mrs. Pears had agreed that they might all go out for a picnic. Coventry had a large hamper in the boot of the Argyll, and a spirit stove, a tea kettle, a silver teapot, and a complete tea service.
“On a Sunday, darling?” Muriel had asked her son. “Such an odd day for a picnic. I don’t think it’s quite the thing.”
“She’s going away tomorrow, Mother, if she doesn’t come now I don’t know when she’ll be free again. And I’ve longed for a picnic in the country for weeks. The forecast is good for tomorrow. And if you don’t tell anyone—who’s to know?”
Muriel had sighed and said nothing more. The tea party to introduce Stephen to young women of his own class had been a total failure. He had hated them all. And Muriel, watching them over her tea cup as they postured and preened, had hated them too. Marjorie had obviously studied the magazines to learn how to be a Modern Girl and was both shocking and vulgar. Sarah had been sickeningly sentimental. Stephen, trapped on the sofa between two versions of post-war womanhood, had looked uncomfortable—even angry. He must wonder, Muriel thought, what it was all for—those long two and a half years away—when he comes home and finds girls like Marjorie and Sarah as the best that Portsmouth can offer, his father a cripple, and the house silent with grief. She sighed.
She was still grieving f
or her oldest son, their heir. Christopher had marched off to war believing that it would be an adventure like a Boys’ Own story. They had all thought that then. It sounded like madness now. But in the first heady days of 1914 there had been a sort of wild carnival atmosphere as if the boys were going away on some delightful crusade. The newspapers had been full of pictures of handsome young men smiling and waving, and the journalists had written that England would reclaim her power and her strength with the British Expeditionary Force. There had not been a war since the Boer war—and the faraway privations of that struggle were quickly forgotten. The Germans were behaving like animals in Europe and should be abruptly stopped. Everyone knew that the British soldier—Tommy Atkins—was the finest in the world.
People were bored of peace. All the rumblings and discontent in the country, all the eccentricities and oddness of the young men and women would be blown away when they had their chance to be great. The newspapers said it, the clergy blessed it in the pulpits. Everyone believed that a war—a good romp of a quick war—would somehow set them up, would unite the nation, cleanse it. The country needed a war, they told themselves. They were a fighting nation, an imperial nation. They needed to prove themselves again.
Christopher had been in the Officer Training Corps at school and joined the Reserve Army after school. He believed it was his duty to go and—more than that—he had thought it the finest adventure possible. He had volunteered and been commissioned at once. His father and he went down to the tailors Gieves, on the harbourside, and ordered his uniform in a joyous male shopping trip which had ended in the Dolphin Hotel with a bottle of champagne for the hero. He had looked wonderfully handsome in khaki. He had been very fair with clear pale skin and light blue eyes. He looked like a boy off to boarding school when he leaned out of the train window and waved his new cap with the shiny badge and shouted goodbye.
He died within seven weeks, during the first disastrous battle that they would later call the first battle of the Somme, when they had to distinguish it from the second, then the third and then the fourth: battles fought again and again, over the same ground, now layered with dead like some strange soft shale rock.
Muriel learned to be grateful that Christopher had died early. He had never known trench warfare and the souring of courage and hope that seemed to happen in the mud. She was glad that her fair-headed son had never come home alive with lice and shaking with nerves. She was glad, afterwards, that it had been quick for him, that she had never had to listen to him screaming from nightmares or found him huddled under his bed, soaked in sweat, keening with terror. Christopher had ridden out like a hero and was gone for ever, before she had time to miss him. She had not even finished knitting his gloves.
Stephen had been totally different. He had resisted recruitment to the very last moment. The news of Christopher’s death had come and his father had dropped where he stood, as if a bullet had found his heart. But still Stephen would not go. His father had been able to move his hand then, his right hand, and he had written Stephen a note, the only thing he ever wrote. It read: “Now, your turn.” Stephen had completely ignored it.
His godfather had written to him that it was his duty to go, and that he would be cut from the old man’s will if he did not volunteer. It was no empty threat. The old man had a large house in Knightsbridge. Stephen had secretly enjoyed the knowledge that it would one day be his ever since Christopher’s death had left him as sole heir. But even that threat did not move him from his refusal to go. One painful evening after dinner Muriel had told him that she was convinced that it was her duty to let him go, and his to leave. She had read in the paper that a woman’s service to her country meant sacrifice. She was ready to sacrifice him. A popular daily paper was minting medals for women who sent their sons to war. Muriel recognized the rightness of the award. A woman could do nothing, could give nothing—but she could let her son go. Muriel had tears in her eyes when she told Stephen that she was convinced that he must leave. But nothing would make him go.
It was only when it became apparent to him that conscription was coming, and that no fit young man would escape, that he could either volunteer as an officer or be conscripted as a soldier, that he went down to the town hall and signed on. He went without telling his mother of his intention, and he came back with a face like a servant.
There was no joyous backslapping trip to Gieves with his father. His father’s hand had lost its strength; he could not write. He nodded at the news, but Stephen had no praise from him. There was no singing on the train which took him and the other surly late volunteers to London. There were no optimistic promises about being home by Christmas.
When she was clearing out his room, after he had gone, Muriel found an envelope tucked at the back of the drawer for his socks. There was no letter, but it was not empty: there was a white feather in it. Someone had posted a white feather to her son. She looked at the postmark. It was posted in Portsmouth, their home town where they had been well-known and respected for generations. Someone had troubled themselves to discover Stephen’s home address and post him a white feather. Someone had seen his reluctance to fight and named him as a coward.
Muriel had thought then that Stephen would never forgive any of them. When he had come home on leave with his face white and tight, slept for days and wallowed in the bath, eaten as if he were starving, but never once smiled at her nor at his father, she knew she was right. She asked him in the new humble voice that she was learning to use to him, measuring the extent of her misjudgement, “Is it very, very bad, Stephen? I’ve seen photographs and it looks . . .”
He had looked at her with his broad handsome face hardened and aged to stone. “You have sent me to my death,” he said simply, and turned away.
Muriel moved restlessly around the sitting room. Stephen had been proved wrong. He had not died, he had come home; and now he had a new life to make. He had his work to do, and he would find a suitable wife, he should have a child, a son to continue the family. It was Muriel’s job to find a girl who would bring some life into this quiet house where the old man upstairs lay in silence and grieved for his brightest lost son.
The girl, the right girl, must be somewhere among Muriel’s many acquaintances. Muriel would make the effort, she would give tea parties, lunch parties and even dinner parties. She would put aside her grief and her longing for silence and fill the house with women and girls so that Stephen could take his pick. He would meet a girl and like her, and the threads of life could be picked up and knitted on like one of those interminable khaki mufflers which everyone had made so badly for four years. The tight cruel look that crossed Stephen’s face sometimes would go. His stammer would fade away and be forgotten. And the nightmares, when he woke the whole house with his screaming—these too would stop. Stephen’s wife would turn him back into a civilian. Stephen’s wife would pick up the pieces left by the war and mend him into a whole man again.
The girl from the Palais and this picnic in the country could not be prevented. Muriel had lost her power over Stephen when she sent him to his brother’s graveyard. He had thought then that if she had loved him at all she would have fought to keep him safe, at home. Her betrayal had opened a wide gulf between them that Muriel alone could not bridge. But Muriel still had authority. The chorus girl from the Palais would never set foot in number two, The Parade.
• • •
Lily lay on her back, a stem of grass in her mouth, hat askew, watching the blue sky and the small pale clouds drifting across it. Stephen was leaning back against the Argyll’s polished mudguard, hardly daring to breathe for fear of harming his sense of peace.
“This is nice,” Lily said carelessly.
Stephen nodded. There were no words for how he felt, watching Lily’s face turned up to the sky, her long body stretched seductively over a tartan rug, her little feet in white stockings and white sandals, demurely crossed. On the corner of the rug Mrs. Pears repacked the picnic basket. Coventry sat on a log a little way off s
moking a cigarette.
There was a lark going upwards and upwards into the blue. Lily’s eyes—as blue as the sky—watched it soaring, listening to its call. “Funny little bird,” she said. “What’s it doing that for?”
“For joy,” Stephen said softly. His heart felt tight in his chest. Lily’s profile, as clear and exquisite as a cameo, burned into his mind. He thought he would see her face, blanched by the bright colours of the tartan rug, for ever. He thought this one picture of a pretty girl on a summer day might drive all the other pictures from his mind.
“How lovely,” Lily said wonderingly. “I never thought they sang because they were happy. I thought they just sang because they had to.”
Stephen smiled. He could feel laughter bubbling inside him like an underground spring, blocked for too many years. “Like a paid choir?” he asked.
Lily giggled at her own silliness. “Like the chorus line,” she said. “Whether they feel like it or not. Up at dawn and in a line, twitter twitter twitter. You, sparrow, you’re flat!”
“And the stars come on later,” Stephen suggested. “The blackbird. And the nightingale only comes for command performances. And the cuckoo has a really short season!”
“Does it? Why?”
Stephen was puzzled by her ignorance. “It’s only here in spring,” he said.
Lily turned to look at him, one casual hand shielding her eyes from the sun. Stephen drank in the crook of her elbow, her short hair spilling out from her hat.
“Is it?”
“You know the song—‘April come she will, May she will stay, June she change her tune . . .’ ”
Lily giggled gloriously. “No,” she said. “Sing it to me!”
Stephen laughed, a croaky unfamiliar feeling. “I can’t sing!”
“Sing!” Lily commanded.
Stephen glanced across at Coventry and Mrs. Pears, embarrassed. Both of them were deaf and blind to him and Lily. Coventry was slowly smoking, looking out over the hills. Mrs. Pears had taken some sewing out of her bag and was concentrating on her stitching.