Fallen Skies

by Philippa Gregory

  • • •

  Lily did not get up for breakfast, although Stephen ensured that she was awake by briskly drawing the bedroom curtains and stamping around the room, his shoes very noisy on the bare floorboards, looking for his cufflinks.

  Lily lay back on the pillows and watched him. She made no effort to get out of bed and help him look for them. When he found them left in the bathroom she showed no interest.

  “I’m going down for breakfast,” he prompted.

  Lily did not move. “Ask Sally to bring me up some coffee and a slice of toast,” she said. “I’ll get dressed later.”

  Stephen hesitated. He wanted to tell her that breakfast in bed was a luxury which had been offered to her yesterday as a treat, as part of their honeymoon. Today was a working day when she should be dressed before him, and downstairs in the dining room ready to pour his cup of tea while they breakfasted together.

  “Are you not having breakfast with me?” he asked pointedly.

  Lily smiled at him pleasantly. “No,” she said simply. “I don’t have any work to go to, I don’t have any friends to meet. There is nothing for me to get up for. I’ll have a bath and get dressed later.”

  “If you’re still sulking . . .”

  Lily shook her fair head. Her smile was imperturbable. “No,” she said. “I’m not sulking. But if I am to be a lady of leisure I might as well enjoy it.”

  Stephen crossed the room and pecked her cheek. “I’ll see you this afternoon then,” he said. He was still dissatisfied but he could find no reasonable grounds for complaint.

  Lily nodded. She sat up in bed and smoothed the covers to her liking. “Have a nice day at work,” she said.

  Muriel poured Stephen’s tea and sat at the opposite end of the table while he ate his breakfast and read The Times. If she expected Lily to come downstairs and have breakfast with her new husband and see him off to work, she did not say. She heard Stephen order Sally to take a tray upstairs to Mrs. Winters and she said nothing. When Stephen went to work Muriel sat in the drawing room on the window seat, watching the children playing at the Canoe Lake for a long time. The swans, which had been banished during the war to prevent people wasting bread on them, sailed serenely on the glassy water, breast to breast with their own reflections.

  Muriel did not want to go upstairs to see if Lily were ill, if she needed anything. She did not want to invite Lily’s confidences. She found that she had no inclination to advise, to intervene into Stephen’s marriage. She found that she wanted to know nothing about it at all.

  There was not a sound from Lily’s room until eleven when the bedroom door banged open and Lily pattered down the stairs. She called in to Rory’s sickroom to say good morning and then she came downstairs. Muriel, emerging from the drawing room, met her in the hall and saw with some alarm that she had on her hat and gloves.

  “Are you going out?”

  Lily smiled. “Just for a little walk, along the front, perhaps up to the shops.”

  “Coventry will drive you. He is in the garden, but I can send for him in a moment.”

  Lily shook her head. “No need. I want a walk. It’s a lovely day.”

  “I am going for tea to Mrs. Frost. Her daughter will be there and some other people. Will you come too, Lily?”

  “Lovely!” Lily said. “What time?”

  “We’ll leave here at half past three,” Muriel said. “Coventry can drop us and then fetch Stephen. We can all come home together.”

  “Lovely,” Lily said again. “See you later.”

  She opened the door herself and stepped outside. “Lunch at twelve,” Muriel called.

  Lily opened the door again and stuck her head round. “Not for me,” she said cheerily. “I’ll be back in time for tea.” And then she was gone before Muriel could protest.

  She walked along the seafront until she was out of sight of the house. It was a surprisingly long way. The house was tall, three storeys high, and the octagonal tower commanded a wide view of the promenade. Lily glanced over her shoulder. When all she could see was the red tiled roof of the tower she crossed the council flower gardens and walked briskly towards Palmerston Road until she came to a tram stop. She waited for a little while and then the tram came, half-empty on a weekday morning.

  Lily looked in her purse when she paid for her ticket. She had a few shillings and some coppers but she had spent her last pound on the telegram to tell Charlie that she was marrying. Stephen had spoken of giving her an allowance but, as yet, he had given her no money. Lily grimaced. It would be embarrassing to ask him for money when he bought all her clothes and had opened accounts for her in the major Portsmouth stores, but without money in her pocket she might as well have stayed Lily Pears with at least a weekly wage to spend.

  She leaned forward to see out of the front window. The boat-like prow of the Kings Theatre was ahead of them. There were posters up for the summer variety shows. There was a sticker pasted over the posters: “And the Kings Orchestra,” it said. “Conductor Charles Smith.” Lily beamed.

  The tram stopped and she jumped down from the wooden slatted steps. The glass swing doors of the theatre were shut, except for one entrance where you could go in to buy advance tickets. A cleaning woman was laboriously washing the marble floor of the foyer. A thick green carpet ran up the steps leading from the foyer into the heart of the theatre.

  Lily had been to shows at the Kings with her mother ever since it had opened in 1907, but they had sat in the gods, the highest seats in the theatre, which had a separate entrance and separate box office at the side of the theatre. They had been strictly segregated from the ladies and gentlemen who entered by the front entrance and walked on carpet. Lily smiled. She was Mrs. Winters now. If she came to the theatre it would be through those doors and up those stairs and into the deep green and gilt and cream auditorium to sit in comfortable cushioned seats. She turned from the front entrance. She would rather be Lily Valance and enter at the stage door.

  The theatre had been squeezed into a block of land tucked between terraced houses. Lily had to walk along the white-painted side of the building and then turn the corner and walk along the street at the back of the theatre to the stage door. On the other side of the road were small two-storey terraced houses. Children played in the street and one, spotting her hat and her expensive yellow dress and jacket, came running up to her with his hands out asking for a penny for sweets. Lily scowled at him, fearing his dirty hands on her skirt. “Shove off,” she said abruptly.

  She paused before the stage door and pulled a hand mirror from her purse. Her hair was smooth, the little slice of straw and flowers which served as her hat was on straight. Her lipstick was discreet. She looked as pretty as she had when Charlie had first seen her, but now, shadowed with sadness, her face had a new maturity which was growing towards beauty. Lily smiled at herself with absolute satisfaction. She raised her hand and tapped on the door.

  A man opened it. “Lily Valance,” Lily said, waving the letter from the theatre. “For an audition.” She was gambling that he would not read it and see that the date was wrong and that she was a day early.

  “All right,” he said. He pushed the door towards her and Lily slipped inside. On her left was the little glass-fronted office, like a booking office, where the doorman sat and brewed tea for the actors and crew, and ran a good business taking bets, selling newspapers, carrying messages and spreading gossip. Ahead of her was a flight of concrete steps which led directly to the stage. Dressing rooms ran off to the left, and there was another floor of dressing rooms up the flight of steps on the next level. The largest room, up a few steps and to the right, convenient for the door and the doorman, was the star dressing room.

  “D’you know your way?” the doorman asked. “Who d’you have to see?”

  “Charlie Smith,” Lily said. She found she was breathless.

  “He’s rehearsing the band,” the man said. He nodded towards the steps which led upward to the darkness. “Go on up.” />
  Lily turned and climbed the short flight of stone steps. At the top was a large echoing space. Lily had never been on such a big stage. It was the size of a warehouse, a barn. Enormous slices of scenery leaned against the back wall, as high as houses. Three men, dirty as tramps, were painting a flight of stairs which led nowhere. They winked at Lily as she glanced at them. She smiled and walked on. She was afraid of being challenged and thrown out before she could find Charlie.

  She could hear the orchestra, they were playing a Charleston number. Lily heard Charlie’s voice say wearily: “No! No! No! We’ll start again. I’ll count you in and then you keep the beat. It has to be crisp. Two, three, four, and . . .”

  The band came in raggedly and Charlie tapped the music stand of his piano again. “No,” he said. “Try again. Two, three, four . . .”

  This time they hit the beat like a sledge-hammer. Charleston Charleston. Lily grinned as the familiar tune made the boards of the stage beneath her feet throb. She had a sudden sense of coming alive again, coming home. She felt herself beaming. Suddenly free of nerves, she went swiftly up the side of the stage and stepped out of the wings on to the stage itself.

  It was in darkness, except for the houselights of the theatre and the musicians’ lights over their stands. Lily looked out. It was a superb theatre, the most wonderful she had ever seen, as good as the London ones. It was richly coloured. Two bulging boxes were stacked two deep on the right and left of the stage. A confident sweep of the balcony showed the generous space of the upper circle, the same wide curl was the balcony of the stalls above. The upper stalls, above that, were raked like a ship heeling over, crammed into the roof space.

  Lily looked from the extravagant painted roof of the theatre, hung with fat glassy chandeliers, to the first row of seats upholstered in green velvet beneath her feet, and thought that she would never be able to reach all those people with her voice. She would never learn, as Charlie had taught her, to be a queen to them, to keep them waiting, to keep them guessing.

  Charlie, glancing up from the score, saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked up to the darkened stage and there was Lily, radiant in her yellow summer dress, her face lifted to the empty gallery, the smooth lovely line of her neck, her shoulders, her body, inviting applause from the empty seats.

  “Well, look what the cat brought in,” he said. “Welcome back, Lil.”

  18

  AT HIS VOICE Lily looked down and beamed at him. She hurried downstage and scampered down the makeshift gangway to the auditorium floor. Charlie swung his legs over the brass rail which divided the orchestra pit from the audience and, as the band raggedly stopped playing to watch, Lily flung herself into his open arms and was thoroughly kissed.

  Her hat fell off, her arms tightened around his body and Lily smelled his warm familiar male smell, as good as baked bread. She buried her face in his neck and felt the warmth of his skin against her face. For the first time since her mother’s death she felt safe.

  “Oh, Charlie . . .”

  “That’ll do,” Charlie said. He glanced behind him at the open interest of the members of the orchestra. “All right,” he said. “Show’s over. You can take a ten-minute break.” He checked his watch. “Back at twenty past twelve and no later.”

  He guided Lily to the front row and sat down beside her. “Well!” he said. “How’s the girl?”

  Lily, suddenly bashful, could think of nothing to say. She bent forward and picked up her hat. “Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you for your letter.”

  Charlie nodded.

  Lily put her hat on again and pushed it vaguely into place. “Madge wrote to me,” she said. “Twice. Oh! Of course you know.”

  Charlie nodded again, his eyes never leaving her face. “I am sorry about your ma,” he said gently.

  Lily looked at him quickly and then looked away. “Yes,” she said.

  Charlie looked at the perfect profile beside him and sighed at his own sense of frustration. There was nothing he could say to comfort Lily for the death of her mother. She had suffered an absolute loss—her guardian, protector, chaperone and manager gone in one moment. He shook his head. Although he had been a witness to the disappearance of a whole generation, and confronted the deaths of many of his own friends, he knew that each death is an individual tragedy. Each of the little white graves which they were starting to arrange so carefully in France was separately named. A whole regiment might have died to hold a little wood on the top of a little hill. But that meant heartbreak in hundreds of individual homes, hundreds of notices in a hundred local papers, hundreds of black arm bands, and more than a million women had learned that their boy would not be coming home again. Lily’s grief, one little death amongst these many, was the greatest loss of her young life. He noted the shadows under her eyes. It would take her a long time to finish grieving.

  “So what’s new?” he asked. “Have you come to audition? Does the Captain let you work?”

  Lily turned her face to him, her blue eyes guileless. “Yes,” she said simply. “As long as I’m back for tea when he comes home, he won’t mind.”

  Charlie shook his head. “You can do that during rehearsal, but not when we’re in performance. The tea matinée finishes at four thirty and then the evening show opens at seven thirty. You’d have to be here for six thirty.”

  Lily shrugged. “So? I’ll have dinner with him instead of tea. His mother can pour his tea. She’s always in.”

  “You live in her house?” Charlie asked. “Aren’t you getting a place of your own?”

  Lily shook her head. “Why should we?”

  Charlie closed his lips on a dozen reasons. “And she doesn’t mind you being on the stage?”

  “Not at all,” Lily said airily.

  Charlie hesitated, scenting the lie. “And what about Captain Winters’s dad? Doesn’t he mind?”

  “I do wish you’d stop nagging on about Stephen’s family! Anyone would think you were his favourite aunt!” Lily exclaimed petulantly. “Nobody minds what I do, or where I go—all right? And stop calling him Captain. He’s not a captain any more, he’s a lawyer. It’s stupid keeping war titles when the war is over and everyone has forgotten all about it.”

  “Have they?”

  “Yes,” Lily said sharply. “Now what’s the show and who’s in it?”

  Charlie grinned at Lily’s new confidence. “Well, Madame, the show is Summertime Variety and the star is George Tyler. We’re auditioning the cast but we’ve got a magician and an animal act, a comedian and a memory man. The chorus line is picked and marking out steps in the circle bar, and I was working with the band when you swanned in.”

  “Can I have an audition now?”

  “Why didn’t you come tomorrow, when you were due?”

  Lily shot him a fleeting sideways glance. “I was in a temper,” she confessed. “I wanted to get out of the house and into the theatre. And I wanted to see you. I’ll come back tomorrow if you can’t see me today.”

  Charlie dropped his hand along the back of the seat to take her shoulder in a quick hug. She was as slight as a child, he could feel her shoulder light and bony through the thin fabric of her dress. He felt a sudden longing to take her and hold her and love her, to comfort her hidden grief, to steal her from the husband who had left her in a temper this morning, only a week married. He took his hand away at once, and when Lily turned her bright face up to him for a kiss he was looking away and his face was shuttered.

  “Today’s fine,” he said. “Richard Rice is the director. He’s coming in at twelve thirty. You can sing for him then. What d’you want to do? ‘Burlington Bertie’?”

  Lily nodded. “Can I do it without a costume? Will he see what it should be like?”

  “Take your hat off.”

  Lily pulled her hat off and shook her head. The bobbed hair had grown and was brushing her shoulders. She had changed from the girl on the Midsummer Madness tour. There was a reserve about her that was new, a gravity w
hich the old well-mothered Lily had never shown. She looked steadily back at Charlie, not smiling or coquetting. She took in his face and his body in the half-darkness of the auditorium as he was reading her. They stared at each other with the open intensity of reunited lovers, without self-consciousness, without any facade. They faced each other and looked and looked.

  He thought Stephen had probably hurt her. He thought she was probably here without his permission, perhaps defying a specific ban. Charlie wanted to caution her, but then he stopped himself. Lily had married of her own free will and he had not cautioned her then. His lips moved into a painful little smile. He had been impotent in every sense of the word. He had taken a decision to set Lily free and keep her free. He had loved her and let her go to another man. There was no point in trying to make her marriage run smoothly, interceding for her happiness. Stephen and Lily would have to work things out for themselves, there was no place for him in their shared life.

  “What is it? You look sad.”

  Charlie shrugged and grinned at her. “Nothing,” he said. “I was worrying about the bother you’re getting yourself into, but I suppose you can look after yourself. A smart girl like you. I suppose you can wind Mr. Winters around your little finger?”

  Lily looked at him thoughtfully. “Not yet.”

  “A clever woman can generally manage a man who is in love with her,” Charlie commented. “You don’t have to get your head down and fight your way through. You can smile and charm and ask for favours. And of course, you can get his mother on your side. If she supports you, you’re home and dry.”

  The orchestra were coming back to their places, coughing loudly to display their discretion. Charlie grinned at them.

  “Right, lads, this is Lily Valance who was with me on the Midsummer Madness tour. She’s going to do ‘Burlington Bertie’ as an audition piece for Mr. Rice when he gets here. We’ll run through it now. Has everyone got the music?”

  There was a scuffle while the musicians hunted for the score on their stands and in their cases. The violinist had no copy but he could stand behind Charlie at the piano and see his.