Fallen Skies

by Philippa Gregory

  “Up you go, Lil,” Charlie said. “And remember, nice and slow and mournful.”

  While she was making her way up the gangplank to the stage he turned to the band. “She does it very slow,” he said. “We’ll take one and two and three and four—that slow. It sounds funny at first but I’ve seen her do it, and it works. It’s like a ballad, a sad Irish ballad.”

  Lily was waiting at the back of the stage. “OK,” Charlie said, counting again. “One and two and three and four . . .”

  The refrain played through once and then Lily stepped forwards. Her voice was strong and clear and simple. She had tucked her hair behind her ears and she looked like an orphaned boy. She held the lapels of her little jacket and sauntered like a street urchin. In her clear steady voice the song became the story of the survivors of the war, who came back to find that their place in the world was gone, that their friends were missing, that their joy was lost.

  When she finished Charlie found that he had a lump in his throat. He swore loudly and thoroughly.

  “Now sit somewhere out of the way,” he said disagreeably. “We’ve got work to do. When Mr. Rice comes he’ll listen to you.”

  Lily backed off meekly to the prompt corner, perched on the stool out of sight in the darkness and listened to Charlie rehearsing the band.

  They stopped after a few more minutes and Lily peeped around the open curtain. Richard Rice was talking to Charlie. He was a tall man, with a fringe of blonde curly hair around a large bald dome of a head, twinkling blue eyes and a look of complete unconcern.

  “Of course I’ll listen,” he said pleasantly. “Miss Valance!”

  Lily stepped forward, shading her eyes against the working lights. “I’m here.”

  “Charlie tells me you’re something special,” he said with a smile. “Is that right?”

  “He says that to all the chorus girls,” she said roguishly.

  Richard laughed and slapped Charlie on the back. “Let’s hear it then,” he said.

  “She does it in costume,” Charlie explained rapidly while the musicians turned back to the “Burlington Bertie” music. “Either morning dress—but I thought, what about uniform? You know, officer’s khaki?”

  “For ‘Burlington Bertie’?” Richard queried.

  “Well, just bear it in mind,” Charlie suggested, turning to the band and giving them a nod. “One and two . . .”

  Lily sang easily. She had the sense of the stage now, and had felt the acoustics of the theatre. She knew she could be heard clearly and easily. She knew she would not have to strain her voice. When the music finished she stayed in the centre of the stage and waited for Richard Rice’s comments.

  “Mmmm,” he said. He nodded at Charlie. “Can she dance?”

  “Loves dancing.”

  “Sing something a bit risqué?”

  Charlie shook his head. “It’s not her style. She’s too young for it. She sings ballads very well and she can do ragtime like no-one you’ve ever heard. She’s got the rhythm and she’s been taught to count.”

  “Can you do something else for me, dear? Can you do ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’?” Richard called up to the stage.

  Lily glanced at Charlie; he nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. The hours in the lodging house drawing rooms with Charlie playing the piano came back to her. He had made her count beats to the bar, clap the rhythm, tap the rhythm, count it silently and come in eight bars later after eight bars of silence, and hit the beat precisely. “I can do ragtime,” she said certainly.

  She went to the back of the stage. She had never sung ragtime on stage, she had always leaned against the piano and sung to Charlie. She thought of Madge’s outrageous vamping and Sylvia’s elegant drifting. Somewhere between the two there must be a style that Lily could manage. She walked as slowly as she could to her position, racking her brains.

  Nothing came. She would just sing the song pure and simple, trusting to the beat and the happy-go-lucky tune to take her through. Lily paused. That was it. Ragtime was more than anything else happy. It was joyful. And that was the style that Madge could not manage because she was a vamp, and Sylvia could not do in her style of an elegant English lady. It was a toe-tapping street dance, a song for errand boys to whistle.

  “Wait a minute!” Lily hissed at Charlie and darted to the prompt corner. Hanging up on the pegs were three or four hats and among them a straw boater. Lily grabbed it and rushed back on to the stage. She turned herself sideways to the audience, tipped the boater low down over her nose, stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket and crossed one foot over another.

  “Attagirl!” Charlie said softly. “Pretty quick, eh, Lil?” he said aloud.

  “Very slow to start,” she replied without moving from her pose, “and then very quick.”

  “Tricky,” Charlie commented. “One, two, three, four!”

  Lily froze motionless, like a tableau of an errand boy, and started the catchy song as if it too were a haunting ballad.

  “Come on and hear, come on and hear, Alexander’s Ragtime Band . . .”

  Slowly she speeded up as Charlie just picked out chords with his left hand so that he could conduct the band with his right, keep them following Lily precisely on a steadily increasing beat. The excitement of the song was infectious. Lily, her face radiant, whipped the hat off her head and spun it on her finger. When she forgot the words in the middle she whirled around and tap-danced and Charlie cut off the band with a sharp gesture to let her tap in silence and then brought them in to a thundering final chorus without missing a beat.

  “Yes indeed!” Richard Rice called. He clapped, walking down the aisle to the orchestra pit. “That was stunning. Miss Valance, you’re in. Third billing. Start Monday, eleven o’clock.”

  Lily flung the boater in the air. “Yippee!”

  • • •

  There was an uneasy truce between Lily and Stephen at dinner. Muriel kept a flow of small talk steadily through tomato soup, liver casserole and apple crumble. Lily ate hardly any meat.

  “I don’t like liver,” she said when Muriel asked if she was unwell. “I never eat it.”

  “How unusual,” Muriel said frostily. The meals at number two, The Parade were planned on a monthly basis. Liver casserole occurred twice a month. She did not know what Cook would say if she were told that it was to be banned.

  “We often have it,” Stephen said. “It’s one of my favourites.”

  Muriel looked from Stephen’s determined heavy face to Lily’s pale stubbornness. “Shall we have coffee in the drawing room?” she asked, as if they did not have coffee there every night. “Lily dear, would you wind some wool for me?”

  Lily sat before the dried flower arrangement in the cold hearth with her arms upraised like a little doll. Muriel draped the yarn of wool over both Lily’s hands and then wound it off into a ball. “What are you knitting?” Lily asked.

  “A little matinée coat and boots. My niece, Sarah-Louise, is expecting a baby. She lives in Scotland so we hardly ever see them, but I like to keep in touch.”

  Lily nodded.

  “She’s only been married two months,” Muriel said, watching the downturned face for any expression. “She always said she wanted a large family. She might as well start as soon as possible.”

  Lily looked up and smiled at Muriel. “I don’t,” she said simply.

  Stephen wandered around the room, his coffee cup in his hand. The tide was down and they could not hear the sea.

  “I think I’ll pop out,” he said. Muriel and Lily looked at him. “I’ll take a run over to Hayling Island with Coventry. I’ve been cooped up in that office all day. I feel like a breath of air.”

  “As you like, dear,” Muriel said placidly. “Lily, would you like to go too?”

  “No thank you,” Lily said sweetly. “I was going to sit with Mr. Winters for an hour.”

  Stephen nodded. Muriel noticed that he did not press Lily to go with him. “I’ll be late,” he said. “I’ll dr
ive myself home. Don’t wait up.”

  Muriel and Lily nodded. “Don’t forget your key,” Muriel said.

  Stephen patted his pocket and went from the room. “Good night,” he said at the door. Lily stayed at her seat before the empty fireplace, her arms raised, the yarn stretched ready for Muriel to roll the ball of wool. Muriel reached forward to take the wool from her, so that she would be free to go to the door and bid Stephen good night, but she checked the movement. Lily sat quietly serene.

  The two women heard Stephen call down the back stairs, “Coventry!” and then Coventry’s footsteps up the stairs.

  “Night patrol,” Stephen said to him. The front door slammed and the two men were gone.

  Muriel wound the ball of wool, Lily moving her hands to the right and to the left, obligingly keeping rhythm with Muriel. They heard the car start and drive away, and then the summer night outside the drawn curtains was silent.

  “I hope you’re happy,” Muriel said abruptly.

  Lily looked up at her. Lily’s lovely face was like a mask to Muriel, she could not imagine what the girl was feeling. Her sapphire eyes were empty. “Why not?” she asked.

  The last of the yarn was wound into a plump ball. “Thank you, my dear,” Muriel said, trying to inject some warmth into her voice.

  “That’s all right,” Lily said politely. “Shall I go and sit with Mr. Winters now?”

  “If you want to,” Muriel said awkwardly. “You know you don’t have to. We don’t know for sure that he even knows we’re there.”

  “Oh, I think he does,” Lily said. “I think he knows everything that’s going on. He hears all the secrets as well. Stephen talks to him, and I talk to him, and you do too, don’t you, Mrs. Winters?”

  Muriel flushed slightly. “The doctors seemed to think it was a good idea. It might make him want to respond, they thought.”

  “It’ll be a surprise for us all when he does respond then,” Lily said brutally. “All the secrets will be out then, won’t they?”

  Muriel stared at her. “Good night,” Lily said pleasantly and went from the room closing the door quietly behind her.

  Muriel sat in silence beside the puffy brown heads of the dried hydrangea in the fireplace vase, the ball of wool in her hands. Stephen was driving in the darkness away from his home to some pub or club or rough gambling place with Coventry. Lily, his vulgar child-wife, was sitting in the half-light beside a half-dead man. Only Christopher was untouched, unchanged. He was smiling as the train drew out of the station, smiling and waving his hat as the band played “Tipperary.” The sunlight very bright on his golden head, his smile as radiant as a boy off to a party. “Home by Christmas!” he had shouted.

  Muriel pictured each of her family one by one; but only Christopher seemed truly alive. Christopher, who had promised to be home by Christmas and had never broken a promise in his life.

  • • •

  Stephen and Coventry drank heavily and well at half a dozen public houses in Havant, Bedhampton, and finally Hayling Island. Then with a quart of whisky in a brown paper bag they drove carefully down the track to Coventry’s houseboat.

  It was as dark and cold and unwelcoming as ever. The tide was coming in and as Stephen got from the car and climbed the rickety steps to the black door he could hear bubbles popping in the mud and the whisper and suck of incoming waves. The highest of the spring tides might wash up all around the houseboat but it would never float again. Coventry’s fisherman father had grounded it with boulders in the keel and wedged it into the estuary bed with sacks of sand. An ordinary high tide, like the one creeping steadily in, never came higher than halfway up the black-painted belly of the boat, never did more than lay a reef of flotsam under the gangplank for Coventry to collect for firewood in the morning.

  “Good,” Stephen said at the flickering light of the oil lamp. Coventry trimmed the wick and put the glass chimney over the flame. He put a match to the newspaper sausages in the grate and they twisted and burned and flamed under the white scraps of driftwood. As the kindling caught, Coventry added larger pieces of wood until the fire was burning well. He took the kettle and went out into the darkness for a few moments and came back with fresh water from the standpipe on the quay.

  Stephen already had his dry shoes set in the grate, and four mugs down from their hooks—two for tea, two for whisky. “Good,” he said again.

  Coventry put the kettle on the stove, put the teapot and the tea caddy and sugar on the table, and then took off his own perfectly dry shoes, and set them against the stove. They both took off their socks and laid them side by side over the brass rail at the front of the stove. They acted as if they had no choice in the matter. They acted without thinking. The little gestures—housekeeping, protecting themselves against trenchfoot, seeking warmth and dryness and comfort—seemed to assert themselves, quite independently of the two men’s will, despite the peace and ease of life which they could both now command. It was as if the habits of survival had been ingrained so deeply by those two and a half years of living under sentence of death that no peace, and no life, would erase them.

  “That’s good,” Stephen said with immense satisfaction as the fire glowed and the kettle steamed.

  Coventry made the tea, added four spoonfuls of sugar, stirred clockwise, and then they took sip for sip of scalding tea and cheap whisky.

  “It’s not as easy as you think,” Stephen said after a long contented silence. “This marriage business. You see a girl and you think—she’s the one—but when you actually have her it’s not just dinners and dances and nights out. It’s different when you’re married. She doesn’t try so hard. She doesn’t look the same.”

  Coventry nodded and blew on his tea. His hands were locked tight around the scalding mug.

  “She’s a good girl,” Stephen said judicially. “But she doesn’t know the rules. She doesn’t come from my part of town. She can’t help it; but she’s going to have to learn.”

  Coventry said nothing. He raised an eyebrow at Stephen when Stephen turned to him.

  “I know. I could have married one of Mother’s friends,” he agreed. “But I was crazy for Lily. I thought she would set me free of it—free of it all.”

  He paused for a moment, sipped his tea, sipped his whisky. “The last thing I thought was that she would make it worse.”

  There was a shocked silence.

  Stephen nodded. “Worse,” he repeated. “The thing in London was worse than it has ever been before. She made it sound like bally madness. She exaggerates of course, all girls do. And she’s inclined to be hysterical, of course. But the dreams I get . . .” He broke off. “And I thought with her in bed beside me, I wouldn’t dream any more. I was rather counting on that.”

  Coventry was watching the fire, his long pale face sad and tired.

  “It hasn’t worked,” Stephen said resentfully. “I seem to be dreaming more and more clearly. And the dreams are in order. I’ve dreamed as far as the first posting. D’you remember? I’ve dreamed arriving in France, and disembarking, and the train journey and then the first time I ever went to the trenches. It was just outside Boezing. That was when you were attached to me. When we met. It was summer, 1917. D’you remember?”

  Coventry shook his head. Nothing would ever make him remember.

  “Well, I wish to God I didn’t remember either,” Stephen said bitterly. “I couldn’t have got there at a worse time. The third battle of Ypres had just started, and we went forward and back in mud so deep that if you stumbled and fell you would drown! Christ! I remember! I remember it all! And now with Lily lying beside me I’m dreaming it all through again, every day, every night. Every inch of that ground. It’s the last thing in hell I want to do.

  “It’s as if she’s so free of it, so untouched by it, that I want to dream it out on to her pillow. She draws it out of me. It’s like I want to tell her. I want to get it out.”

  He gave a shaky little laugh and took a deep swig of whisky from the mug. “Don’t wo
rry,” he said unhappily. “I’m not such a fool. I won’t ever tell about it. We’ll always be heroes. No-one will ever know.”

  Coventry turned and looked at him. His dark unremembering eyes were filled with tears for all that he had forgotten.

  • • •

  Stephen did not work at the weekend and Muriel had promised that he and Lily would attend a garden fete with her in aid of the Portsmouth War Wounded Fund.

  “I hate this sort of thing,” Lily said in the hall as Muriel gathered up her gloves and hat and hurried down the stairs.

  “I’m sure you do,” Muriel said reassuringly. “But we really have to do it. And it’s a very good cause.”

  “I think Lily is a bit of conchie,” Stephen said, but his tone was affectionate; he had recovered his patronizing affection for his little wife, who was looking very sleek and pretty. “I think she’s a bit of a radical. Look at that bobbed hair, Ma! I think we’ve got a Votes for Women type in the bosom of the family.”

  Lily made a face at him. “I just don’t like war charities,” she said.

  “Oh, get along with you,” Muriel said, enjoying the lighter atmosphere. “You need only go round the stalls and say hello to a few people. It’s not much to ask. And then you can disappear as long as you send the car back for me at six.”

  “We will,” Stephen said. “And tonight I shall take Lily out on the town. We’ll go to the Theatre Royal, Lily. There’s a play on: The Three Wise Fools, transferred from London, no less!”

  Lily’s face lit up. “Wonderful!” she said.

  So that’s all right after all, Muriel said to herself as she walked to the car and nodded to Coventry, who held the door for her. The front seat was filled with roses from the garden, cut for the flower stall, and the car was heady with their sweet fruity perfume. Whatever differences they had yesterday, they’re all gone today. I worry too much. And I know too much. I should just leave them to get on with their lives and not fret.

  “Got a head, Coventry?” Stephen asked jovially.