Where Earth Meets Sky

by Annie Murray

  She stopped, seeing the shock, as if from a slap, spread over Lily’s face.

  ‘Oh, my dear . . . My poor girl . . . I’m so sorry!’ Susan leaned forwards and took Lily’s hand which was turning cold, as if her blood supply had been cut off.

  ‘If he is untrustworthy in this respect,’ she said gently, ‘then how would you ever be able to trust him in any way? Dear Lily, I’m not trying to be selfish about your future. I just couldn’t bear to see you in the thrall of a man who can’t even tell the truth about the most fundamental things of his life!’

  The deep hurt on Lily’s face was unmistakable and painful to see. She sat utterly still, unable to speak, as if she had been felled.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘How could you? How could you lie to me, tell me you love me, when all the time you’ve got a wife?’

  Sobbing, she stood before Sam in his room late that afternoon. The day had passed in a swirl of pain. Lily could remember nothing of it. And still she had not seen him, until she could stand it no longer, and just ran to his part of the house and hammered on the door, not caring now who heard her.

  Sam, though still looking seedy, was up and dressed. At her distraught accusation, she saw his face fall and become stony. He hurried over to shut the door, trying to take her hand to pull her closer.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she stormed at him. ‘How could you?’ Her outburst ended with a wordless cry of anguish. Her hair was loosely tied, wild strands curling round her face and hers eyes were swollen with tears.

  ‘God, Lily, my love, listen to me. Just listen to me, please!’ Sam took both of her hands and almost shook her, trying to make her hear him. ‘I know I should have told you. I should. But it didn’t seem real, not while I was here with you. I’ve never been in love before, not like this, with you. God forgive me, I married Helen not knowing what it was to love a woman, really love . . .’

  His face was distraught and she stared at him, wanting to believe, to hear something that would make everything all right so that she could forgive and love him again. All those times they had gazed at each other, all that she had seen in his eyes, it had to be real. She could not bear it all to have been pretence.

  ‘I didn’t know love was like this – that it could be like this,’ he said helplessly. ‘And we can’t let it go, Lily. How can we, after this? I’ll do anything; I’ll stay here in India. Let’s just be together, you and me, away from it all . . .’

  Just for a moment she was drawn into his persuasion, his saying to her all the things she wanted to hear. How she longed for it all to be all right, to know she could be with him! But she heard Susan Fairford’s words in her mind – how could she ever trust him after this, or have any future with him?

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she raged at him. ‘You’ve lied to me and now you want to lie to your wife. How could I ever be with you if you can’t tell the truth?’

  She sank down on the bed, her head in her hands. ‘I was all right until you came here.’ She could not see the misery her words provoked. ‘I was settled. I’ve never expected much of anything because I’ve never had much. I had a bad start. But I’ve liked it here – my work and Cosmo. I felt safe and that was all I wanted. And then you . . .’ She raised her distraught face to him. ‘I’ve never loved anyone before – not like that. And you’ve killed it. You’ve killed trust, and hope, and all my life here.’

  ‘Lily, don’t.’ He knelt down beside her and she saw that he was weeping. The day before it would have moved her to the core, but now she felt a terrible coldness seeping through her.

  ‘Don’t come crying to me.’ She pushed him away and went to the door. ‘What on earth do you expect from me now?’ She stared at his bowed head, her eyes icy and hard. ‘You’ve broken it – everything, Sam. Keep away from me. I hate you.’

  Early the next morning, in the growing heat, the assortment of carts and tongas required to transport the family and their belongings to the railway station began to assemble outside the Fairford bungalow. The servants hurried back and forth with the trunks and bags and other assorted objects, and the family readied themselves.

  Lily had packed for Cosmo and that morning she washed and dressed him, replying mechanically to his questions. Her heart was so heavy with distress she could hardly think straight. When she had left Sam yesterday, she was in a cold fury. This morning she felt numb, a dead person with no feeling at all. Would this be how it was now, she wondered, this deadness, forever? Was it not easier just to be like this, to feel nothing, risk nothing? She was used to that, after all. Only Mrs Chappell and Cosmo, and above all Sam, had opened up places of light and need in her which she scarcely knew of and now they had been forced back into darkness again like a cell door slamming.

  She did not expect to see Sam Ironside again, did not know if she could bear it if he were to appear. She knew that he and the captain would leave on their tour the next day, once the household were safely out of their way. Surely he would not show his face while she was still here?

  She led Cosmo out to their waiting tonga and the driver was lifting the little boy aboard when she heard a low, urgent voice behind her.

  ‘Lily!’ Sam had come running out from the house, not seeming to care who saw them together. His face looked bleached and sick. ‘For God’s sake, don’t leave me like this, woman. I love you – don’t you understand? I can’t go on without you! I’m sorry for not telling you, but how could I? I fell in love with you almost the moment I saw you, and I’d never have got near you if you’d known about Helen, that I was married . . .’

  ‘Yes – but now I do,’ Lily said. She could not let her heart soften even for a second, watching this man she loved in such distress. It was no good. He was married and that was how it was. There could be no argument about that.

  She climbed up on to the tonga and put her arm around Cosmo.

  ‘Lily, please – I’ll divorce her. I’ll do anything to be with you!’

  ‘Drive!’ she ordered the tonga driver. ‘Chelo!’

  She sat up very straight as the pony trotted away pulling the tonga along the drive and out into the broad cantonment road, and she did not look back.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Coventry, 1907

  Sam Ironside dismounted from his bicycle to push it through the front gate and along the side of the house. Already, something felt different about the day. He had taken off his canvas bag in which he took his dinner into the works and was going to the back door, when it was opened by Mrs Blewitt, their neighbour.

  ‘Oh, Sam – you’ve come ’ome just right!’ she cried, flustered. ‘Things are getting going all right now. She must’ve started after you left this morning – you’re about to be a father any minute!’

  ‘What, today? Now?’ Sam pulled off his cap, bewildered. He hadn’t expected this. He was hungry and tired and suddenly it all seemed to be happening frighteningly quickly. He wanted to put it all off for another day.

  ‘Look at you, all sixes and sevens!’ Mrs Blewitt was in her forties, a motherly woman with five children of her own who seldom stopped talking to draw breath. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Sam. Mrs Rodgers is here with her. She delivered two of mine. Helen’s doing ever so well.’

  Sam sat waiting in the back room. Helen had made it into a neat, cosy place, with a maroon velvet drape over the mantel with jugs and horse brasses arranged on it, a pretty fire screen and their chairs facing each other by the fender. As he drank his tea, he could hear Mrs Rodgers moving about on the bare boards upstairs and her voice, speaking quietly and reassuringly to Helen. Every so often there came a moan or a long-drawn-out wail of pain, but not very loud. Good old Helen, he thought, she was never one to make a fuss. He felt out of place here in the middle of this women’s business. He half wished he’d stayed later at the works where everything was familiar, then felt ashamed of this thought.

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t want a drop of summat stronger,’ Mrs Blewitt joked, as she passed th
rough the room. ‘My Sid always had a few stiff ones while I was hard at it!’

  Eventually, after several especially agonized sounds, they heard the rasping cry of a newborn and Sam was allowed upstairs. Helen was lying back, looking plump and pale, with her hair raked back from her forehead, a broad smile on her face.

  ‘I feel as if I’ve been run down by a horse and carriage, Sam,’ she said with a wan smile. ‘But there she is, anyway.’

  In a drawer, by the bed, Sam saw the little crumpled shape of his first child. Her face was puckered, and her eyes seemed to him rather oriental.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ Mrs Rodgers said. ‘A proper little maid, you should be proud.’

  ‘She’s . . . lovely,’ Sam stammered, staring in astonishment. He had never seen a newborn before and could scarcely connect her with himself.

  ‘And your wife’s done ever so well. A natural, you are, Mrs Ironside.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. At least it was quick.’ Mrs Rodgers looked down at her, folding a towel. ‘Well, it’s not your first, is it?’ she prattled thoughtlessly. ‘I saw the stretch marks on your belly from the last . . . Usually takes longer the first time, of course.’

  It took Sam a moment to take in what she had said. Those shiny trails on her skin – he had never known it could be anything to do with that . . . He turned to look at Helen, seeing the horrified look of shock on her face, and her stricken eyes met his.

  The next afternoon, instead of cycling home he went from the Daimler works to his mother’s. She hadn’t heard yet that she was a grandmother, but Sam had more than this news on his mind.

  ‘Oh hello, Sam, boy! I’ve baked today – come in and have summat!’ Mrs Ironside greeted him. ‘Can’t have you looking so peaky – you don’t look right these days. That’s what happens if you go off to foreign parts . . . Ooh’ – she stopped, noticing his expression – ‘you’ve got summat to tell me, haven’t you?’

  Sam smiled wanly. ‘She’s had a little girl, Mom. Born yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘A girl! Oh, now that is a blessing!’ His mother sank down on the old settle, beaming at him. Her cheeks were moist and pink from standing over the range. ‘After all you boys I always longed for a girl to dress. Not that I’m not proud as punch of my boys . . . What weight is she, Sam, and what’re you going to call her?’

  Sam realized he had no idea how heavy the baby was. When Helen asked him about names he’d not even thought, and said, ‘Lily.’ It surprised him how it just slipped out like that.

  ‘Not sure I like Lily all that much,’ Helen said. ‘Couldn’t we call her Sarah or Ann – something sensible? Not like that actress.’

  Sam agreed, though the king’s mistress, Lily Langtry, had not been the Lily he had in mind.

  ‘She’ll be called Ann,’ he said. And then, because he’d been in a fever over it at the works all day and couldn’t keep it in any more, he burst out with, ‘It wasn’t her first – she’s had a baby before and she never said!’

  His mother’s head whipped round. ‘What on earth d’you mean, Sam?’

  Suddenly he was close to tears, and he felt a proper fool and swallowed them down. He’d sat on the side of the bed last night when at last Mrs Rodgers and Mrs Blewitt had taken themselves off, and looked sternly into Helen’s eyes.

  ‘You’d better tell me what she meant.’ He had been holding on to his anger, prepared for lies and deceit, prepared to find that his wife was someone quite other than he imagined. The first thing that came to mind was Laurie, that friend of hers who was always hanging about, and he was all set for righteous fury. But what she told him, crying heartbrokenly as she choked out the words, did something unexpected to him. He couldn’t sort himself out over it. It had gone round and round in his head all day.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam. I’m so, so sorry for not telling you.’ She struggled to sit up, wincing with pain. ‘I was only young. I didn’t know what was happening, and he . . . Well, I was fourteen, and it was when Auntie Lou asked me to stay out on the farm at Stivichall. It was one of the men on the farm . . . He just kept talking to me, all friendly like, and showed me the horses and then one day he just, well, he jumped on me . . . It was in the barn . . .’ She stopped for a moment, weeping shamefully. Sam couldn’t move to comfort her. He just sat, watching.

  ‘He was so big and heavy and he hurt me, forced himself on me. Made me bleed . . .’ She was sobbing. ‘And I didn’t have any thought of what might happen – not ’til months later and my belly was all swollen up. And Mom . . . Well, you know what she’s like. Considering, she was very good to me and said she knew I was too young to know what was what and I could stay home, so . . .’

  Sam’s eyes widened as his mind raced. ‘Emma! She’s yours, isn’t she?’

  Face running with tears, Helen nodded. ‘She doesn’t know. She thinks she’s my cousin – like they told you. From my auntie in Liverpool. She died just before Emma was born so Mom decided that was what she’d tell everyone. She’s been very good to me, in her way. Some mothers would’ve washed their hands of me and put me out on the streets. And I thought if you knew, you’d think . . .’ She began sobbing again. ‘That I was dirty, second-hand goods and you wouldn’t want me.’

  Sam remembered their wedding night. He had thought all that hesitation was only shyness; her not having any idea what the marital act consisted of because she was so innocent. He knew now, and from how she had been since, that it was something very different. That to her it was associated with force and fear and she didn’t like it, had never really liked it with him either, even though he had tried to tell himself it was getting better.

  ‘Mrs Rodgers saw those marks on me, you know, the little snail trails, as you call them . . . I never dreamed she’d say anything, not blurt it out like that. I didn’t want you to have to know.’

  He had sat, numbly, as she told him. He knew he felt things but wasn’t sure what they were. But now, here with his mother, he knew he felt let down, cheated, not just by her but by his marriage. It had all been a fake, with secrets and lies in the background. And that he hadn’t known what love was until he met Lily Waters and now that was lost to him forever as well.

  ‘You should’ve told me,’ was all he said.

  ‘Would you have married me?’ She was so plaintive, her hair all rumpled now, like a little girl’s. ‘I wanted to marry you so much, Sam.’

  ‘Yes, of course I would.’ He forced himself to sound kind, and he wanted it to be true, but secretly he wasn’t sure if it was.

  When he had spilled out the story to his mother, she sat looking solemnly at him.

  ‘Now, Sam,’ she said emphatically. ‘What you’ve got to do, boy, is stick by her and not let this make any difference. She was young – she wasn’t the first this has happened to and she won’t be the last. Heaven knows, it wasn’t her fault, the poor little thing. She didn’t do it to hurt your pride, my boy, and you’re none the worse off, are you? You’ve made your vows and even if this has upset you, you’ve got a lovely new daughter – a family to look after. Now you take yourself home, Sam, and do your best. Life has its ups and downs like this, boy. And it’ll all be the same in a hundred years.’

  Cycling home along the Kenilworth Road that night in the mellow evening light, Sam’s thoughts were in turmoil. It was June, and warm. He had a good cycle, a Starley, Coventry-made, of course, and pushing down hard on the pedals was an outlet for the strong feelings surging through him. He rode like a fury, batting away the tickling midges that flew into his face. Soon, though, he realized that at this speed he would get home before he really wanted to and he stopped at the Grove, a fork in the road, where he dismounted and sat down in the shade of the trees.

  ‘Damn it!’ he erupted, banging his fist on the ground in fury. He was too het up to care that he startled a matronly looking woman who was walking past pushing a perambulator. ‘Damn and blast it!’

  It wasn’t helped by the fact that sitting there in the Grove reminded him of
that picnic with the Fairfords, in the stronger Indian light but also on a still evening like this one, when he had felt so full of hope and such a sense of expansion. And he had sat talking to Lily. God, how could he have sat there so casually when she was close to him? An ache spread right through him. What he wouldn’t give for her to be here now.

  Pushing his sleeves up, he lay back and looked up into the leafy branches above him. His thoughts rolled over those months in India. It had been like a book in two volumes. First there was Ambala and Lily, the extraordinary miracle of falling in love, he realized, for the first time in his life. But then their leaving for Simla, and the way it happened between them was still an agony to him. Her face, when she discovered that he was married, had snapped shut, enclosing all the pain he had given her, and he had felt completely helpless, and then she was gone, holding tightly to Cosmo, and he could not reach her.

  After that he had spent more than two weeks on the road with Captain Fairford and Arsalan, and it was something he would never forget. The car had fared excellently, and they had rolled on through villages and towns, camped, and stayed in cheap lodgings, gone out shooting game, and gradually wound their way to the foothills of the Himalaya with their precarious terraced cultivation, and then higher up, among the bare peaks with their gigantic screes and icy green streams. Sam saw country of a grand scale and awesome wildness that he could never before have imagined. And he felt it change him, as if the shutters of his mind had been flung wide open to let in all the sights. He understood, humbly, that there were places and people very different from what he was used to. And the captain was like a different man. Away from the routines and domestic obligations of Ambala Cantonment, he seemed to come fully alive. He spoke in a more animated way, laughed more, and Sam could see that he was in his element. He wondered if the captain even liked being married and he wondered the same thing about himself.