Where Earth Meets Sky

by Annie Murray

  He drew her to him and kissed her, laying his hand over her left breast with a sigh of pleasure. For a second Lily wanted to resist, to ask him to leave her alone when she felt so raw and sad. But then, as he kissed her, she felt a surge of defiance, an angry passion. Damn Sam Ironside, damn him! Why was she still letting herself tangle her emotions with him when he could come to her and rant at her the way he had without ever truly asking her for the truth or for her side of it? And when, whatever he had felt, she had had to bear and lose his child and had suffered so much more! When all the time, here was this man who did love her and was so very kind to her. As Piers Larstonbury began making love to her, she responded with an angry vigour which he interpreted as passion.

  ‘Oh, my darling!’ He drew back and looked into her eyes, moved. ‘My fiery girl – you are truly extraordinary.’

  He stood up and gently helped her to her feet, removing her diaphanous blouse until she stood in her skirt and camisole. Reverently, Piers lifted the little white garment over her head.

  ‘My God, you’re so splendid . . .’

  She watched his face, his seeming to fall into a trance as he caressed her breasts and saw him with a certain tenderness. He was kind, good to her. Was that not enough?

  He managed to contain himself enough to maintain his natural politeness.

  ‘May I, my dearest? May I stay with you tonight?’

  In answer, Lily unfastened her skirt and let it drop to the floor, then pulled back the covers and got into the bed, sitting looking up at him.

  ‘Oh God,’ he sighed. ‘Those eyes. You beautiful, beautiful girl.’

  Lily watched him hurriedly undress until he stood naked, his thin, pale body, for which she always had to overcome a certain revulsion before she could let him touch her. As he came to lie down beside her, she closed her eyes for a second, preparing herself.

  ‘Come to me, my love,’ he said with reverence, holding out his arms.

  His lovemaking was always gentle, never rough or anything but kindly, yet it left her somehow untouched. As his hands moved over her body, stroking her smooth skin, she kissed the soft flesh of his neck, longing to respond without having to pretend, to be moved by more than his kindness to her.

  Tonight she felt choked, as if she was so full to the brim with emotion she could not contain it, after Sam’s angry words and all the turbulent feelings she had been pushing down in herself all day. As Piers lay on top of her, moving inside her, speaking gentle endearments to her, without knowing it was going to happen, she began to cry. Soon she could not control it and she was shaking with emotion.

  Feeling her moving under him excited Piers further and he thrust into her harder and faster, so aroused that he did not notice at first that she was weeping. It was only after he had cried out as he reached his climax and lay panting on top of her that she began to cry aloud, the sobs tearing out of her, beyond anything she could quieten or even understand. She wept as if for a heart broken long ago, sobbing and mewling like a small child and she could not help herself.

  ‘Lily – oh, Lily, my love, what is it?’ Piers leaped up, disturbed by the violence of her crying, his face full of concern. But she could not answer, could only cling to him and weep all the more, feeling she had gone right down into a dark place which she would take time to come back from. Her eyes squeezed tightly closed as she clung to him, wanting to be held tightly herself.

  And he did hold her, not knowing what else to do. ‘There, there,’ he whispered, as if to a small child. ‘It’s all right, my darling, it’s all right.’

  When she was calmer he said anxiously, ‘Did I hurt you? I should hate to hurt you.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, it’s not that.’ Lily felt suddenly overwhelmed with tiredness.

  ‘Then, for goodness sake, what is it? You sounded in such distress!’

  Lily couldn’t begin to explain, even to herself, about feelings that seemed to come from somewhere so long ago, from a time when she was tiny and couldn’t remember. And she certainly couldn’t explain about Sam.

  ‘Just let me sleep,’ she murmured.

  Piers held her close to him and stroked her hair. ‘Yes, my darling, you sleep.’

  The last thing she felt was his kiss on her cheek.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Sam stormed back into the Pack Horse after his tirade at Lily, quivering with fury. The passage, where he stood for a time to calm himself, smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke. A burst of laughter came through a door which opened and closed nearby. His rage soon drained away into misery.

  What have I done? Oh God, why on earth did I speak to her like that? All these weeks he’d waited to be able to talk to her and when he did, all he had managed was to insult her. Why would she want to have anything to do with him now, after that? The thought was unbearable. He considered going back out to try again, to pour out the words of hurt and longing and adoration he felt for her, but then her rejection of him ignited his fury again. She had betrayed him in India, and she would only betray him again!

  Defiant once more, he went back to the room where they had dined to find that the meal had broken up. Loz and Mary were just shepherding their sons up to bed.

  ‘Night, Sam,’ Loz said, pink-cheeked. ‘S’been a great day.’

  Sam said his goodnights to Loz and Mary. He saw that Cosmo was being helped to his feet by Piers Larstonbury, and was evidently the worse for drink.

  Silly sod, Sam thought savagely. Given every bloody chance in the world and look at the state of him. Cosmo seemed to him like a child, spoilt and petulant. But he could handle a motor all right, there was no denying that. It was as if it was in the blood.

  Piers and Cosmo disappeared after their goodnights and the one person left in the room, looking unsure what to do, was Susan Fairford.

  Sam was reluctant to go up to bed. He couldn’t stand the thought of lying there, full of grief and jealousy as he thought of Lily with Piers Larstonbury. He wanted some company and sensed that Susan did as well.

  ‘Would you like a nightcap?’

  Susan gave a faint smile, looking relieved. ‘That would be very pleasant. I don’t feel quite ready to turn in.’

  He fetched them each a small brandy, enjoying the sight of the warm-coloured liquid in the globular glasses. The two of them sat at one end of the long table. Somehow, since the war there was an ease between them.

  ‘He did well today,’ Sam said.

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled, knowing he meant Cosmo, and he could see the pride and relief, though there was always sadness just behind her social face. Sam felt a twinge of tenderness for her.

  ‘He wants you all to go and stay at Cranbourne, you know, and put the motor through its paces there. I suppose he’s always wanted someone to play with up there!’ She smiled sadly. ‘He has all his toys, but no playmates.’

  There was a pause, while Susan sat leaning forwards, turning her glass round and round on the table.

  ‘I do so worry about him.’ She frowned. ‘He’s had so little family – and no father now. Charles would have taken him in hand, been able to show him what to do, had he lived. But Cosmo was so anti everything – the army, India . . . I mean, he says he was incredibly homesick for India when we first sent him to school, and then it wore off. Of course, he hadn’t lived in India since he was five: he certainly didn’t want to go back and join the army there like Charles.’ She looked up at Sam with tears in her eyes. ‘You know, I don’t think Cosmo has ever known what it means to be happy.’

  Sam looked into her pretty, tired face. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes . . . Well . . .’ She hesitated, considering. I’ve never really thought . . . But yes, I have known happiness. When Charles and I were first married. I loved him, you see – far more than he loved me, I realize . . .’

  Sam thought of the Charles Fairford he had seen on the open roads of India, the adventurer, always seeking the distant horizon, and so very happy in the company of men, and he saw that to correct her woul
d be an untruth, and she would know it to be.

  ‘I did like India at first. It was an adventure and, of course, Charles was so wealthy and so well thought of. And he was always kind to me. It was one of his great qualities. That’s something I realize, from the war, I suppose: even with all the awfulness of things, there is a lot of kindness in the world.’

  Her face crumpled for a moment, but she held back her tears. Sam resisted an impulse to lay his hand on her shoulder, to give comfort.

  ‘I was married at eighteen and I was truly happy for, let’s say, two years. I had gone up in the world: my family are in trade, you see, not like the marvellous Fairfords. But my people sent my brother to Eton and that’s how I met Charles, at prize-givings and concerts and so on. Lewis, my brother, and Charles were good friends. They were in the cricket team. Anyway, that’s how it happened. I suppose I was just a reasonably suitable, jolly sort of girl . . .’

  ‘And very pretty,’ Sam interrupted.

  Susan blushed girlishly for a moment. ‘Yes, well that always helps. Anyway, Charles’s family wanted him to marry so I was sent out after he’d gone to Meerut. I wasn’t part of the fishing fleet – we were already engaged, from a distance.’

  She took a sip of brandy. ‘We were married in Meerut, and at first I found it all exciting. You know what India’s like. In some ways we had it so easy out there, our life of luxury. It was rotten for the young BORs1 who weren’t married – dreadfully lonely. We used to have some of them round for tea and so on. But of course there’s all the social life, and the colour and it’s all so exotic and different. And I was madly in love with Charles. I thought he was the most amazing man I’d ever met. And he was, I suppose. But then we had Isadora. I felt dreadfully ill through most of the pregnancy and then she was . . . Well, you remember how she was . . . And it was as if everything went bad on me. I started to loathe the place. I was afraid, I suppose, as if India had cursed me in some way. Even when Cozzy arrived and he was so lovely I couldn’t rid myself of a feeling of doom and dread, all the time, that something simply awful would happen to him. Very foolish really. But . . .’ Another sip of her drink. ‘In the end perhaps not entirely misplaced.’

  ‘You’ve had a very sad time,’ Sam observed. She seemed so different now, from the frosty young woman he had known in Ambala.

  ‘And you?’ She turned to look at him and gave a faint smile. ‘How odd, that we should be here like this.’

  ‘My life’s been all right,’ Sam said. He thought guiltily of Helen, of little Joe. His heart ached. There must be more to love, to life. And he knew there was, but it was cut off from him. He thought of Lily, of what he had said to her and for a second he almost felt like weeping. God, he thought, it’s been a long day. I’m more tired than I realized.

  He felt he should say something. There was an atmosphere of intimacy between them and he did not want to lose it.

  ‘I suppose the war changed everything,’ he said.

  Susan nodded gravely. He knew what losses she had endured. ‘Yes, everything’s shifted somehow. We are not who we were before.’

  They were sitting close together and she smiled wistfully into his face.

  Without knowing he was going to do it, Sam leaned forward and kissed her. At first he kissed her cheek, but she held his gaze, her face turned up to him, and in the privacy of the quiet back room he kissed her on the lips, holding her slender frame briefly in his arms. He felt her gently kiss him back.

  When he drew back, there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘I long to love again,’ she said. ‘To feel something beautiful and true.’

  To his surprise, Sam felt a lump rise in his throat, and he nodded.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  ‘Of course you must come – I wouldn’t dream of going without you, darling!’

  For several days now, Lily and Piers Larstonbury had been discussing the invitation from Cosmo to go and stay at the Cranbourne estate. This time it was very late, a hot August night, with a night breeze stirring the lacy curtains, and they were once more lying together in Lily’s bed.

  ‘But what about Virginia . . .’ Lily protested, as she so often did.

  ‘Virginia is scarcely ever here,’ Piers said, adding bitterly, ‘do you seriously think Virginia ever concerns herself with what I do?’

  Lily had realized some time ago that Virginia Larstonbury had taken a lover herself and was completely preoccupied, what with that and with her strange spiritual friends. Lily had seen a burly fellow with a beard and colourful, dashing clothes arrive at the house on several occasions and realized that all the hours they spent shut away together upstairs did not consist of praying or whatever it was theosophists did. But she did not know whether Piers knew about his wife’s infidelity. Virginia would appear in the evenings looking pink and sated and unusually good-tempered.

  ‘Oh, my little darlings, come and play with your mama!’ she would greet Hubert and Christabel, flinging her arms round them extravagantly and playing with them for much longer than the normal time allotted. With her long red hair hanging loose, kneeling on the floor with the children pretending to be a witch or a bear, since she was good at pretend games, she looked like a large child herself and Lily could feel almost affectionate towards her. She often wondered whether Virginia had any idea of Piers’s affair with her. Certainly she never showed the least sign of it and he was ever discreet. Lily had come to realize just how deep was Virginia’s indifference to her husband, so perhaps even if she had known she would not much have cared.

  ‘What about the children?’ Lily said.

  ‘Bring them as well,’ Piers said. He laid his hand on her stomach, stroking her. ‘Oh, my beauty, how lovely you are.’

  ‘Could we bring them? It would do them good to be out in the country.’

  Piers raised himself on one elbow and looked down at her seriously.

  ‘You are more of a mother to them than Virginia ever has been.’

  ‘I’m very fond of them.’ It was true, she was fond of timid, sweet-natured little Hubert and fiery Christabel and had become attached to them.

  ‘We can motor up on Saturday morning, have an early start. And Ironside and Marks are coming with our Flyer with her brand-new engine!’ Piers immediately sounded keen and boyish as he always did when he talked about the car.

  Lily’s heart thumped painfully hard for a moment. Sam would be there! She longed to go and see her beloved Cosmo, to look at the estate where he had spent so much of his boyhood and to be out in the country with the children, but if Sam was to be there too . . . However much she made herself angry with him, it didn’t make it any better. Seeing him filled her with so many emotions, most of them painful.

  ‘I should stay behind,’ she tried to suggest. ‘I’ll be in the way – me and the children.’

  ‘Not at all! I want you by my side. I know none of them say anything because they’re too polite and so on – and they can’t do without me, of course – but they must all realize what you mean to me by now. It’s one place we can go and feel comfortable, not worry about what people think. What is it, darling? You look anxious.’

  She stared past him, up at the ceiling. It was her own fault that she and Sam kept being thrown together like this. She had made it happen, hadn’t she? And she also knew that, as so often in her life, when she had occupied this strange social territory, somewhere between servant and confidante as she now did again with Piers Larstonbury, that in the end she never had any choice but to do as she was asked.

  Forcing her lips into a smile, she said, ‘Nothing, dear. I’m quite all right. Of course we’ll go.’ It was for Cosmo, all of it, wasn’t it? If there was one thing she could do it was to see him set on a path to success. Of course – it was all for Cosmo.

  They were up at dawn, carrying the children out to the car into a hazy morning which promised to turn into the hottest of August days. The journey reminded Lily of taking Eustace Bartlett to his people in Leamington Spa and she wondered how
he was getting on. What a handful he had been! She looked fondly down at Hubert beside her. No child had ever replaced Cosmo in her affections, but she did have a very soft spot for little Hubert.

  When, amid the rolling Warwickshire countryside, they turned off the road into the gates of Cranbourne House, Piers and Lily exclaimed with astonishment.

  ‘My goodness me!’ Piers Larstonbury cried. ‘I wasn’t expecting it to be as imposing as this! Young Fairford has always given the impression of it all being a rather crumbling, unmanageable sort of place that’s descending into chaos.’

  ‘It’s absolutely beautiful,’ Lily said, feeling a great swell of pride. All this would be Cosmo’s one day since his Uncle William was unmarried. To think her boy would be the master of a place like this!

  The house, at the end of a curving drive, was a foursquare and symmetrically proportioned brick Regency manor, its grand front door flanked by white columns. In front of the house Lily saw a garden laid out with rose bushes and small shrubs and flowers.

  ‘What a lovely parterre!’ Piers exclaimed.

  Lily smiled. ‘Yes, isn’t it.’ She had never heard the word parterre before. The shaped grass cut round the flowers reminded her of a doily.

  ‘And what a house – no wonder young Fairford was keen for me to see it!’

  But Hubert was jumping with excitement for another reason. ‘Look!’ he cried, leaning across Lily’s lap to see better. ‘Aeroplane – an aeroplane!’

  In the distance, on a bright sward of grass, was an aeroplane, tilted to one side and white and delicate as a resting insect.

  ‘Is it going to fly?’ Hubert was asking, when from round the side of the house they saw Cosmo appear with a slow, languorous walk, dressed in white flannel trousers and a red and white checked shirt. His golden hair fell, curling over one eye, and he tossed his head back and raised an arm in greeting, squinting in the bright sunlight.