The Silent Stars Go By

by Sally Nicholls

  I’m afraid we’re not allowed to receive visitors on a Sunday. And I have to help Mother with a party on Monday morning. Would Monday afternoon suit?

  Yours,

  Margot

  5 Watery Lane

  Thwaite

  North Yorkshire

  20th December 1919

  Monday afternoon it is! Tell your mother to expect me at 2 o’clock sharp.

  I really am ever so pleased to see you again, you know.

  Harry

  Church-Going

  Church on Sunday: James looking an absolute doll in grey knickerbockers and a little grey jacket. He was quite the sweetest child in the Sunday School. Ruth in a hideous green dress Margot had worn herself as a child.

  All the Churchy Ladies twittering around her, ‘So lovely to see you back, dear. And so grown-up! Your dear father must be so proud.’

  Tight smiles back. A self-deprecating, ‘Oh, well...’ and a quick change of subject.

  The old church was absolutely freezing. Ice on the windows, and the congregation all in coats and hats and scarves. The roof-beams all decked out with holly and ivy, and the nativity laid out in front of the altar, the manger empty and waiting for the Christ child. As a little girl, Margot had always loved coming into church on Christmas morning, and seeing the baby in the manger. That was the moment when Christmas really began.

  No Harry – he was a confirmed atheist, she knew, though he always used to come to the Christmas services – but his mother was there with the younger children. She was rather cold but very polite when Margot’s mother insisted they went to say hullo. (How had her mother managed to stay on speaking terms with them all this time? The English were incredible.) Yes, Harry was well and home for Christmas. Yes, he was going to study Agriculture. (Agriculture?) He’d worked on a farm out in Germany, and got the taste for it. His uncle had a dairy farm near York, so it was in the family. (Actually, she could picture Harry as a farmer. He was a hard worker, and he loved the outdoors. He’d be miserable cooped up inside.) Yes, it had been a worry, he’d had pneumonia very badly, but he was much better now. He’d had a hard time of it this last year. (This with a meaningful look at Margot.)

  Damn these people! Damn polite society! It wasn’t as though she were even a Christian herself, really. She only came to church for her parents’ sake.

  Dear Mary, there with George and the children. Her oldest friend.

  ‘Darling!’

  ‘Hullo, darling. Goodness, hasn’t the baby grown!’

  ‘They do that,’ said Mary, comfortable, happy Mary. She couldn’t get used to her as a wife and mother. She was only twenty-two. Margot still thought of her as her pigtailed friend from Sunday School days, sharing whispers and toffees behind their prayer-books. ‘She’s quite the pig, aren’t you, angel? How long are you home for? You must come and see us.’

  ‘Oh, the whole holidays. I’d love to.’

  They arranged a date. Darling Mary. Margot had almost forgotten what it was like to have a proper friend like that.

  1916

  That summer – the summer Margot turned sixteen – had been like something out of a storybook.

  Harry would be nineteen in September, and then he was going to join up. He’d had a bad case of bronchitis the year before, and so had been exempt from conscription, but he thought he’d pass the medical in September.

  ‘I’d feel such a wart if I did anything else,’ he said.

  Margot thought he was probably right, but the idea of it terrified her. Not that she’d ever really believed that anything would happen to him. She’d been more concerned with the thought of them being apart for months and months on end.

  ‘How can I bear it?’ she’d said to him.

  ‘I don’t suppose you will,’ he’d said cheerfully, ‘But that’s what women have to do in wartime, isn’t it? Buck up!’

  He’d agreed to wait until his birthday to join up, so they had the summer at least.

  ‘One summer!’ she said, knowing as she did so that she was putting it on for dramatic effect, and he’d laughed and kissed her.

  They’d belonged to each other from the moment they’d met. Perhaps she’d been deluding herself – could it really have been love? Was such a thing possible when you were fifteen and as much of an ass as she had been? Surely he must have been a bit of an ass too, an eighteen-year-old dragged to a village in the middle of nowhere, full of restless energy and frustration. What had he really seen in her? The recklessness? The adoration? The blonde hair?

  They’d both been bored silly, she remembered. Aside from a week in Scarborough, she’d been home all summer with – it seemed – nothing to do besides chores and music practice and dull church groups.

  The previous summers, Margot had been willing enough to play about with Jocelyn and Stephen in the vicarage garden and on the common, going on excursions with Mother, on woodland picnics and walks on the fells and day trips to Robin Hood’s Bay. They’d helped their father with the Sunday School picnic and the church fête, dug half-heartedly in the garden, helped more enthusiastically with the fruit-picking, made summer puddings and apple cakes, and spent long lazy afternoons reading in the vicarage garden.

  In 1916, however, something had changed. Stephen was moody and frustrated, realising, perhaps, that next year he would be eighteen and expected to fight. He seemed suddenly aware of his status as a young man, and he showed little interest in childish games. Margot too, could feel herself becoming too old for childhood. She had spent a lot of the early part of the year locked in her bedroom, staring at her reflection in the looking-glass and worrying about the life that lay before her. Would she ever find a husband? Why had no one fallen in love with her yet? She was fifteen, after all. Surely someone should have by now?

  And then Harry Singer had walked into the church.

  How frustrating their courtship had been! They could never be alone together. When he called at her house, her mother always insisted on waiting in the drawing room with them; when she called at his, one of his little sisters was forced to chaperone them, protesting loudly at the duty.

  ‘Why can’t you get engaged?’ his sister Prissy had complained. ‘Then I won’t have to sit here for hours watching you canoodle.’

  ‘Could we, though?’ Margot whispered, while Prissy retreated behind her novel, sighing ostentatiously.

  ‘Get engaged? Of course. But—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Well – will it really make any difference? Will your parents let us be alone together? Because I’m damn sure mine won’t.’

  ‘Of course they will!’ said Margot.

  But they hadn’t.

  Her parents had treated her engagement with something like amusement.

  ‘Well, well, we’ll see,’ her mother said. And, ‘I hope you aren’t expecting to get married before he joins up, are you?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Margot had retorted. She would be sixteen in July. But of course she had no intention of doing anything of the sort – how could she possibly get married? She was still at school. Nobody could expect her to run her own house – she was, for all reasonable purposes, a child. But to have the whole thing treated as a joke made her almost want to do it – just to show them.

  As to being allowed to spend time on their own...

  ‘I think not, my dear,’ her father said, and Jocelyn or her mother would be dispatched to sit in the drawing room whenever he appeared.

  ‘Polite conversation!’ said Harry. He was an active young man, and sitting in the drawing room or the garden bored him senseless. He leaned in towards her. ‘What do you think would happen if I kissed you on the lips?’ Margot giggled.

  ‘Goodness!’ she whispered back. ‘I can’t imagine. I rather think my mother might turn into a pillar of salt.’

  ‘Shocking behaviour,’ he agreed, and he dropped a folded piece of paper into her hand.

  She waited until he was gone and unfolde
d it.

  2 o’clock. Make some excuse and meet me at the Harcourts’ house?

  And so it began.

  The Harcourts were away for the summer. They had shut up the house and taken the servants with them, but before they left, they’d engaged Harry to water the plants, feed the cats, mow the lawns and generally keep the garden in good order.

  All that long summer, the Harcourts’ house became their escape and their sanctuary. She would set off in the ostensible direction of his house, then – making sure nobody could see her – duck off into the lane down to the Harcourts’ house. Even now, remembering it, Margot felt the old shiver of excitement. The lane to the Harcourts’ house was a pale green tunnel, the boughs of the trees meeting and intertwining over her head, the sunlight green-patterned and dappled through the leaves. To Margot, it felt like slipping through into a wild green kingdom, one where she and Harry were free to live as they chose.

  And then, of course, there was the Harcourts’ house itself. A modern white-brick bungalow with a half-wild garden ingeniously filled with grottos and seats and bits of statuary. And at the end of the garden, the view over the valley, distant, smoky and strangely beautiful. The empty house itself, the furniture covered with dust sheets, other people’s crockery in the cupboards and other people’s books on the shelves. Other people’s love letters, presumably, in the locked writing-desks, and other people’s nightdresses in the cupboard drawers, although Harry – who was strictly honest about such things – would never look.

  It had been such a queer and magical summer. They had spent every minute they could there, together. They had read the Harcourts’ books, and made themselves little meals of corned beef and bread and butter, and brewed themselves tea on the Primus stove. Harry had done his chores around the garden and she had followed after him, picking the fruit from the canes and gorging on it; the sweetness of raspberries and apples, and goosegogs with sugar in the Harcourts’ finest bone china bowls.

  And whole afternoons in the Harcourts’ guest bed.

  The first time was her sixteenth birthday. Her best present had been a new summer frock in pale blue; her mother had sewn it, so she’d known it was coming, but it had been revealed in all its glory on her birthday morning.

  Harry had cut a white rose from the garden and placed it in her hair.

  ‘Sixteen today,’ he’d said.

  ‘Now I’m really not a child any more,’ she’d said, and he’d kissed her. She’d known what was coming as surely as he had; hadn’t it been coming all that long, misty summer? She’d taken his hand and led him up towards the house.

  Afterwards, she often wondered how they could have been so reckless. She’d been young, but not a fool, she had a brother and older cousins, she knew the facts of life. She’d understood the risks they were taking. And Harry – surely Harry must have known how dangerous it was? Why hadn’t it occurred to either of them to be more careful?

  But apparently it never had. To Margot, it had been all tied up with the magic of the Harcourts’ house, its separateness from reality. It had been like a place in a storybook, like Briar Rose’s sleeping palace, like the Beast’s rose garden. And as it happened, their luck had held. The summer had ended, the Harcourts returned full of praise for the state of their garden. Harry had gone off to an army camp, and sent her long, detailed love letters. She had gone back to school, and to the miserable realisation that she was, in fact, still the child she’d always been. In the Sixth Form, her engagement seemed an unreal thing, a summer game, a child’s promise.

  If James had happened that summer, there would have been time to do something about it. They might have been married before he went off to France. But James hadn’t happened then.

  He’d happened the last weekend Harry had leave, before he’d been sent to the Front. He’d sent a cable to the house – waiting until Friday, when her parents went to play bridge. It was spring half term, and she’d made up a story about a last-minute invitation to stay with her friend Peggy, who’d left school the year before. Then she’d caught the early train to his camp in Sheffield and they’d spent his last day of leave together.

  The best bit had been the joy of seeing him on the station platform. He’d been standing there in his uniform, holding a single white rose, and beaming at her. She’d quite forgotten about looking sophisticated and lady-like, and had run into his arms. The feel of his chest against hers, the smile on his face... it had been perfect. A perfect moment.

  But it hadn’t lasted. The rest of the weekend was miserable. There was the grey, grimy city, full of men in uniform. Then he apparently had to spend half their precious day together doing last-minute shopping for the trip to France. There was the worry about how much money the trip was costing, and the lingering sense that shouldn’t it therefore be better? What was she doing wrong?

  And then – oh, horrors! – he’d pulled a cheap brass ring from his pocket.

  ‘I thought you ought to wear it. For the – well, for the hotel, you know.’

  She’d burned with embarrassment. Pretending to be married so they could spend the night together! It was like something out of the worst sort of cheap novel, about as far away as one could get from the vicarage without actually becoming a chorus girl. What had seemed so magical and precious in the Harcourts’ house suddenly felt dirty and shameful. It had spoilt the whole mood of the occasion.

  The evening had gone wrong somehow too – she’d been stiff and cross and he’d been a little drunk and somehow nothing had quite worked the way it had in the Harcourts’ house. They’d fought about nothing at all – though at the time it had seemed incredibly important – and then the next day he’d had to leave early to get back to the barracks, and she’d realised that she only had thruppence left to last her the whole way home. She’d bought three penny buns and eaten them slowly, but she’d forgotten about water and was so thirsty when she finally got back to the village that she nearly drank the water from the taps in the station lavatory. The whole thing was wretched and awful, and she wasn’t sure who she was most angry with – Harry or herself or both. Maybe this was just what happened when things like war got in the way. Maybe this was what being nearly-married to someone was like. Or maybe everything was over and they’d never really been in love after all.

  Two days later he left for the Front.

  And then a month later the telegram. Missing in action.

  It was the end of everything.

  Christmas

  Holy Week and Christmas were the busiest times of year in the vicarage. The whole family had always been expected to pitch in and help. There were Christmas parties for the children at church, for the Girls’ Friendly Society and the Mothers’ Union, for the children whose parents came to the church soup kitchen, and for the old folk at the almshouses where Margot’s father was chaplain. There was a carol service, a children’s Christmas service, Midnight Mass, a special Christmas Day service, attended by most of the village (up to and including the more pious of the guests at the big house), a Nativity Play, and special Christmas services at the village school and the grammar school. On top of everything, there were Christmas cards to write to all the parishioners, and Christmas presents to receive and return.

  Margot’s father got more Christmas presents than anyone she’d ever met. All of the Churchy Ladies gave him something, but so did all sorts of unexpected people – women from the soup kitchen, poor families he’d helped with clothes or money, shut-ins he visited for communion, all the many disconnected people whose lives he touched.

  It was a rule in the Allen family that all presents must be reciprocated. For years, Margot and Jocelyn and her mother had spent their evenings sewing simple presents for parishioners. Lavender bags and embroidered handkerchiefs. ‘Plain’ sewing and knitting for the poor – ‘Can people really be grateful for a sock knitted by me?’ Margot had famously once asked, aged ten.

  Jocelyn, of course, was busy helping her mother with all the Sunday Sc
hool affairs. Even Ruth was expected to help cut sandwiches and supervise games. And Stephen would play the piano – he had always been a musical child, though he didn’t have a piano in his digs in Sheffield, and as far as Margot knew he hadn’t played at all since coming back from France.

  There were two Christmas parties for the Sunday School children this year – one for children under ten, which included Ernest and James, and would be party games and a party tea – and one for children under fourteen, which included Ruth and would involve dancing – ‘Yuck!’ said Ruth – and slightly more sophisticated fare.

  The younger children’s party was held in the church hall. Margot, Jocelyn, Ernest and James went down early to help set out the food and bring across the props for the various games – the blindfold for Blind Man’s Bluff, the gramophone for the musical games and the creased and battered vicarage donkey picture, a veteran of twenty years of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

  When it came to it, however, Margot discovered that there was a limit to how helpful she could be while minding a two-year-old. She had come prepared with a ball and a train and a couple of picture books, but James showed no interest in playing quietly by himself while she buttered bread and laid out plates and glasses. He insisted on her full attention: ‘Play, Margot!’ although this did not involve actual play so much as wandering around the church hall and the freezing garden, exploring every crack and cranny, stopping to investigate every stick and wall and plant and hole.

  ‘What dat, Margot?’

  ‘It’s – um – it’s a grating. It’s – well, I’m not sure what it’s for, exactly.’

  ‘Bird!’

  ‘Yes, that’s a bird. It’s – a crow, I think. Or a rook, or maybe a raven. Something black. No, James – no, don’t pick that up. Those stones are part of the path, they belong to the church hall. Let’s go over there and see if we can have some of those stones, you can pick one of those up.’

  How had she ever thought the walk to the village shop would be a short affair? It took him half an hour just to cross the garden!