The Silent Stars Go By

by Sally Nicholls

  Somewhere, there was another Margot, who had waited until marriage like a good girl should, and had delivered her first-born in her marital bed and loved him best of all for the rest of his life.

  She hadn’t known it would be like this.

  She hadn’t known you could love something like that. It hadn’t been rational. It had come from nowhere, this animal urge to protect him, to be near him. It wasn’t love exactly – it didn’t feel like love. It felt like something beyond her, outside of her, something she wasn’t able to control.

  It had frightened her, a little.

  He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

  She didn’t think she would be able to give him away. When it came down to it, she had been sure she would change her mind and refuse to sign the papers. Letting him go would be an abomination against nature and against the Will of God. She wouldn’t allow it to happen.

  But she had.

  The Married Lady at Home

  Mary and George lived at the very end of a row of terraced stone houses. It was a respectable street on the edge of the village, the stone flags and the windows well-scrubbed, but Mary’s curtains were threadbare, and though her window was cheerful with a Christmas tree and paper-chains, the decorations were clearly Woolworth’s finest. Though not quite four o’clock, the sun was already setting in the sky, a dull reddish glow through the low clouds. The lamplighter was making his way down the street. Smoke was rising from the chimney-pots and on the street corner, a gaggle of small boys were playing cricket against the gable-end.

  Mary answered the doorbell, baby on her hip and Victoria clutching her skirts. Her hair was falling down, and there was a streak of soot across her cheek. She said, ‘Darling! How splendid to see you! Come in! You’ll just have to shut your eyes and pretend everything’s in order – it’s Eliza’s half-day, and I gave Peggy a week off for Christmas – George says I was a fool, and I expect he’s right, but she did so want to go home, and her mother lost both sons in the War so naturally one wants to be kind.’ She paused for breath. ‘She lives in Barnsley, you see. Peggy’s mother, I mean, so it isn’t as though Peggy could go there and back in a day. And I thought, well, what sort of mother would I be if I couldn’t manage the children for a week – Oh, darling! I didn’t mean!’

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ said Margot. She kissed Mary. ‘I’m not a bit offended, and I don’t know how you begin to manage the girls without a nursemaid, even for a week.’

  ‘Well, darling, between you and me, neither do I. The woman who does my washing has nine – can you imagine? Nine children, and no sort of help, of course. And she’s a washerwoman. I barely have time to wash my own hands, and – yes, darling, what is it?’ This to Victoria, whose tugging on her skirts was growing too insistent to be ignored. ‘Well, I don’t know! You’ll have to ask her yourself, won’t you?’ Victoria retreated further behind her mother. ‘Though actually, dear, it’s rather rude to ask people if they have Christmas presents for you. What if she didn’t, imagine how awkward it would be!’

  ‘But fortunately I do, so all our feelings are spared,’ said Margot. ‘Shall we go inside and see what it is?’

  The little front room was, as Mary had said, in a state of some chaos. Victoria’s wooden horse was lying on its side on the hearthrug, its wheeled legs up in the air. Mary’s workbox was open on the side table, its scissors halfway through turning a copy of the London Illustrated News into strings of paper dolls. Victoria’s coloured pencils were spread out over the tea table, along with an open jar of jam, a ball of wool, a stuffed bear, a teething ring and a box of cigarettes.

  ‘Darling, I know!’ said Mary, as Margot took all this in and more; the bookcase made out of orange crates, the mismatched armchairs, the magazines and letters and children’s pictures piled on the floor, the picture leaning against the wall still waiting to be hung. ‘But you don’t know what it’s like with children. I start every day with the best of intentions and somehow nothing ever seems to get done.’

  ‘I think it’s perfectly charming,’ said Margot. She was noticing other details now: the cheap baubles on the Christmas tree all shining in the gaslight, the tiny candles waiting to be lit, the strings of paper-chains hanging from the sconces.

  Mary was one of the very few people she’d told about James – just Mary, her husband George, and Jos and Stephen. After she’d realised she was in trouble, she’d felt so... distant from her school friends. What did the Sixth Form know about babies? But Mary had been different. Mary was nineteen and married with a new baby of her own. She hadn’t had a house then – she’d been living with her mother while George was in France – but Margot had known she could talk to her. That Mary would understand, wouldn’t goggle at her, or tell the other girls. Would know what it meant to have a child, and what it might mean to lose one.

  Later, she had hung off Mary a little. She couldn’t help herself. It was a form of self-torture – look what you could have had, if you’d been more careful, if you’d been braver – but also, oddly, a comfort. She had drifted apart from her school friends, although most of them had jobs now, and one or two had fiancés. Friendship with any of the girls in the boarding house was impossible. Mary’s was one of the few places in her life where she could be honest.

  ‘Now, Victoria, what do I have in here... ?’

  The children’s presents were duly distributed; the baby dressed in her new jacket and admired, Victoria’s tea set (‘Margot, you shouldn’t have!’) unpacked, and Bear and Mary and Margot all served imaginary tea with milk and paper biscuits. Then Victoria discovered that she was hungry too, and Baby was handed to her Aunty Margot (‘She’s a perfect duck, thank heavens’) while Mary disappeared into the kitchen. She soon reappeared with a huge brown teapot full of tea, and a plate of muffins, which they all toasted on the fire. Then Baby, who’d been growing increasingly fretful, began to wail, and Mary settled down in the chair by the fire to nurse. Margot lit all the little candles on the Christmas tree, carefully supervised by Victoria to make sure she didn’t miss a single one.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked Victoria.

  ‘Stu-pen-dous!’ said the little girl, and the adults laughed.

  ‘But, darling, how are things really ?’ said Margot, as Victoria settled down to make tea for Bear and two ragdolls.

  ‘Oh, well. I know I shouldn’t complain, and we’re very lucky really. But goodness, it is hard work! We only have Eliza mornings, you see, and of course the rough work takes most of her time – I really couldn’t do that – so that does leave rather a lot. And I always was a perfect dunce at domestic science. Peggy does her best, but she’s only fifteen, so she does need everything explained rather, and she tends to think Baby needs feeding when really it’s only wind. And of course one never knows if George is going to be in or out.’

  ‘Yes, how is George?’ George had been in the Royal Army Medical Corps, but had been sent home in 1917 with nervous exhaustion.

  ‘Oh – ever so much better. He’s such a good doctor, everyone says so. But he does worry.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Oh well – like Mrs Higgins’s little boy. They really thought he would die, and though I don’t like to say so, Dr Singer said he thought he would have died, if it hadn’t been for George. But George says he won’t ever walk, and he may not talk. George can’t help but think – if he’d had more experience of childbirth, you know –’

  ‘But surely nobody thinks...’

  ‘Oh! Of course nobody does. But he will keep going to see them, and he won’t think of charging, and of course the poor woman is so grateful, which just makes everything worse. I’m afraid,’ she confessed, with a pathetic air of apology, ‘George is rather in the habit of picking up charity patients. The local people know he won’t charge if they can’t pay and word has gotten around, rather.’

  ‘Father’s just the same,’ said Margot, thinking of the ‘poor cupboard’ by the stairs and the lone
ly people at Christmas.

  ‘And of course it’s all very noble of him, I don’t say it isn’t,’ Mary went on hurriedly. ‘Only – well, the butcher does need paying, doesn’t he? And the girls will have to be educated somehow, and goodness, Margot, I never knew how expensive children were until I had my own! Victoria goes through shoes as quick as blinking! I’m sure we never used to grow so fast.’

  ‘It does sound rather worrying.’

  ‘Well, it is. But there! It isn’t anything like what some families have to go through. When I think of the men who came home blinded or with such terrible wounds – look at Lionel Parker, say, or Reggie Fletcher. Or all those who didn’t come home at all. And of course I wouldn’t trade George and the children for the world,’ she finished, with rather the air of a women’s magazine.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Margot. ‘The world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

  ‘Oh, dear! Here I am going on and on about us, and I haven’t begun to ask about you.’

  ‘Oh, well. There isn’t really very much to say. I just go on the same as ever I always did.’

  There was a short silence, broken only by Victoria. ‘Would you yike a cake, Bear? Yes pease! All right, here you go. Sank you! Would you yike another cake? No, sank you.’

  Mary said, very carefully, ‘If you’d just talk to Harry...’

  ‘And say what?’

  ‘I know he still loves you...’

  Margot gave a short bark of a laugh.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘How can he possibly love me? Could you love George if he’d done what I did to – to Victoria? If you’d gone all these years living this other life, and all the time Victoria was there and nobody had told you she even existed ?’

  Mary drew in her breath.

  ‘You see? It’s not so simple.’

  ‘But, darling, you couldn’t tell him. You didn’t even know he was alive.’

  ‘I’ve known since February,’ said Margot.

  ‘Well, that isn’t so very long. And he was on the Isle of Wight, and—’

  ‘The postal service does reach the Isle of Wight, you know. It isn’t entirely cut off from civilisation.’

  Another pause.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’

  ‘Oh...’ Margot twisted her head from side to side. ‘It was such a shock, him being still alive! The telegram they sent us just said Missing in action, so of course we all thought he was dead... And then in February I got a cable from his mother saying he was alive and coming home. I just didn’t know what to say. Then she sent me this letter about how he had pneumonia and how ill he’d been and would I go and see him? And –’ She stopped. ‘I funked it,’ she said simply. ‘They never let us be together without a chaperone, and I thought, how could I tell him with his mother there? And how could I write it in a letter? It wasn’t him who wrote, you see, it was his mother, so I thought he must be so ill that she was reading his letters to him. And if she found out... well, it would all be over for James and my parents, wouldn’t it? But how could I write to him if I hadn’t told him? What would I say? It would be starting the whole thing off on a lie and... I’ve been lying for so long, and I hate it more than anything. I couldn’t bear the thought of lying to him, even by omission.’

  ‘But what did you say to his mother?’

  Margot looked at her hands.

  ‘I sent her a simply awful card. I said I was so sorry about Harry, and that I was very busy with work at the moment, but maybe when things had settled down, that would be lovely.’

  ‘Darling!’

  ‘I know!’ Margot wailed. ‘Don’t! I know! It sounded all right in my head.’

  ‘It sounds like the worst sort of cold-hearted brush-off you could imagine,’ said Mary sternly. ‘Did they even reply?’

  ‘Yes.’ Margot buried her head in her hands. ‘After an age, he sent me a letter. Quite a decent sort of letter, considering. But by then it was too late. I just didn’t know what to say. And now – well, it is too late, isn’t it? It must be?’

  ‘I think,’ said Mary very carefully, ‘that now is the time – this holiday, I mean. You’re here and he’s here and there’ll be parties and things where you won’t be chaperoned, won’t there? There always are. I think you behaved like a bloody fool, but I think it’s just about forgiveable – now. But if you leave it any longer, it won’t be. You’ll just have to go your way and he go his, and that’s that. When are you going back to that awful school?’

  ‘The fourth of January.’

  ‘Well, there you are. You have to decide what you want, darling. And you’ve got till the end of the hols to do it.’

  Stephen

  It was dark as Margot walked home through the village, the stars appearing one by one over the rooftops. Every little house was lit up, Christmas trees in the windows, smoke rising from the chimneys, and the air that glorious mixture of coal-smoke and dirt and frost.

  As she opened the front door, she closed her eyes and breathed in the familiar smells of home – linoleum and coal and tobacco and wet umbrellas. This was a good home. It had been a good childhood, on the whole. She was glad it would be her son’s.

  By the sound of it, everyone was in the drawing room. Ruth’s high excitable voice, and a familiar male laugh. Stephen. The prodigal son was home.

  She took off her coat, unpinned her hat, and hung them on the coat stand. Then she opened the drawing-room door.

  They were all sitting around the fire, the tea still spread out on the table before them. The children were playing a noisy game of Snap! James was watching with fascination, laughing every time Ruth or Ernest shouted ‘Snap!’ and joining in. Stephen was sitting on the hearthrug arranging chestnuts on the coal-shovel. Jocelyn had her embroidery on her lap, but she was smiling. And Mother – Mother was sitting in the chair by the fireside, her whole face aglow with joy.

  ‘Margot!’ she cried.

  ‘Hullo, Stephen,’ said Margot with a smile. She liked her brother.

  ‘Hullo, old thing,’ said Stephen. They embraced. He looked tired, she thought, watching his face with an odd quickening of anxiety. Stephen had had a hard war too. He’d gone to France in 1917. But while Harry had been captured almost immediately, Stephen had spent eighteen months in the trenches.

  He’d been discharged in March and seemed happy enough, if rather distant. He’d always been a bit awkward, rather musical – he played piano and sang in the church choir – without ever being exceptional. There’d been some idea of him becoming a schoolmaster and he had agreed to teach piano and singing in a boys’ prep school without enthusiasm. The post had lasted less than a month. The headmaster complained that Stephen was often late – sleeping past breakfast and missing choir practice and seeming to forget his turn at taking prep. The situation had come to a head three weeks in, when he’d gone to the local pub with a couple of the other younger teachers, ex-soldiers, all – and, the headmaster had seemed to imply, rather struggling to integrate back into civilian life. They’d come back roaring drunk at midnight, singing soldiers’ songs outside the junior boys’ dormitory and splashing about in the fountain.

  This had been a huge shock to Stephen’s family. Stephen was basically a good child – awkward yes, and idiosyncratic definitely, occasionally vehement (there’d been a teacher at school who’d mistakenly punished one child for another’s mistakes, and Stephen had been so furious he’d refused to speak to him for the rest of the year). But basically clever and good-hearted.

  ‘Darling, why ?’ their mother had wailed, and Stephen shrugged.

  His father found him a junior place in an accountancy firm in Sheffield.

  ‘Is that all right?’ he’d said in his mild way, and Stephen had shrugged again.

  The accountancy firm had lasted a little longer – until the end of August. Their father, on writing to his friend, had discovered more of the same sort of thing. Stephen had spent much of his time sleeping at his desk, doodling on the bac
k of invoices and reading detective novels instead of working. His father had worked on another of his endless contacts, and since October Stephen had been with a tea merchant in Leeds. Margot wondered how long this place was going to last.

  ‘Oh!’ said their mother, watching them now. ‘Isn’t it heavenly to have everyone at home at last! Our first Christmas all together since the War!’

  Stephen winced.

  The evening passed as usual. Ruth and Ernest had supper in the nursery with James. Ruth ate with the adults in term time, but preferred to eat upstairs with Ernest in the holidays. The children were expected to change for the evening though – they dressed after supper and came down to the drawing room to sit with their parents for an hour.

  James, of course, went to bed first. Then Ernest and Ruth, at eight, then their father, who began nodding over his Trollope at about nine o’clock. Their mother sat with the older children for a while longer, but at last she too rose and made her way upstairs, leaving Stephen, Margot and Jocelyn alone.

  They looked at each other a little curiously, a little shyly.

  Stephen sat back in his chair, the fingers of his right hand plucking at the back of his left. Margot thought he looked much older than his twenty-one years. His skin had a greyish tinge to it.

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I could bear any more bonhomie, could you?’ He jumped up, went over to the cabinet in the corner of the room and crouched down beside it. ‘Drink, anyone?’

  ‘All right,’ Margot said. She was nineteen now, she ought to be old enough, oughtn’t she? Especially at Christmas.

  ‘Good girl. Sherry? Whisky? Brandy? Port – good God, the Pater hasn’t left this open since last Christmas, has he? He ought to be shot.’