The Silent Stars Go By

by Sally Nicholls

  ‘Yes, all right, thank you, Edith,’ said Margot’s mother hastily. ‘This is a real treat, no matter how you got it – do tell – er – your sister’s sister-in-law that we’re very grateful.’

  ‘I don’t think I realised until I came home how scarce grub was back here,’ Stephen said conversationally, stabbing a slice of fried ham with his fork and transferring it to his plate. ‘We always had heaps to eat on the Front – that was the one good thing about it.’

  ‘Why, you beast!’ said Ruth. ‘And to think of all those food parcels we sent you!’

  There was a small pile of Christmas cards by Margot’s plate. She opened them idly while the household relaxed into its usual breakfast chaos. Nothing from Harry. Most were from old school friends, a couple from colleagues at St Anne’s. They were full of the usual dull stuff.

  The card on the bottom of the stack was postmarked Newcastle, which was a surprise. She didn’t think she knew anybody in Newcastle.

  Dear Margot,

  Writing cards this year has been somewhat difficult, as you can imagine, but at least to YOU I shall need to make no explanations. YOU will understand how very, very happy I am to be able to wish you a merry Christmas and to sign this,

  John, Phyllis and Robert Backhouse (née Harrison. Phyllis, I mean. John was née Backhouse of course. Apologies – I am not making any sense, but I am so very, very happy. Everything is marvellous. You must come and see us! Robbie is the most delightful child in the world and I am the happiest woman in creation.)

  Margot put down the card. Her hand was shaking slightly.

  ‘Everything all right, dear?’ her mother said – damn mothers, shouldn’t they have better things to do on Christmas morning than notice their daughters?

  ‘Oh! Yes! Perfectly all right, thanks,’ she said, and took a gulp of tea to hide her confusion.

  Phyllis. Funny, flustery, weepy little Phyllis, with her feathery hair and her way of winning the kindness of the Churchy Ladies who came to sit with them at the mother and baby home. They were supposed to lecture them, Margot supposed, but like her father’s own Churchy Ladies, they were rather a soft touch, and spent more time cuddling the babies than worrying the mothers.

  Phyllis had been a favourite of them all, with her tears, and her obvious adoration of her little boy, and her fiancé killed on the Front Line. She and Margot had become friends, mostly because they came from similar backgrounds. The majority of the other patients were shop girls and tweenies. Phyllis was a clergyman’s daughter, and had been living at home and working at a village school when she found herself in trouble.

  Phyllis’s parents had been adamant that the baby be adopted. Phyllis had acquiesced – or at least, Margot suspected, had not protested too hard. But when the baby himself had arrived, Phyllis had fallen for him at once. She had wept to everyone who would listen – how could she give him away, how could she possibly?

  ‘Keep him then, ducks,’ Norma, in the next bed, had said. ‘Who cares what they want? If they don’t want my Elsie, I don’t want them, that’s what I says.’ Norma was practical, cheerful, and completely unrepentant. She didn’t even know the name of her daughter’s father, and had made no attempt to find out. She and Baby Elsie were going to ‘do’ for a broadminded lady who needed a cook-general, and who, Margot rather suspected, would be getting a very good deal for her money. Norma looked like a hard worker, baby notwithstanding.

  But Phyllis had other considerations. There were her parents, for one thing, to whom she was stubbornly loyal, and whose comfortable lives would be devastated by an illegitimate grandson. And her own job as a schoolteacher.

  ‘Not that I care about that, but I’d have to support him somehow, wouldn’t I?’

  She would. And Phyllis – as both she and Margot could see quite clearly – was not the sort who could live the life Norma was proposing with any equanimity.

  ‘It would be too Anna Karenina,’ she’d told Margot. ‘And I would end up resenting him – and I simply couldn’t bear that. I think Mummy resented me sometimes,’ she added, with a clarity which astonished Margot. ‘She was an artist, you know, before she married Daddy. Of course all that had to stop when Daddy and I came along. And – well, it did make for rather a beastly childhood sometimes, feeling like one had taken all that away from her. I’d simply hate for Robert to feel like that. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Margot, who had never thought of her parents as people like that, with their own lives and griefs. In the end, Phyllis had refused to sign the adoption papers, and the baby had been sent to a foster family in the next village along.

  ‘Like Cosette,’ said Margot doubtfully, thinking of Les Miserables. She didn’t think it sounded like much of a life.

  But, ‘Oh no!’ said Phyllis. ‘Not like Cosette at all. I’ll be able to see him, you see. And he’ll be able to tell me how things are, when he’s older. And perhaps...’

  And perhaps one day, he’ll be able to come and live with me again. The words had hung there, shining and unsaid, at the end of her sentence. It had seemed unkind to comment on the unlikeliness of this, so Margot hadn’t.

  And now it had all come true. A new husband, progressive enough to legitimise Robert. (How was Phyllis’s mother explaining that to the neighbours? Margot wondered. Some tale of adoption, probably. It was easier for Phyllis of course, as Robbie could presumably be passed off as a poor child of the parish in need of a home. Nobody would believe that of James. Both of her parents so clearly adored James, it would be obvious that something else was up. Perhaps they could pretend her mother was ill? Or that she and Harry couldn’t have children? Would anyone believe it? And would it matter, if they were married and James were legitimised?)

  Of course it would matter, she told herself furiously. Of course the village would wonder, and gossip. Her father had risked so much already to help her. His good name and reputation were essential if he were to do his job, this job which had been his whole life. She couldn’t bring this shame on his household. On Ruth and Ernest. On her mother, and all her village friendships. On Harry’s parents.

  Could she?

  For a long time, Margot had played various fantasies in the back of her head. Her mother dangerously ill, begging her to come home and be a mother to James. Or wounded perhaps in an accident – not seriously, but enough that something would have to be done about James. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best if James comes to live with you...’

  She had always known, of course, that this was a fantasy. But now she wondered... could it happen? Would people really accept it? It was dizzying.

  A family, with James in it. A future.

  Could it happen, after all?

  A Young Man at Church

  Margot had never been very religious, even as a child. ‘I don’t think it’s quite nice of God to know what I’m thinking,’ she’d said to her father once, a remark which had amused him greatly and gone down in family history. Jocelyn and Stephen had always been the devout ones, as children at least. (Was Stephen still? She realised she didn’t know. She must ask.) Ruth had always been supremely logical, and demanded the same logic of the scriptures:

  ‘But why was it all right for Moses to drown the Egyptians if killing is wrong?’

  ‘But if Jesus could raise Lazarus, why didn’t he raise everybody?’

  ‘But, Daddy, why?’

  Her father rather enjoyed such debates, though Ruth was often dissatisfied with his answers – her father’s patient insistence that faith was about more than logic had never convinced her.

  Ernest had accepted the scriptures without much fuss or interest. God in his Heaven. Father in his pulpit. Nana in the nursery, and sardines for tea. Ernest had never committed a sin much greater than getting mud on his nice coat.

  Margot felt rather detached from religion now she’d left the vicarage – but even she could feel her heart lift walking down the street surrounded by the glory of church bells ringing out Chr
istmas Day properly for the first time in five years. The War was over! Christ was born! And – oh!

  There he was. Standing outside the church, deep in conversation with Mrs FitzPatrick – one of Father’s more intractable Churchy Ladies, a small, fierce woman in her early seventies, with something of the pit-bull terrier about her, his dark head bent in apparent fascination, nodding away as though nothing could be more interesting than what she was saying. So Margot had been quite right about that, all those years ago. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, trying to pretend she hadn’t noticed him, feeling herself go stiff and formal, like a little girl at a party in a smocked pinafore and quite the wrong dress.

  Ruth hopped up and down beside her, tugging on her hand.

  ‘Margot! Margot, look, there’s Harry! Aren’t you going to go and say hullo?’

  ‘Hush!’ said Margot. Harry glanced up at the sound of Ruth’s voice and caught Margot’s eye. Her face flamed.

  ‘Harry!’ shouted Ruth, waving, and Mrs FitzPatrick – curse her – stopped talking about the state of the graveyard or whatever it was she was blathering on about and looked at them with naked curiosity.

  Harry nodded his head to Mrs FitzPatrick and came over to them.

  ‘Hullo, Ruth,’ he said.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Ruth. ‘Did you and Margot row? Ernest thought it would be ungentlemanly to tell what you said, which I think is jolly unfeeling of him. Margot wouldn’t tell either, but you will, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh Ruth, don’t be such an ass,’ said Margot.

  Harry grinned and said, ‘My apologies, detective inspector, but a gentleman never betrays the confidence of a lady.’

  They exchanged pregnant looks over the heads of Jocelyn and Ruth.

  Margot: I am sorry, you know.

  Harry: I know. It’s all right.

  ‘Come along, children, we’ll be late!’ Jocelyn sang, and they hurried into their pew. There they sat, watching as the choir came in, singing ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ in their red surplices. Margot, sitting by the pew door, had a perfect view of the nativity set, now with the baby Jesus lying in His manger.

  For a long time, Margot had felt ashamed to come to church.

  ‘You should ask God for forgiveness,’ her father had said to her, not unkindly – he was never unkind – but Margot had still come away with the sense that she was an unclean vessel, whom only sincere repentance could cleanse. It made her hate the church and her father, a little bit. And while she was truly sorry – oh, God, was she sorry! – she had never gone down on her knees and asked for forgiveness. She had told herself this was because she didn’t believe in fairytales, but now she wondered. Had she perhaps thought she didn’t deserve to be forgiven? Did she think that still?

  She looked at the face of the Virgin Mary, bent over her sleeping child. Mary was an unmarried mother too, she supposed – at least, not exactly, but she very nearly could have been. She wondered if the busybodies had shaken their heads over birthdates and timings. No – of course not – he’d been born in Bethlehem, hadn’t he? Still... she looked at the girl in the stable and wondered not for the first time what had really happened that first Christmas.

  So many families had secrets. You couldn’t live in a vicarage and not know that. People were always coming to see her father in tears, respectable people in absolute devastation. Sometimes the children would find out the story later – a son killed in action, or the collapse of a family business. But more frequently, they would never know. The parishioner would straighten themselves out and get on with their ordinary lives, and the visit would never be mentioned again.

  Margot looked around the bustling church, full to the rafters of course. Rows and rows of scrubbed faces and Sunday frocks. ‘Hosanna in excelsis!’ sang the choirboys.

  All these people, clean and hopeful. Would she ever be part of their number again, or would she always be on the outside?

  After the service, he came over to her.

  ‘I bought you a present,’ he said quietly. ‘I wasn’t sure if it was the right sort of thing to send, but... Well, anyway. Don’t open it here.’

  He passed her a small parcel wrapped in pale blue tissue-paper and tied with a satin ribbon. The whole thing looked most un-Harry-like. Perhaps the shop had wrapped it?

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, wonderingly.

  He gave her a nod, said, ‘Well, then,’ and was gone.

  A Hundred Years Ago

  She opened it in her bedroom while the others were washing for dinner. It was a small silver bracelet with little charms set all around it. Threaded through the bracelet was a slip of paper. On it was written:

  I bought this for my girl in Calais, a hundred years ago.

  There was no signature.

  Crackers and Candles

  And then the Christmas dinner, in all its glory – crackers, plum pudding, and a glass of white wine, one for Stephen, and one, surprisingly, for Margot – she really must be an adult now. The vicarage doors were thrown open at Christmas to all the lonely souls of the parish, mostly elderly people, old women and a couple of bachelors. As an adolescent, she’d found them rather funny and somewhat pitiable. But now, as rather a lonely person herself, she could see the loveliness of her father’s gift. She looked at the Churchy Lady opposite her – Miss Timpson, whose life seemed mainly devoted to the church choir and her cat. Were there love affairs and mistakes and secrets in Miss Timpson’s life too? Had she ever loved anyone the way Margot had loved Harry?

  The drama of this dinner-table was Stephen, of course. The Churchy Ladies twittered around him, saying how pleased they were to have him back, how proud his mother must be of him, how hard those Christmases had been with him away. Stephen bore this about as well as Margot would.

  ‘Well, I was conscripted, you see,’ he told Miss Timpson. ‘So I don’t know that she’s got so much to be proud of – I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.’

  ‘Oh, but we’re so indebted to you brave boys – as a nation, I mean.’

  How they kept trotting out the same old bromides! And how threadbare they were becoming with age. Stephen pulled a face.

  ‘I spent half my war driving an over-promoted general around the fortifications,’ he said. ‘I sometimes think it might have ended six months earlier if I’d driven him into a bloody ditch.’

  Miss Timpson looked shocked. Then, ‘Well, dear,’ she said. ‘We must all be very glad that you didn’t. I can’t think what your mother would have done!’

  And Stephen, to his credit, allowed himself to laugh.

  Ruth, Ernest and James finished eating long before their parents, and disappeared upstairs while the adults lingered over coffee, occasionally reappearing at the doorway to ask ‘Aren’t you finished ?’

  ‘How can anyone take a hundred thousand million years to eat a piece of plum pudding and drink a cup of coffee?’

  James ran over to Margot’s mother and climbed onto her knee.

  ‘Mummy! Come!’

  ‘In a minute, darling.’

  ‘Not a minute. Now.’

  He pressed his nose up against hers.

  ‘Now, Mummy! Christmas tree!’

  Enough, Margot told herself, willing her body to unclench.

  The tree had always been Margot’s favourite part of Christmas. It was decorated on Christmas morning, and the drawing room was strictly out of bounds until their mother had lit the candles. Then the gas was dimmed, and the door opened, and they were allowed to view it in all its beauty.

  Of course, she knew that it wasn’t anything wonderful really, a little Norwegian spruce covered in cheap tinsel and little candles, of course she knew that, of course it wasn’t worth all the ceremony the vicarage imbued it with, and yet, and yet...

  When their mother opened the door and the children pushed through, and gasped...

  The little tree sat in the bay window, its candles glowing, the angel on the top with her china wings
outstretched, the presents nestling in the branches and beneath it. Margot glanced at James. He was wriggling with excitement, his mouth open, and unaccountably her eyes filled with tears. It had been worth it then, all those lonely days, if it meant there were still moments like this one.

  She glanced across at Stephen and saw that he was moved.

  ‘Not so shabby,’ he said, and she nodded.

  Not so shabby.

  After the tree, there were games – Charades with the family dressing-up chest, Twenty Questions and Dictionary. Then presents.

  Her present from her parents was a pair of dancing slippers for the Hendersons’ dance, and a little silver locket.

  ‘Don’t open it now,’ her mother said quickly.

  ‘Why not?’ said Ruth, at once, and Doris said, ‘Them as ask no questions, hear no lies,’ just like Nana used to.

  After the presents, there were carols around the tree, with Stephen on the piano. It was a hideously Victorian Christmas. But somehow because it was Father doing it and he really meant it, and because Mother was obviously so pleased to see Stephen at the piano again, in his old spot... well. Somehow it felt real.

  She looked around the room – at the lonely people singing away at their hymn books, at Ernest and Ruth still wearing the hats from their crackers, at James nearly asleep on her mother’s lap. He had loved his ship. It was quite the nicest present he’d got, and she and he’d played with it all afternoon.

  She opened the locket, making sure that nobody but herself could see. Inside was a little photograph of James, his eyes wide, his head tipped on one side.

  Perhaps it was a message. Perhaps her mother had seen that she and Harry were going to come to an arrangement, and perhaps this was her way of saying that she thought Margot should take James back. He was Margot’s child, after all. Surely he would rather live with his real mother, than grow up to find out that she had abandoned him? And after all, he must be a lot of work for a woman her mother’s age. It wasn’t like he would be moving to live with a stranger. He could still see her mother any time he wanted to, of course he could.